William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man

Hailed as "excellent" (Harper's), "distinctly eye-opening" (WashingtonPost.com), and "astonishingly detailed" (Wall Street Journal), this marvelous biography draws on over a decade of archival research to explore all aspects of William Hazlitt's life. Duncan Wu examines Hazlitt's early aspirations to become a painter, his engagement with revolutionary politics, his rise to prominence as one of England's greatest literary critics, and the disillusionment and poverty of his final years. Along the way, Wu reveals countless new details concerning Hazlitt's relationships with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, William Godwin, J. M. W. Turner, and other important figures of the Romantic era. But Wu sees Hazlitt as an essentially modern writer who took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as it is practiced in our own time. Painstakingly researched and filled with original insight, this biography benefits also from Wu's New Writings of William Hazlitt, many of which make their appearance here, illuminating obscure passages of Hazlitt's life.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the fall of 1816, a group of Londoners came together for merriment and repartee. Their host and hostess were brother and sister Charles and Mary Lamb, who together authored the children's book Tales from Shakespeare (1807) and occupied seven rooms on the third and fourth floors of a building on Inner Temple Lane. There, they regularly brought together many of the choicest offshoots of England's artistic and intellectual community. Evenings at the Lambs were relaxed affairs where priggishness was discouraged; in the words of one of their usual guests, the essayist, lecturer, and arts critic William Hazlitt, "If a person liked anything, if he took snuff heartily, it was sufficient." The informal atmosphere was part therapeutic. Though fond of company and feisty by temperament, Charles looked toward these evenings as a way to massage his sister's spirits. He'd pledged himself as Mary's lifelong guardian ever since, in a rage of unreason, she murdered her mother and injured her father on a Thursday afternoon in September, 20 years before.

Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University.