Spectator The Spectator is the most famous work of journalism of the eighteenth century in English. It helped define what journalism could be. The series of daily essays, published like a newspaper, set the pattern for a kind of writing that persists to the present day. Comparatively short essays on topics of interest to middle-class readers (politics, fashion, the arts), written in straightforward, unfussy prose without professional jargon: this is a mode of writing that is still standard in print and online journalism. A collaboration between Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator was for a long time after its initial run in 1711 and 1712 held up to English students and readers as a model of prose style, and although to our eyes there are moments where the prose feels a little archaic, Addison and Steele's version of English prose is much closer to the way that we write now than the prose from a hundred, or even fifty years earlier (Elizabathan prose, for example, is far more challenging to most modern readers than that period's poetry, which is a reversal from what we might expect.) Addison and Steele's main influence on writers and readers over the last three hundred years may lie mostly in the way that the two of them developed and popularized a style of English prose that is more or less the one that we still use in much expository writing.
In modern times, The Spectatorhas been credited with being essential to the formation of what the sociologist Jürgen Habermas has influentially dubbed “the bourgeois public sphere.” Habermas describes the bourgeois public sphere as being made up of private individuals coming together to constitute a public, in this case a public that was not affiliated with the government or the church, but an independent body that could discuss important issues on its own. Gathered together in coffee houses, over tea tables, or simply in their homes, readers of The Spectator were among the first citizens to have a print publication that became a common frame of reference for middle-class English-speaking people. The journal set an agenda and a way of thinking about society and the arts that seemed derived, not from the aristocracy or the church, but from the shared world of the readers themselves.
Source: Recto of issue from January 1712 (private collection, used by permission) The Spectator followed on the heels of The Tatler, which had run from April 12, 1709 to December 30, 1710. Steele had taken the lead with The Tatler, asking for help from Addison and others on occasion to fill out the pages. But it was Addison who seems to have been the leader for The Spectator, supplying the first issue and many others after that. In this case, timing was everything. Addison and his Whig party had just lost a parliamentary election towards the end of 1710. Addison was a cabinet member, at the center of government policy-making, so he suddenly found himself kicked out of office with time on his hands; writing in collaboration with his old friend Richard Steele was just the thing to keep his hand in the public conversation. The Spectator differed in format in significant ways from its immediate predecessor. It was published daily, except for Sunday; The Tatler had come out three days a week. Where The Tatler had generally had several items in each issue, most issues of The Spectator focused on a single topic. The new journal also had a different framing device than the older one. Where Steele had arranged the articles in The Tatler by the imagined location in London from which various “correspondents” were sending him information (theater news coming from Will's Coffee House, political news from the St. James Coffee House, the whole thing being a parody of the way that official newspapers published correspondence from foreign cities), The Spectator had a fictional “club” that would come up with ideas. Steele described its members in the second issue: there was a country squire, Sir Roger de Coverly, a lawyer, a businessman (Sir Andrew Freeport), a soldier (Major Sentry), an aging libertine (Will Honeycomb), and a clergyman. Between them, the Club represented many of the important segments of middle-class culture in the eighteenth century. The Spectator Club never worked quite as it seems to have been intended—relatively few issues feature it in any central way—but it was another means by which the journal was projecting itself as giving a voice to a variety of contemporary interests.
And the journal occasionally referred to the coffee-house culture that middle-class people (well, middle-class men, since women were generally not welcome) had developed in this period, a milieu (depicted here), where men met to socialize, gossip, talk over issues of the day, read from the coffee-shop's stock of newspapers and journals (which were expensive enough that individuals might not subscribe), and get their caffeine fix satisfied.Source: A London coffee-house, circa 1710 (Wikimedia Commons) Most importantly, The Spectator introduces a new kind of persona, what critics call an eidolon, in the figure of “Mr. Spectator,” in whose voice all of the essays were composed, no matter which of the two men was the actual author. The Spectator did not invent the concept of the eidolon, but it provided perhaps its most influential model, one imitated over and over again in works such as Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood” pieces in The New England Courant (1721), Samuel Johnson’sRambler essays (1750-52), and even the Federalist essays composed by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to defend the U. S. Constitution. Mr. Spectator projected himself as a civilized man of the world, an observer looking on society like a fly on the wall. He is well educated, but not a specialist in anything, which enables him to comment on all sorts of things. In the course of its run, The Spectator offers essays on fashion, on politics, on religion, on literature. Steele’s essay on Inkle and Yarico (#11) popularized the story to eighteenth-century readers; it would become a cultural phenomenon, with plays, musicals, and poems about the doomed pair of lovers abounding in English-speaking culture over the next few decades. Addison’s essays on John Milton's epic Paradise Lost and the series generally known as “the pleasures of the imagination” became widely influential works of literary criticism and aesthetic theory that to some extent established a paradigm for what modern criticism could be. To be sure, this is a very male eidolon, and it is no surprise to discover that The Spectator’s essays are very frequently condescending towards women readers. In the 1740s, Eliza Haywood published a journal called The Female Spectator http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/haywood/, one that forms a nice counterweight to the bluff masculinity of Addison and Steele’s journal.
The Spectator ran from March 3, 1711 to December 6, 1712, comprising 555 issues in all. (On his own, Addison revived The Spectator briefly for a few months in 1714, but these essays were generally not as popular.) Of these, about 250 issues each were written by Addison and Steele; Addison’s cousin Eustace Budgell contributed a small number, as did the poet John Hughes. Over time, we hope to add more issues of both The Tatler and The Spectator to this digital anthology. - [JOB]

