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Addison's Essays from the Spectator

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The audience for both The Tattler and The Spectator was vastly different from the one just a generation or two ago. This difference reflects a multitude of changes in society, government, science, and the daily harsh grind of contemporary life. This harshness is a not widely known offshoot of the rationalism that marked the age. When life is harsh, so is one's attitude toward it. Child mortality was high. Tuberculosis was rampant. The typical lifespan was under forty. Life, therefore, was lived with compensatory rawness and exuberance. Gambling and alcoholism were rampant at all strata of society but one and that one was the middle class, which watched disgustedly as those above and below wallowed in a brief life of seaminess, squalidness, and sordidness. The middle class maintained a pious austerity, partly due to its stern Puritan background and partly from its relentless struggle to survive, knowing that no help would be forthcoming from any quarter.

Except for this growing middle class, nearly all commoners were conveniently ignored both in the literature and by Parliament. The nation was ruled mostly by an unspoken alliance among the propertied class, the merchant princes, and the landed gentry. The term "gentleman" was limited to the small leisure class who had the time, money, or patronage and could concentrate upon politics, leisure, and the arts. Religious fanatics were a rarity. The Sturm und Drang that afflicted Germany was largely avoided in England since the ruling landed gentry had the good sense to remain moderate, flexible, responsible, and committed to choosing reasonably competent rulers. Such were the majority of the readers of The Tattler and The Spectator.

It is reasonable to assume that most people like to read about others much like themselves. Therefore, Addison and Steele made sure to fill the pages of both journals with characters with whom their readers could relate. In The Spectator #2, Steele wrote of a selected group of five men who not only represented a cross section of this newly-minted upwardly mobile middle class, but in their order of representation, Steele could subliminally strengthen the social order of the day. As Chaucer was to do in his Canterbury Tales, Steele would introduce each gentleman by rank. He began with Sir Roger de Coverly, the country squire who was the bedrock of landed gentry. Second was the Templar, a man who knew the law as well as he did the classics and the theater. Third, was Sir Andrew Freeport, who in his business acumen combined the best virtues of English mercantilism. Fourth, was the retired soldier, Captain Sentry, whose very name suggested his diligence as a steadfast officer. And last, was Will Honeycomb, the gallant and fop.

As Steele wrote of these exemplars of English society, he did so in a way that guaranteed that his readers would continue to buy the next issue. Each one was not merely an abstract symbol of their social station, but Steele portrayed them as having fully fleshed qualities that any normal man might have and could appreciate in others. Sir Roger, for example, was often mentioned as having an unhappy and unfulfilling romance with a "Perverse beautiful Widow." Sir Andrew Freeport was described in a way that Charles Dickens would later use--tagging his characters with representative quirks or sayings. Freeport was fond of maxims that tended to make Englishmen proud of their industriousness. "Sloth has ruined more Nations than the Sword" was a typical example. And Will Honeycomb knew in detail all the latest gossip of which Royal Lady was sleeping with whomever. Salacious gossip, it seems, was as relevant then as The National Enquirer proves now.

Thus, the readers of The Tattler and The Spectator differed from readers of today only in superficial ways. The tags that we moderns like to assess to the Augustans--courtliness, restraint, elegance, urbanity, and wit--are as likely to be prized in any age. And if Steele and Addison managed to appeal to his readers using these traits, then it is not difficult to know why even now readers still get pleasure in reading of the foibles and gossip of an age long past.