The editors of the essay collection Romantic Biography tell us repeatedly that biography is an invention of the Romantic period in British literature (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), yet we are never shown that process of invention in motion. Hazlitt, the most prominent example of the Romantic biographer, is almost invisible. The Romantic period was not just the period in which biography was invented – or, rather, the period in which some of its informing principles were invented, since biography could just as easily be said to have originated in the scandalous memoirs that formed part of the pre-Romantic culture of the novel. It was also the period in which biography, through its sheer ubiquity, became an object of major ideological significance within British culture.