Circle of Sympathy

This essay will attempt to assess Hazlitt's influence on the development of Shelley's moral philosophy. Shelley's acquaintance with Hazlitt dates to early 1817, when Leigh Hunt brought them together, thereafter, Hazlitt met Shelley on several occasions at Hunt's cottage in Hampstead. Their shared political interests were manifest; Charles Cowden Clarke recollects an occasion at Hunt's where there took place ‘a very warm argument in favour of the Monarchy upheld by Leigh Hunt and Coulson, and in favour of Republicanism by Shelley and Hazlitt’. ¹ Mary Shelley's journal entry for 9 February 1817 also records the occasion, a supper at Hunt's and ‘after Supper a discussion until 3 in the morning with Hazlitt concerning monarchy & republicanism’. ² The acquaintance never developed. Hazlitt and Shelley ceased to be in contact after May 1817, and Hazlitt's subsequent notice of Shelley in the first volume of Table-Talk (1821) as having ‘a fever in his blood’ and ‘a maggot in his brain’ was not calculated to sustain a mutual regard (viii, 148). But the connection that was established in 1817 was kept up by Hunt in the years afterwards, in his association of Hazlitt's name with Shelley in the Examiner (it is to Hazlitt's attack on Gifford that Hunt refers so as to dismiss the Quarterly’s treatment of Shelley), in his mentions of Hazlitt in his letters to the Shelleys in Italy, and in his efforts at conciliation, following the Table-Talk comments. ³ Their common political ground remained in Shelley's view, in Hazlitt's contributions to The Examiner which Shelley continued to receive in Italy. As late as 1819, in his Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley lists Hazlitt with three other intellectuals, Godwin, Bentham, and Hunt, who might, under a new system, act as checks upon governmental oppression. And in his very last work, Shelley is still acknowledging Hazlitt: as James Mulvihill has convincingly established, the Car of Life image in The Triumph of Life owes not a little to Hazlitt's image for Power in his ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’, in an Examiner article of 12 January 1817 (vii, 147). ⁴