ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the emergence of thing-essays in Britain around 1700 and provides three close readings. Resulting from a coalescence of developments such as processes of secularisation, the proliferation of consumer objects, British empiricism and the flourishing of the periodical essay, eighteenth-century thing-essays give new meaning to objects: Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) instigates this tradition by way of derision and uses the transformative mode to compare broomsticks with human beings. In Joseph Addison’s Tatler-essay 249 (1710), a narrating shilling transforms money into society’s binding force. By describing a friend’s personal attachment to the items in his house, Henry Mackenzie’s meta-reflective Mirror-essay 61 (1779) anticipates the intensified person-thing-relationships that would blossom in many associative thing-essays of the nineteenth century.
