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Metropolitan Writings

William Hazlitt

Edited by Gregory Dart

Cover Picture of Metropolitan Writings
Categories: 18th Century, 19th Century
Imprint: Fyfield Books
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (240 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2005)
9781857547580
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
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  • Some persons think the sublimest object in nature is a ship launched on the bottom of the ocean: but give me, for my private satisfaction, the Mail-Coaches that pour down Piccadilly of an evening, tear up the pavement, and devour the way before them to Lands-End!
    from 'The Letter Bell'
      
    William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English prose writers, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, each one sparkling with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life: Wordsworth and Byron; sportsmen and dandies; street jugglers and footmen and coffee house bores. There is the London Cockney who ventures through Hyde Park 'as a cat crosses a gutter' and the lady's maid returning from Italy 'as giddy as if she had been up in a balloon'.

    Gregory Dart reminds us that Hazlitt is not only an important critic and polemicist, but also a wry and reflective observer of human nature, a man who took continual delight in the various pitfalls and paradoxes of metropolitan life. This selection contains many essays that have not previously been available in paperback, together with a short critical introduction and contextual notes.
    William Hazlitt
    William Hazlitt was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1778, the son of a Unitarian minister. After a short period in America, the family settled in the village of Wem, Shropshire. Hazlitt was educated at the Unitarian college in Hackney from 1793 to 1795, although he decided against the religious life, and ... read more
    Gregory Dart
    Gregory Dart was educated at Clare College Cambridge where he gained both his BA and his PhD. He taught English Literature at York University from 1993 to 2000 and is now teaching the same subject at University College London. He is the author of Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked ... read more
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