Hazlitt's visionary London

Abstract

Although an aggrieved sense of neglect persists among some of his admirers, William Hazlitt has in fact enjoyed a striking critical revival, to the point where one London reviewer's estimate of his 'soaring' reputation 'as one of the great figures in our literature' seems no more than an enthusiastic overstatement of his emergence from literary minority. In particular, the treatment of Hazlitt as a committed radical essayist has come a long way since Herschel Baker's 1962 critical biography, with its invidious comparison between the 'angry and uneven' volume of Political Essays and the subsequent lectures and essays on English literature that are said to secure his reputation.

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