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With its representation of grain shortages, conflicts between the populace and the patricians, and the dependence of political leaders on the approval of the people, Coriolanus was a most topical play for Romantic period audiences. This chapter compares productions by John Philip Kemble, who used the role to portray the rightness of patrician rule in a time of popular unrest, with that of Edmund Kean, who returned the scenery to the mud huts of early Rome and diminished the haughty dominance of the central character. It then evaluates Hazlitt's claim, made initially in a review of Coriolanus, that imagination is an “aristocratical faculty.” The performance history of Coriolanus, the chapter concludes, provides the crucial subtext for Hazlitt's Romantic theorization of the imagination and helps us to understand Romantic anxieties about Shakespearean performance generally.

This chapter takes as its focus William Gifford's 1816, nine-volume edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, offering a historicized account that seeks to understand how the conditions of its making influenced not only its methods but its later reception and influence. The chapter argues that Gifford's edition presented its readers with a social Jonson; and that Gifford, having conceived of the edition in terms that ally themselves closely with, and were earlier formed by, a Jonsonian understanding of friendship, was himself the beneficiary of a network of later literary friends, who provided him with help in the making of, and material vitally with which to make, the edition. The chapter then traces the sources of the manuscripts and books on which Gifford drew, as well as his own long correspondence with Octavius Gilchrist, drawing from this previously unpublished material a new picture of his working practices from which is derived an account of why the edition mattered then, and matters now today. Taking as test cases Gifford's treatment of Jonson's biography (including the Conversations with Drummond), and his handling of The Underwood, Jonson's final, posthumously-published collection of poetry, the chapter explores the way in which Jonsonian models of friendship can be read against and within the edition's editorial practice. The later part of the chapter then explores the hostile treatment that Gifford's edition attracted on publication, surveying its early reviews as a way of setting up a long engagement with the most important of Gifford's critics: William Hazlitt. In Hazlitt's account of Jonson, the chapter argues, we see not only an explicitly hostile political response to Gifford's alignment of Jonson with a particular mode of Regency Tory politics, but a vivid imaginative engagement with Jonson's writings, chief among them his Roman tragedy, Sejanus. This material begins to set up the interests of the book's second part: allusion and imitation.

If the factionalization of the 1780s allowed the coexistence in Bentley of both liberalism and libertarianism, the partisanship of the 1790s would force him into the political camp of one or the other. Unlike his liberal peers, Bentley would become a Democratic Republican, or, more loosely, a Jeffersonian. This shift began in 1785 with the arrival of William Hazlitt, an English Unitarian and member of the circle of English Rational Dissenters that moved around Joseph Priestley. Hazlitt convinced both Bentley and James Freeman, rector of Boston's King's Chapel, of Unitarianism (this was in fact the beginning of Bentley's Socinianism, a term used synonymously), and Bentley and Freeman began participating in a transatlantic network of disseminating Unitarian pamphlets into the public sphere. They met only casual resistance for the first few years, but then more rigorous resistance after the beginning of the French Revolution. After 1789, that is, Jacobinism and Unitarianism merged in the public mind, and supporters of one were linked with supporters of the other. In 1791 when a Church and King mob in Birmingham, England, destroyed Priestley's property, Bentley in Salem came to believe that the path to rational liberation was being blocked not so much by the ignorant masses themselves as by the liberal elites who were encouraging those masses.

This chapter casts back over the entire period under discussion — from the mid-17th century to the 1820s — and sees it as a momentous phase in the history of reading. William Hazlitt's pivotal essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is used to frame an investigation of the symbolic relation between spoken discourse and the written discourse in the performance and reception of literary texts. Hazlitt's hint that such differences were already apparent in 1798 is amplified two pages later in ‘My First Acquaintance’ when he describes how William Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation’. The essay is deeply affectionate and elegiac, but not an uncritical one. It discloses the depth of Hazlitt's anger with respect to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's apostasy and his regret that the political impetus behind Lyrical Ballads could not be sustained.

