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The cover of Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: the First Modern Man features a portrait of Hazlitt—a self-portrait. It is clearly the work of a significant talent, executed with subtle skill. We see in it a young man in a nondescript coat, a white stock wreathing his neck, who looks directly at the viewer. Light from an unseen window illuminates the right side of his face, but the other side is still discernible. His face is tilted ever so slightly downward so that he seems to be looking from under his brows. His eyes are quite large, his closed lips full; but his chin is short and, one might say, rather weak. The overall impression is of immense intelligence, immense sensitivity, immense vulnerability. These impressions are correct, though they do not tell us all we need to know of the man's character.
Hazlitt has not come down to us as a painter, and barely even as an essayist, though that was the role he filled for generations: one of the two great English essayists of the Romantic era, the other being Charles Lamb. When Hazlitt is remembered today it is usually as the beleaguered protagonist of a doomed love affair with a serving girl more than twenty years his junior, a story he faithfully recorded in a book called Liber Amoris. Duncan Wu wants to restore Hazlitt to a far higher place in the public estimation, and anyone who has spent much time reading Hazlitt is likely to wish him success in that endeavor. But Wu's approach—driven by an almost comical determination to justify Hazlitt's behavior in the countless quarrels that dominated much of his adult life—works against his declared aims. A reader of this biography who was not already well acquainted with Hazlitt's prose would have little sense of why Wu thinks Hazlitt deserves the highest possible praise for an essayist, "the title of the British Montaigne." And this is sad, because even so high a claim is plausible. William Hazlitt is a great but largely forgotten genius of English literature.
In July of 1791 in the English city of Birmingham, a mob acting in the name of King and Church sacked and burned the home and laboratory of Joseph Priestley—known to us as a great scientist but to them as an anti-monarchist, Unitarian, and Francophile. (Priestley had aroused their anger by openly celebrating what would later be called Bastille Day.) This treatment of a great man outraged William Hazlitt, who wrote this impassioned defense of Priestley in his local newspaper:
Religious persecution is the bane of all religion; and the friends of persecution are the worst enemies religion has; and of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters for ever. And this great man has not only had his goods spoiled, his habitation burned, and his life endangered, but is also calumniated, aspersed with the most malicious reflections, and charged with every thing bad, for which a misrepresentation of the truth and prejudice can give the least pretence.
Hazlitt was thirteen years old at the time.
No wonder his father had high hopes for him. But those hopes focused on the idea that William would like his father become a Unitarian minister, and this was not to be. Two years after the sad affair in Birmingham, Priestley had moved on to the Unitarian New College at Hackney, just outside London, and young Hazlitt followed to study with the great man. But within two further years Hazlitt had become, as he himself put it, an "avowed infidel." The news broke his father's heart. Hazlitt loved his father deeply, so much so that this moment was in Wu's view "the most catastrophic event of his life," but he never returned to any kind of religious faith.
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