The sex scandal that shocked the literary world of the 1820s

Kenneth Haigh as William Hazlitt and Lynne Frederick as Sarah Walker in the 1977 TV movie ‘Hazlitt in Love’ (Thames Television).

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…