William Hazlitt was steeped in a 1790s culture of radical speaking. Listening to Coleridge as a Dissenting preacher and hearing him recite his verse fostered Hazlitt’s hopes in political and aesthetic reform. In Lectures on the English Poets (1818) he responded to the dashing of those hopes by developing an aesthetic agenda that might renew them and a conversational prose that would become his signature as a critic. He advocated looking to the earliest British poets for examples of how to achieve lasting fame and, rejecting Coleridge’s extemporaneity, honed a delivery style that emphasized qualities he associated with the kind of authorship he championed by preparing full scripts and adopting a studied distance from auditors. In assuming the role of lecturer Hazlitt attempted to supplant his former mentor and assume his own cultural authority.

This chapter deals with the dialogues and crossings which took place between creativity and criticism in the early 19th century. The chapter explores the implications for the power relations between rival discourses. Having considered ways in which creative-cynical dialectic operates in the most distinguished Romantic poet-critics of the first generation, the chapter concentrates here on its manifestations in the periodical culture on which second-generation Romanticism thrived, when criticism and poetry were apparently at war with each other, but when complex mergings between them were taking place. A number of key texts (among others) Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb — all of them characteristic of this more self-conscious phase in the rise of criticism — provide focus for discussion along with the ‘pathology’ of high Romanticism.

Another strand of Hazlitt’s political vision, the identification of London with emerging popular politics, developed in part against the rural vision of William Wordsworth. Yet the essay “On Londoners and Country People” registers Hazlitt’s willingness to treat the “true Cockney” in negative terms. By the end of the essay, this critical approach releases a more positive treatment of the “visible body-politic” of London as an apocalyptic figure of the “Leviathan” of a more democratic order. The sublime proportions of such a figure engage contemporary controversies over the spiritual politics of the sublime, occasioned by postwar English tourism to the Alps. The essay “What Is the People?” contains Hazlitt’s most sustained radical treatment of the democratic possibilities of a collectively embodied London populace. Still, his negative response to role of the public in the Queen Caroline affair and the coronation of George IV registers his ongoing skepticism about political progress.

Recent decades have witnessed a rise in William Hazlitt’s literary reputation. He is no longer valued primarily for his critical response to other writers, notably the major Romantic poets. Still there is a persistent tendency to devalue his political prose by comparison with his writing on literature, theater, and metaphysics. A number of scholars and critics have provided the terms for a more nuanced understanding of his politics, one that allows for the role of determined radical commitment in a mobile and contradictory prose style. The contested development of his conception of the “true Jacobin” reveals some of this complexity. Political consistency and ongoing radical commitment need to be accounted for in any understanding of Hazlitt’s critical method.

Hazlitt expressed his commitment to political and social change by identifying himself as a “Revolutionist,” a term that signaled his commitment to the spiritual traditions of English sectarian Dissent. Yet Dissenting heritage also brought out some of his most internally contested literary impulses, not least an acknowledgment of his own lapsed faith. The figure of his father, and the radical Unitarian faith he represented, was the occasion for sentimental recollection, for (sometimes ironic) expressions of visionary and millennial expectation, and for impassioned attacks on literary “apostates” to the cause of liberty. Essays such as “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” “The Spirit of Controversy,” and “On Court-Influence” reveal the richness and complexity of his treatment of the radical traditions of sectarian Dissent.

Chapter five examines the ‘strong intellectual affinity’ (Uttara Natarajan) between William Hazlitt’s early work and German philosophy, and in particular Kant, in the light of Robinson’s work on the philosopher and the meetings with Hazlitt that Robinson recorded in his unpublished manuscript diaries. Doing so reveals that a paradigm shift – from the imagination establishing disinterestedness diachronically to the ‘formative’, or synthesizing, mind along the lines of Kant – occurred in Hazlitt’s metaphysics around 1806, and that Robinson facilitated this paradigm shift. The chapter then looks at Robinson’s critical transmission of, and preface to, Gustav von Schlabrendorf’s Napoleon, and the French People under His Empire (1806), and how Robinson and Hazlitt began to drift apart as a result of their opposing views on Napoleon and the intensifying war with France. Ultimately, chapter five aims to demonstrate that Robinson’s critical admiration of Hazlitt the writer prevailed in accordance with Robinson’s theoretical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. The originality and stylistic finesse of Hazlitt’s works opened up the kind of ethical discourse whose underlying philosophy – Dissenting disinterestedness amplified by Kant – Robinson continued to share.

