ABSTRACT
In his introduction to the fi rst modern scholarly edition of Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers, Donald Bond describes a 1714 letter from Joseph Collet, deputy governor of the East India Company station in Sumatra, to his daughters back home in London. As Bond notes, one of Collet’s most urgent exhortations to his daughters focuses on their developing tastes as consumers in the early English public sphere: as a surrogate for his own instructions, “Next to the Bible,” he tells them, “study the Spectators.”1 Indeed, from the earliest days of their canonization as required reading for a cultivated English citizen, Addison and Steele’s essay periodicals have been fi gured as hyperbolically original and agential in a way that would explain the intensity of Collet’s paternal advice. Samuel Johnson, one of Addison and Steele’s most prominent eighteenth-century advocates, promotes a 1776 edition of their essays with a claim about what they invented and provided for their audiences; for Johnson, the Spectator in particular “supplied the English nation” not only with “principles of speculation” and “rules of practice,”2 but also, as Johnson would put it in his Life of Addison (1781), with the template for “an English style” (both in writing and in living), one that is “familiar but not coarse” and “elegant but not ostentatious.”3 To its credit, in Thomas Wallace’s account, the eighteenth-century reading public widely internalized the models of judgment set forth by Addison and Steele, evinced in their having “caught a taste for fi ne writing which has operated from that time [the 1710s] to the present.”4 Twentieth-century critics have considerably extended the scope of Addison and Steele’s infl uence over the English public sphere, with C. S. Lewis claiming in 1945 that the “sober code of manners under which we [English] still live today . . . is in some important degree a legacy from the Tatler and the Spectator.”5 Within eighteenth-century literary discourse it is not hard to fi nd explanations for how and why these periodicals attained this pre-eminent role in the English cultural imaginary. For the poet Edward Young, when taken seriously Addison and Steele’s essays initiate a self-perpetuating dialectic of aspiration and abjection in their consumers. As Young puts it in discussing the relationship between the Spectator and his own efforts at authorship, “I never read [Addison]
but I am struck with such a disheartening idea of perfection that I drop my pen”—yet Young both keeps reading Addison and keeps trying to write.6 In practically every critical assessment of their work, Addison and Steele function paradoxically as an inimitable “model for imitation,” to borrow Wallace’s words, and this longstanding appreciation of their essays has stabilized their reputation as a powerful, productive origin in English cultural history, a center against which the margins of that culture have been defi ned and often ignored.7
