Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen

Overview

About fifteen pages, an essay by William Hazlitt published in 1826, recalling an evening at Charles Lamb’s some twenty years earlier when the assembled company played a parlor game, naming which dead persons they would most wish to have met. Although framed as a report of this game, the essay’s genuine subject is Charles Lamb himself, whose particular answers, and the reasoning behind them, give Hazlitt his real material.

Lamb rejects the more obvious, fashionable choices the other guests propose, arguing instead for Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, writers valued for the specific, idiosyncratic pleasure of their company and prose style rather than for conventional historical importance. The conversation ranges widely across Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Pope, Dr Johnson and Rousseau before Lamb’s final answer, naming Christ, brings the entire room to silence.

What happens

The parlor game. Hazlitt recalls an evening at Charles Lamb’s home some twenty years earlier, when the assembled literary company played a game of naming which dead historical or literary figures each guest would most wish to have actually met and spoken with.

Lamb’s unexpected choices. Rather than naming more obviously celebrated figures, Lamb argues for Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, writers whose specific prose style and idiosyncratic sensibility Lamb values for the particular pleasure of imagined company rather than for their broader historical or literary reputation.

The wide-ranging conversation. The discussion moves conversationally across a considerable range of figures, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Pope, Dr Johnson and Rousseau among them, weighing for each the specific appeal or potential disappointment of actual acquaintance against the more comfortable, distant pleasure of admiring their work from historical remove.

Lamb names Christ. At the game’s conclusion, Lamb names Christ as the person he would most wish to have seen, an answer that brings the entire room to silence, the evening’s playful literary speculation suddenly confronting a name too serious and too different in kind for the same casual comparative game.

Hazlitt’s portrait of Lamb. Throughout the essay, Hazlitt’s actual interest lies less in the game’s literary content than in what Lamb’s specific choices and the manner of his conversation reveal about his own distinctive character, making the essay finally a portrait of a particular literary personality as much as a report of an evening’s talk.

How to read it

Read the essay’s central parlor game as a device for character revelation rather than literary criticism proper; Lamb’s specific, unexpected choices matter here primarily for what they show about his own particular sensibility rather than as settled critical judgments about Browne, Greville or the other figures discussed.

Pay close attention to how the essay’s wide-ranging conversational structure itself performs the kind of literary genius and sociability it describes, Hazlitt reproducing the actual texture and movement of table talk among friends rather than simply summarizing its content after the fact.

Notice how carefully the essay builds toward Lamb’s final answer, Christ, through its preceding survey of more conventional literary and intellectual figures, so that the concluding silence lands as a genuine tonal shift rather than an arbitrary or sentimental addition to an otherwise playful piece.

Consider Hazlitt’s own evident affection for Lamb, visible throughout in how attentively the essay records his friend’s specific words and reasoning, as relevant to how you read the essay’s overall tone; this is a memorial tribute to a particular friend’s mind as much as a general meditation on genius and admiration.

Read this essay alongside Lamb’s own writing on Shakespeare’s tragedies to compare directly how two close literary friends and contemporaries, writing in the same familiar essay tradition, each approached questions of literary judgment, personal taste and genuine intellectual companionship.

Questions it raises

• Does Lamb’s preference for Browne and Greville over more conventionally celebrated figures represent a genuinely defensible literary judgment, or does the essay treat this preference primarily as revealing character rather than making an actual critical argument about literary merit?
• How does the essay’s conversational, associative structure, moving between numerous figures rather than developing a single sustained argument, shape its actual effectiveness compared to a more conventional literary essay with an explicit central thesis?
• What does Lamb’s final answer, naming Christ after a sequence of purely literary and intellectual figures, actually accomplish for the essay’s structure and meaning? Does this ending feel like a natural culmination or an abrupt shift into different territory entirely?
• How does Hazlitt’s evident personal affection for Lamb shape the essay’s portrait of him? Would the same conversational material, reported by a less sympathetic or less intimate observer, produce a meaningfully different account of Lamb’s character and judgment?
• What does the specific parlor game Hazlitt describes, naming which dead persons one would wish to have met, reveal about how educated Romantic-era readers actually related to literary and historical figures from earlier periods? Does this game reflect a distinctive period attitude toward admiration and acquaintance?
• Given that the essay is ostensibly about an evening’s light literary conversation, what does its genuine seriousness by the end suggest about the relationship between playful social conversation and more substantial reflection? Can trivial games reveal genuinely important things about character and belief?