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Epistemologies of the Road: William Hazlitt and the Georgian Road Book

AmongWilliamHazlitt’s essays, “OnGoing a Journey” and “WhyDistant Objects Please,” originally published in the second volume of Table Talk (1821–22), present hismotives andmethods concerning travel as inherently contrarian. This posture accords withHazlitt’s notoriously prickly personality in general. While he loves a good walk, Hazlitt announces from the first sentence of “OnGoing a Journey” that “I like to gobymyself” (Selected Writings 136). The solitarymale wanderer is a familiar Romantic trope, but in practice Hazlitt’s contemporaries were typically not opposed to company on the road. In his dedication forDescriptive Sketches (1793), Wordsworth praises his youthful traveling companion in France, Robert Jones, by contending that “two companions lolling in a post chaise” lack the heart of gentleman truants who travel on foot (32). The young Byron set out for the Continent with John Cam Hobhouse. While Hazlitt grants the appeal of having a companion when abroad, in the country of his birth he embraces solitary travel as “liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases” (Selected Writings 136). Hazlitt goes on to clarify that he has “no objection” to journeys “with a friend or a party,” as long as they seek out typical fashionable objectives, which Hazlitt amusingly sums up as “ruins, aqueducts, pictures” (Selected Writings 145). But the endpoint, in these encounters, is all. This approach to a journey reduces a day on the road to a destination: “thefirst consideration always is where we shall go.” It leaves no room forHazlitt’smain interest— namely, “what we shall meet with by the way” (145)—which can provide a