The Rise of Literary Journalism in

the Eighteenth Century

The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s have witnessed a heightened interest in

eighteenth-century literary journalism, an interest that reflects growing
critical fascination with the development of the public sphere in the
Enlightenment. While there are a number of individual studies on specific
categories of publications, until now there has been little attempt to survey
the broad field of the periodical itself as a literary phenomenon.
The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century fills this gap in the
existing scholarship. Examining the period from the launch of the first
essay-periodical, Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709), to the domination of the
market by magazines in the 1760s, Italia surveys a range of monthly, weekly
and sub-weekly publications, producing a study remarkable for its scope and
admirable for its depth. The ten individual chapters focus on publications
ranging from the Spectator to Frances Brooke’s Old Maid.
Appealing to scholars studying media, history and literature, The Rise of
Literary Journalism is a much-needed addition to the fruitful areas of literary
journalism studies and the Enlightenment.

Iona Italia is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of East

Anglia.
Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature

1 The Epistolary Novel

Representations of consciousness
Joe Bray

2 Slavery and Augustan Literature

Swift, Pope, Gay
John Richardson

3 The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century

Anxious employment
Iona Italia
The Rise of Literary
Journalism in the Eighteenth
Century
Anxious employment

Iona Italia
First published 2005
by Routledge
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For Oliver
Contents

Preface and acknowledgements ix

Notes on the text xi

Introduction: the rise of the periodical 1

1 ‘Censor-General of Great Britain’: the Tatler and the

editor as social monitor 23

2 ‘The Conversation of my Drawing-Room’: the female

editor and the public sphere in the Female Tatler 49

3 ‘In Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in

Coffee-Houses’: the Spectator and the shift from the
editorial club to the club of correspondents 66

4 ‘Faction and Nonsense’: the rivalry between Common

Sense and the Nonsense of Common Sense 93

5 Inventor or Plagiarist? Edward Cave and the first

magazine 110

6 Polite, genteel, elegant: the Female Spectator and the

editor’s pretensions to gentility 123

7 ‘Writing like a teacher’: Johnson as moralist in the

Rambler 140
viii Contents
8 ‘A becoming sensibility’: the Old Maid and the
sentimental periodical 165

9 ‘Studies proper for women’: the Lady’s Museum and the

periodical as an educational tool 178

10 ‘Buried among the essays upon liberty, eastern tales,

and cures for the bite of a mad dog’: Oliver Goldsmith
and the essayist in the age of magazines 206

Notes 223
Bibliography 228
Index 240
Preface and acknowledgements

This book was inspired by the need for a basic, introductory critical study of
the eighteenth-century periodical which would be more than simply a brief
survey or annotated bibliography of publications, and which would range
widely over the period 1690–1770, looking at the literary questions raised
by a number of different publications. I hope to shed light on the traditions
of eighteenth-century non-political journalism, in particular essay-periodicals
and magazines, traditions which also raise more general questions about
eighteenth-century authors and readers and provide a fresh perspective on
the contemporary, but very different, development of the eighteenth-century
novel. I make no claims to have written a definitive study of eighteenth-
century journalism. It is a wide field, and some important publications and
interesting aspects of journalism had to be left out of the book, for lack of
space. I hope, however, that the book will form part of an ongoing debate
about the literary characteristics of the periodical press in the Enlighten-
ment and stimulate further studies of journalism, which was such a central
part of the contemporary literary scene.
A version of Chapter 7 has appeared as ‘Samuel Johnson as moralist in The
Rambler’ in The Age of Johnson: a scholarly annual (May 2003). I’d like to
thank the editor for permission to use it here. Illustrations from the follow-
ing texts were supplied courtesy of the British Library: the Compleat Library
(C.189.a.1); The Dunciad Variorum (642.k.2.(1.)); the Female Spectator
(94.c.12); the Friendly Writer (P.P.596.(1.)); the General Magazine of Arts and
Sciences (205.k.8); the Midwife (1081.d.14); and the Universal Magazine of
Knowledge and Pleasure (P.P.5439). Illustrations from the following texts
were supplied courtesy of Cambridge University Library: the Female Tatler
(item no. 1391 in Microfilm P247) and Charles Gildon’s History of the Athen-
ian Society (R.8.52).
A number of people have read and commented on various stages of the
manuscript and shared ideas about the development of this book. I’d like to
thank Peter Barry, John Brewer, Beatrice Clarke, Elizabeth Eger, Richard
x Preface and acknowledgements
Elgar, Melissa Goodman Elgar, Johannes Haubold, David Hornsby, Scott
Kleinman, Jim McDonnell, Shawn Lisa Maurer, James Raven, Timothy
Raylor, David Shuttleton, Stephan Schmuck, Jane Spencer, Constance
Walker, Penny Wilson and Tim Woods. I’d also like to thank the staff at
the Cambridge University Library, the Wren Library, the Bodleian Library
and, especially, the staff at the British Library Rare Books and Music Room.
Very special thanks are due to six people. John Mullan supervised the
PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge, which formed the original germ of this
book. Isobel Grundy gave me extensive help and advice when I was contem-
plating the arduous task of turning the thesis into a book. My friends Father
Paul Kennington and Jonathan Bailey provided hospitality at their vicarages
in East Sheen and Battersea, where I spent several happy summers during
the initial stages of the writing. Nadia Valman has offered unstinting acade-
mic and personal support during almost every stage of this project. My
biggest debt is to Oliver Josephs, who has immeasurably enriched my intel-
lectual and personal life. The book’s many faults are, of course, entirely my
own.
Iona Italia
Notes on the text

Quotations from the Tatler are taken from Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed.
Donald F. Bond, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Quotations from the Spectator are taken from Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele, et al., The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965.
Quotations from the Nonsense of Common Sense are taken from Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert
Halsband and Isobel Grundy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Quotations from the Female Spectator are taken from Selected Works of Eliza
Haywood, series II, vols. 2 and 3, The Female Spectator, eds Kathryn R. King
and Alexander Pettit, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001.
Quotations from the Rambler are taken from The Yale Edition of the Works
of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1958–: III-V.
Quotations from Oliver Goldsmith’s journalism are taken from The Col-
lected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, Oxford: Clarendon,
1966.
I have used the modern system for dates before 1752.
References to shorter periodicals give issue number (where available) in
Arabic numerals, followed by date (where available). References to longer
periodicals, such as magazines, generally cite the annual volume number, in
Roman numerals, followed by the date (where available) and page number
(if appropriate). Some periodicals have their own, more unusual, systems of
references. I have noted within the text where this is the case.
The place of publication of all periodicals is London, unless otherwise
stated.
Introduction
The rise of the periodical

In her review of George Frisbie Whicher’s 1915 biography of Eliza

Haywood, Virginia Woolf roundly dismisses Haywood’s periodical writing,
arguing that she ‘left behind her a mass of unreadable journalism which
both by its form and by the inferiority of the writer’s talent throws no light
upon her age or upon herself’ (1979: 93). Woolf’s comment reveals not only
her low opinion of Haywood’s skill as a writer, but her attitudes towards
eighteenth-century journalism. For Woolf, it is the form in which Haywood
wrote, as well as her lack of talent, which renders her journalism unworthy
of scholarly attention.
The rise of the periodical coincided with an increasingly commercial lit-
erary marketplace, and journalism was often regarded as typifying all the
worst qualities of the mass market, as unscrupulous hacks produced dispos-
able literature, the ‘Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines . . . and all the
Grub-street race’, which cannot ‘’scape the martyrdom of jakes and fire’ in
Pope’s Dunciad (1951: 5.273–4, 5.280). The frontispiece to the 1729
edition of Pope’s mock-epic shows the crumpled sheets of periodicals drop-
ping from the donkey’s back, being blown away and littering the ground,
conveying a vivid image of the transience of journalism (Figure I.1). Henry
Fielding comments acidly in 1752 that most journalism serves only as toilet
paper: the large number of periodicals proves ‘there are . . . many B–ms in
the World’ (Covent-Garden Journal 1, 4 January 1752).
This book provides an account of the eighteenth-century periodical as a
literary genre. The 1980s, 90s and 2000s have witnessed a heightened inter-
est in eighteenth-century literary journalism, an interest that reflects
growing critical fascination with the development of the public sphere in
the Enlightenment. While there are a number of studies of individual papers
or specific categories of publications – most notably, several books on peri-
odicals by and for women (Ballaster et al. 1991; Maurer 1998; Shevelow
1989) – there has been little attempt to study the periodical itself as a liter-
ary phenomenon. Eighteenth-century genres are usually defined by their
Figure I.1 Frontispiece of The Dunciad Variorum (1729).
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 3
structure – as novels, drama or poetry – or in terms of the specific themes
and approaches which characterize particular styles such as the sentimental
or the Gothic. The periodical does not fit easily within this scheme of cate-
gorization. While we might see the essay as a particular genre, governed by
specific conventions and influenced by a rich literary tradition, the essay-
periodical, we might argue, is not a genre in itself, but simply a form in
which to market, distribute and publish essays.
An essay published in a book is very different, however, from one which
appears as a single issue of an essay-serial and also distinct from an essay
‘buried’, as Oliver Goldsmith puts it, ‘among the essays upon liberty,
eastern tales, and cures for the bite of a mad dog’ in the pages of a bulky
magazine (1966: 4.111). The format and context in which a work is to
appear profoundly affects its writer’s choice of literary strategies. In this
book, I will describe and analyse the set of literary conventions which char-
acterize the eighteenth-century periodical and suggest reasons why the peri-
odical developed its distinctive literary traits.
The study encompasses the period between the launch of the first essay-
periodical, Richard Steele’s Tatler, in 1709 and the domination of the
market by the magazines in the 1760s. It spans the height of the essay-
periodical’s popularity and describes the conception and early development
of its powerful rival the magazine. By an essay-periodical, I mean a publica-
tion issued weekly or sub-weekly with a long leader essay, sometimes
accompanied by a brief section of foreign and domestic news and a selection
of advertisements. These publications were often written by a single writer,
and were usually no more than two folio pages long. Magazines were bulky
publications, usually issued monthly, with very diverse contents that often
included abridged essays reprinted from weekly and sub-weekly publica-
tions, as well as articles on politics, scientific discoveries, mathematical
questions, readers’ letters, poetry, serialized fiction, shipping news and the
prices of goods and stocks.
While the distinction between essay-periodicals and magazines is central
to this study, eighteenth-century periodicals cannot always be easily classi-
fied. Some studies of the genre have suffered from dividing the publications
into somewhat arbitrary and often misleading categories. This study does
not attempt to impose a strict system of taxonomy: the terms periodical,
journal and paper are treated as approximately synonymous, and the anachro-
nistic word journalism is used to describe periodical writing in general, not
simply political reporting. Journals in this period were not always clearly
defined by special interest, audience and approach. Many periodicals borrow
features from several types of publication. Haywood’s lengthy and varied
issues in the Female Spectator share features with both the essay-periodical
and the magazine, for instance. It is often difficult to distinguish literary
4 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
from political papers. Publications such as the Craftsman (1726–50), which
was primarily devoted to news reporting, often diversified their material
with essays on manners and morals.
In addition, it is almost impossible to identify a separate tradition of peri-
odical writing by or for women. While the titles of many papers – ladies’
magazines, museums, companions and others – suggest that they were aimed at a
female readership, there is evidence to suggest that male readers constituted
a sizeable proportion of the audience of these periodicals. The editor of the
Ladies Journal (1727) promises that his paper will contain ‘nothing . . . but
the lighter Affairs of the Ladies’, such as ‘Love and Gallantry’ (no. 1), but
there is a clear assumption that such material will also appeal to men. His
advertisement explains that ‘several Gentlemen’ had subscribed to a songbook
that could not be published, as the printer absconded with the copy. The
periodical, he assures them, ‘was chiefly writ on their Accounts, wherein they have
the . . . Songs, but also variety of the most entertaining Subjects’ (no. 1). The poetry
miscellany Flowers of Parnassus (1734–6) is explicitly aimed at ‘THE LADIES of
Great-Britain’, but the editor adds that if women endorse the publication
‘our own Sex must relish and approve’ (1736, Preface). Helen Berry has cal-
culated that ‘seven out of ten “Ladies” issues of the Athenian Mercury (which
were purportedly devoted to questions from women) where the sex of the
correspondent was mentioned, there were in fact as many or more questions
from men than from women’ (2003: 61). She notes that these ‘Ladies’ issues
were gradually phased out after vol. V of the Mercury and that the Ladies
Mercury folded after only a few issues, ‘suggesting that segregation by gender
was not a profitable venture’ (ibid.). Jean Hunter has shown that never less
than a third and frequently more than half of all letters to the Lady’s Maga-
zine (1770–1832) bear a male signature (1977: 103–71). We cannot be
certain of the actual sex of some of these writers, but their sheer numbers
indicate that the magazine was regarded as eminently suitable for male
readers. Publications which are addressed specifically to women often do not
differ from those which claim a mixed readership. Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies
Magazine (1749–53) printed serialized histories of Britain, accounts of the
‘Proceedings of the British Parliament’ and the Court of Session, criminal
biographies, reviews of novels, and a ‘Chronological Diary of Foreign and
Domestic Affairs’ as regular features, beside occasional items of more
traditionally feminine interest. In addition, the style of a female-edited
paper is not always distinct from one written under a male pen-name. Oliver
Goldsmith’s pacifist essay ‘Some Thoughts Preliminary to a General Peace’
was first published in the Weekly Magazine for 29 December 1759, where he
wrote as a male journalist addressing a male readership. Just over a year
later, the article reappeared in an only slightly altered form in the Lady’s
Magazine; or, Polite Companion (1759–63) for October 1761 under the
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 5
heading ‘Thoughts Upon the Present State of Affairs’, written in the guise of
the woman editor, Mrs Caroline Stanhope, and addressed to an explicitly
female audience. Goldsmith allows the fictional Mrs Stanhope to apologize
gracefully for ‘indulging herself in political speculations’, telling readers
that ‘none, not even women, should sit unconcerned in the calamities . . . of
their country’ (Lady’s Magazine: II.150). However, the political sentiments
expressed are considered as suitable to a female, as to a male pen. Papers like
the Orphan Reviv’d (1718–20) combine a news section, ‘Containing all
Remarkable Occurrences Foreign and Domestick’, with material specifically
intended to appeal to women such as ‘The Tea Table Tatler; or, The Ladies
Delight’. Contemporaries did not necessarily think that a female pen-name
indicated female authorship. The Female Tatler was often attributed to
Thomas Baker (see Chapter 2). Roxana Termagant, editor of the Drury-Lane
Journal, imagines male readers commenting sceptically on her sex: ‘A
woman pretend to write! – Pshaw, ’tis impossible. – No, no, – a mere
humbug – a stale pretence – ’twon’t do, ’twon’t do’ (2, 23 January 1752).
Her female readers, however, ‘all of them strenuously maintain, that I must
be, and most certainly am what I pretend to be, – a woman’, variously
attributing the periodical’s authorship to Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding and
the transvestite soldier Hannah Snell (1723–92) (ibid.). Correspondents to
the Female Spectator, ostensibly written by a club of four women, address the
editors as ‘Ladies, or Gentlemen, / Madam, or Sir’ (bk VII: 2.233) and express
their doubts of the Female Spectator’s sex: ‘I very much Question whether
you are of the Feminine Gender or not’ (bk XXIV: 3.405).
Some papers modified their titles, perhaps to reflect the changing gender
balance of their readership. The Ladies Diary (1704–1871) became first the
Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary and then the Gentleman’s Diary; or, the Math-
ematical Repository, before finally reverting to the title of the Lady’s and Gen-
tleman’s Diary. Tipper’s companion publication the Monthly Entertainments
(1713) begins as a collection of ‘Delightful Arithmetical Questions . . . sent
me by the Fair Sex’ (Ladies Diary 1713, Advertisement). By 1728 almost all
the mathematical questions are both proposed and answered by male corre-
spondents, but Tipper still describes his readership as ‘British Ladies’ (Ladies
Diary 1728, Advertisement). Tipper’s Delights for the Ingenious (1711) is
addressed ‘to all Gentlemen, Ladies, and Others’ (January 1711) and alter-
nately singles out male readers – ‘Which are the most prevailing Arguments
to persuade a Woman, that we really love her?’ (ibid.) – and female ones – ‘Oh
ye charming fair Female Readers’ (ibid.). By the middle years of the century,
most literary publications promise to contain articles of interest to men and
women. This is reflected in their titles and subtitles: in the Gentleman and
Lady’s Companion, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Magazine, Gentleman and Lady’s
Repository and Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium among many others.1
6 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
Addresses to the fair sex, together with letters from female correspon-
dents and discussion of issues of relevance to women, are ubiquitous in
eighteenth-century journalism, whether written by men or women. In the
first issue of his Tatler, Steele promises to include material ‘which may be of
Entertainment to the Fair Sex’, in whose honour, he claims wryly, he has
chosen the name of his publication. The editor of the Free-thinker addresses
his paper to ‘the Fair Sex (whose Approbation most flatters the Heart of a
Writer)’ (1, 24 March 1718), and the editor of the Visiter proclaims that ‘the
Ladies I design as my peculiar Care’ (1, 18 June 1723). Adam Fitz-Adam of
the World claims proudly that ‘during the course of these my labours, there
is nothing that I have applied myself to with more diligence and attention
. . . than the reformation of the fair sex’ (158, 8 January 1756). The editor of
Haywood’s Parrot declares, ‘I thought it my Duty, as well as found it my
Inclination, to pay a peculiar Homage to that Sex [women]’ (no. 7). In the
second issue of the Gray’s Inn Journal, the editor, Charles Ranger, tells his
readers, ‘Having recommended myself, in my last Saturday’s Paper, to the
Patronage of the male Part of my Readers, I shall dedicate the present Essay
to the British Fair’ (6 October 1753). Samuel Johnson complains in his
Rambler that he has been ‘censured for not imitating the politeness of his
predecessors, having hitherto neglected to take the ladies under his protec-
tion’ (Rambler 23), while the editor of the Connoisseur tells us in the periodi-
cal’s fourth issue that his female readers already ‘exclaim against me for not
having as yet paid my particular addresses to the Fair’ (21 February 1754). A
correspondent of Fielding’s Champion rebukes him for having ‘most shame-
fully neglected the Ladies; as if we had foresworn reading’, threatening that
he ignores her ‘at his Peril’ (327, 15 December 1741).
The feminization of the periodical is linked to a gentrification of the
genre. Studies of the eighteenth-century novel have often focused on the
figure of the vulnerable and naïve female reader and have seen the novel’s
associations with women as a sign of its lack of literary respectability. In the
periodical, by contrast, addressing a female audience and discussing topics of
traditionally feminine interest came to be viewed as a mark of literary and
social cachet. As women were increasingly portrayed as indifferent to party
politics, an address to women was taken to signal a high-minded political
disinterestedness and preference for literary subjects, which would guarantee
that the publication would outlast the scurrilous work of mercenary hacks,
paid to inflame and perpetuate party squabbles. Periodical editors tried to
shake off journalism’s associations with a male, urban, trading readership
who anxiously monitored foreign policy and the prices of goods and stocks.
While gentlemen were merely a sub-group of male readers, by polite con-
vention all female readers were regarded as ladies.
The periodical’s early literary history clearly demonstrates the ways in
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 7
which the conditions of the literary marketplace can shape the development
of a genre. The neglected periodical is, perhaps, a casualty of our abiding fas-
cination with the novel. However, it shares a number of important historical
features with the novel: most notably its historical youth, relatively low
price, dubious respectability, widespread availability and particular associ-
ation with female readers. Its popularity raises important questions about
the transition from intensive to extensive reading, the growth of a non-
aristocratic readership and the status of the professional writer in the eight-
eenth century. The majority of the writers, both male and female, who form
the focus of this study were professionals who turned to journalism as an
opportunity of making a living.
The periodical illustrates a central tension in eighteenth-century writing:
a preoccupation with class coupled with a blurring of traditional class
boundaries. While editors were increasingly seen as mercenary hacks writing
for a semi-literate mass audience, within the periodicals they maintain a pre-
tence of gentility. More than in any other form of eighteenth-century
writing, class and genre are intricately connected in the periodical. All the
major features of the genre were influenced by the desires of periodical
writers to shake off journalism’s disreputable image. The work of each of the
individual writers in this study represents a different approach to the
problem of securing a measure of literary respectability.
While some of the works examined by this study were to gain lasting lit-
erary fame, the periodical as a genre was never to attain significant literary
prestige. The essay-periodical, which represents the genre’s most literary,
least commercial product, was moribund by the end of the period covered by
this study. While essay-periodicals continued to be published after 1770,
they were never to regain the popularity they enjoyed during the early
decades of the century. In the course of this study, I will suggest some
reasons for the failure of journalism to achieve the privileged literary status
accorded to the novel. First, however, I will place the study’s central texts in
their wider context by describing the historical conditions which led to the
development of journalism and charting the main features of the genre.

