The nineteenth century idea of literary talent

Hazlitt, genius, juggling, and David Copperfield

In The Dandy School, a review of Disraeli’s 1826 novel Vivian Grey, William Hazlitt complained that modern fiction no longer used imagination to take readers to times and places they were unfamiliar with—“to place us in the situations of others and enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them”—but preferred to depict fashionable society on Bond Street. The fashionable novel means, “You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air.”

Hazlitt was angry about the clanging way novelists added information that was “new to him” but old to his characters. The problem when a novelist “informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks” is not just that it’s clunky technique, but that it prioritises the surface. The quality don’t spend their time thinking I am eating fish with a silver fork. What then are they thinking? What about the use of art to help us understand the situations of others? Forget it, says Hazlitt: