On the Pleasure of Hating, by William Hazlitt

In 1826 the English writer William Hazlitt (1778-1830) wrote an essay called "On the Pleasure of Hating." Today considered one of the great British critics and essayists, his aim in this work was to explain the power of hate as an emotion, why so many people find satisfaction in hating others. Although much of the essay relates to Hazlitt's time and personal relationships, his analysis of hatred remains relevant to the present, given the upsurge of hate and cruelty across the planet. 

[Image: William Hazlitt, Self-portrait, from c. 1802]

At the outset, it is important to note that as a young man, Hazlitt was convinced of the benevolence of human nature. By the 1820s, he had rejected that belief. In the essay, Hazlitt argues that hatred is built into our nature. We need to have something to hate to maintain "our  thought and action." The human mind hankers after evil and "takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction." In contrast, pure good is boring. It lacks "variety and spirit." 

Perhaps for this reason, he continued, old friends often begin to hate one another as the years pass by. People who once delighted us begin to bore or annoy us. Hazlitt confesses that he no longer is on good terms with close friends of the past, who included many of the literary lights of the day, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. His staunch admiration for the cause of liberty created friction with friends who had become more conservative due to the French Revolution. They might (and did) blame his bad temper, but he countered that they fell out with each other as well.  

The worst effects of hating, Hazlitt argued, arise in relation to religion and politics. "The pleasure of hating," is "like a poisonous mineral." It perverts religion, turning it into anger and bigotry. Virtue becomes "a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others." It turns "the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion" into excuses "for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces." 

Hatred "makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands." Love of country does not inspire any friendly feeling or disposition to help one's countrymen. It means only hatred for the inhabitants "of any other country we happen to be at war with for the time." Here, Hazlitt was thinking of Britain's wars against the French in particular. 

People claim to be "patriots and friends of freedom," but the world is divided into two types: tyrants and slaves who support the efforts of kings to forge "chains of despotism and superstition." The words and actions of fools and knaves are hailed as "public spiritedness."  

If humanity truly desired right to prevail, "they might have had it long ago." But "they are prone to mischief." In private life, "hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed." Meanwhile, "modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot." 

Hazlitt then turns to and on himself. He confesses to having witnessed and analyzed human "meanness, spite, cowardice;" to have seen people's lack of feeling and concern for others; to have observed our self-ignorance and our tendency to prefer "custom" over "excellence." 

All these failings lead to social "infamy," to disgraceful and appalling behavior. In his own case, they have led to disillusion. "I have been mistaken in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love." He asks, has all this not given him reason "to hate and despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."

Perhaps these were the words of a bitter old man, who spent his last years in poverty. His two marriages had failed. He found it difficult to make a living due to his radical ideas and critiques of influential people. Or perhaps he had discovered an inconvenient truth about human nature, one that helps explain the failure of "the acme of Creation" to establish a world of peace and justice. 

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An 18th century Trump: Jonathan Wild, Thief and Thieftaker.

Jonathan Wild was a notorious Jekyll and Hyde character of early 18th century London. Wild played both sides of the law brazenly. He fenced stolen goods, working with a gang of thieves and highwaymen. 

At the same time, he acted as a law-abiding citizen vigilante who informed on criminals, earning the unofficial title of "Thieftaker General." Many of the criminals he denounced to the law were rivals and even members of his gang. (Image: Wild, by Charles Knight, 1791-1873)

Wild was born in Wolverhampton @1682 the son of a carpenter. He moved to London in the early 1700s. After being arrested for debt, he became involved in the criminal underworld, learning from and working with Mary Milliner or Mollineaux, a prostitute. Around 1712 they began to live together. He set himself up as a fence of stolen goods, and Mary operated as a madam. Somehow, he managed to hide this unsavory side and present himself publicly as a respectable citizen with a veneer of gentility. he attracted the attention of the then chief thief taker in London, Charles Hitchens, who recruited him as an assistant.

Wild was aided on both sides of the law by a surge in property crimes in the 1720s. Alarm was increased by crime reporting in London's first daily newspapers. The public was demanding vigorous action, but the authorities were hamstrung. A professional police force was more than a century away, and was opposed as a possible tool of authoritarian government. Crime prevention was in the hands of superannuated night watchmen and part-time, unpaid constables who relied on public posses (the "hue and cry") to pursue thieves. Criminals had an easy time outwitting this ramshackle crew. In a grossly unequal society growing in wealth, opportunities and incentives for theft were legion. 

Wild manipulated the legal system masterly, and collected rewards for returning goods he and his colleagues stole. When one of his gang crossed him, or demanded a larger share of the proceeds, he would "impeach" them (inform on them), sending them to jail and perhaps the gallows. Wild then collected the reward for "taking a thief." The amount, £40, would be worth about £8000 today. In 1720, Wild manged to convince the government to raise the fee to £140. 

If Wild wanted to bring a thief back into his gang, he would bribe the jailers to let them out. He also used his gang members to "take" members of rival gangs, including that of Hitchens, his former mentor and partner. The two crooks engaged in a public pamphlet war, each protesting their devotion to the law and accusing the other of criminality. Wild also accused Hitchens of being a sodomite (homosexual), which stuck and eliminated him as a threat. There is no honour among thieves. 

Wild managed to balance his contradictory persona for more than a decade. But he amassed a large number of enemies. Evidence of mass corruption in the government in the early 1720s increased public skepticism of his civic spiritedness. One of his gang members he had impeached attacked him in the courtroom and cut his throat. 

Wild survived the attack, but it left him greatly weakened, and he began to lose control over his gang. Several of them came forward and testified against him. He was convicted of theft and sentenced to hang. On the morning of his execution he tried to commit but failed to commit suicide. On May 24, 1725 Wild was taken from Newgate prison and hanged at Tyburn (now Marble Arch). A huge crowd turned out to watch the execution, the largest ever to attend such a spectacle, according to Daniel Defoe. Tickets were sold for the best viewing spots. William Hogarth produced a famous engraving of an execution at Tyburn in "The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn." (1747)

In one of history's ironies, the hangman had been a guest at Wild's wedding. An 18 year old Henry Fielding was among the throng. Wild's body was dissected at the College of Surgeons. His skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. (Image: Ticket to Wild's Execution)

Many writers, including John Gay and Henry Fielding, were inspired by Wild's career. They used the story of Wild to attack corrupt politicians, notably Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Today, it is not difficult to see a parallel between Wild and Donald Trump. The former president presents himself as a great patriot and public servant, while engaging in a series of criminal and legally questionable activities. Trump, like Wild, has often thrown his associates to the wolves to save his skin. Will the course of justice catch up with Trump as it did with Wild, or will The Donald end up more like Walpole, who survived as prime minister for 21 years? American voters will decide. 

Further Reading:

John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728).

Henry Fielding, The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743).

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The American Revolution Revisited: A War Between History and Memory

The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and War for Independence is nearly upon us. It is destined to reach new heights of commercialism, with beer companies no doubt leading the pack. Corny commemorations and tall tales will all be a part of the celebration. Will there be room for calm reflection on the events of 1775-1783? Not much, I fear, especially in the Age of Trump and MAGA. In the best of times, dispassionate analysis of great events tends to be in short supply, overwhelmed and marginalized by the popular taste for hoopla. On this occasion calm analysis is likely to be obliterated by the Trumpets of MAGA. 

The revolution will be celebrated as a great victory for liberty and equality. It was, though more in the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence than anything in reality. Awkwardly, it was also a war to preserve slavery. 

In 1773, British judge Lord Mansfield declared in the Somerset Case that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling aroused panic among some slaveholders, mostly in the southern colonies. It helped unite them with the northern colonies, where the rallying cry was the more historically palatable "no taxation without representation." Traditional narratives of the revolution have tended to emphasize Britain's attacks on colonial liberty while ignoring the colonist's denial of liberty to the enslaved. 

Alarmed slaveholders denied the right of Parliament to pass laws affecting the internal or domestic affairs of the colonies. Slavery, they argued, was a domestic American issue. In 1775, on the verge of war, they accused the British of plotting slave revolts and Indian attacks as a means of subduing the rebellious colonies. In 1776, they decided that independence was necessary to prevent emancipation and loss of control over enslaved Blacks. 

In that sense the War for Independence had more in common with the Civil War than is generally acknowledged. Looked at from the perspective of the enslaved population, both were wars for liberty. Many Blacks absorbed the rhetoric of their white masters and saw the Revolutionary War as an opportunity to secure their freedom, by joining the British. Historians estimate that around 100,000 enslaved persons ran off to British lines between 1775 and 1783, 25,000 in South Carolina alone. They were not complacent bystanders, but active participants in the struggles that gave birth to a nation. 

