What is the people?

I have been reading Duncan Wu's excellent biography, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man and today I was walking through Soho, doing some shopping (you know, the usual Soho stuff, whips, chains and the like), when I came upon this sign on Frith Street. William Hazlitt actually died in the building I was standing in front of. Remarkable. I have walked down the street many times (it is next to the brilliant Frith Street Tattoo where Hazlitt himself got his 'Winona Forever' and 'Fuck Tha Police' tattoos) and never noticed it. Perhaps because the sign is rather high on the wall. The slum building where Hazlitt died in near-forgotten penury at the age of 52 is now a posh hotel trading on his name. You can have one of the Georgian suites in the Hazlitt Hotel for a mere £325 a night. "It's like stepping back into the 18th Century," breathes the hotel's website. Hm, is that Soho of the 18th Century? So then: rats scuttling about the rooms, lumpy lice-infested straw mattresses, some spotted dick for dinner, gin-addled and pox ridden strumpets outside, your own chamberpot to empty out the window to the street, about a 75 percent chance of catching tuberculosis or cholera.

But this is what I love about London. Not the gin-addled, pox-ridden strumpets, though they are a dime a dozen in the Big Smoke, let me tell you. At least that's what those adverts the NHS runs in movie theatres are having me believe, and I do go to a lot of publishing parties. No, it is the chance to randomly stumble upon some place with rich historical, artistic or literary associations that the city, so overrun with those associations, presents to us with an insouciant shrug and an offhand blue plaque. If Hazlitt had died in some hellhole like Swindon, I am sure that city would make a big hoo-ha about it.

Hazlitt has been more than a little neglected. He is rarely read today, and that is a shame. Mostly, I think, because he wrote no fiction and to be attuned to his essays you have to know a little more about the period than you would have to reading, say, Jane Austen. Yet his essays are profound and still able to shake me to the core. I love him because he was able to marry cynicism with an affection for humanity, which is a tricky thing. Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens are two contemporary writers I admire in varying degrees and would perhaps think of themselves as heirs to Hazlitt, yet they write with acid pens but flinty hearts.

Hazlitt was far from perfect, perhaps why he makes such a compelling subject for Wu. He had a misogynistic streak, was a raging whoremonger, had a soft spot for that despot Napoleon. But I didn't have to live with him. Instead, I can read 'The Fight', ostensibly an account of a prizefight (in those days it wasn't Marquess of Queensbury rules - you battered a man until he couldn't be revived), but more a poignant look at the lengths humans will go to inflict brutality on their fellow man. Few people as perceptive as Hazlitt are writing today, and we are poorer for it.