Pennine Productions -- details of
"William Hazlitt, Philosopher (3)"
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Network:  Radio 3
Date: 
 Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Time: 
 23:00
Duration: 
 15
Presenter: 
 Jonathan Ree
Producer: 
 Mark Whitaker
Repeat date: 
Repeat time: 
  
 

Description: 

 

 William Hazlitt is recognised as a founder of English literary criticism and a magnificent exponent of the art of the essay. But he spent the first half of his career grappling with abstract questions in philosophy, and the fact that he had to abandon the rigours of theoretical writing in favour of relaxed literary journalism was always a source of regret to him. 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.

Three: The education of William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt had a happy childhood, wandering round the countryside of Kent, County Cork, New England, and Shropshire. But his father wanted him to carry on his own work as a Unitarian minister, which at first he was glad to do. Indeed he became so enthusiastic about studying Priestley that his family thought he was suffering from over-exertion, and just before his sixteenth birthday they sent him off to a residential academy in Hackney, where he came to suspect some inadequacy in the work of the philosophers who defined his father’s view of the world; in the summer of 1795, to his father’s great distress, he threw up his education.

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