General historical background

Periodicals flourished and grew both in number and diversity throughout
the period 1690–1770. They ranged from the learned to the lewd. The
scholarly Phoenix Britannicus (1731), which contains rare pamphlets from the
Civil War period, together with the equally erudite Miscellaneous Observations
(1731–2), which offers textual criticism of the Classics, appealed to ‘the
Curiosi of these Realms’ (Phoenix Britannicus 1, January 1731). At the other
end of the scale, comic miscellanies like Heraclitus Ridens (1703–4 and 1718)
8 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
and Ned Ward’s Humours of a Coffee-House (1707–8) published collections of
bawdy jokes, riddles and anecdotes. Learned abstracts such as the Philosophi-
cal Transactions of the Royal Society (1665–present day) and De la Crose’s
History of the Works of the Learned (1699–1712) carried reviews of scholarly
publications, together with accounts of scientific experiments and theologi-
cal debates. These erudite publications were later to develop into book
reviewing journals such as the Monthly Review (1749–1844) and the Critical
Review (1756–1817), which began by reprinting lengthy extracts and sum-
maries of mainly non-fictional texts and gradually diversified to provide crit-
ical comment on a wide range of publications.2 The ambitious Edinburgh
Review (1755–6) presents itself as a ‘national benefit’, which will encourage
‘a more eager pursuit of learning’ among Scots, enabling them ‘to distin-
guish themselves, and to do honour to their country’ (1, July 1755). The
Scots Magazine (1739–1826) also wishes to ‘revive that universal esteem
which SCOTLAND so justly acquir’d among her neighbours by the valour and
learning of our ancestors’ (vol. I, Preface).
A number of historical circumstances concurred to make the early to mid-
eighteenth century a particularly propitious time for the development and
proliferation of journalism. The first English newsbooks and corantos, mod-
elled on Dutch publications, appeared in the 1620s in London (Harris 1978:
83). The breakdown of governmental controls during the Civil War fostered
the appearance of a multitude of periodical publications. With the Restora-
tion, conditions of publication became far more restrictive. The Licensing
Act of 1662 placed the press under the supervision of a series of licensers. In
1684, the Stationers’ Company was granted a royal charter and a monopoly
on printing. Printing was restricted to 20 master printers from the
Company, each of whom was allocated a set number of presses. In 1695, the
Licensing Act was allowed to lapse, and at the same time the Stationers’
Company lost their monopoly. There was to be no further registry of print-
ing presses until 1799 (Brewer 1997: 135–7).
The official government vehicle for news, the twice-weekly London
Gazette, had been established in 1665, but in 1695 non-official newspapers
appeared, beginning with the Post Boy. The first daily newspaper, the Daily
Courant, was launched in 1702 and the first evening paper, the Evening Post,
in 1709. Provincial presses were quickly established, and local newspapers
rapidly emerged, beginning with the Norwich Post in 1708. A newspaper
provided a steady source of income and required only a small investment. It
was also a cheap advertising medium for the bookseller or printer’s other
wares. By the 1730s, every major provincial centre had its own newspaper
(ibid. 132). Provincial bookshops spread rapidly, increasing from 400 outlets
in 200 towns in 1749 to nearly 1,000 in 300 locations in the 1790s (ibid.
137). The number of journals rose steadily throughout the eighteenth
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 9
century. R.P. Bond has estimated that in 1711 there were 66 periodicals
available in the British Isles, 90 in 1750 and 140 in 1775 (1969: 4). Robert
Mayo lists 120 essay-periodicals for the period 1740–1815, about half of
which were non-political papers (1962: 72).
The size of the readership of eighteenth-century periodicals is difficult to
gauge. We do not usually have access to printers’ and booksellers’ ledgers,
and print historians have often been forced to rely on the claims of editors,
who may well have exaggerated their own success. Since periodicals were fre-
quently lent out, shared, read aloud or consulted in a public place, a single
copy may have been read by many people. Addison claims that each copy of
the Spectator had 20 readers (Spectator 10) whilst one contemporary describes
the Craftsman as having ‘no more than 40 Readers to a Paper’ (Harris 1987:
48). Historians have estimated the sales figures of some of the most popular
publications. The Craftsman, an enormously successful polemical paper,
achieved a sale of around 13,000 per week (ibid. 86). At the height of their
influence, the major Opposition papers were bringing in profits of around
£1,000 p.a. (ibid. 92). Major weekly periodicals of mid-century, which com-
bined news and non-political features, often enjoyed sales of up to 10,000
per issue (ibid.). Monthly magazines had a readership of between 5,000 and
15,000 from the 1760s onwards (Mayo 1962: 84). In 1710, the official news
organ, the London Gazette, printed 1,000 copies per issue, some of which may
have been remaindered (R.P. Bond 1971: 39).
Very few estimates have been made of the circulation of literary periodi-
cals: that is, all publications whose content was not primarily political. Most
publishing history studies focus on newspapers. The Tatler and the Spectator
were the most successful essay-periodicals, with sales of the original issues
estimated at 3,000 and 4,000 respectively (R.P. Bond 1971: 39 and D.F.
Bond 1965: lxxiv). Richmond P. Bond estimates the Tatler’s original profits
at around £37 per week (1971: 39). The mid-century literary essay-sheet the
World, published by Robert Dodsley, edited by the dramatist Edward Moore
and numbering among its star-studded band of contributors Lord Chester-
field, Horace Walpole, William Whitehead, Soame Jenyns, Richard Owen
Cambridge and Joseph Warton, reputedly sold 25,000 copies per week
(Mayo 1962: 118). Very few literary essay-periodicals achieved comparable
readerships. Most probably had a circulation of no more than a few hundred
in their original sheets. It was customary, however, to bind and print col-
lected issues of a periodical at the end of the run, and many publications
reached much larger audiences in volume form (ibid. 71). Those who owned
incomplete sets of the original sheets were also encouraged to replace issues
they had missed and bind them themselves. Back copies, indexes and title
pages were often available from the printer (R.P. Bond 1971: 41). Literary
essay-periodicals tended to have much shorter lifespans than most of today’s
10 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
publications: in the majority of cases, the papers appear to have ended
within a year, and many are only extant in two or three issues.
Periodicals were very widely available, especially in the capital. They
could be bought at the publisher’s office or ordered by subscription from the
printer or from metropolitan or provincial booksellers. They could be pur-
chased or hired from hawkers on the London streets, read at taverns, barbers’
shops, chandlers and India houses (Jeremy Black 1991: 99–108). J.H.
Plumb has estimated that there were around 2,000 coffee-houses in London
during the reign of Queen Anne (1983: 269). Most held periodicals, which
could be read on site or sometimes borrowed, and some played host to
private book clubs, whose members purchased periodicals as a group and
read them aloud over drinks or a meal (ibid. 269–70). By the 1720s, col-
lected editions of periodicals could also be obtained from the new circulat-
ing libraries (ibid. 270).
Relatively little is known about the readership of eighteenth-century
journalism. The extent of literacy in the period is difficult to estimate, and
the means of defining literacy are contested. Those able to sign their names
on a legal document – the usual measure of literacy in this period – were
probably not all capable of reading Johnson’s polysyllabic prose in the
Rambler, for instance. However, most historians agree that literacy levels
were rising rapidly, particularly in London and among women and mer-
chants. John Brewer estimates that 45% of men could read and write in
1714, rising to 60% by mid-century and that female literacy rose from 25%
in 1714 to 40% in 1750 (Brewer 1997: 167–8). He argues that the percent-
age of literate women in London changed more dramatically than elsewhere
in the country, increasing from 22 to 66% between the 1670s and 1720s
(ibid.). Wages for skilled workers in the capital seldom fell below 10s. a
week, making periodicals affordable to many (Harris 1987: 192). Of the
lower classes, shopkeepers were the most likely to be literate: 95% of them
could read and write by 1775 (Brewer 1997: 168). The audience for periodi-
cals in the first few decades of the century, then, was probably predomi-
nantly urban and included some shopkeepers, domestic servants and
apprentices and their masters. It is likely that a significant proportion of
that readership was female.
The cost of purchasing periodicals rose faster than the rate of inflation
throughout the century, putting them quickly out of the price range of most
unskilled and semi-skilled workers (Jeremy Black 1991: 107–8). This price
rise is reflected in the style and focus of the periodicals themselves. As the
century progresses, periodical editors increasingly portray their publications
as genteel entertainment. The maverick literary entrepreneur John Dunton
edited a number of popular epistolary periodicals in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, which reached a large and socially diverse audi-
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 11
ence. Dunton’s papers, in particular the Athenian Mercury (1691–7) and the
Post-Angel (1701–2), together with their later imitators, the British Apollo
(1708–11) and the Athenian News (1710), contained a number of readers’
queries and editors’ responses on questions ranging from the nature of the
soul to the reasons why prostitutes have so few pregnancies (Athenian
Mercury I.1, 17 March 1690; I.18, 23 May 1691). The editor promises to
answer queries sent in by ‘All Persons whatsoever’, providing a source of
information to ‘those whose Pockets could not arrive to a better Education’
(Athenian Mercury I.1). No original letters to the Mercury have survived.
However, Helen Berry’s research suggests that Dunton’s readership encom-
passed a wide range of society, including servant maids, shop assistants and
apprentices (2003: 36–43, 63–5). Referring to the British Apollo, a corre-
spondent of the Female Tatler comments acidly that ‘the chief Querists are
Drapers, Haberdashers, Grocers, Ale-house-keepers and such sort of Trash’
(30, 14 September 1709).
Early journals frequently describe their role as that of disseminating
knowledge to those without the leisure, money or education to read books.
The Weekly Pacquet (1678) promises to cater for ‘meaner capacities’, arguing
that ‘though there be good Books enow abroad, yet every Mans Purse will
not allow him to buy . . . This Method is therefore chosen, as most likely to
fall into Vulgar hands’ (qtd. Jeremy Black 1991: 6). In a similar manner, the
Weekly Amusement (1734–6) reassures its readers that ‘nothing shall be
inserted but what may be understood by persons of the meanest capacities’
(no. 1). Few periodicals of the mid- to late eighteenth century acknowledge
such a humble readership. Robert Mayo has noted the predominance of
phrases such as ‘elegant amusement’, ‘entertaining companions’ and ‘taste,
fashion and politeness’ in editors’ descriptions of their publications after
1750 (1962: 220–1). The editor of the immensely popular World defines his
readership as high society or ‘the well-dressed, and . . . everybody one knows’
(162, 5 February 1756). The titles of publications such as the Royal Maga-
zine (1750–1), the Court Miscellany,3 the St. James’s Magazine (1762–4) and
the Court and City Magazine; or, a Fund of Entertainment for the Man of Quality
(1770–1), announce their aristocratic pretensions. This does not necessarily
imply that their readers were drawn from the upper echelons of society. As
the authors of Women’s Worlds have pointed out, ‘Publishers and editors
recognise their readers as “aspirational”, aspiring to . . . a higher class or
social bracket’ (Ballaster et al. 1991: 11). A correspondent tells the Court
Magazine that, although it is bought by ‘the nobility’, its chief readers are
‘the servant in waiting, or the journeyman hair-dresser’ (January 1762).
Michael Harris has argued that ‘the press in this period did not succeed in
substantially broadening the basis of its readership’ (1978: 97) and believes
that the readership of newspapers was largely drawn from the aristocracy,
12 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
gentry and clergy, although it also included a substantial number of self-
employed craftsmen, tradesmen and shopkeepers (1987: 191–5). The reader-
ship of literary essay-periodicals was almost certainly smaller and less diverse
than that of newspapers. While few editors and not many readers were actu-
ally drawn from the upper classes, by mid-century most editors maintained a
pretence of mutual gentility when addressing their audiences.
Taxation and the cost of paper kept the price of periodicals high after the
first quarter of the century. The Stamp Act of 1712 taxed single-sheet news-
papers 1d. for every copy printed: printing, say, 8 copies would cost 8d.
Publications of more than one sheet paid only 2s. per sheet irrespective of
the number of copies: a 4-sheet publication, for example, would pay only 8s.
duty, no matter how large its print run. Multi-sheet publications were also
exempted from advertisement duty (Harris 1987: 19–20). It became more
profitable to publish several sheets weekly, instead of one daily sheet. A
number of newspapers converted to the miscellany format, combining news
items with literary essays and miscellaneous items, including ‘scraps of
Poetry, Trials of Highwaymen, pickpockets and many other subjects, that
tend to debauch the morals of the community’, as one reader complained in
the early 1720s (Harris 1978: 85–6). The Stamp Act of 1725 closed this
loophole by requiring all newspapers to be stamped on every page, regard-
less of length. In the 1740s, tough legislation was introduced to suppress
the illegal sales of cut-price, unstamped papers. The hawkers who sold them
on the streets were liable to up to three months’ hard labour, and rewards
were offered for information leading to a conviction (Harris 1987: 29–30).
The stamp duty was doubled in 1757.
The stamp tax and the cost of paper were the largest expenses involved in
setting up a periodical. At least £200 was needed to launch a newspaper in
the 1730s (ibid. 49). Essay-periodicals brought in smaller profits, but also
had smaller initial costs and overheads and could often be financed by indi-
viduals. As the costs of periodical production increased, there was a shift in
the ownership of London papers, especially daily newspapers, from indi-
vidual printer entrepreneurs to large groups of shareholding booksellers
(Harris 1978: 92). This in turn was to bring about a significant change, not
just in the way in which periodicals were produced, but in their form and
content. It was to lead to a conception of journals not as the literary work of
specific individuals, but as business enterprises undertaken primarily for
profit, without a distinctive single editorial voice or artistic vision.
Although there was no pre-publication censorship, periodical printers and
publishers were liable to prosecution for obscenity, blasphemy or seditious
libel. Between 1715 and 1759 over 70 warrants were issued against news-
papers, not including prosecutions for breach of parliamentary privilege.
The reporting of parliamentary debates was to remain illegal until 1771
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 13
(ibid. 96). Printers and publishers were more likely to be arrested than
authors, since they printed their names and addresses on their title pages, for
commercial correspondence. Printers could be sentenced to a maximum of
two years’ imprisonment and fined up to £200. Even when a prosecution
was unsuccessful, they were often imprisoned pending trial for a number of
months – in some cases several years – and were released only when substan-
tial bail had been raised. Printing materials and presses were often confis-
cated or damaged in government raids (Harris 1987: 142–7). A conviction
could, however, make a paper more popular, by advertising its radical, sala-
cious or titillating content. As well as taking legal measures, government
officials at the Post Office could prevent the distribution of issues or threaten
a paper’s finances by intercepting orders and advertisements (ibid. 136–9).
Despite these difficulties and restrictions, periodicals continued to flourish
throughout this period, although these historical developments led to
changes in the relative popularity of different forms of journalism. In the
early part of the century the essay-periodical enjoyed considerable popular-
ity, but by mid-century the periodical market was dominated by the maga-
zines. I will be tracing the effects of these changes within the individual
chapters of this book. First, however, it is important to understand the main
characteristics of these two forms of periodical writing.

The essay-periodical
The single-essay periodical was pioneered by Richard Steele in his Tatler
(1709–11) and then developed further by Steele and Joseph Addison in the
Spectator (1711–12 and 1714). These periodicals were written in the guise of
fictional personae. Both the Tatler’s Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator were
genial, mildly eccentric figures, who combined moral gravitas with loveable
idiosyncrasy. The concise and manageable form of the single essay meant
that the papers could be written by one individual. In most essay-periodicals,
one writer had editorial responsibility for the publication, as well as compos-
ing most of the material him- or herself. I use the term editor in this context
almost interchangeably with writer. Richmond Bond has attributed 47
Tatler papers to Addison, estimating that he wrote a further 22 in collabora-
tion with Steele. Other possible contributors to the Tatler include John
Hughes, Arthur Maynwaring, Anthony Henley, Temple Stanyan, William
Congreve, William Asplin, Richard Parker, Charles Dartiquenave, Jonathan
Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (R.P. Bond 1971: 14–20). I treat
the Tatler, however, as the work of Steele throughout, since he not only
wrote 181 of the paper’s 271 issues, but exercised full editorial control over
all the material that was published (ibid. 15).
The use of a fictional persona allowed Steele to censure the faults and
14 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
follies of his society, without exposing himself to personal attacks or to the
charge of hypocrisy. The device brilliantly combines wit with morality,
ironic distance with direct appeal. As the editor of the Medley comments in
1711,

Isaac Bickerstaff . . . had the Skill to talk in a superior Air to his Oppon-
ents, and support himself in it, by giving himself a comical Figure at
the same time. Without this Subtlety . . . the Tatler had been the most
insufferably arrogant of any Writer that ever appear’d in the World.
(38, 18 June 1711)