I HAVE observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man^blackblackThis is not a racial category in Addison's day; the distincion is between having dark or light hair and complexion., of a mild or cholerick Disposition^cholerickcholerickA relaxed or angry disposition., Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce^conduceconduceContribute to. very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory^prefatoryprefatoryintroductory. Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account in them of the several persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief trouble of Compiling, Digesting, and Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do myself the Justice to open the Work with my own History.

I was born to a small Hereditary Estate, which according to the tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the same Hedges and Ditches in William the Conqueror's^WilliamWilliamThe Norman warlord who defeated the English king Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and became William I. Time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from Father to Son whole and entire, without the Loss or Acquisition of a single Field or Meadow, during the Space of six hundred Years. There runs a Story in the Family, that when my Mother was gone with Child of me about three Months, she dreamt that she was brought to Bed of a Judge. Whether this might proceed from a Law-suit which was then depending in the Family, or my Fathers being a Justice of the Peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged^presagedpresagedPredict or foretell. any Dignity that I should arrive at in my future Life, though that was the Interpretation the Neighbourhood put upon it. The Gravity of my Behaviour at my very first Appearance in the World, and all the Time that I sucked^suckedsuckedbreastfed, seemed to favour my Mothers Dream: For, as she has often told me, I threw away my Rattle before I was two Months old, and would that was the Interpretation which the Neighbourhood put upon not make use of my Coral^coralcoralThat is, his teething ring; these were often made of coral in this period. till they had taken away the Bells from it.

As for the rest of my Infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I shall pass it over in Silence. I find that, during my Nonage^nonagenonageYouth or childhood. Source: Oxford English Dictionary, I had the reputation of a very sullen Youth, but was always a Favourite of my School-master, who used to say, that my parts^partspartsCharacteristics or elements of a person. were solid and would wear well. I had not been long at the University, before I distinguished myself by a most profound Silence: For, during the Space of eight Years, excepting in the publick Exercises of the College, I scarce uttered the Quantity of an hundred Words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole Life. Whilst I was in this Learned Body, I applied myself with so much Diligence to my Studies, that there are very few celebrated Books, either in the Learned or the Modern Tongues, which I am not acquainted with.

Upon the Death of my Father I was resolved to travel into Foreign Countries, and therefore left the University, with the Character of an odd unaccountable Fellow, that had a great deal of Learning, if I would but show it. An insatiable Thirst after Knowledge carried me into all the Countries of Europe, in which there was any thing new or strange to be seen; nay, to such a Degree was my curiosity raised, that having read the controversies of some great Men concerning the Antiquities of Egypt, I made a Voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the Measure of a Pyramid; and, as soon as I had set my self right in that Particular, returned to my Native Country with great Satisfaction.

I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am frequently seen in most publick Places, tho there are not above half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next Paper shall give a more particular Account. There is no place of general Resort wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Wills^willswillsWills was a popular coffee shop. Coffee-drinking was comparatively new to England, havinug arrived as a practice, probably from Turkey, a few decades before. But coffee shops were everywhere in London in the early eighteenth century, becoming popular places for men (and they were almost-always male dominated domains) to socialize while they satisfied their cravings for caffeine and (since smoking pipes was also popular) nicotine. Over the next few lines, Mr. Spectator names several of the most popular coffee shops in central London at the time., and listening with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Childs; and, while I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-man^post-manpost-manone of the daily newspapers in London at that time, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James's Coffee House, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner-Room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the Theaters both of Drury Lane and the Hay-Market^theatrestheatresThe theaters on Drury Lane and the Hay-Market were the two state-licensed playhouses in central London. As Mr. Spectator implies here, theaters were as much places to be seen by others as to see a play; they were intensely social spaces, where theatergoers enjoyed the spectacle of other audience members almost as much--and sometimes more--than they enjoyed the performances on the stage.. I have been taken for a Merchant