History is often unpleasant, messy, and chaotic. It is seldom as simple as we would like it to be. Historical myth is the opposite: neat, generally pleasing -- at least to our prejudices -- and comfortably black and white. The myths are "alternative facts" or "fake history." Not surprisingly, myths tend to dominate if not smother actual history in the popular consciousness, the "public memory." By "actual history" I do not mean the "truth" but the result of painstaking historical research, writing, and interpretation. If well done, the result is our best current approximation of the truth. In that sense, history resembles science. Science is a more exact business, of course. Scientists can use repeated experiments to confirm their hypotheses. Historians do not have that luxury. They cannot repeat history. In most cases, they would not wish to. 

Historian Lewis Namier wrote that the writing of history "is not a visit of condolence." He might have added that the same is true of reading it. Learning our history is often difficult, troubling and confusing. If it never is, we are reading the wrong stuff. Some people avoid the problem by ignoring history, just as others avoid ethical problems by ignoring philosophy. Henry Ford is alleged to have said that "history is bunk." Apparently, he didn't say exactly that, but he did reject the past as dead and meaningless, not worth bothering about. 

Abraham Lincoln disagreed with Ford. In his Second Inaugural Address he declared, "My Fellow Americans, we cannot escape history." He understood that the terrible war nearing its end was the result of the country's failure to abolish slavery early in its history. Novelist William Faulkner held a similar view: "The past isn't dead. It is not even past." His characters are prisoners of their history, in this case the history of the Deep South. 

Karl Marx wrote in much the same vein in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Marx prefaced that statement with "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." One does not have to be a Marxist to agree with that statement. Our history, like our biology, constrains us, for good or ill.

Peter McCandless, REMARKABLE CHARLESTONIANS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Arcadia, The History Press, 2025)

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Admiral Anson of Charleston and Carshalton

Admiral George Anson is best known for commanding a British naval squadron on an epic circumnavigation of the world between 1740 and 1744. Britain was at war with Spain, the War of Jenkins' Ear, and his goal was to raid Spanish possessions. 

The voyage was in some ways a disaster. Of his six ships, only one completed the journey. Most of his men died of scurvy, then the scourge of long voyages. But he did capture a Spanish ship loaded with treasure near the Philippines. [Image: George Anson, by Thomas Hudson]

By the time he returned to Britain, the country was also at war with France. In 1747, Anson captured an entire French squadron at the First Battle of Cape Finisterre, which netted him an enormous treasure. The government rewarded him with a peerage, as First Baron Anson. In 1751 the government elevated him to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. In that capacity, he was responsible for reforms that greatly improved the efficiency of the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War (1756-63). He also commissioned an investigation into the causes and cure for scurvy. Anson died near the end of the war, in 1762, aged 65.

I have a "special connection" to Anson. No, we are not related, except maybe through Adam and Eve. It is this: he lived in two places I have lived in, in Charleston, South Carolina in America and Carshalton, Surrey, in England.

I first learned about Anson's Charleston connection while working as a history professor at the College of Charleston. One of the neighborhoods of the city is named after him, Ansonborough. So are Anson Street, the Anson Restaurant, Ansonborough House, and the Ansonborough Inn. George Street was also named for him. Several other streets were named for ships he commanded, but they have other names now.

In 1724, when he was only 26 but already a captain, the Royal Navy sent Anson to Charleston in command of a small squadron to defend the city and its region from pirate attacks. He remained in that capacity until 1735, long after pirates had ceased to be a major threat. 

In 1726, he purchased 64 acres of land on the Charleston peninsula. That land later became the town's first "suburb," Ansonborough. According to one story, perhaps apocryphal, Anson won the money he used to buy the land in a card game. True or not, gambling was a common pastime of the elite. 

Now for Carshalton. In 1749 Anson leased Carshalton House, a country house originally built around 1700 for a tobacco merchant, Edward Carlton. He went bankrupt and the house passed to several other owners before Anson leased it. Anson lived there until 1752, when he moved to a house he had built in Hertfordshire, Moor Park. [Two Images of Carshalton House, a mid-19th century lithograph and a modern photo.]

At the time of the lithograph Carshalton House was being used by the government as a preparatory school for cadets of the Royal Artillery and Engineers. In the late 19th century, an order of Catholic nuns purchased Carshalton House and grounds. They established a primary and high school for girls there, St. Philomena's. It is still in operation and is only a short walk from my house. 

Most people in Carshalton have probably never heard of Anson. Lots of Charlestonians will be familiar with his name because it is everywhere. How many know why is another matter. But be ye from Charleston or Carshalton, raise a glass for Admiral Anson! I'll raise two! We’ll meet at the Anson Arms pub, as soon as it’s built!

Interestingly, online articles about Anson do not mention his connections to Charleston or Carshalton. If I hadn't lived in both places, I would never have known about them.