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The sex scandal that shocked the literary world of the 1820s
Two hundred years ago, the English essayist and painter William Hazlitt was in the middle of a tragi-comic love affair which led to a notorious literary confession that reverberated through the nineteenth century
In August 1820, William Hazlitt moved into rooms at 9 Southampton Buildings in Holborn, London. The Walker family’s lodging house was the stage on which the worst ordeal of the writer’s life was set over the next three years, as described in his notorious account of erotomania, the Liber Amoris (‘Book of Love’).
An irrational obsession with Sarah, the daughter of Maciah, a tailor, and Martha Walker, drove Hazlitt to a nervous breakdown, took him close to madness and suicide, and almost destroyed his writing career. While Liber Amoris, originally published anonymously in 1823, supposedly as fiction, scandalised 19th century readers, today we find much of it risible, a sad comedy of errors, of overwrought Romantic effusion on Hazlitt’s part.
When he first encountered Sarah, he was 42 and she was 19. She brought him his breakfast of black tea and toast each morning and, immediately, he became infatuated with her, captivated at the outset by what he saw as her hypnotic movements. She seemed to glide rather than walk, with a wavy motion he likened to that of a snake.
