"Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy"
About this Quote
Punctuality sounds like a petty bourgeois virtue until Hazlitt makes it a litmus test for whether you take another person seriously. He’s writing as a critic of manners as much as of literature, and the bite here comes from treating a missed dinner not as a scheduling hiccup but as a small act of disrespect with big social consequences. A late arrival is time theft dressed up as accident: it forces someone else to wait, to wonder, to recalibrate their evening around your priorities. That’s why it alienates friendship. It doesn’t just waste minutes; it rearranges the hierarchy.
The phrasing is quietly prosecutorial. “Engagements” gives a casual meal the moral weight of a contract, and “want of punctuality” frames lateness as a character deficiency, not misfortune. Hazlitt’s key insight is how intimacy is built out of repeated, almost boring proof that you’ll show up when you say you will. Friendship, in this view, isn’t sustained by grand declarations but by the reliable choreography of everyday life.
Context matters: in Hazlitt’s London, sociability was infrastructure. Dinners and suppers were where alliances formed, gossip traveled, reputations were made. Breaking a promise to meet wasn’t just rude; it signaled unreliability in a world where introductions and patronage could hinge on your word. Hazlitt also slips in a critic’s disdain for self-dramatizers: the chronically late person implicitly demands the room orbit them. He’s warning that friendship can’t survive long as someone else’s supporting cast.
The phrasing is quietly prosecutorial. “Engagements” gives a casual meal the moral weight of a contract, and “want of punctuality” frames lateness as a character deficiency, not misfortune. Hazlitt’s key insight is how intimacy is built out of repeated, almost boring proof that you’ll show up when you say you will. Friendship, in this view, isn’t sustained by grand declarations but by the reliable choreography of everyday life.
Context matters: in Hazlitt’s London, sociability was infrastructure. Dinners and suppers were where alliances formed, gossip traveled, reputations were made. Breaking a promise to meet wasn’t just rude; it signaled unreliability in a world where introductions and patronage could hinge on your word. Hazlitt also slips in a critic’s disdain for self-dramatizers: the chronically late person implicitly demands the room orbit them. He’s warning that friendship can’t survive long as someone else’s supporting cast.
Quote Details
| Topic | Broken Friendship |
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