Hazlitt’s torment in the prison of love

Radical writer William Hazlitt had his world turned upside down by a 19-year-old goddess who didn’t return his passion, writes Gerald Isaaman

Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment by Jon Cook. Short Books, £12.99. order this book

THE lodging house at No 9 Southampton Buildings no longer exists, swallowed up decades ago in the development of Southampton Row, Holborn.
The bricks and mortar may have gone but what remains is the enduring echo of a fascinating saga which this little gem of a book tells with mesmerising effect about the life and miserable times of William Hazlitt.
Then aged 42, the essayist, lecturer, critic and defiant political radical, adrift from his wife and embattled by literary foes seeking to scandalise his name, Hazlitt moved into two rooms on the second floor at No 9 on August 13, 1820.
Breakfast was brought to his room by Sarah Walker, his landlady’s 19-year-old daughter, a not altogether pretty girl but one with snaky swish in her walk.
And as she turned at the door to leave, Hazlitt was already hooked. For him it was unbelievable love at first sight, a magical moment that would tragically transform him, virtually send him mad with desire that was not reciprocated, apart from an occasional kiss and a hug from Sarah sitting on his lap.
“Her face was round and small, eyes motionless and glassy,” wrote a contemporary. Yet to Hazlitt she was his goddess, his sensual dream that became a torment of frustration, ending with him screaming his head off like Oedipus, smashing the presents he gave Sarah and declaring her to be “a boarding house jilt” sent to tease him, all because he was always willing to test the bounds of conventional society.
The dramatic story that Professor Jon Cook tells with sympathetic insight – and some relish – reminds us all of those moments when we too have touched, felt, kissed and tumbled into triumphant love only for it to end, consummated or not, in terrible tantrums and tatters that are virtually unexplainable.
And the more so when meeting the same person months or years later and perhaps realising that we must have been bonkers in the first place.
Hazlitt, so fiercely independent non-conformist, believing in the freedom citizens fought for in the French revolution, truth, honesty and accountability at all costs, had already revealed part of the saga in Liber Amoris (The Book of Love), his own confessional account of imprisoned love.
One occasion had almost led to him being ducked in a village pond in Cumbria for his sexual audacity, at a time when Jane Austen manners were the order of society. The book was published anonymously, Hazlitt selling the copyright for just £100.
Ironically for a man with such a brilliant brain, Hazlitt actually exposed the myths of bountiful love in his work, especially when it came to the creative ability of writers to launch into new realms of fiction and fantasy without having any basis in personal experience or reality, imagination taking them into the clouds of the unknown.
In his essay On Living to One Self he warns against the enticements of a “wavering air” yet still his bodice-ripping passions abound, his sheer recklessness providing his enemies with the ammunition that want to destroy without mercy his reputation.
Indeed, Hazlitt’s obsession also included persuading his sensible wife, also Sarah, going to Scotland to seek a divorce, the ony place where one was possible, based on his infidelity. Hazlitt was prepared to do anything to unlock the legal handcuffs that prevented marriage to the landlady’s daughter
Yet, equally ironically, he was able, thankfully, to maintain the tough discipline he set himself for writing, his only means of income, from which his wild wit, wisdom and enlightenment are still very much alive today to enthral us Cook remarkable sets the scene of Hazlitt’s dumbfounded days with consummate skill and elan, a London packed with 80,000 prostitutes, with whom Hazlitt relieved his ultimate frustration, and a literary scene full of cloaks and daggers for John Keats and the Cockney school of writers, one of his friends, John Scott, killed in a pistol duel at Chalk Farm.
And of course it all calmed down with Sarah Walker and Hazlitt, particularly haggered by money troubles and ill health, going off to get married, unhappily it appears, to others. Nevertheless, this complex man whose lust for life was filled with illusions remained ahead of his age.
Way before Sigmund Freud appeared on the scene, Hazlitt, an admirer and biographer of Napoleon, wrote of the “possibility that dreams give us a clue to our most powerful and involuntary” feelings.
By 1830 he was living in Frith Street, Soho, where he died, probably from stomach cancer, on September 8 surrounded by friends, among them Charles Lamb. And you can pay silent tribute at his nearby grave in the grounds of St Anne’s, Soho.
As Cook contends in his poignant epitaph: “Some of his friends were convinced that in the last years of his life Hazlitt had developed a special relationship with ‘one of the girls of the theatre’. In his own way, and despite his self-knowledge, Hazlitt continued to imagine himself in love.”