Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay

Transatlantic Retrospects

R. Squibbs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137378248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Urban Enlightenment offers the first literary history of the British periodical essay spanning the entire eighteenth century, and the first to study the genre's development and cultural impact in a transatlantic context.

1

Reviewing a Genre

If British and American critics could agree on one thing at the end of the eighteenth century, it was that the periodical essay stood apart as the century’s signal contribution to world literature. This might be surprising to generations of critics trained to read these essays mainly as passing lessons in the complacent morality undergirding an emergent liberal-bourgeois social order in England. Beginning in the 1790s, however, readers on both sides of the Atlantic were presented with ‘British classics’, multi-volume collections of periodical essays that asserted the genre’s anchoring role in a newly constituted literary canon. The British Classicks (1785), Select British Classics (1793) and British Essayists (1803) – each collecting over a dozen of the most popular eighteenth-century serials – established a canonical presence for these essays even before the English Poets (1810) and British Novelists (1810) officially cemented Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Richardson, Fielding, Burney and others as permanent fixtures in English literary culture.¹ The latter collections make sense to us, given the continued centrality of those poets and novelists to the British literary canon. But who would now proclaim the timeless value of the World and Connoisseur, or the Mirror and Lounger? Who has even read them? Individual essays from the Tatler and Spectator, the two most enduring serials from the period, appear here and there in English literature anthologies. But these two series have come to represent the genre as a whole, even to most specialists in eighteenth-century literature. And where these titles are concerned, the one selected edition that remains in print contains only 10 percent of the total number of essays from the two serials.² One could hardly ask for a more striking demonstration of the vicissitudes of literary taste and value than what appears in the precipitous decline of the periodical essay from ‘classic’ to less than marginal status.

There are institutional, political and aesthetic reasons why the periodical essay has lost its exalted place in the canon.³ But none of these explains how such a manifestly humble literary genre could have achieved ‘classic’ status in the first place. Why did publishers repeatedly issue the major essay serials in bound volumes throughout the eighteenth century? What did their readers find in these serials worth preserving for posterity? And what prompted their canonization as British Classics? Trying to answer these questions involves reconstructing an old and strange literary and cultural world. Eighteenth-century conceptions of the periodical essay share a common assumption that the genre carried within it the accrued civic wisdom of classical antiquity. Conventional critical views of essay serials as distinctly modern, and expressly topical, forms of publication have tended to overlook this pedigree.⁴ But the association of the essays with ancient civic philosophy ran deep, and helps explain why critics and publishers near the end of the eighteenth century had so exalted the genre not just as a permanent contribution to Anglo-American literary culture, but as a prime mover of Enlightenment itself.

A history of innovation

The portrait of the Enlightenment that emerges from Samuel Miller’s A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) allows a glimpse into this lost world, where essay serials like the Tatler and Idler registered with atavistic force. Miller was one of the leading lights of Manhattan’s intelligentsia in the early Republic. As a founder of the New-York Historical Society, and a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Miller became one of America’s foremost curators of the past during the Jeffersonian era. His most enduring work, A Brief Retrospect, offers a panoramic view of the life of the mind in Britain, America and on the continent, arguing that Enlightenment was largely a product of the popular press. Despite its heft (two volumes totaling 1054 pages) and its century-wide sweep, there is nothing lofty about Miller’s Retrospect. Monumental works of history writing like Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1789), and the epoch-making contributions to natural science of Linnaeus and Isaac Newton receive no more – and in some cases less – attention than do accounts of newspaper publishing and the rise of critical journals in eighteenth-century Britain.⁵ The Retrospect’s focus on the quotidian milieu of popular print appears congenial to current trends in cultural history and literary studies. But for Miller, the popularity of print alone is unremarkable. What matters most to him is the capacity of print culture to renew older, humanistic forms of knowledge and writing by formally adapting them to the conditions of modern urban life.

