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.

On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition

The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.

Stories without Plots

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

Johnson and the Eighteenth–Century Periodical Essay: A Corpus–Based Approach

The style of Samuel Johnson’s essays for the periodicals The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler is quite different from that of earlier eighteenth–century essayists such as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift. However, despite advances in recent years in corpus–based stylistic approaches to texts, a comparison of these three authors using current corpus–analytic techniques has yet to be attempted. This paper reports on the first stages of such a project. Johnson’s essays are compared with Addison and Swift’s essays using WordSmith Tools 5, and an analysis of keywords, semantic groupings of keywords, and key collocations of keywords in Johnson’s essays are identified. It is argued that a keyword analysis brings to the fore grammatical aspects of Johnsonian sentence patterns and provides empirical support for what have hitherto been only intuitively–based statements regarding his style. Also, further patterns in the data will be identified through a phraseological analysis of the essays focusing on the most common four–word clusters (4–grams) that Johnson uses.