SOURCE: An introduction to A Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft, The New York Public Library, 1922, pp. 7-31.

In the following excerpt, Colby provides an overview of Holcroft's writings, supplementing Hazlitt's biography with newly available information.

It seems that the hour has come for a fuller and clearer consideration of the life of Thomas Holcroft. A hundred years have passed since Hazlitt published Holcroft's narrative of his own boyhood, and supplemented it with such facts as were then available among the notes, papers, diary, letters, and published writings. It may, of course, appear a bit presumptuous to try to add to the value of Hazlitt's Memoirs,¹ especially since the original editor enjoys a reputation as one of the best essayists of the nineteenth century, whose judgments of contemporaries have in so many cases stood the test of generations of critics and whose writings are so uniformly remarkable for ease and...