_________________________

Cathleen Miller at Hazlitt's Hotel

I am writing to you from the London home of William Hazlitt, the great British essayist. He was kind enough to let me stay here. Of course he's dead, so he had little say so in the matter, but I suppose his ghost could have tipped the bed over, at which point I would have rolled down the cantilevered floor and scurried out into the Soho night.

Sitting at his desk here at 6 Frith Street during the early nineteenth century, Hazlitt wrote prolifically about the culture of his times. At that moment this Georgian townhome was a boarding house. When he died, another great English essayist, Charles Lamb was by his bedside. When Mr. Lamb went home, the clever landlady stowed Hazlitt under the bed until the undertakers could collect the body. It seems she was eager to re-rent his room, and wisely presumed—with those feral wiles that earmark her trade—that a stiff as part of the decor would somewhat diminish her property values. Having read this, the first thing I did when I checked into the hotel was look under the bed for prior lodgers.

Many times I've heard travelers remark that they don't want to spend much money on a hotel room. "After all, you're only sleeping there," they sagely conclude. I am not like these people. I travel with a different agenda, one being (as I noted in my previous column) a notion which is always simmering just beneath the surface of my consciousness: the search for my perfect home. But another is to lose myself, to try being a different person for a change, like performing a role in a play. Far from home there is no pressure to be the same old Cathy Miller.

Hazlitt's Hotel is perfect for this game. However, it would not be the place for those travelers who like to get up early and head downstairs to the "fitness center," to grunt while pulling some chrome bar up and down, then grab a quick coffee at the local Starbucks (which seem to be invading England now like Huns), dine at the TGI Fridays at Covent Garden, then round out the day by calculating how many frequent flyer points their Sheraton stay has accrued. No. Hazlitt's is for a romantic like me who pretends she is an eighteenth-century Georgian lady staying at her city home. The servants bring my breakfast to the room in the morning. I rise from my canopied bed and stumble over to the leather-covered writing table and pour a cup of tea. Other than a small, unused television set, there is nothing within the confines of my paneled room to suggest I am in the twenty-first century, or even in a hotel, for that matter. The fireplace with a coal grate, and cast-iron clawfoot tub in the bath, look as if Mr. Hazlitt just slid under the bed yesterday.

As an essayist and critic, Hazlitt was acquainted with all the important writers of his day; Charles Lamb and Jonathan Swift visited this home frequently, and I find sleeping in such quarters a heady notion. Maybe by merely sleeping here I can soak up genius that has seeped into these walls. Perhaps I am drawn to Hazlitt most of all because of all the things we have in common: in his early years he trained as a painter; while his contemporaries Wordsworth and Coleridge mellowed with age, Hazlitt remained a political radical all his life; his essay "The Fight"—told with vivid sensory details—is one of the early progenitors of today's creative nonfiction genre. And how can you not admire a man who writes an essay titled "On the Pleasure of Hating”? He was a man who dared to speak his mind.

While Hazlitt found much to criticize about his era, today it feels reassuring to be in England during such uncertain times. I haven’t been here in a dozen years, and some things have changed: the staid black lorries are painted up with advertisements for everything from Lloyd’s of London to internet providers; the beloved red phone boxes are disappearing; and the streets are lined with ethnic restaurants and foreigners. While the British press is full of tales of terrorist threats and high alerts, and Americans stay home in droves, I feel safer here than I did in the States. After all, England has survived attacks for centuries, from William the Conqueror to Adolph Hitler. And yet it has remained a proud and thoughtful center of civilization and culture.

For anyone interested in the literature of the English-speaking world, London is the fountainhead, the Mecca for one's pilgrimage. Many of the physical locations of these artists' birth, life and death, are still in tact, not having been razed for strip malls as we Americans would so gleefully accomplish in the name of progress. Here you can see the homes where Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, and John Keats wrote their masterworks. And you can visit Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey where the great names of English literature are buried (Ben Jonson standing up because he figured a way around paying for the six-feet of eternal real estate).

But Hazlitt is not interred at Poets' Corner, and perhaps rightfully so, as he dedicated his life to perfecting the essay form to rival poetry. Once he got out from under the bed, he was buried a few blocks from here in St. Anne's Churchyard, with a tombstone carved as he directed. It reads: "Grateful and Contented."
__________________________
Hazlitt's Hotel makes a terrific location for night owls interested in the Soho club scene, or those exploring London's West End. Theater-goers will find many shows a five-minute walk away. (Discount tickets are available on the day of the show at the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square.) For more information on staying at Hazlitt's, see their website.