Addison and the Romantics

This chapter looks at the Romantic essayists as critics and emulators of Addison. It begins with ‘The Round Table’ of 1815–17 and Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s paradoxical attempt to revive the form and spirit of The Tatler and Spectator in their own time, while simultaneously attacking the polite consensus that those two periodicals had brought into being. It shows Lamb and Hazlitt seeking to discriminate between ‘Steele’s’ Tatler, in which the ‘first sprightly runnings’ of the periodical essay form had supposedly run freshest and clearest, and ‘Addison’s’ Spectator, in which that flow had been regulated and tamed. It explores how the Romantics, and Romantic-period magazine culture more generally, sought to revitalize the familiar essay form by breaking down its straitjacket of politeness with the contemporaneous cult of personality. But it also shows how a powerful nostalgia for the ‘honeymoon of authorship’ that had been enjoyed by Addison and Steele in the early 1710s continued to haunt both Hazlitt and Lamb. Finally, the chapter looks at the way in which Hazlitt made Addison’s supposed move away from conversational intimacy towards alienated sententiousness an allegory of the development of modern literature more generally, thus characterizing him as a kind of Eve in the garden of modern prose, at one and the same time its fairest embodiment and the harbinger of its ruin.