In the Spectator, Addison also describes the liberating effect of writing in a

mask. He tells his readers, ‘That might pass for Humour, in the Spectator,
which would look like Arrogance in a Writer who sets his Name to his
Work. The Fictitious Person might . . . assume a Mock-Authority, without
being looked upon as vain and conceited’ (no. 555). Henry Fielding’s Jaco-
bite’s Journal is unusual in the level of irony with which the author handles
his persona, John Trott-Plaid. Fielding chooses to pose as a Jacobite in order
‘to be laughed at for the Good of my Country’ and to ‘reduce all Men to be
as great and as sincere Jacobites as myself’ (Jacobite’s Journal 1, 5 December
1747). However, Fielding abandons his alter ego after only 16 issues, declar-
ing himself ‘weary of personating a Character for whom I have so solemn a
Contempt’ and fearing that there is ‘no Species of Wit and Humour so little
adapted to the Palat of the present Age’ as irony, as well as ‘no kind of
Humour so liable to be mistaken’ (Jacobite’s Journal 17, 26 March 1748).
Most editors employ their personae more or less as mouthpieces – they are
eccentric, perhaps, but ultimately respectable and authoritative spokespeo-
ple. The idea of the editor as a figure of moral authority was to remain
central to conceptions of the genre.
It is impossible to overestimate Addison and Steele’s influence on later
periodicalists. The Spectator, in particular, continued to be read, anthologized
and praised as a model of English prose and moral thought until the early
part of the twentieth century. Editors frequently complain that because of
the Spectator ‘it is a . . . fashion to condemn all other writings of the same
kind’ (World 173, 22 April 1756). The editor of the Gray’s Inn Journal sees
the eminence of Addison and Steele’s publications as a hindrance to other
journalists: ‘It has for a long Time been the Objection to the periodical
Writer of Essays, that every Subject is pre-occupied; that the Spectators,
Tatlers and Guardians have cultivated every Field of Reflection’ (29 Decem-
ber 1753). Addison is lionized in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original
Composition (1759) and in John Gilbert Cooper’s Letters Concerning Taste
(1755). In 1760, Hugh Blair held a series of lectures on rhetoric, many of
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 15
them involving painstakingly close readings of individual numbers of the
Spectator. Blair comments that ‘the “Spectator” . . . is a book which is in the
hands of every one, and which cannot be praised too highly’ (Bloom and
Bloom 1980: 368). The copyright to the collected edition of the Spectator
was sold for £1,150 in 1712, while the copyright to a part-book of the peri-
odical was valued at the very high figure of £1,300 in 1767. Shakespeare’s
entire works, by comparison, were worth £1,800 (Brewer 1997: 100). Jane
Austen complains of the continued veneration of Addison in her celebrated
defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey. Young girls, she writes, are gener-
ally ashamed to be caught reading a novel. The author comments dryly
‘Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Specta-
tor . . . how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name’
(Austen 1988: 38).
As Robert D. Mayo has pointed out, the eighteenth-century periodical
was a genre characterized by ‘journalistic orthodoxy’ (1962: 71). In an age in
which skilful imitation and adaptation of Classical models was highly
prized, the periodical lacked a venerable literary ancestry. Ironically, this
very deficiency made the essay-periodical, in particular, a highly conservat-
ive genre, as editors attempted to establish clear traditions and guidelines
for periodical writing. The genre’s historical youth, coupled with editors’
aspirations to literary gentility, led to the establishment of the Tatler and
the Spectator as prescribed models for every journalist. Mayo has discovered
over a hundred imitators of the Tatler and the Spectator in the period
1715–40 alone (ibid. 43). In the preface to the collected edition of the
Censor, the editor describes the 1710s, following the publication of ‘the inim-
itable Spectator’, as ‘the Age of Counsellors, when every Blockhead who could
write his own Name attempted to inform and amuse the Publick’ (1717).
This attempt to compensate for the paucity of illustrious journalists by
canonizing Addison and Steele also led to the periodical’s relative immunity
to literary fashion. The early periodical was a highly self-absorbed literary
genre and appears to have neither influenced, nor been influenced by, the
novel to any significant extent.4 Mayo has noted that Addison and Steele’s
writing formed the ‘single most important influence upon magazine fiction
in the eighteenth century – Richardson, Sterne, and other popular novelists
not excepted’ (1962: 84). Henry Fielding wrote or edited at least five period-
icals: the Grub-Street Journal (1730–8), the Champion (1739–43), the True
Patriot (1745–6), the Jacobite’s Journal (1747–8) and the Covent-Garden
Journal (1752). The journalism of the author of Joseph Andrews (1742),
Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751) conforms to the Addisonian tradition
and shares very few features with his novels. Fielding frequently adopts a
Spectatorial persona. His alter ego in the Covent-Garden Journal, ‘Sir Alexan-
der Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain’, is a knight-errant in the
16 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
Bickerstaffian tradition. Fielding also assumes the identity of the colourfully
named cudgel player Captain Hercules Vinegar in the Champion and of the
fanatical Jacobite John Trott-Plaid, whose cousin, the Tory fox-hunter
Humphrey Gibbins, resembles the Spectator’s Sir Roger de Coverley. In addi-
tion, Fielding’s use of fictional letters to the editor, verse, political allegory
and a ‘Court of Censorial Enquiry’, which echoes the Tatler’s ‘Court of
Honour’, all bear witness to the influence of Addison and Steele. The novel-
ist Frances Brooke was almost unique in her efforts to combine the
characteristics of the two popular genres; Chapter 8 will explore her reinter-
pretation of the Addisonian essay-paper.
A large number of essay-periodicalists followed Addison and Steele’s
example by writing in the guise of a quirky and eccentric editor figure, often
referred to by historians of journalism as the editor’s eidolon, taken from the
Greek word meaning ‘ghost’. Almost all eighteenth-century journalism, like
much other contemporary literature, was published anonymously. Editors
wrote under colourful, patently fictitious pseudonyms, which were usually
ironically self-deprecatory. Aaron Hill tells his readers in the Prompter
(1734–6) that ‘Custom has made it necessary . . . to assume a Character . . .
either heroic or ludicrous’ and ‘take up some Soubriquet, or mock Name’ (1,
12 November 1734). The convention was so well established by 1723 that
the editor of the Visiter felt the need to apologize to his readers for not
adopting a ‘Character . . . which I think can be of little Use . . . to them, or
my self’ (1, 18 June 1723). Many of the names and titles chosen refer to
those traits that seem particularly appropriate to a journalist. The Busy Body
(1759), the Prattler (1747) the Prater (1756) and the ‘Babbler’,5 and fictional
creations like Mrs Prattle of the Parrot (1728) and Mrs Penelope Pry of the
Lady’s Weekly Magazine (1747) allude to the proverbial loquacity and nosi-
ness of editors, whereas the Grumbler (1715), the Grouler (1711) and Lewis
Theobald’s irascible Mr Censor (1715–17) exploit the stereotype of the dis-
affected and misanthropic critic of society. Editors adopted a host of bizarre
and flamboyant identities. They wrote as hermits, Jesuits, lay-monks and
pilgrims; high German doctors, hyp-doctors, conjurors and mountebanks;
dreamers, rhapsodists and projectors; and lovers, devils, fairies and knights-
errant.6
It is difficult to judge how frequently their original readers knew the real
authors of such publications. Contemporaries were quick to attribute the
Tatler to Richard Steele, whereas the authorship of the Female Tatler aroused
some controversy and remains uncertain. Some writers hint playfully at their
real personalities within their periodicals, allowing fleeting glimpses of the
author behind the mask. Guessing the editor’s identity may have sometimes
been part of the pleasure of reading a periodical, but more frequently it
probably served to disguise and protect the writer. Editors usually handled
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 17
their assumed characters with comic distance. Sheltering their true identities
behind personae, editors were able to treat their alter egos with self-
deprecatory humour, while still retaining their own dignity and credibility
as social commentators, educators or moralists.
Female personae range from Eliza Haywood’s genteel Euphrosine in the
Young Lady (1756)7 to Mother Bawdycoat of the Tatling Harlot (1709).
There were, however, far fewer female pseudonyms, probably because of the
narrower range of female occupations. Women were also allowed less
freedom than men to display eccentricity of character. Any extreme person-
ality trait in a woman was liable to be interpreted as a vice, whereas in a
man it could be seen as a charming eccentricity.
A bizarre pseudonym was sometimes employed simply as an eye-catching
marketing device, and the character of the editor was not developed further.
As a correspondent of the Lady’s Museum puts it, ‘It is common enough
among periodical authors to forget their titles: they fill their heads with the
theory of a plan which experience soon shews them to be too narrow to last
long’ (3: I.163). The editor of the Hermit (1711–12), for example, is never
described, nor is anything about the paper’s presentation or political stance
especially appropriate to a hermit. In many periodicals, however, the fiction
is taken to far greater lengths. The High-German Doctor (1714–15) is edited
by a series of quacks and circus performers: among them the mountebank
‘Hermodactyl’; Harry Gambol, a tumbler and rope dancer; and ‘Orlando Mez-
ereon, Professor of the Occult Sciences, Adept in Palmistry and Physiognomy
. . . Licentiate in Surgery and Midwifery, Second-Sighted, and a Seventh Son’
(II.1, 26 October 1714). Each editor relates his own life story, which is dis-
torted and discredited by his successor, who presents the readers with a dif-
ferent version of the same events. Much of the periodical is dedicated to
these varied and involved histories. An equally unusual strategy is adopted
in News from the Dead (1715–16). One Saturday night, the printer enters his
printing house to find Mercury, ‘a little dapper Fellow, about twice the size
of an Umble-Bee’, playing on a pipe, at which ‘the Letters came hopping out’ of
their own accord and ‘fill’d up . . . half a Sheet’ (no. 1). The diminutive mes-
senger from hell promises to supply ‘a Weekly Account of all the Remarkable
Passages that happened in the Infernal Regions’ (ibid.).
Christopher Smart developed perhaps the most flamboyant editorial
persona of all in his Midwife (1750–3). Its editor, Mary Midnight, represents
a distillation of all the stereotypes surrounding the figure of the female
editor in their most extreme form: her sexuality, her ambition and her
vanity. The frontispiece to the periodical shows two plump old women, the
editor and her confederate Succubus Canidia, in a shabby, bare room, dressed
in mob-caps and spectacles. The editor is smoking a pipe, seated next to a
privy labelled ‘The Jakes of Genius’. A witch’s pointed hat hangs on the
18 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
door. The scene is Hogarthian in its detailed squalor, and Mother Midnight
resembles the infamous bawd Mother Needham in Hogarth’s Harlot’s
Progress (1732). The disreputable nature of women’s writing could not be
more clearly emphasized than in the figure of an editor who is also both a
witch and a bawd (Figure I.2). However, despite this, Mother Midnight is a
figure of extraordinary vitality and fertility of both body and brain – she is
the mother of 26 children (Midwife II.3), has visited Turkey and Cairo (II.5)
and has some impressive academic publications to her name (see II.2, II.6).
From December 1751, Smart extended the periodical into a circus and drag
show called ‘The Old Woman’s Concert’, in which he himself appeared
dressed as Mother Midnight (Sherbo 1967: 75–81). The show featured the
Midwife playing on the Jew’s harp and hurdy-gurdy and also included imi-
tations of Italian opera, pseudo-sermons in the manner of Orator Henley,
animal pantomime, a company of Lilliputians and a dancer with a wooden
leg.8 It ran intermittently at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row until at
least 1760.
Although most editors did not surround their personae with such intric-
ate narratives, some of them did create subtle, complex characters, whose
personalities shed light on the literary strategies and aims of their authors.
This study will begin with an exploration of the figure of Bickerstaff, the
first vividly realized fictitious portrait of a periodical editor, and will go on
to examine the varied identities assumed by Steele’s successors. The personae
chosen by almost all the other editors in this survey are, in varied ways,
responses to Bickerstaff.

The magazine
The essay-periodical was usually the work of a single author or small group
of writers, who combined editorial and authorial responsibilities. However,
in 1731 the printer and entrepreneur Edward Cave launched a periodical
that signalled a radical new departure. Adopting a metaphor drawn from the
commercial world, he called his publication a magazine and was the first to
use the word in its modern sense. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the
original meaning of magazine as a ‘storehouse or repository of goods or mer-
chandise’ and cites Cave’s publication as the first example of its figurative
meaning of a ‘periodical publication . . . consisting of a miscellany of critical
and descriptive articles, essays, works of fiction etc’. Eighteenth-century
editors like Charlotte Lennox and Mark Akenside also adopted the term
museum to refer to a collection of fugitive pieces, a journalistic ‘repository for
the preservation and exhibition of objects’ (‘Museum’, OED 1989 ed.) – or,
as one of Akenside’s correspondents puts it, ‘an Hospital for every thing that
Figure I.2 Mother Midnight and Succubus Canidia of Christopher Smart’s
Midwife (1750–3).
20 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
is singular’ (Museum 2, 12 April 1746) – but the coinage was to be short-
lived.9
The Copyright Act of 1710 only applied to publication in volume form
and did not affect periodicals. Cave conceived of his Gentleman’s Magazine as
a monthly anthology of all the best essays from the daily and weekly papers,
combined with book reviews, translations, short biographies, poetry and
readers’ correspondence, as well as items of practical interest to businessmen,
such as the prices of grain and stocks, shipping reports and foreign affairs
that might affect the course of trade. He aimed to offer his readers a wide
variety of material at a modest price and expected them to browse and select
articles of personal interest, rather than reading cover to cover. The Magazine
took no political stance, printing articles from the Whig and Tory press side
by side, and had no distinctive editorial persona or voice. It aspired to the
widest possible readership. Cave, who was a highly conscientious worka-
holic, superintended the publication himself, but employed journalists and
sub-editors, most famously Johnson, who seems to have been paid £100 p.a.
to edit the paper and provide copy (Bloom 1957: 7). As Edward Bloom has
pointed out, Cave was one of the first editors to provide a team of staff
writers with more or less permanent and reliable employment (ibid. 71).
Like Addison and Steele’s periodicals, Cave’s successful formula was copied
by many other editors. Beginning with the appearance of the rival London
Magazine (1732–97), a year after the launch of Cave’s paper, there quickly
followed such publications as the Bee (1733–5), the Country Magazine
(1736–7), the Scots Magazine (1739–1826), the Gentleman’s and London Maga-
zine (1741), the Museum (1746–7) and the Universal Magazine (1747–1815).
By mid-century, magazines dominated the periodical market. Essay-
periodicals became fewer in number, with a rapidly decreasing share of the
available readership. With their extensive format, magazines could reprint
essay-periodicals in their entirety within their pages. When Johnson’s
Rambler was published in 1750–2, it achieved a sale of less than 500 in its
single sheets, but reached a very wide audience through reprintings in
London and provincial magazines (see Chapter 7). The editors of the British
Magazine proudly announce that they ‘propose to enrich every number . . . with
one paper from the Idler’ (January 1760: 25) and also print individual numbers
of Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’. Magazines also carried their own essay-
series within the periodical. Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1),
which I discuss in Chapter 9, is a magazine that incorporates an essay-serial
in the Spectatorial mode within its pages.
Magazines and miscellanies were bulky and diverse publications which
relied heavily on teams of staff writers and readers’ contributions. Cave and
his followers were magazine editors in an almost twenty-first century sense:
overseeing and correcting, rather than providing copy. Cave oscillates
 Introduction: the rise of the periodical 21
between portraying himself as an author and as a businessman, blurring the
boundaries between literature and the commercial venture. By mid-century,
few periodicals centred on the personality and adventures of an individual
fictitious creation. The cranks and spinsters were relegated to essay-series
within the magazine. From editors, they had dwindled into columnists.
These historical developments reflect changing attitudes towards the nature
of authorship, the purposes of journalism and the relationship between the
writer and his or her audience. The magazines’ increasing reliance on
second-hand copy both reflected and influenced a growing disparity between
literary values and journalistic practice. While poets and novelists came to
value originality ever more highly, journalism was increasingly associated
with the derivative, hackneyed and commonplace.
This association of journalism with the second-rate and with unscrupu-
lous plagiarism was strengthened by the editorial practices of many of the
later magazines modelled on Cave’s format. Not all magazines achieved the
high standards of Cave’s publication. Many, particularly in the provinces,
were scissors-and-paste operations, offering little or no original material and
lacking any kind of editorial agenda or rationale to guide them in the inclu-
sion or rejection of copy. Many of the same tales, letters, poems and essays
were reprinted on numerous occasions in many different publications, and it
is often difficult to trace the origin of a popular piece of writing. Sometimes
the editors acknowledge their sources and at other times present these reper-
tory pieces as original work. Issues of the Tatler and the Spectator were still
appearing in magazines, under the guise of new writing, almost a century
after their original publication (Mayo 1962: 225–31). As Mayo has shown in
his comprehensive survey, magazine editors increasingly relied on the
anonymous unpaid contributions of their readers (1962). No matter how
fraught with difficulties, it was cheaper to print copy sent in by readers or to
plagiarize existing material, than to pay professional journalists. Mark
Akenside, as a well known author, was paid £100 a year to edit Robert
Dodsley’s bi-weekly Museum, but his salary was atypically generous (Brewer
1997: 144). A mid-century reviewer for the magazines would receive 2
guineas as a standard fee for writing eighty pages of reviews (ibid. 148).
The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), which printed a large volume of
fiction submitted by its readers, provides a striking example of contempor-
ary editorial incompetence. The editor mislays manuscripts, prints the same
short story twice and reprints articles that have already appeared. He or she
prints episodes of serial fiction in the wrong order. Narrative pieces con-
tributed by readers are frequently abandoned in mid-flow, and the editor is
forced to beg remiss correspondents to send in further chapters of their
stories. In the absence of continuations, the stories are sometimes brought to
a sudden, perfunctory end. Sometimes other readers come forward, offering
22 Introduction: the rise of the periodical
to continue the story, only to abandon it in their turn. There are lapses of
months and even years between instalments (Mayo 1962: 220–3).
The voluminous magazines of the later eighteenth century are filled with
repertory pieces of dubious origin and sometimes of venerable antiquity,
which have often been plagiarized many times over. They rely on readers’
contributions, which can seldom be attributed to specific authors, and rarely
display any consistency of editorial stance or purpose. A number of literary
periodicals and essay-series in the Spectatorial mould appeared during the
last quarter of the century, but they represent only a minority of the total
number of publications and did not exert a significant influence over the
development of the genre. The periodicals of the late eighteenth century
form a vital link in the history of journalism, but they call for a very differ-
ent approach from their predecessors up to 1770.

The periodical and the mock-heroic

In the Museum, Mark Akenside comments with wry irony that ‘hereafter I
expect, that . . . Sylvanus Urban, and myself, shall be as good Classics as Mr.
Pope and Mr. Prior’ (2, 12 April 1757). Like Akenside, most eighteenth-
century periodical writers treat the genre in which they work with gentle
mockery. With genteel but disingenuous irony, they relinquish all claims to
posterity. A writer for the Examiner laments the fate of ‘Half-Sheet Authors’
in a typically elegiac tone: ‘We are like those little Animals . . . that are
born, and live, and dye, within the Compass of a Day. If we please [or]
amuse our Readers . . . between Sun and Sun, ’tis sufficient; but our Fame
seldom lasts till late in the Evening; and the very Remembrance of us is
usually lost by the next Morning’ (5, 31 August 1710). The image of the
editor as an insect, with its humorous connotations of a short-lived and
mildly irritating creature, was a popular one. The Covent-Garden Journal
compares journalists to a swarm: ‘Homer’s Simile of the Bees gives us scarce
too vast an Idea of them. . . . Some of them fly abroad only every other Day;
some send forth their Works once a Week; others once a Fortnight’ (1, 4
January 1752). Fielding describes the individual issues of the London Gazette
surviving ‘little longer than the Life of that posting Insect, whose Flash of
Being endures but six Hours’ (Champion 328, 17 December 1741), while
Frances Brooke compares contemporary journalists with ‘summer insects’,
which ‘just make their appearance, and are gone’, and wishes to ‘buzz
amongst them a little’ (Old Maid 1, 15 November 1755). In this context,
the periodical could be seen as a mock genre, bearing the same relationship
to history as mock-epic does to epic or town eclogues to pastoral. Journalis-
tic work will survive because of its author’s wit and eloquence, despite the
triviality of his or her medium.
1 ‘Censor-General of Great
Britain’
The Tatler and the editor as social
monitor

