Scholar Jon Cook sets out to explain a single puzzling event in the life of essayist and critic William Hazlitt. In August 1820, Hazlitt took rooms at 9 Southampton Buildings, Holborn – not exactly a fashionable quarter at the time. Near the brothels of St Giles and the Inns of Court, Holborn was a teeming, contradictory neighbourhood that suited the radical bent of Hazlitt’s political sympathies.
At 42, estranged from his wife, Hazlitt settles into his lodgings and promptly falls in love with 19-year-old Sarah Walker, the landlord’s daughter. She is a coquette who every morning delivers his breakfast tray along with an ample serving of flirtation. Hazlitt is fascinated by his reaction to this girl, and the teasing torment of unconsummated attachment becomes the basis for his ‘Liber Amoris’ (‘Book of Love’).
As frustratingly noncommittal as Sarah is, Hazlitt nevertheless decides to divorce his wife at a time when this literally required an act of Parliament, and colludes with her to take advantage of the more relaxed Scottish marriage laws. They travel to Scotland separately to begin the required 40-day residency and to trump up a divorce case. When ‘Liber Amoris’ was published anonymously in 1823, the critics readily identified its author and gleefully savaged both, one reviewer grousing, ‘Let us have no more of his landlord’s daughter.’
‘Liber Amoris’ painstakingly framed the torment of one person loving an uncooperative, idealised Other. This intriguing book dissects one such experience as a backdrop to Hazlitt’s greater work.
