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William Carew Hazlitt

London, 1834 - 1913, Richmond, England

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043355
Hazlitt, William Carew (1834–1913), bibliographer and writer, was born at 76 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, London, on 22 August 1834, the eldest son of William Hazlitt (1811–1893), registrar of the court of bankruptcy, and his wife, Catherine Reynell (d. 1860); he was a grandson of William Hazlitt (1778–1830), the essayist. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School from 1842 to 1850, and after experimenting with journalism and civil engineering, and serving during the Crimean War as a supernumerary clerk at the War Office, he turned to historical research. In 1858 he published The History of the Origin and Rise of the Republic of Venice, which appeared in revised and extended forms in 1860, 1900, and 1915. It played a significant part in the later Victorian rehabilitation of medieval and Renaissance Venice, earlier portrayed by historians as the home of a tyrannous and arbitrary oligarchy.

Hazlitt married, on 10 October 1860, Henrietta Foulkes, the daughter of John Foulkes of Ashfield House, Wrexham, in Denbighshire. They had one son and one daughter. Hazlitt was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1861, but instead of practising he became interested in bibliography. In 1867 he published a Handbook to the popular, poetical and dramatic literature of Great Britain from the invention of printing to the Restoration (1867). To listing and editing these early works he devoted much of the rest of his life, examining thousands of old books as they passed through the salerooms. Three series of Bibliographical Collections and Notes, with two supplements to the third, were published by him during the years 1876–89, followed by a General Index, compiled by G. J. Gray in 1893, and a fourth series in 1903. Written on odd bits of paper in a difficult hand, his notes, when they appeared in print, were sometimes inexact, but the Collections and Notes nevertheless became a much used book of reference.

In his old age Hazlitt gave much time to bringing all his notes together, with many new ones, as a Consolidated Bibliography, and made the cost of printing this a first charge on a reversionary bequest to the British Museum, the balance of which was to form a fund for purchasing early English books. The preparation of his Handbook enabled Hazlitt to give much valuable help to Henry Huth (1815–1876) in the formation of the latter's well-known library, and he frequently offered bargains from the salerooms to the British Museum and elsewhere. His methods of work and experiences are revealed in his Confessions of a Collector (1897) and in his two biographical volumes, The Hazlitts (1911) and The Later Hazlitts (1912).

Hazlitt's chief editorial undertakings were new editions of Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays in fifteen volumes (1874–6) and of Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1871), Shakespeare's Library in six volumes (1875), Old English Jest Books in three volumes (1863–4), and the Poems and Plays of Thomas Randolph (1875). He also wrote Shakespeare: the Man and his Work (1902), Coinage of the European Continent (1893–7), two volumes of poems (1877, 1897), and Man Considered in Relation to God and a Church (1905). The record of Hazlitt's publications extends to over sixty items and provides evidence of a busy life. He died at home at 87 Church Road, Richmond, Surrey, on 8 September 1913.

A. W. Reed, rev. Nilanjana Banerji
Sources

W. C. Hazlitt, Four generations of a literary family, 2 vols. (1897) · J. Foster, Men-at-the-bar: a biographical hand-list of the members of the various inns of court, 2nd edn (1885) · W. C. Hazlitt, The Hazlitts (1911) · W. C. Hazlitt, The later Hazlitts (1912) · W. C. Hazlitt, The confessions of a collector (1897) · J. Pemble, Venice rediscovered (1996) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1913)
Archives

BL, corresp., Add. MSS 38898–38913 · Man. CL, MSS :: U. Edin. L., corresp. with James Halliwell-Phillipps

Wealth at death

£10,831 1s. 9d.: probate, 4 Oct 1913, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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A. W. Reed, ‘Hazlitt, William Carew (1834–1913)’, rev. Nilanjana Banerji, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/33780, accessed 19 Oct 2017]

William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33780

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Last Updated8/7/24

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