Primarily self-educated, Hazlitt went to Paris in 1802 to study painting and work in the Louvre. Forced to return to London in 1803 at the outbreak of the Napoleonic War, he abandoned art for philosophy and metaphysics, publishing his first work, On The Principles of Human Action in 1805. In 1808 he moved to Winterslow near Salisbury with his new wife Sarah, but continued to work in London as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays was published in 1817 and met with success. That year he also contributed 40 essays to Leigh Hunt's The Round Table. In 1818, he published A View of the English Stage, a collection of his dramatic criticisms. Hazlitt was divorced in 1822 and a subsequent disastrous affair was described in his Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion (1823). He remarried in 1824, but separated again in 1827. Among Hazlitt's best known works are his essays in Table Talk (1821) and The Plain Speaker (1826), Notes of a Journey in France and Italy (1826), Life of Napoleon (1828-30), The Spirit of the Age (1825), Conversations of James Northcote (1830), Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1819), On the English Poets (1818), On the English Comic Writers (1819), and Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (1824). Hazlitt is best remembered for his essays and lectures. |
