Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners

"Table-Talk is a collection of essays. Hazlitt is one of the greatest essayists of the English language. He applies himself in his essays to everything from philosophy to the arts and theatre. He works to the model set by Montaigne, the French essayist. Another of his books particularly testifies to his perceptive mind, The Spirit of the Age , in which he names all the people he thought would still be known 100 years ahead. Reading it now, one sees that he was amazingly prescient. What’s interesting about the collection is that the essays are some of his most wonderful work, and yet he wrote them at a time of heartbreak. He had fallen in love with a girl of 19 and divorced his wife to be with her. But by the time he had done this, it was too late; she was already sitting on someone else’s knee. Mary Shelley, Mary Godwin’s daughter, said after seeing Hazlitt at this time that she didn’t recognize him until he smiled at her; he was looking so harrowed by the experience of unrequited love. And yet he was able still to produce this fantastic work. Hazlitt’s era was the great heyday of the essay. All educated people, who admittedly only made up a small portion of the population, would read essays. The participants of this intellectual society were participants in the “great conversation”, what you might call the great debate of mankind, the conversation that society has with itself about ideas, politics, and beliefs. All these areas were written about in journals and magazines, which were miscellaneous in content. Essay collections were the television, the radio, the debating society of the day. If you open a Sunday newspaper you tend to get a variety of subject matters, and in a way you might say that the Sunday papers have inherited the role of collections of essays. Essays were an education, a university in themselves. There is nothing exactly matching them today."