Hazlitt was more involved with the mainstream radical press than has often been acknowledged. Even the essay form, sometimes taken to distinguish his polite style from a more plebeian radical manner, was (under the auspices of William Cobbett) a central feature of the early nineteenth-century reformist press. Hazlitt drew creatively on a range of popular radical idioms and forms. His prose was often shaped by the terms of radical economic analysis, with its emphasis on concrete terms, on strict material limits, and on figures of corruption and decay. The contemporary radical catalog of corruption, typified by John Wade’s Black Book, provides a useful point of comparison for Hazlitt’s radical argument. The economic analysis of corrupt government triggered some of his most vivid accounts of catastrophic social and political division, though he was less optimistic than other radicals about whether corruption implied the imminent demise of oppressive power.

A radical language of corruption often involved catastrophic or apocalyptic expectations. Hazlitt’s calculated engagement with this dimension of contemporary radical discourse shaped his approach to historical representation, particularly his tendency to develop contradictory relationships among competing period frames. The essay “Of Paradox and Common-place” offers revealing evidence of his interest in paradox and his approach to typical or representative figures, notably the poet Percy Shelley and the politician George Canning. While contradictory forces unfold throughout his political prose, Hazlitt remained committed to radical expression. His conception of “Legitimacy” as a form of power that required absolute submission underwrote his determination to “be critical” and to value the “word uttered against” as an indispensable form of protest.

Hazlitt shared a contemporary radical commitment to sharply drawn partisan differences and vigorous political warfare. At the same time, his critical method tended to complicate antithetical terms, and he reflected critically on the politics of radical reform. His contradictory manner allowed for inconsistency as well as sharp polemic. Like others in the radical press, he made vivid personal expression and the sharp boundaries of the independent self a hedge against the threat of political corruption. The heroic figure of Napoleon Bonaparte was an ally in his own radical self-definition. Hazlitt’s idea of post-French Revolutionary “legitimate” government as a revival of divine right monarchy posed the main threat to political liberty and personal autonomy. His “Legitimacy” drew on a radical discourse of corruption, but tended to more desperate visions of unbounded oppression. A sense that unjust power exploited weaknesses in human nature reinforced his political skepticism.

Describing Samuel Johnson's prose style, William Hazlitt turned to the image of the pendulum. It is depicted by him as oscillating with predictable regularity, its movement inflexible as well as circumscribed within a narrow axis. Johnson's metaphorical pendulum is, for Hazlitt, rendered incapable of latitude and compromise. In this light, patterns of opposition and contrast in Johnson's prose merely represent a mechanical reflex rather than creative response and control. This opening chapter to the volume argues, however, that both Johnson and the pendulum merit rereading and further scrutiny. Eighteenth-century writing (including evidence from Johnson's Dictionary) reveals that the pendulum was often used to suggest movement, variation, and mutability in ways which set up their own oppositions to Hazlitt's often-cited assumptions. Similarly, rather than being trapped in a rigid pattern of balance and opposition, Johnson's ability to embrace rival impulses emerges as a positive feature of his life, work, and reception. The introduction concludes with a discursive summary of the ensuing 15 chapters, arguing that each of them demonstrates that Hazlitt's brilliantly flawed reading of Johnson's pendulum remains open to dispute and critical revision.

Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s poetic development is well known, but as an auditor in Hazlitt’s lectures Keats learned not only from what was said but also from the experience of hearing it live. In the letters and poems written during and after Hazlitt’s first literary series, Keats developed a line of thinking in response to Hazlitt’s disparagement of the quality of “indolence” in James Thomson’s poetry. In an unrhymed sonnet in which the speaker does nothing but hear a thrush sing, Keats developed a poetics of listening as a potentially productive idleness. This insight informed subsequent poems in which the drama is anticipating what another will say and responding to it in the moment. In his letters the recurrent figure of the thrush and an accompanying image of leaves become shorthand for a counter-impulse to the ardent pursuit of what Hazlitt in his lectures called “true fame.”

The Romantic period saw a critical turning away from Hamlet in performance (for example, in the writings of William Hazlitt) to the Hamlet of Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A philosophical young man, paralyzed into inactivity by his thoughtful meditations on the impossibility of the task of revenge. Meantime, stage performances were dominated by John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean, and Sarah Siddons. In Victorian England of after 1837, Hamlet was often sentimentalized, with much attention to the sad fate of Ophelia. The stage was dominated by William Charles Macready, Samuel Phelps, Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree.