Celebration of a Life: William Hazlitt
Died September 18, 1830, London,England
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the British essayist William Hazlitt on the 194th anniversary of his death.
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In The Best American Essays 1994, founding series editor Robert Atwan wrote:
“‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ an excited William Hazlitt says to himself as he hurries down Chancery Lane ‘about halfpast six o'clock, on Monday the 10th of December, to inquire at Jack Randall's where the fight the next day was to be.’ The year is 1821, the city is London, and Hazlitt is pursuing his way to an out-of-town boxing match, his first fight ever. He's eager to see big Bill Neate, the raging Bristol ‘Bull,’ take on the ‘Gas-Man,’ Tom Hickman, the bravest and cruelest fighter in all of England. ‘I was determined to see this fight, come what would, and see it I did, in great style.’
You can consult all the handbooks on literary nonfiction for all the elements of style, structure, and composition, but you'll rarely find mention of what Hazlitt just noted—determination. Yet its literary value is inestimable.
[…] You can see the fight in great style. You can narrate it with equally great style. But as Hazlitt reminds us, you’ll first have to get there. No sitting in your study with a boxing encyclopedia, no telephone interviews with experts, no electronic highway; and the travel involved takes you beyond your local library.”
“The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their application. A word may be a find-sounding word, of an unusual length, and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the connection in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and irrelevant. It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the expression to the idea, that clinches a writer’s meaning :—as it is not the size of glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timber, and more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.”
All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.
First published work: An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (J. Johnson, No. 72 St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1805). Anonymously published pamphlet.
Select nonfiction bibliography:
The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu (Pickering and Chatto, 1998). A nine-volume edition.
The Collected Works of William Hazlitt in Twelve Volumes, edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent & Co., 1902). These volumes are available in different digital formats, online (and free) through Project Gutenberg.
New Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu (Oxford University Press, 2007). This is a collection of 205 newly-discovered essays by Hazlitt.
Thirty essays by William Hazlitt, available online for free, curated by Quotidiana.
Select biographical works:
Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: the First Modern Man (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Virginia Woolf, “Wm. Hazlitt, the Man,” in Collected Essays, edited by Stuart N. Clarke, volume 5 (Mariner Books, 2005).
See also, works by authors whose essays have appeared or been listed in Notables in The Best American Essays series:
E. J. Levy, “On the Pleasures of Hating,” Fourth Genre, Spring 2012.
Visit The Hazlitt Society website. The society “grew out of a project to restore the long-neglected site of William Hazlitt's grave in St Anne's churchyard, Soho. […] The committee which was formed for the purpose of the restoration established the Hazlitt Society to promote and encourage the appreciation of Hazlitt's life and work. Since 2005, the Society has organized a free annual lecture by a public intellectual and/or scholar of Hazlitt and his age, on the Saturday closest to 18th September, the day Hazlitt died.” The society also publishes the annual Hazlitt Review; issues published between 2008-2019 are archived as PDFs online.