With his Tatler, Richard Steele inaugurated a wholly new departure in peri-
odical writing: an essay-paper centred on the character of its fictional editor,
Isaac Bickerstaff. No journalist before Steele had explored the possibilities of
writing a paper which would be both objective and amusing, appeal to a
wide readership and yet present its views through the figure of an eccentric,
elderly man. Steele’s subtle and highly successful blend of literary character-
ization and social commentary was to influence periodical writers through-
out the century.
Steele tells us in his final issue that he assumed the persona of Bickerstaff
for didactic aims. If he wished to reform, as well as entertain his readers, he
would lay himself open to the charge of hypocrisy if he did so in propria
persona: ‘I considered, that Severity of Manners was absolutely necessary to
him who would censure others, and for that Reason, and that only, chose to
talk in a Mask’ (Tatler 271). The idiosyncrasies of Bickerstaff’s character
provide the humour that sugars the bitter pill of moral censure, making his
periodical a model of the utile dulci. Steele tells us that he ‘spoke in the Char-
acter of an old Man, a Philosopher, an Humorist, an Astrologer, and a
Censor, to allure my Reader with the Variety of my Subjects, and insinuate,
if I could, the Weight of Reason with the Agreeableness of Wit’ (ibid.).
These two aims might at first appear to be potentially at odds. Steele had a
difficult balance to achieve: he needed to create a figure of loveable and
comic eccentricity, who would not repel readers by his saintliness, without,
however, forfeiting his moral gravitas. The portrait of Bickerstaff was not
autobiographical: he is a frail old man in his sixties and a social outsider,
while Steele was a well-known playwright and a career politician aged 37.10
Some contemporaries quickly identified the periodical as Steele’s (Bloom and
Bloom 1980: 103–30), but Steele’s alias served not merely to protect his
anonymity. The use of a comic alter ego enabled Steele to make his moral
points with humorous exaggeration: to entertain, rather than preach. Before
we can consider Steele’s depiction of Bickerstaff as an eidolon, we need first
24 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
briefly to examine Bickerstaff’s method of attack, his moral categories and
the system of which he was the spokesman.
In a humorously hyperbolic image, Bickerstaff describes himself as the
‘Censor-General of Great Britain’ (Tatler 163), an image which he borrows from
Classical history. In ancient Rome, the censor-general’s task was to count the
population and establish the numbers of citizens in each rank, in order to assess
them for tax purposes. The image suggests an obsession with taxonomy which
is evident throughout the Tatler. It also betrays the Tatler’s strongly urban bias:
it is a paper primarily concerned with London society. While the Roman
censor’s categories were based on income and rank, Bickerstaff categorizes men
(I use the gender-specific term intentionally) not by their social position, reli-
gious or political affiliations, but by their dress and behaviour. The implica-
tions of Bickerstaff’s categories are clearly didactic: the Tatler’s readers can
choose to be smarts, pretty fellows, coffee-house statesmen or dappers (all sub-
species of coxcomb, for Bickerstaff) or they can, as Bickerstaff instructs, avoid
the various fashionable foibles which characterize these kinds of men.
The image of the editor as Roman censor was to be taken up by Lewis
Theobald in his periodical the Censor. Theobald’s eidolon, Benjamin Johnson,
takes as his model ‘my great Predecessor in this Office, Marcus Cato the
Censor’ (Censor 30, 17 June 1715). Like Bickerstaff, he is concerned with
modish follies, declaring himself the enemy of ‘Nonsense, Bad Poets, illiter-
ate Fops, affected Coxcombs, and all the Spawn of Follies and Impertinence,
that make up and incumber the present Generation’ (Censor 1, 11 April
1715). Concerned chiefly with the ‘Beau Monde, in all its Views and Vari-
eties’, he promises to ‘make a strict Inquisition into the licens’d Vanities of
both Sexes, and lay an Interdict upon any Importation of new ones’ (Censor
1). The Censor shows little interest, however, in the individual ‘Varieties’ of
folly or in enumerating the ‘licens’d Vanities’ of the ‘Beau Monde’. Prone to
fits of misanthropic rage, the editor has a tendency towards wholesale con-
demnations of the age in which he lives. In his ‘testy Humours’ he has ‘dis-
charg’d my Venom in a Satyr on the Times, wrote Declamations against the
Stage and Pulpit, and begun an Examen on the Modern Poets’ (Censor 2, 13
April 1715). He also demonstrates less interest in foolish, foppish behaviour
than in bad writing, focusing his criticism on ‘the heavy Pages of the
Moderns’ (Censor 1) and, in particular, the theatre. The image of the censor
simply endows Theobald’s figure with authority and also alludes to the
volatile temper that leads him to express censure so frequently.
Mark Akenside’s definition of a censor in the Museum is much closer to
Steele’s conception of the term. In an essay ‘On the Office of a Censor’,
Akenside proposes the institution of a modern, civil censor, to enforce good
manners and punish antisocial behaviour, a role which he regards as neces-
sary in a liberal and prosperous country:
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 25
The quick Circulation of Property, and the Latitudinarian Temper of
the national Liberty, inevitably produce many Irregularities, grievous
Nuisances to Society, and such as well deserve to be punished, though
they are not within the Letter of the Law, nor under the Jurisdiction of
any Court of Justice.
(Museum 2, 12 April 1746)

The Tatler often exercises a similar function of passing judgement on

offences which are too petty or too common for the reach of the law and too
ludicrous for the pulpit. The contemporary Records of Love (1710) adapts this
idea of the editorial court, instituting a ‘High Court of Judicature at Paphos,
against Criminals in Love’, who are tried for such crimes as ‘Feloniously
Stealing’ a woman’s virginity, ‘being Enamour’d of a very ugly Woman’ and
falling in love with a horse (9, 4 March 1710). Fielding adopts the same
pseudo-legal device in his Covent-Garden Journal, where the editor presides as
‘Mr. Censor’ over a ‘Court of Censorial Enquiry’, hearing such cases as that of
an indictment against a recently published novel ‘on the Statute of Dulness’
(15, 22 February 1752), a disbanded officer accused of attempting to raise a
false alarm of fire at the theatre (16, 25 February 1752) and the complaint of
the word ‘No-body’ (41, 23 May 1752). One of Fielding’s correspondents
offers the same reason for the necessity of a censor as Akenside does in the
Museum: ‘The greatest Evils in Society are those which are out of the reach of
the Law’ (Covent-Garden Journal 64, 30 September 1752). Fielding equates
the roles of periodical editor and censor. In the Jacobite’s Journal, he accuses
the contemporary newspapers of having ‘vilified and degraded the Office of
Censor . . . which [has] formerly exercised the Pens of Men of true Learning
and Genius’ (1, 5 December 1747) and institutes a ‘Court of Criticism’
where he judges contemporary literature (6, 9 January 1747), assuming the
title of ‘Censor of Great Britain’. Fielding’s use of the word ‘censor’ as almost
synonymous with periodical editor is repeated in the Connoisseur, where Mr
Town describes himself ‘the CENSOR-GENERAL of all England’ (140, 30 Sep-
tember 1756).
By focusing this chapter on Steele’s moral programme in the Tatler, I do
not mean to suggest that this periodical is always entirely serious in its aims.
Many of its essays seem to have been written for sheer amusement value
(such as a wonderful issue on the baffling antics of a dance teacher in Tatler
88). Bickerstaff’s grave prose often contrasts ludicrously with the triviality
of the subjects he turns his attention to, as in the issues on Bickerstaff’s
‘Court of Honour’, where Steele’s earnest sexagenarian alter ego presides over
trials involving the abuse of canes, failure to return a bow and removing the
hassock from a neighbouring pew (see Tatlers 103, 265, 259). However, in
the Tatler, as in Steele’s plays, comedy and didacticism are by no means
26 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
mutually exclusive. The Tatler is strongly concerned with the ways in which
our choices of clothing, mannerisms and social behaviour reflect our concep-
tions of ourselves as individuals and therefore our ethical codes. The periodi-
cal’s pedagogical programme is concerned with the ways in which these
choices shape our identity.
This idea of self-fashioning, of choosing an identity, is central to the
Tatler’s vision of society. When Richard Steele began the Tatler, he was
already a successful playwright, author of The Funeral (1701), The Lying
Lover (1704) and The Tender Husband (1705). In the Tatler, Steele borrows
from contemporary theories of acting in order to comment on the posturing
and role-playing of his society, as well as to suggest new models of behavi-
our. He views the periodical as the natural successor to the theatre as a
school of morality and presents his views through the dramatic persona of
Isaac Bickerstaff. In the first part of this chapter, I will discuss Bickerstaff’s
taxonomic activities and the importance of theatrical imagery to Steele’s
conception of his society.
While Bickerstaff does include some definitions of female types, on the
whole women do not fit easily into the schemes of classification he adopts for
men, yet the periodical demonstrates a keen interest in monitoring and
reforming female behaviour. In the second part of this chapter, I will
examine some of the ways in which Steele approaches this task. Bickerstaff
himself is a feminized editor. As an old man, he is represented as both
desexed, too old to feel sexual desire, while still vested with masculine
authority. He bridges the male and female worlds. Bickerstaff provides a
model for female editorship and female moral reformation in his half-sister,
Jenny Distaff.

The Tatler and the theatre

For Bickerstaff, the Tatler’s moral decorum, and in particular its celebration
of marriage and family life, form an antidote to a Restoration ethic in which
‘Love and Wenching were the Business of Life’ (Tatler 3). Contemporary
writers, especially the ‘Stage-Scribblers’ of the day, exploited the corrupt
taste of their audiences and helped further to promote sexual immorality:
‘The Wits of this Island, for above Fifty Years past, instead of correcting the
Vices of the Age, have done all they could to inflame them’ (Tatler 159).
Bickerstaff’s publication, by contrast, aims ‘to put an honest Father of a
Family in Countenance’ (Tatler 159) and focuses, not on the masculine world
of court, but on domestic values. The periodical offers an alternative to the
amorality of the Restoration stage.11
Bickerstaff’s comments can also be seen as a reflection on some of Steele’s
journalistic predecessors, who took the theatre as their model. Publications
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 27
like the weekly Momus Ridens (1690–1) contained alternating stanzas of
‘Report’ on the news and irreverent ‘Remark’. The Observator (1705–6) is
written in the form of a dialogue between the editor and a ‘Countryman’.
Ned Ward’s Weekly Comedy (1699) has speech headings and a list of dramatis
personae. As its name suggests, each issue resembles a scene from a play,
with such stock characters as ‘Snarl, a Disbanded Captain’, ‘Squabble, a
Lawyer’ and ‘Prim, a Beau’ (Weekly Comedy 2, 17 May 1699). Ward’s paper
combines political satire with tales of ‘Love and Wenching’ of the kind of
which Bickerstaff disapproves. In the Weekly Comedy 8 (28 June 1699), for
example, the poet ‘Scan-all’ and the journalist ‘Scribble’ exchange salacious
gossip about a woman’s obscene revenge on her seducer.
Peter Motteux’s monthly Gentleman’s Journal (1692–4) also combines the
political and the mildly pornographic. Motteux juxtaposes summaries of the
news, theological essays and scientific treatises on such topics as ‘the Saltness,
and Flux . . . of the Sea’ (3 April 1692) with erotic poetry like the ‘Verses
from a Lover to his Mistress’ describing the delights of sex (1 February 1692)
and lewd ballads, such as ‘Acteon; or, the Original of Horn-Fair’ (2 March
1692). The Journal, with its short prose narratives, poetry and news, has
often been regarded as a precursor of the Tatler (see, for example, R.P. Bond
1969), but it has little in common with Steele’s publication. The editor’s
personality remains undeveloped, and Motteux adopts no pen-name, refer-
ring to himself simply as ‘the Author of this Journal’ (1 February 1692). The
Journal’s obscene verses and erotic short stories contrast vividly with Bicker-
staff’s genteel irony and moral decorum and recall a tradition of bawdy farce.
The stage, for Bickerstaff, is the ideal instrument of social and moral
reformation. ‘There is no Human Invention so aptly calculated for the
forming a Free-born People as that of a Theatre’, he writes (Tatler 167). The
statement appropriately forms part of an elegiac passage on the death of the
actor Thomas Betterton, for the stage itself is moribund, in Bickerstaff’s
eyes. Infected by the lascivious and amoral spirit of Restoration wit, play-
wrights attract audiences by scoffing at moral values. A country gentleman
discusses the decay of social manners in London and asks why playwrights
have not turned their pens to the eradication of contemporary folly, which
would surely ‘give an excellent Field to Writers for the Stage’, only to be
told that ‘there might be some Hopes of Redress of these Grievances, if there
were proper Care taken of the Theatre; but the History of that is yet more
lamentable’ (Tatler 12).
Just as Addison was later to claim that the Spectator had brought philo-
sophy ‘out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs
and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses’ (Spectator 10), we are
told that the Tatler will ‘bring the Stage as it were into the Coffee-house’
(Tatler 64). Both periodicals, in fact, frequently employ theatrical metaphors
28 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
to describe their journalistic enterprises. The title of the Spectator, as its
editors point out, recalls the stage: ‘The Word SPECTATOR being most
usually understood as one of the Audience at publick Representations in our
Theatres’ (Spectator 22). Bickerstaff’s correspondent Josiah Couplet tells him,
‘You will always have a large Scene before you, and can never be at a Loss for
Characters to entertain a Town so plentifully stock’d with ’em’ (Tatler 64).
Bickerstaff’s pleasure in the theatre comes as much from observing the
audience, however, as from the play itself. He is the discerning spectator and
critic of London society, confessing that he loves

to sit unobserved and unknown in the Gallery, and entertain my self

either with what is personated on the Stage, or observe what Appear-
ances present themselves in the Audience . . . Our Thoughts are in our
Features; and the Visage of those in whom Love, Rage, Jealousy or
Envy, have their frequent Mansions, carries the Traces of those Passions.
(Tatler 182)

The notion of the theatrum mundi is, of course, a commonplace. What is

more striking is the ironic suggestion that the place where we can best
observe mankind is when they themselves form the audience in a theatre.
The response to a theatrical representation is itself one of the surest tests of
character: ‘I would undertake to find out all the Persons of Sense and Breed-
ing by the Effect of a single Sentence [of a play], and to distinguish a Gen-
tleman as much by his Laugh, as his Bow’ (Tatler 122). This focus on the
theatre audience is perhaps unsurprising in a period in which there was no
method of dimming the house lights, and the auditorium was frequently
better lit than the stage itself.
Bickerstaff reads the minds and characters of the members of the audience
with ease. The editor tells us frequently, not that appearances can be decep-
tive, but just how revealing our facial expressions can be: ‘Our Thoughts are
in our Features’. He cautions that ‘you may trace the usual Thoughts of Men
in their Countenances’ (Tatler 198) and tells us that ‘the Balls of Sight are so
form’d, that one Man’s Eyes are Spectacles to another to read his Heart with’
(Tatler 145). Appearances are far more than merely superficial: they are the
outward expression of the inner personality and, as such, must be closely
scrutinized, analysed and controlled. The self is not private and invisible,
but public and conspicuous. It is foolish to attempt to disguise our feelings
and motivations; the bad actor is quickly exposed: ‘This Town will not allow
us to be the Things we seem to aim at, and are too discerning to be fob’d off
with Pretences’ (Tatler 14).
As a successful playwright himself, Steele’s ideas may have been influ-
enced by contemporary theories of acting. Charles Gildon’s Life of Mr.
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 29
Thomas Betterton (1710), which was dedicated to Steele, emphasizes the links
between a person’s outward appearance and his or her emotional state. He
likens the body to a musical instrument, passively responding to the
impulses of the mind: ‘The whole Body of Man, all his Looks, and every Sound of
his Voice, like Strings on an Instrument, receive their Sounds from the various Impulse
of the Passions’ (Gildon 1710: 43). Gildon argues that a person’s facial expres-
sion is a reliable guide to their feelings: ‘The Countenance . . . is commonly the
most certain Index of the Passions of the Mind’ (ibid. 45). Each emotion leaves its
mark on the countenance, and we can read the character from the traces left
by habitual ‘Passions and Habits of the Mind’, such as a ‘rolling Eye’, which
indicates ‘a quick but light Wit’, or a ruddy complexion, a sign of its
owner’s ‘inconstant and impatient mind’ (ibid. 41). Aaron Hill’s The Art of
Acting expresses this philosophy succinctly: ‘The Idea prints the Look’
(1746: v). Both Gildon’s and Hill’s works serve at least partly as instruction
manuals for actors. Not only do we assume a certain facial expression when
we feel an emotion, but if we mould our features into that expression and
perform the appropriate bodily gestures, we will automatically experience
the emotion itself. As Hill puts it, ‘Rightly to seem, is transiently, to BE’
(ibid. 9). Hill even cautions against the power of the emotions that can be
unleashed through the mimicry of gesture and expression. He relates the
cautionary tale of an actor playing Ajax who was so successful at capturing
the antic postures of madness that he suffered from temporary insanity and
narrowly avoided killing a fellow actor during the performance. Hill praises,
by contrast, an actor who was wary of performing the madman’s role too
convincingly and, paradoxically, ‘represented Ajax raving so gracefully and dis-
creetly, that he gain’d a great Applause’ (ibid. 142).
Steele represents his readers as constantly on stage to an audience of their
peers. When Bickerstaff tells his readers that the theatre is the perfect
instrument for reforming a free-born people, he refers us not to the moral
lessons that a play may inculcate, nor to the theatre as an exercise in judge-
ment and empathy. Instead, he concentrates on the figure of the actor, who
provides a model for our emulation. Bickerstaff has been describing Better-
ton’s classical predecessor Roscius:

The Perfection of an Actor is only to become what he is doing. Young Men,

who are too unattentive to receive Lectures, are irresistibly taken with
Performances . . . to speak justly, and move gracefully, is what every
Man thinks he does perform, or wishes he did.
(Tatler 167)

Bickerstaff places physical poise and elegance of speech and action at the
heart of his programme of moral reformation. To be a gentleman, it seems,
30 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
it is necessary first to learn to appear one, to be a fit representative of a
class and culture. Unexpectedly, it is the actor who is the perfect gentleman,
though not usually a member of the gentry himself. To act convincingly,
the actor must ‘become what he is doing’: that is, of course, he must suit
the part, but it also means that by ‘speaking justly and moving gracefully’
he is transformed into an embodiment of the ideal. He is performing,
but also behaving perfectly naturally. His charm is irresistible to young
and impressionable men and, by modelling themselves on him, they too
become gentlemen and are able to perform their social roles with equal
poise.
The theatrical metaphor pervades many of the periodical’s discussions of
morality. Bickerstaff himself assumes the ‘Office of Prompter’, an image that
was later adopted by Aaron Hill in the Prompter (1734–6), whose editor,
‘Broomstick’, recalls Bickerstaff. The prompter, Hill writes, ‘stands in a
Corner, unseen and unobserved by the Audience, but diligently attended to
by every one, who plays a Part’ (Prompter 1, 12 November 1734). The editor
can notify those who are blind to their foibles of the impression which their
behaviour makes upon the ‘well-bred’. A careful attention to the minutiae of
one’s own behaviour is vital for the smooth functioning of social interaction.
The Tatler’s world is highly codified, and people must be seen, in their
actions, facial expressions and manner, to be treating others with due polite-
ness to avoid giving offence. Bickerstaff’s ‘Court of Honour’ provides a tri-
bunal at which the affronted can complain of coldness or ungraciousness of
manner in others: ‘short Bows, cold Salutations, supercilious Looks, unre-
turned Smiles’, as well as the ‘ambiguous Expression, accidental Justle, or
unkind Repartee’ (Tatler 250). The Tatler paints a vivid picture of a world in
which the subtlest nuances of behaviour are subjected to constant scrutiny
by the proud and touchy. By asking his readers to correct and regulate their
behaviour, the editor is not only redressing social grievances, but protecting
the well-meaning, but thoughtless, from censure.
Eccentricities of dress and behaviour are, to Bickerstaff, a form of per-
verted ambition: a wish to distinguish oneself for mere superficialities.
People attempt to force themselves on society’s notice with an unusual
waistcoat or an outlandish habit of speech: ‘The Desire of Fame in Men . . .
who have the Ambition without proper Faculties, runs wild, and discovers it
self in a Thousand Extravagancies, by which they wou’d signalize themselves
from others’ (Tatler 77). This wild desire for personal conspicuousness leads
to the affectation of fashionable disabilities: such as the use of a pierglass to
scrutinize one’s acquaintance because ‘it was the Fashion to be short-sighted’
(Tatler 77) or the adoption of a ‘jaunty limp’, rendering the owner ‘genteely
a Cripple’ (ibid.). Others assume a modish lisp: ‘Some never utter’d the
Letter H; and others had as mortal an Aversion to S’ (ibid.).
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 31
For Bickerstaff, such departures from social norms of self-presentation
signal a dangerous disregard for society’s sanctions:

The giving into uncommon Habits of this Nature, is a Want of that

humble Deference which is due to Mankind; and (what is worst of all)
the certain Indication of some secret Flaw in the Mind of the Person
that commits them. . . . I remember a Gentleman of great Integrity and
Worth was very remarkable for wearing a broad Belt and an Hanger
instead of a fashionable Sword, tho’ in all other Points a very well-bred
Man. I suspected him at first Sight to have something wrong in him,
but was not able for a long while to discover any collateral Proofs of it. I
watched him narrowly for Six and Thirty Years, when at last, to the Sur-
prize of every body but my self, who had long expected to see the Folly
break out, he married his own Cook-Maid.
(Tatler 103)

