Hazlitt's Ethological Essentialism

The epigraph from Middlemarch views character as an organism. Like an organism, character grows and develops, while nonetheless retaining its individuation (presumably Eliot means that character may grow and develop beyond its hypothetical point of maturation in childhood). Contra Eliot, in several of his essays William Hazlitt emphasises not the organic qualities of character but its fixedness: its permanent conformation at birth – not, say, at age six, as Thomas Jarrold argued in 1825 – and its role thereafter as a determinant of all individual feeling and action. Yet in other contexts Hazlitt suggests, like Eliot, that character is fluid, changeable. In still others he implies that the substantial existence of character itself is questionable: that the concept may have no knowable or reliable basis in reality other than one we find it convenient or desirable to invent. This chronic struggle on the part of Hazlitt to know and define the limits of character – despite periodic waves of scepticism regarding its existence – shapes a large portion (perhaps the majority) of his essays and the arc of his literary career.

While several critics have conducted article-length studies of Hazlitt centred on his view of character, none of them has reached beyond a handful (if more than one) of his texts. The recent work on literary character by Manning and Frow makes a systematic and comprehensive study of Hazlitt and character all the more urgent. The fact is that Hazlitt wrote about character broadly and deeply and in response to an intellectually vibrant age determined to define it.