The purpose of these five 15-minute talks is to evoke and celebrate Hazlitt’s work as a philosopher, and show how it helped shape the celebrated ‘familiar style’ of his later essays. Implicitly, it will also seek to show that rumours of a fundamental antipathy between philosophy and English literature are greatly exaggerated.

Each talk will present a story of its own, told to a considerable extent (about one fifth) in Hazlitt’s own words. One: Winterslow

In 1828, when he had just turned 50 and was nearing the end of his life, William Hazlitt was criticised as a hack who gave himself high intellectual airs, as if he ‘fancied himself a Leibniz.’ He was stung by the comment, and made a spirited reply: in the first place, essay writing was itself a high intellectual tradition, and secondly, he himself happened to have form as a philosophical author, having written an Essay on the Principles of Human Action in 1805, long before he became established as a journalist. Without his early experience of the agony of serious philosophical writing, Hazlitt argued, he would never have won through to his accursed fluency.