This assumption prompts Miller to declare that ‘the eighteenth century may be emphatically called the age of periodical publications’.⁶ Students of eighteenth-century British literature customarily presume the rise of the novel to be the real story of the period, a perspective Miller seems to anticipate in also deeming the century ‘the Age of Novels’ (2:158). Fielding and Richardson, Miller avers, ‘may be said to have invented a new species of fictitious writing’ (2:159). Yet this does not amount to much in his eyes, for ‘[f]ictitious narrative, as a medium of instruction or entertainment, has been employed from the earliest ages’ (2:155). The kind of imaginative entertainment the ‘modern Novel’ provides simply eliminates the fantastic elements of traditional romance in favor of ‘natural and probable … manners and characters’ (2:157). The form of this ‘fictitious history’ does not really change in Miller’s assessment; only its content does. As such, he sees the century as the ‘Age of Novels’ mainly because of the sheer number of them that were published (2:157, 158). While periodical essays too fairly poured from the presses (to an extent that ‘so far transcends all preceding times, as to forbid comparison’), this is not what makes them stand out to Miller (2:246). More important is how the genre emerges from formal innovations that distinguish it from earlier literary forms, such as the courtly conduct literature of Casa and Castiglione. ‘The mode of addressing the public by short periodical Essays’, Miller concedes, was ‘not wholly peculiar to the eighteenth century’ (2:243). The ‘amusing, popular form’ of the eighteenth-century essay serials, however, ‘constitutes a peculiarity in the literary history of the period’ that enlists the appearance of the genre ‘among the remarkable circumstances of the age’ (2:246, 243).

Miller’s summary history of the periodical essay synthesizes a century’s worth of literary-historical inquiry into the origins of the genre. Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Addison’ (1778) had the greatest influence on Miller, for it was Johnson who most forcefully asserted that the essay serial belonged to a tradition of civic thought and writing to which the English essayists made unique, though not unprecedented, contributions. Johnson, in turn, relied heavily on John Gay’s ‘The Present State of Wit’ (1711), which gave to later Enlightenment readers an enduring portrait of the moral and social wonders that could be wrought by such an apparently humble sort of publication. In what he presents as a ‘letter to a friend in the country’, Gay retails the ‘Histories and Characters of all our Periodical Papers’ that had recently appeared in the city.⁷ Most of these were ‘Monthly, Weekly, or Diurnal’ news sheets that fed the notorious party-political rancor of Queen Anne’s London (452). But things changed with the publication of the Tatler. The serial’s cheeky persona, Isaac Bickerstaff, mostly eschewed politics, opting instead ‘to tell the Town’ – twice weekly – ‘that they were a parcel of Fops, Fools, and vain Cocquets’ (452). Bickerstaff lambasted the public with such compelling humor and wit, however, that instead of offending, the essays actually prompted readers to reflect upon, and improve, their behavior: ‘’Tis incredible to conceive the effect his Writings have had on the Town,’ Gay exclaims; ‘How many Thousand follies they have either quite banish’d, or given a very great check to’ (452). The Tatler has moreover ‘set all our Wits and Men of Letters upon a new way of Thinking’, to the extent that ‘every one of them Writes and Thinks much more justly than they did some time since’ (452–3). The Spectator only began publishing two months before he composed his letter, yet Gay already declares the serial ‘our shelter from that Flood of False Wit and Impertinence which was breaking in upon us’ since the Tatler ceased in January 1711, and wonders at the ‘Spirit and Stile’, and the ‘Prodigious … Run of Wit and Learning’ these new essays display (455). His remarks on the Spectator make clear that the threat of backsliding is ever-present. But the London from which Gay writes to his friend is, nonetheless, essentially a new place, having been intellectually and morally elevated by the popularity of these two serials.

This story of how the Tatler and Spectator reformed London society and culture was picked up by Johnson, who fortified Gay’s putative eyewitness account by placing Addison’s and Steele’s achievements in a wider literary-historical context. In a genealogy Miller would repeat, Johnson hails ‘Casa in his book of Manners, and Castiglione in his Courtier’ for being the first modern authors to write extensively about ‘the practice of daily conversation’.⁸ Johnson surely knew how different Castiglione’s clever dialogues were from Casa’s proscriptive treatise. But to him, their common attention to ‘the minuter decencies and inferior duties’ of daily life, and shared sense that conversation improves (and sometimes corrupts) human character, allies them as key antecedents of the English serials.⁹ The example of Jean de la Bruyère, however, whose Characters; or the Manners of the Age (1688) ‘continued, and perhaps advanced’ the aims and achievements of his Italian forebears, appears to Johnson as the proximate influence on Addison and Steele.¹⁰ We will see in the following two chapters how the vogue for character writing that prepared the way for the popular success of La Bruyère’s Characters in England spurred the first periodical essayists to ascribe moral character to various aspects of urban life itself. But it is worth noting here that what had appeared so clearly to Johnson as a key antecedent of the periodical essay has basically vanished from eighteenth-century English literary history as currently conceived. The loss of such genres, and of the literary-historical contexts they provide, makes it almost impossible to understand the impact the periodical essay had on readers and critics of the time.