Of course, Bickerstaff’s close attention to details of dress, and his deep

interest in eccentricities is itself an eccentricity, but the humorous exaggera-
tion of this passage does not disguise the centrality of these ideas for the
periodical as a whole. Bickerstaff is a censor in the modern, as well as the
Roman, sense of the word, asking his readers to edit out those aspects of
their behaviour which are undignified, uncivilized and odd. Dress, that sup-
posedly most superficial of all concerns, is an important form of self-
representation, and it is a politeness that we owe to society to defer to its
opinion in such matters. An inordinate attachment to an article of clothing,
whether it be broad belt and hanger, red heels, or a cane dangling from a
buttonhole, demonstrates a preoccupation with life’s trivia and an unbecom-
ing personal vanity.
At the same time, however, whilst ‘unjustifiable Singularity’ is to be
avoided, Bickerstaff warns against a slavish dependence on fashion. Virtue
and piety are out of fashion: people ‘have generally taken up a Kind of
inverted Ambition, and affect even Faults and Imperfections of which they
are innocent’ (Tatler 77). These sheep in wolves’ clothing have inherited the
idea of the dashing, witty and gallant villain from Restoration comedy and
imported it into a more moral and sober age. It is a mere piece of theatre
and verbal bravado, a game played by men like the young gentleman ‘who
talks atheistically all Day in Coffee-houses, and in his Degrees of Under-
standing sets up for a Free-Thinker; tho’ it can be prov’d upon him, he says
his Prayers every Morning and Evening’ (ibid.). It is also a short step, for
Bickerstaff, from an idiosyncratic sartorial taste to a ‘secret Flaw in the
Mind’. Just as some disfigure their bodies with canes and monocles, others
disable their own intellectual integrity.
32 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
The coffee-house atheists are playing a dangerous game, for Bickerstaff.
Imitating the appearance of vice can lead to condoning real evil. Such play-
acting attracts some of Bickerstaff’s bitterest scorn in the unlikely context of
a discussion of rakes. As professed ‘Knight Errant’ of the fair sex (Tatler 195),
we might imagine that no character could be more despicable to Bickerstaff.
The editor, however, shows surprising sympathy for the rake as a man in the
grip of a powerful addiction. His strongest moral disgust is reserved for the
rake’s imitators, who are motivated merely by pride and affectation:

Second-hand Vice sure of all is the most nauseous: there is hardly a Folly
more absurd, or which seems less to be accounted for . . . But the Fatal-
ity (under which most Men labour) of desiring to be what they are not,
makes ’em go out of a Method, in which they might be receiv’d with
Applause . . . into one, wherein they will all their Life have the Air of
Strangers to what they aim at.
(Tatler 27)

For Bickerstaff, it is not only dishonest, but also futile, to attempt to assume
a role in which we have not been cast by nature. We can only ‘be receiv’d
with Applause’ when we are playing ourselves.
Steele is an irrepressibly optimistic and cheerful moralist. He would never
have subscribed to Samuel Johnson’s pessimistic belief that ‘the Majority are
wicked’ (Rambler 175). Opaque hypocrisy and secret guilt are rarities in the
Tatler’s moral vision. On the contrary, most people are incapable of effective
deception, being poor actors. Far from being worse than they appear, many
– or even most – are better. They may imitate the appearance of vice, but
they usually stop short of its commission. The Tatler’s emphasis on avoiding
eccentricities is not simply a doctrine of rigid conformism. It also testifies to
Steele’s deep respect for his society and to a basic faith in human nature and
in ‘the Deference due to the Sense of Mankind’ (Tatler 138). Society ideally
acts as a corrective to the follies and vanities of individuals. The society that
Steele describes is a shame, not a guilt, culture and in such a society a
popular and fashionable periodical publication could exert a powerful influ-
ence over the lives of its readers. Their concern for the ways in which others
regard them may make many of those readers slaves to fashion and copiers of
petty vices, but it also makes them keenly susceptible to criticism. They do
not like to be laughed at, and Steele, the gifted humorist, is supremely
qualified to laugh them out of their follies. Bickerstaff’s friend Sophronius
advises the editor to treat sharpers in this manner:

The Acceptance of these Men being an Ill which hath crept into the
Conversation-Part of our Lives . . . [it] is to be amended only by bring-
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 33
ing Raillery and Derision upon the Persons who are guilty, or those who
converse with ’em.
(Tatler 56)

Steele believes in the centrality of the ‘Conversation-Part of our Lives’, an

evocative phrase that suggests mixed company discussing matters of general
interest in a domestic setting. The Tatler takes as its ideal the domestic and
social setting rather than the professional or mercantile and recommends the
kind of behaviour that would be suitable at a gathering or a dinner party,
where ladies were present, rather than in a tavern or coffee-house.
Bickerstaff attempts to reform the ‘Conversation Part of our Lives’ by cat-
egorizing the members of London society, ‘disposing them into proper
Classes’ (Tatler 162). He defines the characteristics of ‘a Gentleman, a Pretty
Fellow, a Toast, a Coquet, a Critick, a Wit, and other Appellations of those
now in the gayer World’ (Tatler 21). The ‘Smart Fellow’, for example, can be
identified both by his dress – a ‘Cane on his Button’ and ‘red heel’d Shoes’ –
and by his behaviour: he elbows his way into theatres without paying and
‘sends his Children a begging before they can go’ (Tatler 26), while a ‘very
Pretty Fellow’ is one who is ‘successfully loud among the Wits, familiar
among the Ladies, and dissolute among the Rakes’ (Tatler 24). While osten-
sibly defining terms, Bickerstaff is clearly also pronouncing social and moral
judgements, in order to expose the true characters of those who shelter
under specious appellations.
Bickerstaff’s preoccupation with ordering and sorting reveals a characteris-
tically eighteenth-century conception of judgement as a discriminating
faculty, drawing fine distinctions between things which are outwardly
similar, in opposition to the combinative activities of wit and imagination, in
which dissimilar things are yoked together in new and fantastic combinations
or parallels are drawn between things superficially unlike. Addison was to
distinguish the ‘knotty and subtile Disquisitions’ that characterize the activ-
ity of the understanding from the imagination’s power of ‘retaining, altering
and compounding those Images, which we have once received, into all the
varieties of Picture and Vision’ (Spectator 411). Johnson, in his Dictionary
entry under ‘Wit’, cites Locke’s distinction between wit and judgement:

Wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together
with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance, or
congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures in the fancy. Judgment,
on the contrary, lies in separating carefully one from another, ideas
wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled
by similitude.
(Johnson 1755 and Locke 1975: 156)
34 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
Addison cites the same passage from Locke in his essay series on wit in
the Spectator, in which he describes wit as consisting in ‘such a Resemblance
and Congruity of Ideas’ as ‘is capable of giving the Reader some Surprize’
(Spectator 62).12 Coleridge draws on the same distinction in Chapter 13 of his
Biographia Literaria (1817) when he describes imagination as the force that
‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’, in implied contrast with
judgement, which separates and distinguishes (1983: 1.304).
Bickerstaff’s many definitions and classifications make his periodical into a
reference book of social folly. He tells his readers that he has made it his study
‘to marshal and fix People under their proper Denominations, and to range
them according to their respective Characters’ (Tatler 96). By drawing pen-
portraits of character-types, Steele is drawing on a long-established comic tra-
dition, whose most recent proponent was Jean de la Bruyère. Bruyère’s Les
Caractères de Théophraste, published in 1688 and still very popular in Steele’s
day, also contains a number of comic thumbnail sketches. However, Bruyère’s
characters are eternal types, characters whose main features have not changed
since the time of Theophrastus, their original source. Henry Fielding was to
use stock characters of this kind in his novel Joseph Andrews, where he tells us,
‘I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species’ (Fielding
2001: 242). He depicts a selfish lawyer as an unchanging example of human
depravity: ‘The lawyer is not only alive, but hath been so these 4000 years’
(ibid.). By contrast, Bickerstaff, like a naturalist, constantly adds new species to
his catalogue and acknowledges the field research of his correspondents,
reporting, for instance: ‘Letters from Hampstead say, there is a Coxcomb arriv’d
there, of a Kind which is utterly new’ (Tatler 57).
The Tatler demonstrates a keen interest in the latest London foibles. The
critic J. Paul Hunter has described journalism as characterized by a
‘commitment to contemporaneity’ (1990: 167–94), a concern with news in
the widest sense. While the Tatler’s news section is short-lived, Bickerstaff
presents London society as a fertile source of ‘utterly new’ fools and fops who
need to be catalogued, described, warned against and discouraged, as soon as
they come to his notice. The editor’s cataloguing tasks are unending, as new
species of folly are constantly evolving:

The World is so overgrown with Singularities in Behaviour and Method

of Living, that I have no sooner laid before Mankind the Absurdity of
one Species of Men, but there starts up to my View some new Sect of
Impertinents that had before escaped Notice.
(Tatler 166)

All those who indulge in any ostentation or peculiarity of dress are liable
to be judged by their dress alone, the editor warns. Bickerstaff labels such
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 35
people according to their appearance, as a naturalist would unusual speci-
mens:

I . . . shall take it as a Favour of all the Coxcombs in the Town, if they

will set Marks upon themselves, and by some Particular in their Dress
show to what Class they belong . . . A Cane upon the Fifth Button shall
from henceforth be the Type of a Dapper; Red-heeled Shoes, and a Hat
hung upon one Side of the Head, shall signify a Smart; a good Periwig
made into a Twist, with a brisk Cock, shall speak a mettled Fellow; and
an upper Lip covered with Snuff, denotes a Coffee-House Statesman.
But as it is required that all Coxcombs hang out their Signs, it is on the
other Hand expected, that Men of real Merit should avoid any thing
particular in their Dress, Gait, or Behaviour.
(Tatler 96)

A reader writes to tell the editor that he has called a gentleman with red-
heeled shoes and a cane dangling from his button a ‘smart Fellow’ on the
strength of Bickerstaff’s definition. The other, clearly also a Tatler reader
since he is duly offended by the epithet, has challenged him to a duel. Bick-
erstaff defends his correspondent: ‘Indeed, it is a most lamentable Thing,
that there should be a Dispute rais’d upon a Man’s saying another is, what
he plainly takes Pains to be thought’ (Tatler 28). Like an actor in a commedia
dell’arte production, the smart fellow has assumed a role with his red heels
and suspended cane. He is ‘what his Taylor, his Hosier, and his Milliner,
have conspired to make him’ (ibid.). He is the natural property of the satirist
since his attention-seeking behaviour deserves a public chastisement. All
those ‘who labour to distinguish themselves, whether it be by Vice or
Virtue’ (Tatler 50) are subjected to Bickerstaff’s scrutiny.
The most damning of Bickerstaff’s ‘proper Distinctions’ (Tatler 67) is that
of his so-called dead men. The editor pronounces the deaths of all those

who bestow most of their Time in Eating and Drinking, to support that
imaginary Existence of theirs, which they call Life; or in dressing and
adorning those Shadows and Apparitions, which are looked upon by the
Vulgar as real Men and Women.
(Tatler 96)

Bickerstaff’s dead lack the moral and intellectual qualifications to be con-

sidered as full human beings. They may think of themselves as unique, yet
they ‘differ from each other but as Flies [butterflies] do by a little Colouring
or Fluttering of their Wings’ (Tatler 174). Steele’s comic exuberance as a
satirist gives way here to a tone of cynical pessimism. Bickerstaff is weary of
36 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
a society in which superficial differences in apparel and behaviour have come
to be seen as a substitute for any real strength of personality, in which the
dressing and adorning of shadows and apparitions has replaced character and
individuality. He is forced to categorize people by superficial attributes such
as their dress because they lack any other distinguishing features: their
minds and personalities are unformed blanks. To use an anachronistic term,
they are zombies. The naturalist who took delighted note of the new species
of coxcomb has become a bored butterfly-collector, contemplating with
apathy the gaudy markings of the short-lived insects.
Bickerstaff’s own character and personal habits avoid the two extremes of
a slavish adherence to fashion and an obstinate affectation of singularity.
Steele’s old bachelor has a developed sensibility and a tenderness and gal-
lantry towards women, whilst remaining celibate. Bickerstaff’s love affairs,
both past and present, provide a touch of humour which does not detract
from his moral gravitas. The champion and promoter of marriage and family
life, Bickerstaff himself resembles a lay monk, a fatherly adviser whose
readers form a substitute for the wife and children which he has never had.
Some of his successors were to imitate Bickerstaff’s age and celibacy. The
editor of the Censor has never been married, and now ‘my Years are turned of
that Date, when Love and the Small-Pox are most wholesome and most
natural’ (16, 6 May 1715). The editor of the Plain Dealer (1724–5) is ‘a talk-
ative Old Batchelor, in my grand Climacterick’ (1, 23 March 1724). Jeoffry
Wagstaffe of the Batchelor tells us that he is ‘now past my grand climacteric’
and has been single all his life (1, 29 March 1769) and Nicholas Babble of
the Prater (1756) is ‘an oldish man, sixty odd’ (1, 13 March 1756) and a
bachelor.

Bickerstaff and his women readers

Bickerstaff divides women into far fewer distinct types and much less
systematically than he does men.13 When he separates people into their
proper classes, the editor refers only to male categories, explaining that he
has not yet reduced ‘the soft Sex . . . into any tolerable Order’ (Tatler 162).
With their far more limited range of available occupations, women have
fewer opportunities for adopting the idiosyncratic manners of any particular
profession and, with their more private and domestic lives, they are not as
likely to expose themselves in public. Their faults and foibles are not those
of individuals, or of types, but of an entire sex. For Bickerstaff, as for Pope,
‘Most Women have no Characters at all’ (Pope 1951: 3.46). Woman may be
satirized, but rarely individual women.14 For women, even more than for
men, personality is consistently equated with personal folly, idiosyncrasy
with unattractive eccentricity, originality with dangerous and self-indulgent
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 37
experimentation. Bickerstaff characterizes women in sweepingly Manichean
language, as angels and devils: ‘The Ill are employed in communicating
Scandal, Infamy, and Disease, like Furies; the Good distribute Benevolence,
Friendship, and Health, like Angels . . . Such is the destroying Fiend, such
the guardian Angel, Woman’ (Tatler 201).
Women occupy an unusual and contradictory position within Steele’s
publication. Bickerstaff stresses the importance of his women readers from
the very first issue, in which he claims to have named his publication in
their honour and promises to include material ‘which may be of Entertainment
to the Fair Sex’ (Tatler 1). During the course of the paper’s run, Steele greatly
increases the amount of material of interest to women and the numbers of
female correspondents, as well as introducing Bickerstaff’s half-sister, Jenny
Distaff, as the author of a number of issues.
With their perceived leisure and insatiable appetite for light reading,
Bickerstaff considers women the ideal audience for a publication which aims
to reform its readers by stealth. This makes the natural subject matter of a
periodicalist the correction of women’s faults and follies: ‘Business and
Ambition take up Men’s Thoughts too much to leave Room for Philosophy:
But if you speak to Women in a Style and Manner proper to approach them,
they never fail to improve by your Counsel’ (Tatler 139). For Bickerstaff,
men as a sex are engrossed by ‘Business and Ambition’, whilst women are
receptive to the moral observations of ‘Philosophy’. Rather than attempting
to find topics for both sexes, Bickerstaff turns in mock-frustration from his
unreceptive male readers to the more susceptible female audience, whom he
must address ‘in a Style and Manner proper to approach them’. The decision
to focus on his female readers affects both his subject matter and the form
and register of his writing.
Steele’s pamphlet The Ladies Library (1714), whose title page announces
that it was ‘Written by a Lady’, is a lengthy and detailed reading list for
women. The Tatler issue which announces this future project defines the
kind of reading material that Steele considers suitable for women. Bicker-
staff tells us that ‘the Ideas which most frequently pass through our Imagi-
nations, leave Traces of themselves in our Countenances. There shall be a
strict Regard had to this in my Female Library’ (Tatler 248).
As we have already noted, Bickerstaff proposes the graceful and skilful
actor as a model for emulation by young men. He is far from suggesting,
however, that actresses are models of decorum for women. Acting as a pro-
fession for women was frequently associated with prostitution, and some
actresses were perceived to be – and were – the mistresses of wealthy
theatre-goers.15 Men are invited by Bickerstaff to consciously act the part of
gentlemen. The personal appearance of women, on the other hand, is not
formed by public emulation, but by their private reading activities. A secret
38 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
enjoyment of imaginative fiction in the closet will be revealed in their faces,
since ‘the Ideas which most frequently pass through our Imaginations, leave
Traces of themselves in our Countenances’. Women must subject themselves
to far stricter forms of self-control than men, regulating not only their
public behaviour, but their private thoughts and fantasies. By implication,
women are far more dependent on their reading matter to form their charac-
ters. They are both more morally vulnerable and more impressionable,
forming a malleable, receptive audience for Bickerstaff’s writing. It is not
surprising then that the Tatler is preoccupied with Bickerstaff’s relationship
with his female readers, a preoccupation which is evidenced by Bickerstaff’s
portrayal of himself as a chivalrous knight-errant, by the femininity of his
own personality and by the portraits of his sister, Jenny Distaff, part-time
journalist, bluestocking and eventually tamed shrew.
Bickerstaff warns his male readers, ‘The great Source of our wrong Pur-
suits is the impertinent Manner with which we treat Women’ (Tatler 201).
For Bickerstaff, large numbers of single women constitute an indefinable
threat to the peace and political stability of society: ‘Some Provision [must]
be made to take off the dead Stock of Women . . . Let there happen but the
least Disorder in the Streets, and in an Instant you see in the Inequality of
the Numbers of Males and Females’ (Tatler 195). Idle and therefore mischie-
vous, single women encourage rioting and civic disturbances. Whether
influencing parents in favour of a love-match (Tatler 185), advising women
on the choice of a husband (Tatlers 20 and 91), outwitting a coquette (Tatler
98) or encouraging his readers to be married by lottery (Tatlers 166, 168 and
195), Bickerstaff is a constant promoter of wedlock.
Bickerstaff’s attitudes towards women are not, however, based entirely
on considerations of social utility; he is ‘of a Complexion truly amorous’
(Tatler 10). For Bickerstaff, love and courtship, far from being merely the
province of women, are essential to refine and polish the characters of men:
‘Every Temper, except downright insipid, is to be animated and softned by
the Influence of Beauty’ (ibid.). For Bickerstaff, ‘Love is the happy Composi-
tion of all the Accomplishments that make a fine Gentleman’ (Tatler 49).
Bickerstaff describes chivalrous behaviour towards women as ‘the heroick
Virtue of private Persons’ (Tatler 94), a definition eminently suited to a peri-
odical that champions domestic life and values. Bickerstaff himself could be
viewed as a hero of private life. He uses language and imagery drawn from
Don Quixote and the French romances to define his role as a knight-errant of
the fair sex, a knight fighting for the cause of moral decorum in the dis-
tinctly unheroic setting of contemporary London. He assumes the role of ‘a
Champion of distressed Damsels’, promising to ‘employ my Right Hand for
their Redress, and serve them to my last Drop of Ink’ (Tatler 128). In a
humorous reversal of the normal proceedings of knights who save virgins
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 39
from rape and abduction, he is a ‘studious Knight Errant’ seeking ‘the Relief
of all British Females, who at Present seem to be devoted to involuntary Vir-
ginity’ (Tatler 195), through his many injunctions to his male readers to
marry.
The image of the editor as knight-errant was to be adopted by a number
of Steele’s successors. Lewis Theobald’s ‘Mr. Censor’ promises to ‘enter the
Lists’ on behalf of women as ‘a Knight-Errant . . . in their Service’ (Censor 72,
6 April 1717), while the anonymous editor of the Visiter describes himself as
a ‘Guardian of the Fair’ and a ‘sort of Knight-Errant’ (2, 25 June 1723). The
Prompter alludes to ‘the generous Knights-Errant, my Progenitors’ (1, 12
November 1734), and John Hawkesworth’s Adventurer hopes that ‘if the
world has now no employment for the Knight Errant, the ADVENTURER may
still do some good’ (1, 7 November 1752). Henry Fielding adopts the
persona of ‘Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt.’ in his Covent-Garden Journal
(1752), in which the editor does battle against the forces of Grub Street,
declaring proudly: ‘How much more noble is it in a great Author to fall
with his Pen in his Hand, than quietly to sit down, and see the Press in the
Possession of an Army of Scribblers’ (1, 4 January 1752). Fielding’s persona
alludes to a character in Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671), a bombastic
hero who claims to ‘slay both friend and foe’ (Buckingham 1976; V.i.332).
Later in this scene, he kills everyone on stage. Buckingham uses Drawcansir
to ridicule the theatrical convention of representing battles on stage using
only a small number of actors – hence Drawcansir’s ability to slay entire
armies single-handedly. The editor of the Dublin Ladies Journal (1727) also
declares himself a ‘Champion’ of women, defending them, like Bickerstaff,
with ‘a little Instrument, call’d a PEN, as sharp as the best point’ (no. 1). In
the Knight-Errant, the editor explicitly identifies himself with both Draw-
cansir and Don Quixote. He walks the London streets by moonlight in
search of adventure, tilting at fashionable folly as Cervantes’ knight did at
windmills and, like him, in possession of an unlikely squire, Satyrano de
Gorgona, ‘lineally descended from Orlando Furioso’ (Knight-Errant 2, 5 March
1729). The editor is haunted by the ghost of Isaac Bickerstaff, who blesses
his publication by appearing at his bedside (ibid.). The image of the knight-
errant would, for eighteenth-century readers, have been more likely to
summon the ludicrous images of Don Quixote or Drawcansir than that of
Camelot. Like Don Quixote, Bickerstaff is a comic figure doing battle
against red-heeled shoes and hoop petticoats. It is comically paradoxical that
such an archaic figure should edit a work in a self-consciously new and
modern genre, and much of the Tatler’s humour stems from the contrast
between the timeless heroic world of romance and the essay-periodical’s
concern with daily life in contemporary London.
Bickerstaff is not only a protector of women: his own personality has
40 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
many characteristics associated with femininity. He describes his tempera-
ment as ‘Saturnine and Melancholy’ and claims to be working on a tragedy
(Tatler 22). He is prone to the spleen and ‘Poetical Vapours’ (Tatler 47) and
has a suggestible imagination: at midnight ‘a Shower of Rain, or the
Whistling of Wind . . . is apt to fill my Thoughts with something awful
and solemn’ (Tatler 111). Bickerstaff’s responsiveness to literature is so great
that even a newspaper can arouse his sorrow, and he has ‘frequently been
caught with Tears in my Eyes over a melancholy Advertisement’ (Tatler
224).
Bickerstaff’s correspondents often hint that the editor must be ‘well
acquainted with the Passion of Love’ (Tatler 128). We are offered tantalizing
hints of the history of Bickerstaff’s love affairs. We learn that one mistress
died suddenly just before their engagement could be completed (Tatler 181).
‘Teraminta’, who ‘reigned in his heart’ in Bickerstaff’s youth (Tatler 95), has
become a kept mistress and now leads a miserable existence (Tatler 45).
Bickerstaff describes himself as an ‘old Beau’ who, in his youth, had ‘a great
Pleasure in Dress’ and wrote extravagant love-letters:

When I was Five and Twenty, upon sight of one Syllable, even wrong
spelt, by a Lady I never saw, I cou’d tell her . . . All she cou’d say, tho’
she had an infinite Deal of Wit, was but a Repetition of what was
express’d by her Form; her Form! which struck her Beholders with Ideas
more moving and forcible than ever were inspir’d by Musick, Painting,
or Eloquence.
(Tatler 83)

The editor as an ardent admirer of women is a frequent figure in the early

eighteenth-century periodical. A correspondent assures the editor of the
Plain Dealer that ‘LOVE . . . seems to have had a considerable Share in your
Composition’ (91, 1 February 1725). The publication ends at the request of
the Plain Dealer’s sweetheart, Patty Amble, who promises to marry the
editor on condition that he give up journalism. Patty’s request seems to
imply that the editor’s marriage would compromise his devotion to his
female readers. Literary gallantries are incompatible with domestic
monogamy. The editor of the Ladies Journal is another love-sick bachelor.
He is forced to leave one issue to the care of his printer after he is thrown
into a ‘Delirium’ by ‘a fatal Glance from the . . . incomparable Myra’ (12, 6
April 1727).
Bickerstaff possesses the ‘Severity of Manners’ (Tatler 271) of the celibate
devoted to nocturnal studies, yet he has a past as a gallant admirer of
women, enabling him to talk of love with the benefit of personal experience.
Bickerstaff’s personality qualifies him as a satirist without malice, an editor
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 41
equally suited to social and political commentary and to narratives of love,
to the humorous and the sentimental. He forms a link between the male
worlds of politics and public life and the female preoccupations of love and
courtship.
Bickerstaff’s ‘unmanly Gentleness of Mind’ (Tatler 181), the ‘certain
Weakness in his Temper’ (Tatler 224), his ‘particular Cast’ of mind (Tatler
111), his ‘Vapours’ (Tatler 47) and his ready tears (Tatler 224) all, according
to his own account, stem from the death of his father when he was only 4
years old. The sight of his mother weeping, he tells us,

struck me with an Instinct of Sorrow, which, before I was sensible of

what it was to grieve, seized my very Soul, and has made Pity the
Weakness of my Heart ever since. The Mind in Infancy, is, methinks,
like the Body in Embrio, and receives Impressions so forcible, that they
are as hard to be removed by Reason, as any Mark with which a Child is
born to be taken away by any future Application. . . . I imbibed Com-
miseration, Remorse, and an unmanly Gentleness of Mind.
(Tatler 181)

Bickerstaff’s emphasis on the indelible nature of early childhood experi-

ences anticipates Walter Shandy’s well-intentioned but fatal accidents with
his son Tristram in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1760–7) as well as the preoccupations of the Romantics in works like
William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), Thomas De
Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) and Mary Hays’
Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). Steele’s eidolon is a very unusual figure in
early eighteenth-century literature: a man whose character is formed neither
by education, choice, nor influence, but by accidental circumstances in
infancy, which have profound and permanent consequences. Bickerstaff, a
helpless child, with no real understanding of his situation, passively
‘imbibes’ ‘Commiseration, Remorse, and an unmanly Gentleness of Mind’
and receives ‘Impressions so forcible’ that they cannot be changed by reason.
No other periodical editor describes a childhood event of such significance.
We learn little about the past lives of Mr Spectator and his club and nothing
about their early years. The Tatler’s oft-vaunted special appeal to women
readers is associated with an ‘unmanly’, feminized, gentle editor, whose own
past has a novelistic quality and whose sensibility is that of a poet.
Bickerstaff is able to be the confidant of his women readers because of his
own celibacy. The editor repeatedly claims that at his advanced age all
carnal desires have been extinguished. He feels no sexual interest even in the
‘beauteous Flavia’: ‘Wrapped up in the Safety of my old Age, [I] could with
much Pleasure, without Passion, behold her sleeping’ (Tatler 139). When
42 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
Bickerstaff tells a female friend that ‘those bright Eyes, which are the Bane
of others, are my only Sun-shine’ (Tatler 16), he clearly means that he is
immune from the danger of falling in love with her.
Despite Bickerstaff’s advanced age, his celebrity as the editor of the Tatler
brings him a proposal of marriage. Other celibate editors, like the Female
Tatler’s Mrs Crackenthorpe and Mary Singleton of the Old Maid, were also to
receive bulging mail-bags of honourable propositions from readers attracted
by the wit and intelligence of their writing: a phenomenon I shall discuss
further in later chapters. Bickerstaff is flattered by Maria’s attentions, but he
is quick to discourage false expectations:

If you have that kind Opinion of my Sense as you pretend, I question

not, but you add to it, Complexion, Air, and Shape: But, dear Molly, a
Man in his Grand Climacterick is of no Sex. Be a good Girl . . . love one
younger than my self.
(Tatler 83)

In a later issue, Maria requests Bickerstaff’s advice on choosing a husband

and follows his counsel of being a good girl and marrying someone younger
(Tatler 91). The lover has been entirely subsumed in the fatherly adviser.
Despite these protestations, Bickerstaff is not entirely free from preten-
sions to marriage, but is cured by his encounter with a gold-digger. She
woos him by embroidering a ‘Wrought Nightcap’ (Tatler 91), the same gift
which he later requests from a female correspondent who wishes to send him
a Valentine (Tatler 137). The night-cap appears to symbolize Bickerstaff’s
celibacy, old age and perhaps impotence. Nights spent snuggled up in bed
with a night-cap against the cold are the antithesis of nights of steamy
passion. In connection with Bickerstaff’s would-be bride, Steele offers us one
of the periodical’s few descriptions of the frailty of the elderly editor, who
has to be lifted on to his horse. Turning, he sees his mistress laughing at his
physical debility and realizes that she is a hypocrite and that he himself cuts
a ludicrous figure as a lover (Tatler 91).
Bickerstaff’s sexual abstinence is an essential recommendation for his role
as a physician for ‘the Distempers which proceed from Affections of the
Mind’ (Tatler 34). Like a doctor, he is able to view women closely and in a
state of moral and, on occasion, physical undress (Tatlers 139 and 215),
without the suspicion of dishonourable motives, while, as a man, he can
discuss topics that a woman could not broach. The periodical provides
women with a forum in which to express their feelings in the security of
anonymity. Through the male editor’s mediation, they can speak of emo-
tions and wishes without being thought immodest. Bickerstaff makes this
explicit:
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 43
A Woman that is ill-treated, has no Refuge in her Griefs but in Silence
and Secrecy. The World is so unjust, that a Female Heart which has
been once touched, is thought for ever blemished. The very Grief in this
Case is looked upon as a Reproach, and a Complaint almost a Breach of
Chastity.
(Tatler 128)

Jenny Distaff
Early in the periodical’s run, in Tatler 10, Steele introduces the figure of
Jenny Distaff, Bickerstaff’s much younger half-sister. The first portrayal of a
female periodical editor, Steele’s creation provides the paper with the claim to
speak for and to women more directly. She writes six of the periodical’s 152
issues, at her brother’s invitation, using the ‘Papers in his Closet’, the polit-
ical reports of Kidney, a waiter at St. James’s coffee-house, and other mater-
ials which Bickerstaff has left her ‘with liberty to speak it my own way’
(Tatler 10). Four of the Jenny Distaff issues are featured in June and July of
1709 (Tatlers 35, 36, 37 and 38), after which she does not contribute another
issue until November of the following year (Tatler 247). Jenny’s fifth paper (7
July 1709) immediately precedes the launch of the rival Female Tatler on 8
July 1709. Not only can the Female Tatler be seen as a response to Steele’s
successful publication, therefore, but Steele may have decided to reduce the
presence of Jenny Distaff in the periodical as a reaction to having been what
he describes as ‘scolded at by a Female Tatler’ (Tatler 229). Six issues, spread
over a period from October 1709 to June 1710, narrated by Bickerstaff,
describe Jenny’s marriage to Tranquillus and her behaviour as a young bride
(Tatlers 75, 79, 85, 104, 143 and 184). The duties and quarrels of the early
months of Jenny’s marriage seem to preclude her journalistic contributions,
and she only writes another issue after her power struggles with her husband
have ceased and she has become ‘a notable and deserving Wife’ (Tatler 184).
From Jenny’s first issue, it is assumed that a female journalist would
address a primarily female audience on topics of exclusively feminine inter-
est. In comic mock-apology, she begins:

It is so natural for Women to talk of themselves, that it is to be hop’d,

all my own Sex at least will pardon me, that I could fall into no other
Discourse. If we have their Favour, we give our selves very little Anxiety
for the rest of our Readers.
(Tatler 10)

The natural instincts of a woman, newly offered access to publication, are

the defence of her own sex against male aspersions. With ‘Pen and Ink in my
44 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
Hand’, Jenny is eager to ‘give a right Idea of Things which, I thought,
[Bickerstaff] put in a very odd Light, and some of them to the Disadvantage
of my own Sex’ (Tatler 33). Jenny espouses the ‘Cause of my Sex’ (Tatler 247)
both by combating misogyny and by advising individual female readers. She
proclaims her intention ‘to propose Remedies against the greatest Vexations attend-
ing Female Life’ (Tatler 37).
In a bid for revenge against male satire, Jenny contributes a number of
thumbnail sketches of ridiculous men of her acquaintance: the utterly
passive ‘Quid nunc’ (Tatler 10), a coffee-house newspaper addict; ‘Will Shoe-
string’, her ‘dear Outside’, whose main activities are ‘combing your Wig,
Playing with your Box, or Picking your Teeth’; ‘Umbra’; an amateur physi-
cian who understands ‘the Cure of a Pimple or a Rash’; and the scandalmon-
ger ‘Fly-blow’ (Tatler 38). All have one thing in common: their failings –
passivity, vanity, laziness and addiction to gossip – are those of which
women are most commonly accused. Jenny promises her female readers the
enjoyment of further attacks on the common enemy: ‘I have Ten Millions of
Things more against Men, if I ever get the Pen again’ (Tatler 33). Without
independent access to print, Jenny has to make the most of every opportun-
ity. Her claim that men and women have the same faults should be regarded
in this light less as a proto-feminist agenda than as a blow struck in the age-
old battle of the sexes. Jenny does not call for social and political reform of
any kind; neither does she incite her female readers to rebellion against the
rules of an inherently sexist society or urge them to resist the accepted defin-
itions of femininity as, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft was to do at the
end of the century in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). She
simply aims to redress the balance of criticism a little and satirize men as
effectively as Bickerstaff does women.
As a woman, Jenny regards men as potential lovers, and it is in this light
that she evaluates them. She promises her readers marital advice in a comi-
cally grave tone and with an unshakeable confidence in her own judgement:
‘No Vow shall deceive me, but that of Marriage: For I am turn’d of Twenty,
and . . . have heard all that can be said towards my Undoing’ (Tatler 33).
The irony of a 20-year-old solemnly avowing her insusceptibility to the
temptations of illicit love fits perfectly the portrait of Jenny as the head-
strong, impulsive, spirited bluestocking. She promises that her contribu-
tions to the periodical will be dominated by the most appropriately
feminine of concerns, that of ‘Love in all its Forms’ (Tatler 36).
The association of women writers and readers with what the editors of the
Ladies Journal call ‘the lighter Affairs of the Ladies . . . Love and Gallantry’
(no. 1) was a frequent one in the first half of the eighteenth century. The
Athenian Mercury regards ‘Questions of Courtship, Love and Marriage’ as
particularly appropriate to women (III.13, 5 May 1691), and the editors of
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 45
the Ladies Mercury ironically resign ‘Learning, Nature, Arts, Sciences’ to
their male counterparts, restricting themselves to ‘a little homely Cookery . . .
a small Treat of Love, &c’ (1, 27 February 1693). The Female Tatler’s editors
regard ‘the Errors of Love’ as one of the main themes of the woman journal-
ist (87, 25 January 1710), and the annual Ladies Complete Pocket-Book ‘By a
LADY’ promises its readers ‘Moral Reflexions on the Passion of Love’ (1769).
Some periodicals offer romantic short fiction and verse to a female audience.
Records of Love (1710) leads each issue with a ‘Novel’, a brief tale of love. The
frontispiece to Flowers of Parnassus (1734–6), an annual poetry collection, is
appropriately decorated with cupids, one of whom is taking aim at a couple
walking arm in arm. John Tipper’s monthly Delights for the Ingenious, with
its mathematical questions, riddles and enigmas, also offers romantic tales.
A story of two star-crossed lovers is specifically addressed to ‘ye charming
fair Female Readers, whose Souls have e’er been touched with tender Love!’
(Delights for the Ingenious 1, 1 January 1711). Eliza Haywood, herself a writer
of enormously successful amatory fictions, dedicates the first issue of her
periodical the Female Spectator (1744–6) to love:

Of all the Passions giv’n us from Above,

The noblest, softest, and the best is Love.
(bk I: 2.20)

Jenny’s most detailed description of her experiences in love bears all the
stylistic hallmarks of an amatory novel: florid prose, a seduction scene, a young
innocent girl and a man overwhelmed by physical passion. Her false friend the
wicked Lady Sempronia has decoyed her young protégée to her country
mansion, in order to leave her prey to the designs of an aristocratic rake:

There was at the further End of her Garden a Kind of Wilderness, in the
Middle of which ran a soft Rivulet by an Arbor of Jessamin. In this
Place I usually pass’d my retir’d Hours, and read some Romantick or
Poetical Tale till the Close of the Evening. It was near that Time in the
Heat of Summer, when gentle Winds, soft Murmurs of Water, and
Notes of Nightingals had giv’n my Mind an Indolence, which added to
that Repose of Soul, which Twilight and the End of a Warm Day natu-
rally throws upon the Spirits. It was at such an Hour, and in such a
State of Tranquility I sat, when, to my unexpressible Amazement, I saw
my Lord walking towards me . . .
(Tatler 33)

