William Hazlitt, Blogfather

It is all Hazlitt's doing. I realised this when walking through Soho after a lunchtime showing of Michael Moore's Sicko. I was in search of caffeine, and suitably fixed with a curiously orange/pink-cupped latte from the nearby Patisserie Valerie, I found myself in a contemplative mood at the north end of Frith Street. The effects of the healthcare polemic & invigorating beans had nicely left my synapses fizzing when I stumbled upon the one-time residence of the aforementioned radical journalist (currently a bijou hotel offering "intimate charm and old fashioned hospitality").

Now, I adore Hazlitt. His muscular prose and unabashed enthusiasm for both demotic and high culture is one of the few high points of English literature in the nineteenth-century (if you mention Wordsworth then I'm afraid that we really can't be friends). I never tire of reading his essays on Gusto, Indian Jugglers, walks in the country, boxing-matches, painting, sculpture, theatrical performances, common-sense, well-thought prejudices, even the sketches of contemporary figures from every conceivable field of life. And in a buttoned-up politically suspicious age, he was honest enough to map out his own revolutionary beliefs and romantic entanglements (a 4-volume work on Napoleon and the reputation-destroying Liber Amoris).

After a legendary encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the height of his powers in 1798, it probably could not have been any other way for him. Ingrained with a palpable sense of wonder, Hazlitt's writings also delight in the very pleasure of ordering and expressing that wonder. And so it was, hovering on that Soho pavement with a north-westerly wind whipping round my ears, it occurred to me that not only is Hazlitt the father of journalism in English, but he is the father of Web 2.0 as well. For when he wrote, 'Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets', he was actually articulating the very notion of blogging. I raised my cup on behalf of the capital's 48,000-plus blogger members and continued on my way.