William Hazlitt, Classical Rhetoric, and The Spirit of the Age

Abstract

Nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt’s attention to the complex interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism deepens our understanding of “romantic” rhetoric as reflexive and politically engaged. In sketches of orators and authors, Hazlitt criticizes their moribund deployments of classical rhetoric and its damaging consequences on British parliamentary politics, literature, and society. However, he also reworks classical rhetorical exercises and revives their civic potential in his dynamic prose.

Notes

1 Many thanks to Don Bialostosky, David Gold, Rusty Bartels, Tatjana Schell, and Marion Wolfe for their guidance on this article. Thanks also to RR reviewers John Belk and Suzanne Bordelon for their generous readings and constructive comments.

2 For other discussions of Hazlitt’s political critique in Eloquence, see Homar; Hessell (99-103); and Mulvihill (74-88).

3 See Schoenfield (126-7); Higgins (61-74); Parker (153-55); Chandler (174-86); and Cafarelli (118-36).

4 Bromwich, Paulin, and Mulvihill have examined the relationship between Hazlitt’s oppositional politics and writing style.

5 See, for instance, Kennedy’s introduction to a translation of progymnasmata manuals (ix-xviii).

6 I borrow Mack’s interpretation of the progymnasmata in the early modern curriculum (1-21).

7 For a discussion of classical topoi, see Curtius (79-105).

8 See Richardson (81-82) and Tompson Classics or Charity?.

9 See Burley (49-90) for an account of Hazlitt’s career at Hackney New College in the 1790s. For additional histories of Hackney New College, see Stephenson and McLachlin (246-55).

10 For the influence of Priestley on Hazlitt, see Burley’s study of Hazlitt the Dissenter, Paulin (52–53, 237–38), and Mee.

11 For Wakefield’s critique, see Burley (67-72). For a discussion of Dissenter, middle-class radical, and Scottish critiques of classical education, see Wallace (26-31).

12 See Hazlitt’s sketch of Jeffrey in The Spirit of the Age (Complete Works 11: 126-33).

13 See, for example, the ancient rhetorician Aphthonius’s description of this exercise (113).

14 See Benedict (4).

15 In addition to Miller’s study, see Nan Johnson’s seminal work Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in America, which traces the transatlantic spread of those rhetorics, and Christopher Reid’s Imprison’d Wranglers for Parliament’s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rhetorical culture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Homar

Katie Homar is an Academic and Technical Writing Specialist in the Graduate School at North Carolina State University. Her interdisciplinary research investigates rhetorical theory and practice in early nineteenth-century Britain with an emphasis on the intersection of rhetoric and romantic literary culture. She has published other articles on essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb in Advances in the History of Rhetoric and Studies in Romanticism. Her research and teaching interests also include writing in the disciplines, translingual composition, and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers or Other Languages). Readers may reach her at [email protected].