ABSTRACT
Though sixteen years younger than Godwin, William Hazlitt (1778–1830) had a similar background in English religious Dissent and its traditions of resistance to the established political and cultural order. Hazlitt and Godwin first met on 17 September 1794 at the London studio of Hazlitt’s brother John, a successful portrait painter and miniaturist. The meeting was not accidental. Hazlitt’s father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, a Unitarian from Ireland and a man of outspoken liberal views, had succeeded Godwin’s father as minister at Wisbech in 1764, and the two families had been friendly for many years. In 1799 Hazlitt began to visit Godwin frequently, as he did for the rest of his life whenever he was in London. For his part, Godwin encouraged Hazlitt’s literary projects and helped him to find publishers for several of his early works, beginning with An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), his philosophical account of disinterestedness, which Godwin persuaded Joseph Johnson to accept.
