Sociability and Polite Improvement in Addison’s Periodicals

Addison argued in his periodical essays that the distinctive sociability of the coffee house was especially, if not uniquely, polite, rational, and civic, and as such, an important metaphor and location for Addison’s social reform. Addison developed his conception of coffee-house sociability in dialogue with Richard Steele, but while Steele argued that emulation of virtuous behaviour in neighbourly communities was sufficient guarantor of the polite and rational reformation of public culture, Addison repeatedly toyed with a more regulated model in which an arbiter or censor moderated coffee-house behaviour. In The Spectator, Addison had identified women readers as an important commercial and ideological opportunity. While women of the polite and middling classes bore the weight of Addison’s reformist expectations, such women were excluded from the public sociability of the coffee house. In recognition of this impasse, Addison and Steele addressed a series of essays to the tea table, a form of sociability in which women and female manners were dominant. These essays develop an innovative construction of tea-table sociability located in a fluid zone between public sociability and private domesticity, centred around tea consumption, polite conversation, and reading essays from The Spectator. The tea table was, accordingly, a significant extension and revision of their theory of public sociability.

Nature and Imagination

This chapter explores Addison’s attempt at opening new perspectives for the convocation of the work of imagination in the production and reception of representation. Developing a new, dynamic understanding of the concept of pleasure, he explains how the works of nature and art acquire more value as they allow the imagination or the fancy some scope for the picturing and mapping of new territories. The chapter then suggests how some of the new forms of expression in Enlightenment England (the novel, the landscape garden, Hogarth’s series of images), all based on a form of sequentiality similar in many ways to that present in the periodical essays, proposed progressive, enhancing apprehensions of nature which allowed the emergence of a more dynamic, less abstract sort of beauty, designed to create pleasure in the meaning defined by Addison.

“Modern Biography”: Form, Function, and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Genre Theory

This essay outlines the comprehensive theory of “modern” eighteenth-century biography that was articulated throughout the century in the often lengthy prefaces to collections of lives, disseminated in periodical essays, and applied in reviews to stand-alone lives. This theory addressed the proper selection, presentation, and treatment of both individual and collected “lives.” It gave biography national, historical, commercial, and educational functions; detailed the components of its life-historical narrative and of its critical portions; set standards for what constituted “a fair and full account” of a character, life, and works; and contained in embryo virtually all aspects of biography that would later be singled out as the primary or most valued characteristic of biographical writing. This essay describes the ways biographers and theorists confronted and resolved two ubiquitous difficulties arising from their consensus that “fame or celebrity among us in their generation” was “the grand principle” on which biography was founded: first, how to “do justice” to a person on the basis of sources and testimonials that reflected the partisanship of a country “rent by faction” since the Reformation; and second, how to represent people who had been celebrated in their own time, but not in the biographer's later generation.

‘Strips of Essayism’

Taking its cue from James Wood’s now famous critique of the fetishizing of ‘information’ in British fiction (‘always breaking in to speak over their characters and tell us what to think, mummifying them somewhat in strips of essayism’), this essay takes a close look at two Victorian novelists famous for their creative deployment of what might be called an ‘essayistic’ narrative voice: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Tracing the roots of this voice in Victorian periodical culture—in particular, the tenure of Marian Evans/George Eliot at the helm of the Westminster Review—the essay explores the ways in which two contending senses of the ‘essayistic’, one based on contingency, the other on prescriptiveness, may often occupy the same space in both periodical essays and the fictions which dramatize and draw on them.

Letters

Epistolary writing finds expression everywhere in Charles Brockden Brown’s career. We see it in his praxis, as he writes epistolary novels, periodical essays, and letters. We also see Brown articulate a theoretical explanation for his devotion to the form in his actual correspondence and his fiction. A letter writer, unlike a narrator, self-consciously constructs identity as a textual performance. And letters, unlike prose narratives, draw conspicuous attention to communicative exchange and to the ways that communication links (and fails to link) individuals and groups across time and space. This chapter focuses on two longer sequences in Brown’s correspondence and the epistolary fragment the “Henrietta Letters” as source material for Brown’s epistolary praxis and theory.

Federick Denison Maurice as Literary Critic

His voluminous theological works have established Frederick Denison Maurice as one of the most eminent Anglican clergymen of the 19th century. Little attention has been given, however, to his important role as literary critic. This study is an overview of Maurice's literary criticism, highlighting the principles and convictions that governed his scrutiny of major (principally British) writers as reflected in his periodical essays, lectures, and personal correspondence extending over a period of nearly 50 years.

IDENTIFYING DISTRIBUTIONAL PATTERNS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICAL ESSAYS

This paper investigates the distribution of words and clusters within a single corpus and across a pair of related corpora. With a corpus containing Samuel Johnson’s periodical essays as the target corpus and a corpus of Addison’s essays as the reference corpus, it is shown how standard techniques for identifying keywords can be extended to identifying distributional tendencies within texts at the levels of sentence, paragraph and whole section/essay. Supplementing the investigation with collocational and concordance data, the main keywords, including TO at sentence, AND at paragraph, BY at essay level, and the main three-word clusters at the various levels, are discussed. It is argued that the methods described are useful additions to the corpus stylistic researcher’s arsenal of techniques.