Joseph Addison and the Domestication of Paradise Lost

Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Corns
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Cultural Icon ◽  
Sixth Edition ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
The Spectator

This chapter examines the profound impact the editorial interventions and elaborate textual notes that Patrick Hume contributed to Tonson’s sixth edition of Paradise Lost in 1695 had on Milton’s status as a popular and accessible writer. Hume’s Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first significant editorial treatment of a vernacular poet, acknowledges that a new readership had emerged that needed the kinds of assistance that Milton’s educated Protestant contemporaries had not required when reading the lifetime editions of 1667–9 and 1674. The shift in Milton’s status, from that of an elite-culture writer embedded in a radical political and theological tradition to that of the cultural icon of a broadly conceived English Protestantism, both prompted and was advanced by Joseph Addison’s remarkable series of essays on Paradise Lost in The Spectator.

2. Morality

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
James A. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
The Spectator

‘Morality’ considers Hume’s moral thought as developed in Book Three of A Treatise of Human Nature, various of his essays, and, especially, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume engages with the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson in the Treatise. He then turned to essay writing, in relation especially to the essays of Joseph Addison in The Spectator. This turn to essay writing sees Hume modify the purely ‘anatomical’ philosophy of the Treatise in favour of a more practical engagement with the morality of common life. In his work, Hume considered the damage done to natural moral sentiments by religion, and by Christianity in particular. Hume displayed a lack of confidence in moral progress, and showed a sense of the persistence and pervasiveness of human unhappiness. Hume also made an important contribution to aesthetics.

On Bourgeois Dignity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Dunn Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Socioeconomic Class ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
And Diffusion

Somewhere near the beginning of the eighteenth century a new concept of “dignity” was emerging alongside the rise of a new socioeconomic class, the bourgeoisie. This chapter explores the development of this distinctive new concept of dignity, investigating first the key elements of the so-called bourgeois virtues that provided content to this new ethos of dignity. Next, it probes the economic, political, and social conditions that facilitated the emergence and diffusion of bourgeois dignity during the eighteenth century. Finally, it discusses how this new understanding of dignity was diffused throughout society by one of the most influential literary endeavors of the period, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711–1714).

Joseph Addison

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Art History ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Poetry Translation ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Victorian Age ◽  
Historical Periods

Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by a team of internationally recognized experts specially commissioned to commemorate in 2019 the three-hundredth anniversary of Addison’s death. Almost exclusively known now as the inventor and main author of The Spectator, probably the most widely read and imitated prose work of the eighteenth century, Addison also produced important and influential work across a broad gamut of other literary modes-poems, verse translations, literary criticism, periodical journalism, drama, opera, travel writing. Much of this work is little known nowadays even in specialist academic circles; Addison is often described as the most neglected of the eighteenth century’s major writers. Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays sets out to redress that neglect; it is the first essay collection ever published which addresses the full range and variety of his career and writings. Its fifteen chapters fall into three groupings: an initial group of five dealing with Addison’s work in modes other than the literary periodical (poetry, translation, travel writing, drama); a central core of five addressing The Spectator from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (literary-critical, sociological and political, bibliographical); and a final set of five exploring Addison’s reception within several cultural spheres (philosophy, horticulture, art history) by individual writers (Samuel Johnson) or across larger historical periods (the Romantic age, the Victorian age), and in Britain and Europe (especially France). Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays provides an overdue and appropriately diverse memorial to one of the eighteenth century’s dominant men of letters.

1. Classical Ground

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Bohls
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Addison ◽  
The Spectator

Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, etc. in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703 (1705; from Addison, Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 1914) Best known as author of the weekly magazine The Spectator (1711–12), Joseph Addison (1672–1719) produced...

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