With each reiteration of the periodical essay’s literary genealogy, critics added new historical context to the story in order to accentuate how new serial forms build upon, and surpass, their predecessors. This is nowhere clearer than in Nathan Drake’s three-volume Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, Illustrative of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian (1805). Drake was the preeminent historian of the periodical essay in turn-of-the-century London, producing a second, two-volume historical study in 1809 of British literary serials from the Rambler to the end of the eighteenth century.¹¹ He was also an essayist of some note, having published 26 numbers of the Speculator (a serial in the ‘classic’ mode) in 1790. In the opening essay to his 1805 study, ‘General Observations on Periodical Writing …’, Drake extends Johnson’s literary-historical inquiry back into antiquity to reinforce the genre’s venerable lineage while also stressing the innovations made by English writers. Like Johnson, Drake cites La Bruyère’s Characters as the principal predecessor of the Tatler and Spectator. He then measures how much La Bruyère improved upon the Characters of Theophrastus, the French author’s classical inspiration: aesthetically, La Bruyère bests Theophrastus with the ‘shrewdness of remark and vivid delineation of character’ that marks his sketches.¹² This aesthetic advance allowed La Bruyère’s work to correct ‘more follies and indecorums than perhaps any other moralists, ancient or modern’, because their new incisiveness made them more engaging to readers than even the ancient Greek’s landmark collection of characters.¹³ The appearance of the English periodical essay then pushed the reforming, and aesthetic, potential of the short prose sketch even further. But here, too, for Drake the new genre is uniquely compelling because of how it reactivates a popular taste for moral essays that originated in classical Greece and Rome. By reaching back through the courtly European avatars of this form to its classical origins, the periodical essay recovers a literary-civic vein of writing that, via the agency of print, becomes newly cast as a vehicle of Enlightenment.

Drake points to the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius as evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans, like British and European readers of the Enlightenment, ‘delighted in miscellaneous composition’.¹⁴ Gellius was a second-century Roman lawyer whose Noctes Atticae, which he began composing during a year-long stay in Athens as a philosophy student, compiles excerpts from otherwise lost works of history, biography, philosophy, law, literary criticism and other areas of intellectual inquiry. This compendium had been a standard part of the old humanist curriculum, mainly as a source of information about otherwise lost classical authors and works: Latin editions of the Noctes had been widely available in England and Europe since the later fifteenth century, though the first English translation (cited by Drake) appeared only in 1795.¹⁵ But writing in a moment when British and American critics took for granted that popular print made Enlightenment possible, Drake finds in the Noctes an obvious antecedent of the essay serial form.

Drake’s Gellius is a humanist popularizer of knowledge who regards brief, miscellaneous writings on moral and philosophical subjects as the literary media best adapted to meet the civic and cultural needs of an urban population. In his preface to the Noctes, the Roman author posits a public that is consumed with the affairs of everyday life; amidst such bustle, citizens only have occasional moments of leisure in which to read. Readers are not the only ones pressed for time: like the Enlightenment essayist in London, Gellius too feels the pressure of a busy life and has to adapt his literary ambitions to his circumstances. The Noctes Atticae therefore aims to allow readers ‘to relax and indulge themselves, at the intervals from more important business’, an experience that replicates Gellius’s own in producing the book, which he assembled in ‘those intervals [he] could steal from business’.¹⁶ Yet what might be a hindrance has, in his hands, become a stimulus to innovation. Mindful of the demands of everyday ‘business’ on his readers, Gellius breaks from the standard practice of Greek authors in order to make his book as engaging and useful as possible. The compilers of Greek miscellanies, he charges, have traditionally ‘heaped together, whatever they met with, without any discrimination’, leaving readers only a ‘[v]arious but confused knowledge [that] does not lead to wisdom’.¹⁷ He resolves instead to select from his voracious reading just those bits ‘as might lead lively and ingenious minds, by a short and simple process, to the desire of liberal science, and the study of useful arts, or which might rescue men busied with other occupations, from a mean and disgraceful ignorance of things as well as words’.¹⁸ The result is a miscellaneous publication whose casual and unsystematic, yet carefully selected, presentation of excerpts from intellectually enriching works aims to enlighten a busy urban readership. Here, Drake contends, is the ancient precedent for the English periodical essay’s modern innovations.¹⁹

Drake’s American contemporary Miller did not go back into antiquity to locate the origins of the essay serial. But both historians present the periodical essay as an ‘extraordinary’ contribution to British literary culture whose uniqueness lies in how it newly extends a venerable tradition of urban writing. Even the essayistic persona, the great hallmark of the genre tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1   Reviewing a Genre
• 2   London’s Characters
• 3   Characters of the Age
• 4   Public Prospects
• 5   Scottish Variations
• 6   Federalist Revisions
• 7   Irving’s Knickerbocker in Retrospect
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index