William Hazlitt

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2010

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of William Hazlitt. Hazlitt is best known for his essays, which ranged in subject matter from Shakespeare, through his first meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to a boxing match. What is less well-known, however, is that he began his writing life as a philosopher, before deliberately abandoning the field for journalism. Nonetheless, his early reasoning about the power of the imagination to take human beings beyond narrow self-interest, as encapsulated in his 'Essay on the Principles of Human Action', shines through his more popular work.Hazlitt is a figure full of contradictions - a republican who revered Napoleon, and a radical who admired the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke. His reputation suffered terribly from his book 'Liber Amoris', a self-revealing memoir of his infatuation with his landlady's daughter. But in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, his importance was acknowledged by writers like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ford Madox Ford. In the 180 years since his death, his stature as perhaps the finest essayist in the language has grown and grown. With:Jonathan BateProfessor of English Literature at the University of Warwick Anthony GraylingProfessor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of LondonUttara NatarajanSenior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of LondonProducer: Phil Tinline.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.0	Hello, on a tomb in the graveyard of St Anne's Church in London, there's an inscription
0:16.2	that reads, The First Unanswered Metaphysician of the Age, a despiser of the
0:21.7	merely rich and great, a lover of the people, poor or oppressed, a
0:25.9	hatred of the pride and power of the few, the unconquered champion of truth, liberty and
0:31.7	humanity. The S.A. S. and critic William Haslett was buried in 1830.
0:37.0	By some he was described as the Shakespeare prose writer of our glorious country,
0:42.0	yet his rebellious Republican views led him to be
0:44.4	demonized and ridiculed by the Regency elite. Hazliss' writing was as wide-ranging
0:49.4	as his interests. She brought the same energy and focus to essays on boxing and racquetball as he did to those on Shakespeare.
0:55.3	What's less well known is that he began his career as a painter and a philosopher.
0:59.3	However, his unrequited infatuation with his landlady's daughter and the memoir in which he revealed this led him into disgrace and he died in poverty.
1:07.5	His reputation as an intellectual is still recovering.
1:10.5	With me to discuss the turbulent life and works of William Haslett are Anthony Graling,
1:14.6	Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London,
1:18.0	Ultra Natarajan, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature
1:22.3	at Goldsmith's College University of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College
1:23.2	University of London and Jonathan Bait professor of English
1:26.0	literature at the University of Warwick. Jonathan Bait can you give us a sense
1:29.7	that William has this family, background and the effect it had on his ideas.
1:34.0	Yeah, he was born into an Ulster dissenting family, actually born at Maidstone in Kent,
	...

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