Introduction

Abstract

The epigraph to this book is taken from an essay that Hazlitt wrote towards the end of his life. It was published in The Atlas in 1829, and it contains his final thoughts concerning the nature of the difficulties that perhaps inevitably bedevil the study of English grammar. It is a topic that had fascinated him for many years and which had prompted him to publish his own grammar textbook, A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (henceforth Grammar) in 1809. Although twenty years had intervened between the publication of the Grammar and the appearance of the Atlas essay, Hazlitt adopts the same basic position in both texts: he repeatedly implores his audience not to allow themselves to be ‘hoodwinked and led blindfold by mere precedent and authority’, and he speaks disparagingly of those who unquestioningly accept the linguistic precepts with which they had been indoctrinated as children.¹ As these remarks suggest, the system of grammatical analysis that was standardly taught in British schools was, for Hazlitt, a detestable absurdity:

If a system were made in burlesque and purposely to call into question and expose its own nakedness, it could not go beyond this, which is gravely taught in all seminaries, and patiently learnt by all school-boys as an exercise and discipline of the intellectual faculties.²