the design into the heads and thoughts of those to whom it might be useful." This " entertaining part," which Defoe hoped would make readers for his more serious reflections, he called "Mercure Scandale: or, Advice from the Scandalous Club." It consisted of short discourses on questions of fashions, manners, morals, taste, and the like, purporting to be written by the members of the "Scandalous Club,” usually in answer to inquiries sent to them from readers. For about a year it was published regularly in the Review; then, on account of a press of other matter, it was taken out and issued separately, under the title of The Little Review; presently it was discontinued altogether. These journals were important in that they established in England the tradition of the literary or miscellaneous periodical. Of direct influence upon the essay, however, they exerted but little. Neither the Athenian Mercury nor Defoe's Review had much to do with determining the character of this genre as it was written in the eighteenth century. That rôle was reserved for two papers which followed shortly upon them, appealed to the same general interests, and profited by the taste which they had helped to create. The Tatler (1709–1711) On April 12, 1709, while the Review was still coming out, there appeared the first number of a new journal, The Tatler. In external form it consisted of a single folio sheet printed on both sides; and a prospectus at the beginning announced that it would be published on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, "for the convenience of the post." At first the name of the editor was not known. But it was presently whispered about that he was Richard Steele, a writer and politician of strong Whig sympathies, who at the time was editor of the official government newspaper, The London Gazette. As Gazetteer, Steele had access to the latest news, especially of foreign affairs to a great deal, moreover, that he could not use in the Gazette itself. This circumstance, combined with the recent success of Defoe's "Scandalous Club," had given him the idea of publishing a journal of his own that should be at once a newspaper and a collection of essays on miscellaneous subjects. For various reasons he did not wish his own name to appear as editor. He therefore announced the Tatler as the work of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., a benevolent astrologer in whose name Swift had diverted the town in a humorous pamphlet controversy of the previous year. The prospectus in the first number announced that the Tatler was to consist of two parts accounts of news and essays. For a time this program was carried out. Until October, 1709, the numbers of the paper regularly contained, under the heading of St. James Coffee-house, a paragraph of foreign news condensed from the latest dispatches from the Continent. After No. 80 (October 13, 1709), however, this disappeared as a regular feature and reappeared only occasionally thereafter. The essays also appeared from the first. In the beginning they were as a rule short, and each number contained several. Thus in No. 5 there was a discourse on love, a notice of a new book, a story of two brave English soldiers, besides several paragraphs of news. As time went on, the length of the essays was increased, and the number ultimately reduced to one to each issue; when the Tatler was discontinued, this had become the usual practice. Steele began his periodical entirely by himself; the plan was his, and he wrote the first few numbers without any assistance. With No. 18, however, he began to receive help from an old school friend and fellow Whig, Joseph Addison, then under-secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Addison wrote for the Tatler off and on until its withdrawal, contributing in all some forty-one papers and parts of thirtyfour others, a little over a third of the total number. At no time did he become a dominant influence in the journal. The Tatler continued to appear for twenty-one months. Finally, on the 2d of January, 1711, it was suddenly withdrawn, greatly to the regret of the large public which had come to welcome its halfhumorous, half-satirical comment on the life of the day. "Everyone,” wrote the poet Gay,wanted so agreeable an amusement, and the coffee-houses began to be sensible that the Esquire's Lucubrations alone had brought them more customers than all other newspapers put together." It was not long, however, before a new periodical took its place. On March 1, 1711, two months after the cessation of the Tatler, appeared the first number of the Spectator. The new paper resembled the Tatler in external form, but, unlike the Tatler, it was The Spectator published daily, and at no time contained news. A single (1711--1712) essay, headed by a Latin or Greek motto, and followed by group of advertisements, made up the contents of each number. The editor was announced to be a silent but very observing man named Mr. Spectator, who was assisted in his conduct of the paper by a club composed of an old country knight, a lawyer, a merchant, a soldier, a man of the world, and a clergyman. The general editorial charge of the new periodical was in the hands of Steele. Addison was a very frequent contributor, and indeed wrote more essays than his friend; his assistance extended also to the general design of the work. A few other persons, such as Addison's cousin Eustace Budgell, John Hughes, Henry Grove, and Henry Martin, contributed papers occasionally. The audience which the Spectator was designed to reach was a diversified one. It included persons of quality, students and professional men, merchants of the City, and, above all, women. "I take it for a particular happiness," wrote Steele in No. 4, "that I have always had an easy and familiar admittance to the fair sex ... As these compose half the world, and are, by the just complaisance and gallantry of our nation, the more powerful part of our people, I shall dedicate a considerable share