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 Title page of The Spirit of the Age 2nd London edition | |
| Author | William Hazlitt |
|---|---|
| Genre | Social criticism biography |
| Published | 11 January 1825 (Henry Colburn) |
| Publication place | England |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | Liber Amoris: Or, The New Pygmalion |
| Followed by | The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things |
| Text | The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits at Wikisource |
The Spirit of the Age (full title The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits) is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly The New Monthly Magazine in 1824, the essays were collected with several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825.
The Spirit of the Age was one of Hazlitt's most successful books.[1] It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece,[2] even "the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism."[3] Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays. His artistic and critical sensibility, however, infused his prose style—Hazlitt was later judged to be one of the greatest of English prose stylists as well[4]—enabling his appreciation of portrait painting to help him bring his subjects to life.[5] His experience as a literary, political, and social critic contributed to Hazlitt's solid understanding of his subjects' achievements, and his judgements of his contemporaries were later often deemed to have held good after nearly two centuries.[6]
The Spirit of the Age, despite its essays' uneven quality, has been generally agreed to provide "a vivid panorama of the age".[7] Yet, missing an introductory or concluding chapter, and with few explicit references to any themes, it was for long also judged as lacking in coherence and hastily thrown together.[8] More recently, critics have found in it a unity of design, with the themes emerging gradually, by implication, in the course of the essays and even supported by their grouping and presentation.[9] Hazlitt also incorporated into the essays a vivid, detailed and personal, "in the moment" kind of portraiture that amounted to a new literary form and significantly anticipated modern journalism.[10]
- ^ Wardle 1971, pp. 406–7.
- ^ Park 1971, p. 204; Wu 2008, pp. 344, 360.
- ^ Kinnaird 1978, p. 301.
- ^ Grayling 2000, p. 349.
- ^ Paulin 1998, pp. 234–35; p. 266: "Hazlitt's vast knowledge of the visual arts helps to structure the individual portraits in The Spirit of the Age."
- ^ Wardle 1971, p. 503.
- ^ Wardle 1971, p. 406; Kinnaird 1978, pp. 301–2.
- ^ Kinnaird 1978, pp. 301–2.
- ^ Park 1971, pp. 213–15: "The Spirit of the Age can no longer be regarded as it often has been in the past ... as a series of perceptive but disparate and impressionistic sketches .... His conception ... emerges powerfully but indirectly through the massing of particulars .... What appears to be a collection of detached portraits is converted into an historical painting of an age"; Kinnaird 1978, pp. 301–7; Paulin 1998, p. 237: "What he is aiming for is an expressive flow ... which carries the reader along .... The momentum of his prose aims at a totally unified composition ..."
- ^ Kinnaird 1978, pp. 302, 411; Paulin 1998, p. 323; Grayling 2000, p. 315.