The sensuous setting, with its nightingales and jessamines, the lulling
effects of the wind and water and the novel-reading heroine, whose mind is
46 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
rendered susceptible to love by the excitements of her ‘Romantick or Poeti-
cal Tale’, could have been taken from a best-selling amatory novel by
Steele’s contemporary Delarivier Manley (compare Manley 1992: 20–1
and 39). Jenny, however, escapes rape or seduction and, less predictably,
refuses to accept the lord when he repents, reforms and makes honourable
proposals of marriage. She tells her readers, with spirit and a little self-
dramatization: ‘I glory in contemning a Man who had Thoughts to my Dis-
honour’ (Tatler 33).
Jenny claims that her prudent attitude towards lovers allows her to be a
disinterested judge of male behaviour. With playful lightheartedness, she
anticipates Bickerstaff’s image of men as butterflies (Tatler 174), promising
her readers to ‘stand among Beaux and Pretty Fellows, with as much Safety
as in a Summer’s Day among Grass-hoppers and Butterflies’ (Tatler 33). The
innocence of the metaphor reflects Jenny’s chastity. Unlike many other
female writers, Jenny is not suspected of sexual laxity. From this vantage
point of personal immunity, Jenny deplores the sexual double standard: ‘If
we have Merit, as some allow, Why is it not as base in Men to injure us as
one another?’ (Tatler 247). At the same time, however, she believes that
‘we have contributed to our own Deceit’ (ibid.) because of female inability
to judge male character: a skill ‘which is the most important of all others
in Female Life’ (ibid.). Jenny advises women to evaluate their lovers in the
light of their ‘Reputation among the Men’ and their behaviour in male-
dominated settings ‘in the Camp, at the Bar, on the ’Change, in the
Country, or at Court’ (ibid.). Ironically, Jenny, writing on a subject of
traditionally feminine expertise, refers her women readers to the more objec-
tive and reliable knowledge that men have of the members of their own sex.
Bickerstaff, the male editor, is the natural marital advisor and women’s
moral guide, since he can provide a disinterested male perspective on the
male character.
‘Love in all its Forms’ (Tatler 36) appears a very inadequate topic for a
journalist addressing women readers. In the same issue in which she claims
that love is the only fitting topic for a female writer, Jenny writes of Sir
Scipio Hill’s speculation in life annuities. She paints the portraits of various
habitués of St. James’s and provides thumb-nail sketches of a variety of
coffee-house denizens (Tatler 38). Jenny has her information from male
gossips: ‘Tho’ I never visit these publick Haunts, I converse with those who
do . . . they are as talkative as our Sex’ (Tatler 37). The content of Jenny’s
papers does not differ significantly from that of Bickerstaff’s: they both share
the satirical pen-portraits of men and women, the news section, which Steele
was later to cut, the correspondence, the short fiction and the concern with
love, marriage and domesticity. These similarities bear testimony to Steele’s
belief that there are few, if any, topics of exclusively male or female concern.
 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor 47
Steele does not envisage a gender-specific audience for either the Bickerstaff
or the Distaff issues of his paper.
A wit who loves to sit ‘with her Nose full of Snuff, and a Man’s Nightcap
on her Head, reading Plays and Romances’, Jenny bears most of the charac-
teristic attributes of the much-satirized figure of the literary lady. Her
brother hopes to find a husband to tame the spirited Jenny and ‘let her see,
that to be well dress’d, in good Humour, and chearful in the Command of
her Family, are the Arts and Sciences of Female Life’ (Tatler 75). Jenny is
symbolically purified for her wedding by her brother who makes her
renounce the masculine appendage of a snuff-box and ‘half drown her self
with washing away the Stench of the Musty’ (Tatler 79).
The snuff-taking, play-reading, journal-writing Jenny’s metamorphosis
into ‘a notable and deserving Wife’ (Tatler 184) is a gradual and far from a
complete one, and the choice of her husband’s name, Tranquillus, allows us
from the outset to suspect that he will be henpecked. Within a couple of
weeks of her wedding, Jenny has quarrelled with her placid spouse. Her
brother’s intervention reconciles the couple, but it is clear that Jenny is in
control of the relationship. She boasts to Bickerstaff that ‘I find I can do any
Thing with him’ (Tatler 85). A couple of months later, Jenny visits her
brother, who finds her very altered. Her sprightly wit has been replaced by a
‘a decent and Matron-like Behaviour’, and she has adopted ‘a great deal of
her Husband’s Way and Manner in her Remarks, her Phrases, the Tone of
her Voice, and the very Air of her Countenance’. Her identity appears to
have been subsumed in her duties as a wife, and Bickerstaff notes with pleas-
ure that ‘she expected to be treated hereafter not as Jenny Distaff, but Mrs.
Tranquillus’ (Tatler 104).
Several months later, however, Jenny has a further ‘Change in her
Humour’ (ibid.). Visiting her brother after a lengthy absence, she boasts to
him that she has been living in London without Tranquillus and has bought
a coach in her husband’s absence. Once again, Bickerstaff has to intervene to
restore domestic harmony by writing to Tranquillus and urging him to
forbid his wife the luxury of an equipage. The taming of Jenny – by Bicker-
staff, rather than by her husband – appears complete two months later,
when, visiting the play with her husband, she is both ‘sprightly and airy’,
but also a model wife and ‘the true Figure of Conjugal Affection’ (Tatler
184).
The fact that Jenny contributes another issue to the Tatler towards the
close of the paper’s run (Tatler 247) may be taken as an indication that only
once she has accepted her position as a dutiful wife to Tranquillus can she be
permitted by her brother to write for the periodical again. On the other
hand, it also suggests that marriage is not incompatible with female editor-
ship. Had Steele continued his periodical, he might have developed both her
48 The Tatler and the editor as social monitor
character and her journalistic style further. Instead, the figure of the female
editor was to be explored by others in the Female Tatler, which I will turn to
in the following chapter.
In the Tatler, Steele describes and catalogues a society governed by a mul-
titude of social and sartorial codes: obsessed with status, reputation and
public behaviour. Steele envisages his audience as primarily metropolitan,
highly influenced by fashion and hence amenable to censure by the editor of
a fashionable periodical. Through the figure of Bickerstaff, Steele is able to
suggest ways to regulate that society, to order and categorize, without
appearing censorious or dictatorial. By focusing on what Steele describes as
the ‘Conversation-Part of our Lives’ (Tatler 56), he blurs the boundaries
between public and private, to provide impish commentary on both male
and female behaviour alike. The Tatler does not have a clearly gendered
audience. There is an assumption, however, that genteel women, with their
lack of occupation and their voracious appetite for print, will form a signific-
ant, if not the major, part of the readership of the essay-periodical. Steele
named his paper in the fair sex’s honour, and Bickerstaff, with his sensitiv-
ity, tenderness, gallantry towards women, his propensity to tears, his melan-
choly, his poetry and tragedy-writing and his chastity, is in many respects a
feminized figure. Both these aspects of Steele’s publication were to have
almost prescriptive force for later journalists. Steele’s moral aims and his
successful ironic wit were to be cited as models by generations of journalists,
who were to view literary journalism as necessarily characterized by a
concern to record and catalogue the minutiae of contemporary life, coupled
with a special focus on women readers.
2 ‘The Conversation of my
Drawing-Room’
The female editor and the public
sphere in the Female Tatler

Before we can turn to the Female Tatler in more detail, it is necessary to

provide a few words of explanation on the subject of its publishing history
and the vexed question of attribution. The Female Tatler ran for 115 issues,
which were numbered 1–112 (there were three issues of Female Tatler 88,
and one issue was unnumbered) and was issued three times a week, on non-
post days: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 8 July 1709 to 31 March
1710. Issues 1–18 were printed by Benjamin Bragge. On 19 August 1709,
two rival Female Tatlers appeared, one printed by Ann Baldwin, the other by
Bragge, and the two publications continued to be issued concurrently, each
strenuously denouncing the other as spurious, until Female Tatler 44 of 14
October, when the Bragge issue ceased publication, and the periodical
appeared with Ann Baldwin’s imprint until the end of its run. The first 51
issues of the Female Tatler were written under the sobriquet of ‘Mrs. Crack-
enthorpe, a Lady that knows every thing’, but in Female Tatler 51 the editor
announces that she has ‘resign’d her Pretensions of writing the Female Tatler
to a Society of Modest Ladies’, and the final 65 issues of the periodical are
alternately ascribed to Lucinda (17), Emilia (16), Artesia (15), Rosella (10),
Arabella (3) and Sophronia (3).16
It is beyond all reasonable doubt that the original author of the Female
Tatler changed publishers with Female Tatler 19 and that Bragge continued
to print the periodical under a different editorship (R.B. White 1974:
51–60), a practice which illustrates editors’ lack of control over the use of
their names or their literary property. Bragge’s attempt to continue the pub-
lication suggests that it was a profitable venture. Its popularity was probably
the result of its scandalous content, since Bragge’s continuation appears to
be a jumble of thinly veiled personal allegations, unskilfully presented in a
bitter, humourless tone. All references in this chapter to Female Tatler 19ff.
are to the Baldwin publication, unless otherwise stated.
The identity of Mrs Crackenthorpe remains uncertain but the two most
likely contenders are Delarivier Manley and the lawyer and playwright
50 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
Thomas Baker. The British Apollo, which feuded with the Female Tatler
between August and October of 1709, identifies Baker as the author of the
Female Tatler:

But others will swear that this wise Undertaker,

By Trade’s an At---ney, by Name is a B---r,
Who rambles about with a Female Disguise on
And lives upon Scandal, as Toads do on Poyson.
(49, 12 September 1709)

It is unclear, however, whether the paper is referring to the Baldwin issue

of the Female Tatler or to Bragge’s rival publication. Fidelis Morgan has sug-
gested that Baker may have authored the Bragge production, rather than the
original paper (1992: viii). The Dictionary of National Biography (1997)
includes the Female Tatler in a list of works credited to Baker and does not
mention the periodical in its entry on Manley. John Harrington Smith has
traced verbal echoes of Baker’s plays in the Female Tatler (1952). In addition,
he directs our attention to Baker’s feud with rival playwright Thomas
D’Urfey, who is attacked in Female Tatler 4 (15 July 1709), 8 (25 July 1709)
and 26 (5 September 1709) (1952: 286–300). Baker lampoons D’Urfey in
his prologue to Susannah Centlivre’s play The Busie Body (Centlivre 1709a),
which receives a favourable mention in Female Tatler 41 (10 October 1709).
Baker’s association with Centlivre strengthens his claim, since she may also
have been involved in the editorship of the periodical. On 19 October 1709,
the Female Tatler was indicted before the Grand Jury of Middlesex as a
public nuisance due to the activities of a person posing as the editor of the
Female Tatler and threatening to expose public figures in print if not paid for
his silence. In the previous two issues of the publication, Female Tatlers 44
(17 October) and 45 (19 October), Mrs Crackenthorpe dissociates herself
from ‘those his Rascally and Knavish Impositions’ (Female Tatler 45). The
court case may have prompted Mrs Crackenthorpe’s resignation from her
paper less than a month later, and Baker’s increasing disillusionment with a
literary career may have played a part in the decision, since he was to retire
from Grub Street to the country in 1711 (Smith 1952: 286–300).
Paul Bunyan Anderson, on the other hand, has more convincingly
ascribed the periodical to Delarivier Manley (1931: 354–60). His case for
her authorship rests on the timing of Mrs Crackenthorpe’s retirement from
the paper on 4 November 1709, immediately following Manley’s arrest for
libel as the author of the New Atalantis, published that same year. Manley
was held in custody from 29 October 1709 to 14 February 1710 (Luttrel
1857: 4:505–8). Female Tatler 51 might have been written immediately
before Manley’s arrest and a final Mrs Crackenthorpe paper issued subse-
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 51
quently to explain that editor’s disappearance from the paper. Anderson also
believes that a sarcastic reference to ‘my Sister Mickelthwait’ (Female Tatler 1,
8 July 1709) may allude to Manley’s estranged elder sister, Mary Braith-
waite, and that the ancient landed family of the Crackenthorpes, with their
adherence to the royalist cause and their antiquity, resemble Manley’s claims
concerning her own family (Female Tatler 43, 14 October 1709). Fidelis
Morgan, who also identifies Manley as the periodical’s editor (1992), cites
the General Postscript’s claim that the Female Tatler was written by ‘Scandalo-
sissima Scoundrelia and her two Natural Brothers’ (27 September 1709), a
wonderfully appropriate sobriquet for the notorious novelist. Manley’s long-
running feud with Steele may have inspired her to edit a spoof of his period-
ical.17 The periodical editor is playfully compared with the author of the
New Atalantis (Female Tatler 45, 19 October 1709), whilst a lover of Mrs
Crackenthorpe’s hopes to impress his mistress by sending her a versification
of a scene from the novel (Female Tatlers 8, 25 July 1709; 15, 10 August
1709). Steele may also be associating the editor of the periodical with the
novelist when he complains that he was ‘scolded at by a Female Tatler, and
slandered by another of the same Character, under the Title of Atlantis’
(Tatler 229). Manley’s resourceful literary professionalism may well have led
her to turn to journalism as an additional source of income, but there is
little specific external evidence to link her with the publication.
The editorship of the periodical under the Society of Ladies has been
ascribed by Anderson to the partnership of Bernard Mandeville as
Lucinda/Artesia and Susannah Centlivre writing the remainder of the papers,
on the grounds of strong internal, but no external, evidence (1936:
286–300). We can detect a characteristically Mandevillian brand of political
theory in Female Tatler 64, which argues that ‘to wish for a flourishing
Trade, and the decrease of Pride and Luxury is as great an Absurdity, as to
pray for Rain and Dry Weather’, and similar ideas appear in future issues,
including an attack on contentment as an economically unviable virtue
(Female Tatler 109, 24 March 1710).
The case for Centlivre’s involvement rests mainly on Female Tatler 69 (14
December 1709), in which Emilia reviews the dramatist’s second comedy,
The Man’s Bewitch’d (Centlivre 1709b), which had been given its first
performance at the Haymarket only two days previously. The issue details a
visit which the playwright pays to the Society of Ladies, in which she com-
plains bitterly at the affronts offered her by actors and managers. Rumours
of Centlivre’s authorship were clearly rife, since in her introduction to the
printed play, the dramatist felt the need to deny any involvement with the
periodical: ‘I . . . declare I never was concern’d, either in Writing, or Publishing
any of the Tattlers’ (ibid. Preface). In addition, Female Tatler 87 may have
formed the basis for Centlivre’s play The Artifice (1722), although its tale of a
52 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
woman pretending to poison her lover seems to have been a common one
and recurs in a slightly adapted form in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator
nearly 40 years later as ‘The Lady’s Revenge’ (bk XIV: 3.58–70).
Contemporary readers clearly took a lively interest in the authorship of
the Female Tatler, and it appears to have been both popular and controver-
sial. Centlivre’s wish to distance herself from the publication suggests that
its scandalous content was considered less than respectable for a woman
writer. Given the paucity of contemporary testimony, it is difficult to judge
whether most original readers believed the periodical to have been written
by a man or a woman or both. The paper’s tone and level of irony is ambigu-
ous at many points. The inappropriateness of a woman’s writing an essay-
paper may have provided some of the paper’s humour. Some contemporaries
may have regarded the Female Tatler as evidence of female journalistic skill,
others as a thinly disguised and misogynistic drag act.
With ironic self-deprecation, the Female Tatler’s editor claims the non-
political essay-sheet as a quintessentially feminine venture. Mrs Cracken-
thorpe envisages that the imminent end of the War of the Spanish
Succession will lead to peacetime effeminacy and laziness and with it the
demise of the newspaper and the rise of ‘Tatlers, both Male and Female’
(Female Tatler 81, 11 January 1710):

When our News Papers are laid aside; and when . . . Peace . . . shall,
instead of promoting Religion, Virtue, and Sobriety, so far intoxicate
Men’s Minds, as to draw ’em into Pride, Luxury, and all Manner of
ridiculous Excursions, an ingenious Tatler will conduce more to the
Reformation of Mankind than an Hypocritical Society.18
(Female Tatler 1, 8 July 1709)

Mrs Crackenthorpe claims that her publication will complement, rather

than replace Steele’s, since the market could support ‘ten such Papers’. In
such a venture, her gender is a qualification, rather than a handicap, since
‘Tatling was ever adjudg’d peculiar to our Sex’ (ibid.). Eliding the differences
between speech and writing, Mrs Crackenthorpe defines her periodical as a
printed form of gossip, a more public version of the elegant chit-chat of
drawing rooms and the scandal spread on visits to female friends. She asks
Bickerstaff’s leave ‘to prate a little to the Town’ (ibid.).
Dated from her own apartment, Mrs Crackenthorpe’s periodical is, at
least in part, a record of the conversation at her visiting days, almost like the
minutes of a meeting. As Sarah Prescott and Jane Spencer have pointed out
(2000), Mrs Crackenthorpe’s drawing room is a public as well as a private
space. The company is mixed and extensive: ‘I have twice a Week a very
great Assembly of both Sexes . . . Grave Statesmen, Airy Beaus, Lawyers,
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 53
Citts, Poets, and Parsons, and Ladies of all Degrees assemble there’ (ibid.).
Business of both male and female import is transacted at Mrs Cracken-
thorpe’s – ‘Books are canvass’d, Removals at Court suggested, Law Cases
disputed, the Price of Stocks told, the Beaus and Ladies inform us of new
Fashions’ – and the drawing room provides a social meeting place ‘which
comprehends, White’s, Will’s, The Grecian, Garraway’s in Exchange-Alley, and
all the India Houses within the Bills of Mortality’ (ibid.). Mrs Crackenthorpe
already presides over a forum for public discussion in her drawing room and,
in this context, the periodical appears to be a natural extension of this. Her
status as a society hostess qualifies her for editorship.
The authors of the rival Female Tatler are portrayed as men, and a corre-
spondent of Mrs Crackenthorpe’s is taken to meet the editor in a locus classi-
cus of brutish masculinity, a ‘common Ale-house’, in St. Paul’s Churchyard,
an area full of booksellers’ and printers’ shops, ‘where in a dark Rook [sic] . . .
behind a slabber’d Table, sat a surly . . . old Dotard, snarling . . . and
cursing . . . I expected to have seen a glittering Coquet, and wonder’d such a
Monster shou’d Personate a Young Lady’ (Female Tatler 35, 26 September
1709). This denizen of Grub Street could not be further from a society lady:
educated by Puritans, his mother was a military prostitute. According to
Mrs Crackenthorpe, it is grotesque that he ‘talks of Ladies Drawing-Rooms,
who was never yet admitted into tolerable Company’ (Female Tatler 20, 22 August
1709). The editors of the Bragge Female Tatler also claim that their rival is
written by a man: Mrs Crackenthorpe’s footman Francis Powder-Monkey,
dismissed from her service for fornication and ‘forc’d to pump for Bread’
(Female Tatler ed. Bragge 23, 29 August 1709).
The sex of the Female Tatler’s editor is represented as a topic of intense
interest among the periodical’s readership. The ‘Ridiculous Report of the
Authors being a Man’ allegedly circulating around town (Female Tatler 47, 24
October 1709) can be seen as a flattering testimony to Mrs Crackenthorpe’s
competence, equal to that of any male writer, or as an ironic allusion to the
gender of the periodical’s actual author. Mrs Crackenthorpe dismisses the
speculations as ‘a splenetick and irrational Aspersion upon our whole Sex’ (Female
Tatler 11, 1 August 1709) and as the belief that a woman would be inca-
pable of authorship, protesting that ‘those Ladies who have . . . div’d into Arts
and Sciences, have ever discover’d a quicker Genius, and more sublime Notions’
(ibid.). Mrs Crackenthorpe claims the periodical as a feminist exercise, a
proof to convince the sceptical of female literary skill. Such a claim must be
seen in the context of a contemporary audience uncertain, and perhaps
doubtful, that Mrs Crackenthorpe’s creator was a woman.
The female editor is keen to distance herself from the inhabitants of Grub
Street, insistent that she does not publish ‘meerly for the Profit that may
accrue to me by it’, that she possesses ‘an Estate of 300 l. per An.’, together
54 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
with a retinue of ‘two Maids and a Footman’ (Female Tatler 1, 8 July 1709).
Mrs Crackenthorpe’s claim to gentility echoes Charles Gildon’s declaration
in his History of the Athenian Society that the Athenian Mercury was not written
for profit. Gildon asserts mendaciously that the founder member (John
Dunton) thinks ‘it so much below him to mingle Interest with so noble a
Design, that I am confident it would be the only certain way to make him
forsake it, to press any Reward’ (c.1693: 14). The British Apollo claims to
have been ‘Perform’d by a Society of Gentlemen’ (subtitle). Ruth Collins of
the Friendly Writer claims to write ‘without the Reward of filthy Lucre’ (vol. for
1732, Preface). Jean de la Crose tells a correspondent that ‘it’s my Book-
seller’s care to get Customers, and not mine, who am altogether uncon-
cerned in the Sale’ (Memoirs for the Ingenious March 1693). The editor of the
Patrician (1719) loftily declares ‘that he never intended or hop’d for, by such
his Publication, any thing peculiar to himself, but the Pleasure of promot-
ing his Country’s Service’ (no. 4), while the editor of the Plain-Dealer,
though not rich, possesses ‘an Estate, rather moderate than plentiful’ (1, 23
March 1724). The Old Whig (1719) accuses the Plebeian (1719) of being,
unlike himself, ‘a Son of Grubstreet’ (no. 2). Some contemporary editors argue
that there is no profit to be made from journalism in any case. Defoe tells us
that in editing the Review ‘Profit, the Press would not allow; and therein I am not
deceiv’d, for I expected none’ (vol. I, Preface). The editors of the Athenian Mercury
refute the accusation that ‘’tis a Mercenary Design to get a Peny’ with the
sarcastic riposte, ‘A wondrous Estate . . . he [the paper’s editor-bookseller,
John Dunton] is likely to raise by a Peny-Paper’ (vol I, Preface). De la Crose
also argues that ‘if I design’d any thing like getting an Estate by the writing
of Books, I would make choice of a Matter more suitable to my ends’
(Memoirs for the Ingenious March 1693). The editor of the Visiter is almost
unique in his frank admission that ‘I am not in a Capacity to make the
Town a Present of my Paper’ (4, 9 July 1723).
As a woman, Mrs Crackenthorpe is particularly eager to avoid the taint of
being ‘forc’d to pump for Bread’ (Female Tatler ed. Bragge 23) and, in
particular, the associations of the professional woman writer with prostitu-
tion. Bickerstaff writes for a living and retains his moral integrity; Mrs
Crackenthorpe could scarcely do so – she must be seen to be a genteel
amateur. The Female Tatler’s tone is characterized by an unrelenting snob-
bery. It bears many of the hallmarks of a coterie publication: written for a
small and privileged audience who know each other and recognize the
editor’s satirical pen-portraits:

the gay part of Mankind, who frequent Park, Plays, Chocolate-Houses,

and every little fashionable Assembly, that rid away many a tedious
hour in reading Tatlers, eating Jellies, disputing on twenty different
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 55
sorts of Snuff, and making pretty satirical Observations upon one
another.
(Female Tatler 34, 23 September 1709)