of these my speculations to their service, and shall lead the young through all the becoming duties of virginity, marriage, and widowhood . . . In a word, I shall take it for the greatest glory of my work if among reasonable women this paper may furnish tea-table talk." With this variety of appeal, it is not strange that the new journal became popular. Gay wrote in May, 1711, two months after it began to appear: the Spectator . . . is in every one's hand, and a constant topic of our morning conversation at tea-tables and coffee-houses."1 In August, 1712, when this popularity was at its height, the government imposed on all periodicals a stamp tax of a halfpenny for each half-sheet and a shilling a week for each advertisement. As a consequence, a great many papers went under. For a time the Spectator continued to appear, though, as its price was doubled, many of its subscribers fell off. But the loss of the subscribers was a less serious blow to the paper than the loss of a great number of its advertisers as a result of the shilling tax. From this blow it never recovered, and was discontinued, with the 555th number, on December 6, 1712. It was in the Tatler and the Spectator, and under the conditions imposed by the nature of these papers, that the new essay of the eighteenth century had its birth. As was only natural, many of its 420. 1 For details concerning the circulation of the Spectator, see below, pp. 419 Effect of periodical publication on the new essay distinguishing features betrayed clearly the character of its origin. Thus, the limits of the single sheet on which the journals were printed restricted the essays to a relatively brief compass; the efforts of the writers to conceal their authorship under the names of imaginary editors gave to their self-revelations an indirect and somewhat dramatic tone; and the fact of periodical publication resulted in the adoption of many devices of a purely occasional and journalistic nature, such as letters from correspondents, answers to criticisms, references to events of the day, and the like. Nor was the influence of the conditions under which the new essay was produced confined to these more or less external features. Written not as the seventeenth-century essay had been for a limited circle of cultured individuals, but for a large and growing periodical-reading public with diversified interests and tastes, it inevitably took on a popular tone entirely absent from the older essay. Finally, as an indirect result of its connection with the periodicals, the new essay came strongly under the influence of the social movement of the time. The influ ence of the social move new essay Both Steele and Addison, in numerous passages in the Tatler and the Spectator, laid great stress on the didactic character of their undertaking. Steele, in particular, made no secret of his reformatory zeal. "I own myself of the Society for ment on the Reformation of Manners," he wrote in Tatler No. 3. "We have lower instruments than those of the family of Bickerstaff for punishing great crimes and exposing the abandoned. Therefore, as I design to have notices from all public assemblies, I shall take upon me only indecorums, improprieties, and negligencies, in such as should give us better examples. After this declaration, if a fine lady thinks fit to giggle at church, or a great beau to come in drunk to a play, either shall be sure to hear of it in my ensuing paper; for merely as a well-bred man I cannot bear these enormities." And again, with perhaps a growing seriousness, he declared in No. 39: "I am called forth by the immense love I bear to my fellow creatures, and the warm inclination I feel within me, to stem, as far as I can, the prevailing torrent of vice and ignorance." Addison was scarcely less explicit, though he perhaps emphasized more than Steele had done his intention to make his teaching agreeable. "I shall endeavor," he wrote in a famous ९९ passage in Spectator No. 10, 'to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thoughts, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age is fallen. . . . I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." In thus adopting as the aim of their journals moral and social reformation, Steele and Addison were simply placing themselves in line with one of the most powerful tendencies of early eighteenthcentury England - the reaction against the moral license of Restoration society which came with the rise into prominence and affluence of the middle classes. This was not, however, the only way in which the social movement affected the periodicals, and through them the new essay. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the coffeehouse had come to be one of the most influential of London institutions, the center of innumerable discussions on morals, literature, politics, society, in which members of the reading public sharpened their wits, learned to have opinions of their own on all manner of subjects, and acquired a taste for a simple, colloquial, unbookish style of speech. The periodicals became in a very real sense the organs of this coffee-house world. Their writers were members of it; they reported its conversation, described and sometimes satirized its characters, attempted to reform its evil tendencies, and in general reflected its spirit and tone. In short, more than any other literary form of the eighteenth century, the periodical essay was an outgrowth of the London coffee-houses. Literary influences on the periodical essay A third group of influences affecting the new essay came from the field of literature. Confronted by the problem of promoting moral and social reform and at the same time holding the interest of a large and heterogeneous public, the periodical writers found the somewhat narrow formula of the seventeenthcentury essay inadequate to their needs. Without abandoning it entirely (Steele, indeed, owed not a little to Cowley, and both Bacon and Montaigne continued to have an influence), they looked |