Those who dislike biographical criticism and maintain that an author's life is irrelevant to his writings will find it difficult to come to terms with Hazlitt. For Hazlitt was a biographical critic who believed that ideas are best seen as an expression of personality. For him character was always more important than abstract notions. Even when dealing with fictional writing his preoccupation with people manifests itself. His criticism of Shakespeare concentrates on character, and in The Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth he expresses a dislike of the ‘German’ type of tragedy as compared with Shakespeare's, because its characters are merely ‘mouthpieces’, the symbolization of ‘speculative opinions’ and not flesh and blood people with a life of their own. Not only was Hazlitt a great exponent of biographical criticism, but nearly all his writing is autobiographical and personal, recording his opinions, airing his prejudices, expressing his likes and dislikes, and defending his views. Above all, he advances with passionate conviction what he himself believes to be true and demolishes what he thinks is false. He is a master of rhetoric whose task, as he sees it, is not only to please his readers, but to persuade them, to convince them, and to rouse them. Ideas are not so much a matter of intellectual assent but of how we live.

This means that his writing was often argumentative, a quality strengthened by the realization that most of his contemporaries disliked him and by a determination to command their attention and respect, even if he could not win their affection. There is often in his writing the feeling that he is an outsider, a sense at times of injured merit, though to do Hazlitt justice, later generations have acknowledged his merit and recognized that he was treated unfairly in his own day. One can discern the seeds of this sense of alienation in Hazlitt's upbringing. His father was a Unitarian minister and he was educated at a Unitarian academy. To be a Unitarian at this time was more than a matter of religious opinion; it meant that one was a radical in politics, probably with republican sympathies, an enemy of the aristocracy and of the Established Church with its state patronage and traditional privileges.