A recollection in the essayistic disposition
I was thinking about William Hazlitt the other morning. There was coffee. There were cheap biscuits. I don’t remember what prompted him. That’s how writers usually return to us; not through ceremony, but because something has caught on something else. Hazlitt understood that. And, apparently, I’ve been carrying him around for rather longer than I realised.
It began, I think, with Shooters Hill. Hazlitt’s remembered ascent; the long straight pull up the Dover Road, London falling away behind, Kent opening ahead, is one of those passages where a life becomes a landscape. I didn’t know that when I lived at Hillside, Cantwell Road, on the very summit of the hill. I walked home from Blackheath countless times, up the same Roman road Hazlitt climbed in his twenties. I knew nothing of his passage then, only the feel of the rise, the sudden exposure at the top, the way the city loosens behind you and the country begins.
Later, reading Hazlitt again, I realised I had been retracing his steps for years. And then Kent returned. Not Hazlitt’s Kent, but mine; the weekends when I took a train to Dover or Rochester or somewhere en route, and walked back through lanes and riversides; sleeping out in hedgerows, dunes, beaches. I didn’t imitate Hazlitt. I simply lived inside the geography that shaped him. His essays wander because his life wandered. Mine did too.
Hazlitt’s contribution to essayism, if I can call it that, may lie precisely here: he wrote from the residue of attention. In my notes for this essay one line stood out: “His opinions are interesting because they are the residue of attention.” That is Hazlitt’s method. He doesn’t build a system. He notices. He returns. He lets the mind catch on things. He trusts the movement.
And perhaps that is why I keep coming back to him. Because I have been doing something similar without quite knowing it. In 1992, I wrote about Arthur Young, Raspe and Muckross. Hazlitt was there, in that re-imagining of 18th century life and concerns; material I had forgotten until my wife was clearing sediment from our barn. And scanned those old notes.“You have actually written this material before, in 1992.” That younger self, the one who went looking at Young and Raspe, may have noticed things the present self has forgotten noticing. Memory isn’t retrieval. It is sediment. You return to an old encounter and discover it has been quietly waiting for you.
Hazlitt would have understood that. He is not a thinker of systems. He is a thinker of returns. His essays are recollections that become encounters. They turn up because something has caught on something else. And that is how this essay is turning up.
Hackney Downs, an early rambling haunt for Hazlitt, and my old student home, brings forth Shooters Hill. Shooters Hill brings Kent. Kent brings walking. Walking brings Hazlitt. Hazlitt brings desire. Desire brings Young. Young brings Raspe. Raspe brings Muckross. Muckross brings 1992. And 1992 brings me back to the present morning, with coffee and cheap biscuits, wondering why Hazlitt has been accumulating in my attention for forty years.
This is not a literary‑history essay, perhaps I will attach that later, and place this elsewhere. It is a recollection of how a particular writer keeps turning up in my own life. And perhaps that is the point. Essayism, as I’ve been describing it elsewhere, is not a method. It is a disposition; relational, unfinished, attentive. It is the stance the organism takes when something in the world asks to be noticed.
Hazlitt didn’t write from a conceptual architecture. He wrote from a disposition. He sat beside things and saw what happened. He let the relation do the work. He trusted the movement of attention. And perhaps that is why he matters now. Because I have several dispositions; conceptual, essayistic, recollective, fictive; but the one Hazlitt calls forth is the essayistic one: thinking with rather than thinking through. Not “Hazlitt understood that…” but “I wonder whether…”. Not architecture. Attention.
Sometimes, when I write, I tighten my belt. Or take off my watch. Or shift the chair. Or change the light. The organism adjusts before the explanation arrives. Hazlitt wrote like that. His stance was not metaphorical. It was the point where body, attention and judgment meet. Just maybe that is his contribution to essayism: he shows that thinking is not a purely intellectual act. It is relational. It is physical. It is a way of entering into encounter with the world.
Hazlitt’s essays are not arguments. They are movements. They are the residue of attention. They are what happens when a writer lets the relation change him.
And perhaps this essay, this recollection over coffee and cheap biscuits, is the residue of mine.
William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
English essayist, critic, and journalist. Born in Maidstone, Kent, raised partly in America and the West Country, later based in London. One of the central figures of early nineteenth‑century essayism, known for Table-Talk, The Spirit of the Age, and his autobiographical and critical essays. A man of passion.