“Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the species; by which means I have made myself a Speculative statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever meddling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the Hostilities of either Side. In short, I have acted in all the Parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper.”—Joseph Addison, March 1, 1711, launching The Spectator, in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selections From The Tatler and The Spectator, with an introduction and notes by Robert J. Allen (1965)
Charlie Sheen and his antics (will they never cease?) will just have to wait for another time. Today, we’ll talk about something \of far greater cultural import: the beginning of the London periodical The Spectator, founded by longtime Oxford friends Joseph Addison and Richard Steele—one of the crucial moments in the development of the English essay.
Their achievement was enough to link them forever as a team, as surely as Smith and Dale, Simon and Garfunkel, Mantle and Maris, even though the two had separate careers and personalities. (Addison, the more equable of the pair, eventually became Secretary of State in the British government, while Steele, who tended to write more from his gut, was better suited to journalism and the theater.) A tip of the hat to their influence can still be seen on newsstands in the U.K. (and large out-of-town periodical emporiums here in the U.S.) where the names of two magazines, The Tatler and The Spectator, bear the names of the great progenitors of the English essay.
From today’s perspective, neither publication lasted too long, with The Spectator calling it a day after only a year and a half. Some seminal rock bands (e.g., the Velvet Underground, Buffalo Springfield), known for expiring before their time, have still had longer shelf lives than this. Nor have many of their original topics remained relevant (amazingly, 20 years after the madness across the ocean in Salem, the pair were still discussing witchcraft).
But, no matter what the medium—a blog, or even those now-threatened print dinosaurs, the newspaper and the magazine—whenever someone writes something that becomes the talk of the town, endlessly discussed Out There, it’s the legacy of Addison and Steele coming into play.
The Tatler was their first try at putting out periodicals for the rising English middle class, and the two friends would have kept that going, except that their involvement—and particularly their political commentary—was exposed. Two months after that exposure—three centuries ago yesterday—Addison’s essay, quoted above, was the opener of their follow-up, The Spectator.
This time, Addison and Steele did their best to keep politics out of the mix. (Probably a good thing, too: they had already fallen out with former ally Jonathan Swift when he took up the cause of the Tory Party, and by the end of the decade these two fast friends would fall out with each other—a breach never healed in Addison’s lifetime—over a different political matter.)
Nevertheless, they didn’t mind taking risks of a different kind, concerning aesthetics. Addison’s reflections on the theater, for instance, did much to sustain an audience for this art form.
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