the city’s factory products increased from $998,823 in 1900 to $2,185,876 in 1905, or 118.8%, only three other cities in the state having a population of 8000 or more in 1900 showing a greater rate of increase. There is a state hospital here for the treatment of persons injured in mines. Hazleton was settled in 1820, was laid out in 1836, was incorporated as a borough in 1856 and received a city charter in 1891. The local coal industry dates from 1837.
HAZLITT, WILLIAM (1778–1830), British literary critic and
essayist, was born on the 10th of April 1778 at Maidstone, where
his father, William Hazlitt, was minister of a Unitarian congregation.
The father took the side of the Americans in their
struggle with the mother-country, and during a residence at
Bandon, Co. Cork, interested himself in the welfare of some
American prisoners at Kinsale. In 1783 he migrated with his
family to America, but in the winter of 1786–1787 returned to
England, and settled at Wem in Shropshire, where he ministered
to a small congregation. There his son William went to school,
till in 1793 he was sent to the Hackney theological college in the
hope that he would become a dissenting minister. For this
career, however, he had no inclination, and returned, probably
in 1794, to Wem, where he led a desultory life until 1802, and then
decided to become a portrait painter. His elder brother John
was already established as a miniature painter in London. The
monotony of life at Wem was broken in January 1798 by the
visit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Shrewsbury, where young
Hazlitt went to hear him preach. Coleridge encouraged William
Hazlitt’s interest in metaphysics, and in the spring of the next
year Hazlitt visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey and made the
acquaintance of William Wordsworth. The circumstances of
this early intercourse with Coleridge are related with inimitable
skill in a paper in Hazlitt’s Literary Remains (1839).
On visits to his brother in London he made many acquaintances,
the most important being a friendship with Charles
Lamb, said to have been founded on a remark of Lamb’s
interpolated in a discussion between Coleridge, Godwin and
Holcroft, “Give me man as he is not to be.” He also formed
an acquaintance with John Stoddart, whose sister Sarah he
married in 1808. In October 1802 he went to Paris to copy
portraits in the Louvre, and spent four happy months in Paris.
When he returned to London he undertook commissions for
portraits, but soon found he was not likely to excel in his art;
his last portrait, one of Charles Lamb as a Venetian senator
(now in the National Portrait Gallery), was executed in 1805.
In that year he published his first book, An Essay on the
Principles of Human Action: being an argument in favour of
the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, which had
occupied him at intervals for six or seven years. It attracted
little attention, but remained a favourite with its author. Other
works belonging to this period are: Free Thoughts on Public
Affairs (1806); An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Revealed,
by Abraham Tucker ... (1807); The Eloquence of the British
Senate ... (2 vols., 1807); A Reply to Malthus, on his Essay
on Population (1807); A New and Improved Grammar of the
English Tongue ... (1810).
Hazlitt married in 1808. His domestic life was unhappy. His wife was an unromantic, business-like woman, while he himself was fitful and moody, and impatient of restraint. The dissolution of the ill-assorted union was nevertheless deferred for fourteen years, during which much of Hazlitt’s best literary work had been produced. Mrs Hazlitt had inherited a small estate at Winterslow near Salisbury, and here the Hazlitts lived until 1812, when they removed to 19 York Street, Westminster, a house that was once Milton’s. Hazlitt delivered in 1812 a course of lectures at the Russell Institution on the Rise and Progress of Modern Philosophy. He soon abandoned philosophy, however, to give his whole attention to journalism. He was parliamentary reporter and subsequently dramatic critic for the Morning Chronicle; he also contributed to the Champion and The Times; but his closest connexion was with the Examiner, owned by John and Leigh Hunt. In conjunction with Leigh Hunt he undertook the series of articles called The Round Table, a collection of essays on literature, men and manners which were originally contributed to the Examiner. To this time belong his View of the English Stage (1818), and Lectures on the English Poets (1818), on the English Comic Writers (1819), and on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1821). By these works, together with his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), and his Table Talk; or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821–1822), his reputation as a critic and essayist was established. Next to Coleridge, Hazlitt was perhaps the most powerful exponent of the dawning perception that Shakespeare’s art was no less marvellous than his genius; and Hazlitt’s criticism did not, like Coleridge’s, remain in the condition of a series of brilliant but fitful glimpses of insight, but was elaborated with steady care. His lectures on the Elizabethan dramatists performed a similar service for the earlier, sweeter and simpler among them, such as Dekker, till then unduly eclipsed by later writers like Massinger, better playwrights but worse poets. Treating of the contemporary drama, he successfully vindicated for Edmund Kean, whose genius he recognized from the first, the high place which he has retained as an actor, and his enthusiasm for Mrs Siddons knew no bounds. His criticisms on the English comic writers and men of letters in general are masterpieces of ingenious and felicitous exposition, though rarely, like Coleridge’s, penetrating to the inmost core of the subject. Moreover, at the time when the lectures were written, Hazlitt’s views, orthodox as they may seem now, were novel enough.
As an essayist Hazlitt is even more effective than as a critic. Being enabled to select his own subjects, he escapes dependence upon others either for his matter or his illustrations, and presents himself by turns as a metaphysician, a moralist, a humorist, a painter of manners and characteristics, but always, whatever his ostensible theme, deriving the essence of his commentary from himself. This combination of intense subjectivity with strict adherence to his subject is one of Hazlitt’s most distinctive and creditable traits. Intellectual truthfulness is a passion with him. He steeps his topic in the hues of his own individuality, but never uses it as a means of self-display. The first reception of his admirable essays was by no means in accordance with their deserts. Hazlitt’s political sympathies and antipathies were vehement, and he had taken the unfashionable side. The Quarterly Review attacked him with deliberate malignity, stopped the sale of his writings for a time and blighted his credit with publishers. Hazlitt retaliated by his Letter to William Gifford (1819), accusing the editor of deliberate misrepresentation. In downright abuse and hard-hitting, Hazlitt proved himself more than a match even for Gifford. By the writers in Blackwood’s Magazine Hazlitt was also scurrilously treated.[1] He had become estranged from his early friends, the Lake poets, by what he uncharitably but not unnaturally regarded as their political apostasy; and he had no scruples about recording his often very unfavourable opinions of his contemporaries. He displayed, moreover, an exasperating facility in grounding his criticisms on facts that his victims were unable to deny. His inequalities of temper separated him for a time even from Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, and on the whole the period of his most brilliant literary success was that when he was most soured and broken. Domestic troubles supervened; he had gone to live in Southampton Buildings in September 1819, and his marriage, long little more than nominal, was dissolved in consequence of the infatuated passion he had conceived for his landlord’s daughter, Sarah Walker, a most ordinary person in the eyes of every one else. It is impossible to regard Hazlitt as a responsible agent while he continued subject to this influence. His own record of the transaction, published by himself under the title of Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion (1823), is an unpleasant but remarkable psychological document. It consists of conversations between Hazlitt and Sarah Walker, drawn up in the spring of 1822, of a correspondence between Hazlitt and his friend P. G. Patmore between March and July, and an account of the rupture of his relations with Sarah. The business-like dissolution of his marriage under the law of Scotland is related with amazing
- ↑ For some quotations see Alexander Ireland’s bibliography.
