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Hello, on a tomb in the graveyard of St Anne's Church in London, there's an inscription that reads,

The first unanswered metaphysition of the age, a despiser of the merely rich and great, a lover of the people, poor or oppressed, a hater of the pride and power of the few,

the unconquered champion of truth, liberty and humanity. The S.S. and critic William Haslet was buried in 1830.

By some he was described as the Shakespeare prose writer of our glorious country. Yet his rebellious, republican views led him to be demonized and ridiculed by the regency elite.

Haslet's writing was as wide-ranging as his interests. She brought the same energy and focus to S.S. on boxing and racquetball as he did to those on Shakespeare.

What's less well-known is that he began his career as a painter and a philosopher. However, his unrequited infatuation with his learned aid his daughter and the memoir in which he revealed this,

led him into disgrace and he died in poverty. His reputation as an intellectual is still recovering.

With me to discuss the turbulent life and works of William Haslet are Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy, a Birkbeck College University of London,

Otra Nata Rajan, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Goldsmiths College University of London,

and Jonathan Bait, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

Jonathan Bait, can you give us a sense of William Haslet's family background and effect it had on his ideas?

Yes, he was born into an Ulster dissenting family, actually born at Maidstone in Kent, and the key fact of his background is upbringing was that his father was a dissenting minister.

He was a unitarian, so he's involved with the non-established church, and immediately that has very strong links with politics in the period.

Early in Haslet's childhood, there was a falling out, really for sort of political reasons, within the congregation of his father, as a result of which his father went to America for a time and became one of the first unitarian ministers in America.

Then back to England and started a ministry on the Welsh borders, a little town called Wem, just outside Shrewsbury.

But, as I say, the key fact is that Haslet's father is a preacher and a political radical, and indeed publishes his sermons and so forth.

And being in England, he didn't believe that Christ was the son of God, but Christ was a great moral teacher.

And this barred the young Haslet from education at the ancient university, so at 15 he went to Hackney College, a college set up by descenders, in which he got a far better education.

So all three of you here today claim that he would have got at Oxford or Cambridge.

Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things about the links between radical thinkers in the 18th century and religion.

The only established universities were Oxford and Cambridge in England.

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