ABSTRACT
The shaping influences of this essay were journalistic rather than the traditions of Montaigne, Bacon, or Cowley. There is a considerable influence of the seventeenth-century “character”;2 and such pictures of daily life as those in
The Nature of the Periodical Essay
Formative Influences
Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698-1700)—supposedly descended from G.P.Marana’s Turkish Spy (which was not a periodical)—clearly had influence also. The periodical or pamphlet cast in the form of a letter, like Willis’s Occasional Paper or the anonymous Miscellaneous Letters (1694-6), helped to popularize the use of the letter as an essay device. The periodical essay usually had a dual aim: to amuse and to improve. It was through deft management of the second of these, while not neglecting the first, that Steele and Addison achieved their great success. The editorial devices that they adopted-the single editor, aided by relatives or friends, or the club of editors-had existed before them. The Observator was the best known type of editorial personality of earlier times, and The Weekly Comedy (12 numbers, 1699) and The Humours of a Coffee-House (1707-8), both probably by Ned Ward, who had the assistance of William Oldisworth in the second, showed how use could be made of a club or of a group of persons that parallels noticeably the club of The Spectator. Editorial personalities were not very carefully delineated at best. The Tatler, Isaac Bickerstaff, frequently forgets his age of sixtyfour and his profession as astrologer. The Spectator is supposed to be a very taciturn man; but he gossips with all the garrulity of his tattling predecessor. Serial publication fully as much as collaboration is probably responsible for the inconsistencies of age and behavior seen in the portraiture of both the Spectator and his friend Sir Roger de Coverley.