We do not know to what extent the paper is a periodical à clef, nor the
editor’s real social standing or the social class of the majority of readers:
whether they really consisted of ‘those of Birth and Education’ (Female Tatler
24, 31 August 1709), or whether a readership of lower social standing and
less disposable income may have read the paper partly out of an aspiration to
belong to such a select group or gain further knowledge of them. Mrs Crack-
enthorpe alludes consistently to a readership of ‘Men and Women of Emi-
nence and Figure’ (Female Tatler 38, 3 October 1709). She offers her readers
‘the Darling Quality Pleasure of Railing at Citizens’ (Female Tatler 48, 26
October 1709), satirizing the social aspirations of such characters as ‘Deputy
Bustle, Cheesmonger, and Reformer of Manners’ (Female Tatler 24, 31
August 1709), who is libelled in six issues of the Female Tatler (24, 26, 30,
39, 47 and 50). Like Bickerstaff, she prescribes norms of dress and behaviour
to each particular branch of society and deplores the confusion resulting
from those who do not conform: ‘This town does so swarm with People in
Masquerade that one hardly knows a Gentleman from his Taylor’ (Female
Tatler 26, 5 September 1709).
The editor’s own life is a constant round of visiting and receiving visits
from such aptly named friends as Lady Coupler, Lady Scandal, Mrs All-Talk
and Colonel Tatalindus (Female Tatlers 2, 5, 11 and 28). Her claims that ‘we
ought to touch upon great Peoples Characters, with . . . awful Respect’
(Female Tatler 17, 15 August 1709) ring very hollow as she constantly
requests new gossip from her friends and acquaintance. Not only does Mrs
Crackenthorpe claim to be writing for ‘those of Birth and Education’ (Female
Tatler 24), but she also invites only such readers to send in correspondence:

Young People and Fools, think the TATLERS give ’em a mighty
Opportunity to expose their Superiours . . . Should such People be
encourag’d, a Paper of this kind would be not only Useless, but Perni-
cious . . . But if Gentlemen or Ladies please to write any thing . . . it
will be kindly receiv’d.
(Female Tatler 7, 22 July 1709)

Mrs Crackenthorpe invites potential correspondents to introduce them-

selves at her visiting day. The periodical’s correspondence is an extension of
her social intercourse. Those who would not be admitted to Mrs Cracken-
thorpe’s drawing room do not have the liberty of writing to the paper either.
Despite Christine Blouch’s claim that the Female Tatler is ‘the first periodical
56 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
written by a woman directed at a female audience’ (2000a: lxxi), there are
many more appeals to a class-based readership, than to one defined by
gender. When Mrs Crackenthorpe first proposes launching a paper to a
friend, she is told that ‘the Ladies, more particularly would encourage it’
(Female Tatler 2, 11 July 1709) and she herself maintains that ‘the Ladies gave
the first Reputation to this Paper’ (Female Tatler 20, 22 August 1709), yet such
references to a predominantly female audience are rare. The editor more
commonly describes her readers as ‘Gentlemen and Ladies’ and describes the
aim of her paper as ‘impartially to laugh at the Foibles of both Sexes’ (Female
Tatler 5, 18 July 1709).
The paper’s audience’s hunger for society gossip is attested by the reveal-
ingly self-contradictory nature of her readers’ most common complaint, ‘that
. . . Characters are too plain when they are continually inquiring, ‘Who’s meant by
this Lady, and T’other Gentleman’ (Female Tatler 47, 24 October 1709). Like
Bickerstaff, the Female Tatler’s editors appeal to pride, rather than con-
science. It is public behaviour, rather than private morals, which such a
paper can correct: ‘A Tatler alarms the World into a Circumspection . . . The
Giddy Sort Gossip less for fear of being laugh’d at, and the Libertines of this
Age, Sin more in private for fear of being abhorr’d’ (Female Tatler 41, 10
October 1709). Her paper, Mrs Crackenthorpe claims, will continue popular
until the objects of her satire outnumber her other readers: ‘A Paper of this
kind will flourish, till the whole Town at their own Instigation have been
Ridicul’d, and then it will be generally exploded’ (Female Tatler 44, 17
October 1709).
Mrs Crackenthorpe, by her own account, is herself of an ancient landed
family, unsullied by trade (Female Tatler 43, 14 October 1709). Unlike the
Bickerstaffs, whose family have inherited long chins, bad posture and other
physical failings (Tatler 76), this hearty old English family have ‘neither the
Men nor the Women, had ever the least Deformity in Mind or Body’ (Female
Tatler 43). The editor roundly asserts of her ancestors, ‘The Crackenthorpes
were what ev’ry true English Family ought to be’ (Female Tatler 43). Like her
family, Mrs Crackenthorpe has no obvious failings or peculiarities. She
defines herself as close to the norm: ‘a middle ag’d, middle siz’d Brown
Woman, that’s neither Awkward nor Coquettish, Foppish nor Fantastical,
but Dresses her self like a Gentlewoman, moderately in the Mode, with an
Easy, Affable Disposition’ (Female Tatler 43) (Figure 2.1). Steele distin-
guishes his creation with a number of loveable eccentricities, while, for Mrs
Crackenthorpe, it appears to be enough to be a woman periodical editor to
differentiate and characterize her, as journalists are necessarily a rare species
among women, and women themselves are defined by their sexual character-
istics and by their alleged differences from men, such as their loquacity and
fondness for gossip.
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 57

Figure 2.1 Mrs Crackenthorpe of the Female Tatler (1710–11).

Mrs Crackenthorpe tells her readers that, with her few faults, she ‘can
never want Admirers’ (Female Tatler 43). The single female editor’s sexual
availability is stressed from the opening of the periodical. The two periodi-
cals, male and female, sharing a name, resemble a married couple, as the
editor’s friend Lady Coupler is quick to point out in the Female Tatler’s
second issue, where she suggests a union of the pair: ‘For our Progeny, the Sons
would be all Bishops, Judges and Recorders, and the Daughters Behns, Philips’s
and Daciers’ (Female Tatler 2, 11 July 1709). In Lady Coupler’s fantasy, the
women are the creative writers, presumably resembling their mother, whilst
the men become ‘Bishops, Judges and Recorders’, following in the footsteps of
their father Bickerstaff the ‘Censor of Great Britain’ (Tatler 163), who pre-
sides over his own ‘Court of Honour’. Female periodical writing is here
envisaged as closer to poetry and novel writing, whilst male journalism more
closely resembles law and judgement.
Even Bickerstaff, at his advanced age, is popular with his female readers
and receives proposals of marriage, and Mrs Crackenthorpe finds that ‘since I
published an Account of my Person and my Family, Lovers croud in upon
me’ (Female Tatler 47, 24 October 1709). The woman editor is in a pecu-
liarly privileged position, since men are attracted to her wit and intelli-
gence, without being influenced by her appearance. Mrs Crackenthorpe
hints at this when she warns a suitor that ‘if he saw my Face, he’d think no
more of Adoration’ (Female Tatler 8). Female editors have the rare luxury of
58 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
wooing with their eloquence and can ‘take more Pains to place their Words,
than their Patches’ (Female Tatler 8). However, since the periodical’s male
readership takes a keen sexual interest in Mrs Crackenthorpe, she cannot
avoid being associated, like other women writers, with pornography and
prostitution. She becomes an obscene toast among men ‘in Taverns and dirty
Eating-houses’: ‘One wou’d give a Shilling, and t’other half a Crown to – – – – – – –
Nasty Wretches! A third Jack a-Dandy, cries, Hang her, she must be Three-
score, or she cou’dn’t know so much of the World’ (Female Tatler 18, 17
August 1709). An Oxford undergraduate sends the editor a versification of a
notorious incest-like seduction scene from Manley’s New Atalantis (Female
Tatler 8, 25 July 1709; see Manley 1992: 35–7). When he too promises to
toast Mrs Crackenthorpe, it is unclear whether it is her authorship – he
clearly ascribes the periodical to Manley – or her sexual attractions which he
would like to celebrate.
The sexual innuendoes continue when Mrs Crackenthorpe has resigned
her editorship to the Society of Ladies. Artesia is ‘teiz’d out of my Senses’ by
her associates for her alleged fondness for her ‘Brother, Practitioner in Gar-
rulity’ (Female Tatler 29, 12 September 1709). Alluding to Bickerstaff’s own
account of his impotence and decrepitude, her friends regret that a sexual
union between the editors is no longer possible: ‘If the Male had not been so
Old, we might have encreased and multiply’d before now’ (Female Tatler 97,
24 February 1710). Like Mrs Crackenthorpe, the Society of Ladies receive
sexual propositions from their male readers. The correspondent Jack Rakish
advises them to marry rich old fools and deceive them with dashing young
lovers, offering his services in the latter capacity (Female Tatler 59, 21
November 1709). The ladies also receive a general proposal of marriage from
a fortune-hunting colonel who advertises himself as a gigolo:

I’m not quite Six Foot, well shap’d, clean limb’d, a good Rakish Air . . .
a Woman of Twenty, with a tollerable Forehand – – – For as many
Guineas, shall enjoy all, and every single part of me for the Space of
Twenty Four Hours.
(Female Tatler 82, 13 January 1710)

Jack Rakish assumes that the Society of Ladies are a group of young,
desirable, unmarried women seeking husbands, implying that a woman with
a husband would not be able to write a periodical and would have no moti-
vation to do so. The army colonel seems to envisage a female readership
hungry for titillation and eager to find lovers through the periodical. Gillian
Teiman has argued that the Female Tatler as edited by the Society of Ladies is
a more prudish version of Mrs Crackenthorpe’s paper, that the ladies ‘were
virtually silent on issues of sexuality’ (1993: 233), a tactic which Fidelis
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 59
Morgan regards as ‘a cover for a more prurient attitude’ (1992: x). Even
though the change of editorship does reflect a decrease in the amount of
sexual scandal and lewd innuendo, the paper is still considered an appropri-
ate venue for a prospective male prostitute like the colonel to solicit custom,
despite Mrs Crackenthorpe’s claim that the new editors are ‘a Society of
Modest Ladies’ (Female Tatler 51, 2 November 1709).
Under the ladies’ editorship, the focus of the periodical does shift,
however, from the prominence of personal satire to topics ranging from
Donne’s poetry, through suicide, duelling, pacifism, Sacheverell’s sermon
and mothers-in-law to macroeconomics. Complaints from fictional readers
that ‘of late the Authors of the Female Tatler set up for Morality’ (Female
Tatler 98, 27 February 1709) serve to underline the periodical’s increased
variety. The editors are keen to point out that they have adopted the moral
high ground at the expense of popularity. Most readers, we are reminded,
‘love to find an Acquaintance exposed or a neighbour ridiculed’ (ibid.). The
correspondent Thomas Love-Truth warns the ladies that ‘as Scandal was the
rise of your Paper, so whenever that fails ’twill sink’ (Female Tatler 59, 24
November 1709).
It is impossible to know how seriously to take such pseudo-complaints,
which read like disclaimers on the part of the editors. Personal satire does
continue in the periodical: both in the divertissements, in which individuals
like ‘Sarah Stroakings, at the Cow-House at Islington’ are alluded to under
fictional names (Female Tatler 67, 9 December 1709), and in the short
narrative anecdotes. Often sensationalist, lurid and sexually titillating, tales
of women like Chloë, whose garter was discovered in a lodger’s bed (Female
Tatler 56, 14 November 1709) and the voyeur Ephelia, who has had numer-
ous abortions (Female Tatler 102, 10 March 1710), would not be out of place
in the periodical’s more suggestive early issues. It is impossible for the
modern reader to judge whether such narratives are pure fiction or allude to
contemporary scandals.
Since scandal can no longer be considered the paper’s raison d’être, the
Society of Ladies attempt to define a new agenda. The editors form an open
collective, and the term ‘Society’ suggests a professional organization. The
image of the periodical as a society recalls John Dunton’s publications,
particularly the Athenian Mercury (1691–7). Charles Gildon’s History of the
Athenian Society describes Dunton’s editorial collective as a ‘Learned Society’
with ‘a Master in every Science’ including a philosopher, physician, mathe-
matician, poet and theologian (c.1693: 12–13). In grandiose and unconvinc-
ing terms, Gildon compares Dunton’s venture with the Royal Society as
a contribution to learning and science of national importance (ibid. 3).
Daniel Defoe’s Little Review, which imitates Dunton’s epistolary format,
also adopts the term, ‘being allegorically rather than significantly call’d a
60 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
Society’ (A Supplementary Journal September 1704). The Weekly Oracle, a publi-
cation also modelled on the Athenian Mercury, claims to be the work of ‘a
SOCIETY of GENTLEMEN’, comprising ‘a SAGE AND VENERABLE DIVINE’, ‘a most
LEARNED PHYSICIAN’, a ‘GENTLEMAN OF THE LONG ROBE’, ‘a Profound Adept in
the MATHEMATICKS and NATURAL PHILOSOPHY’ and a ‘MORAL PHILOSOPHER’,
along with ‘AN EMINENT VIRTUOSO’ and ‘A MAN OF MODE’. The latter two
members are described as ‘two Characters of lighter Freightage’, included
‘that our Vessel may not be in Danger of sinking by being overladen with
too great a Quantity of weighty and substantial Learning’ (vol. I, Introduc-
tion). The Oracle’s claims are grandiose – the details of the society members’
qualifications take up two closely printed half-sheets – and probably ironic:
the Introduction alludes to ‘the Art and Mystery of Puffing’ and describes the
members of the editorial committee as ‘worthy and never-enough-to-be-
admir’d’ (vol. I, Introduction). The editors of the British Apollo, a publication
which adheres closely to Dunton’s model, also claim to be ‘a Society of GEN-
TLEMEN’ (1, February 13, 1708). The Apollo’s social and academic pretensions
are mocked in the Female Tatler (30, 14 September 1709).19 The convention
of the learned society is also satirized in the Grub-Street Journal, whose editor
playfully compares the members of his club – Mr Quidnunc, ‘a wealthy old
Citizen’; the somnolent poet ‘Mr. Poppy’; and the historian ‘Giles Blunder-
buss’ – with the Royal Society (1, 8 January 1730). The Grub-Street Journal’s
collected issues were published in 1737 under the ostentatious title of
Memoirs of the Society of Grub Street, recalling the Memoirs of the Royal Society
(1665–1735), an abridgement of the Society’s Transactions. The Society of
Ladies playfully mock the pseudo-erudition of male editors, whilst at the
same time their name leads the reader to expect a wider range of material
than Mrs Crackenthorpe provided.
In her first issue, Sophronia outlines the Society’s editorial policy in
detail. The ‘Conversation of my Drawing-Room’ is to ‘exclude all Politicks
. . . as a Topick most unfit for a Female Assembly’ and focus instead
on ‘Snuff, Billet-Doux, Joynts, Canes, Weather or Opera’s &c’. (Female Tatler
87, 25 January 1710). The Female Tatler continues to be organized as a
series of ladies’ visiting days, and Sophronia, like Mrs Crackenthorpe,
emphasizes the periodical’s verbal origins: it is based on conversation,
which she as the society hostess directs and facilitates. She includes a wider
range of topics than Mrs Crackenthorpe: ‘History, Philosophy, Poetry or
Prophecy’.
The unrestrained gossiping of Mrs Crackenthorpe’s drawing room is to be
replaced by a kind of debating society, of which the periodical is to be the
minutes: ‘We shou’d reduce our Conversation to general Heads, and alot a
Convenient Subject for each Day . . . one of the Society shou’d relate a Story
by way of Example, and the rest approve or condemn’ (Female Tatler 87). The
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 61
fiction of multiple authorship allows for a number of different viewpoints to
be aired within the publication and for dissensions between individual
members of the society, in particular between the two most frequent con-
tributors, Lucinda and Artesia, who, though sisters, disagree fiercely on the
ethics of duelling and on the merits of the War of the Spanish Succession
(Female Tatlers 52, 53 and 59). Despite Sophronia’s disclaimer, political
topics are introduced by male guests. The most controversial views in the
periodical are expressed by an ‘Oxford Gentleman’, a regular visitor to all the
ladies, who has usually been identified as Bernard Mandeville. The male
guest can present theories which would be both too abstract and too
provocative for a woman writer, such as his idea that content is no virtue
(Female Tatler 109, 24 March 1710). He outlines his theories at greatest
length on Lucinda’s visiting day, telling the company that ‘to wish for a
flourishing Trade, and the decrease of Pride and Luxury is as great an Absur-
dity, as to pray for Rain and Dry Weather at the same time’ (Female Tatler
64, 2 December 1709). Lucinda disclaims responsibility for such opinions,
barring him from her house: ‘I . . . told him . . . that I thought it not worth
my Time to refute his abominable Principles . . . and desired him never to
visit me any more’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, she prints the episode, thereby dis-
seminating his views, and offers no convincing counter-arguments. The
‘Oxford Gentleman’ continues to expound his ideas in the periodical, con-
demning scholars as useless social parasites only two issues later (Female
Tatler 66, 7 December 1709).
The female editors continually defend their right and ability to edit a
periodical. A friend of Artesia’s father tells the ladies that ‘Young Women
shou’d only study how to get Husbands’, referring them to the example of
Jenny Distaff: ‘Mr. Bickerstaff’s Sister Jenny . . . writ Tatlers almost as well as
her Brother, but unless he was out of the way she never meddled with it’
(Female Tatler 95, 20 February 1710). This prompts Artesia to ask ‘why may
not Women write Tatlers as well as Men?’ and to deny that there is anything
to be ashamed of in writing for money: ‘Suppose Tatlers were writ for
Money, were not Sermons the same?’ (ibid.). Emilia also offers a spirited
defence of female literary professionalism. Without attempting to curry
favour by suggesting that the writing of such a periodical might be a moral
or educational exercise of some kind, she simply asserts her right to act as
she thinks fit:

Why shou’d a Book or a Pen be more appropriate to a Man than a

Woman, if we know how to use them? . . . ’Twas the Tyranny of
Mankind that condemn’d us to the Glass and Needle, or we had sat in
Parliament long before this time.
(Female Tatler 101, 8 March 1710)
62 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
The publication of the Female Tatler itself is, in both cases, used to testify
not only to female literary skill, but also to general female competence and
potential. It might itself be viewed as a radical act, and where there are
female journalists, female politicians seem more conceivable. Contemporary
readers may, however, have found Emilia’s vision of women MPs laughable
and preposterous.
The periodical contains several impassioned appeals to its female readers,
which might be regarded in modern terms as consciousness-raising exercises.
Artesia’s indignant indictment of women’s collusion in their own oppression
is the most striking example:

What enrages me most is to see our Sex so stupid . . . How can People
in their Senses think, that the fine Cloaths and all the Trinkets that are
given us, are bestow’d upon the Sex any other ways than Play Things are
given to Children, to amuse, keep their Thoughts employ’d, and their
Hands from doing of Mischief?
(Female Tatler 88, 27 January 1710)

Women are kept in deliberate ignorance, without any ‘Knowledge of Arts

and Sciences’, to make them more tractable, Artesia claims (ibid.). She
attempts to inspire her female readership with a disdain of luxury, of the
‘fine Cloaths and . . . Trinkets’ that distract them from more important
issues. Her serious and moralistic attempts to turn women from dress to
learning are counteracted, however, by her sister Lucinda’s more light-
hearted suggestions. Lucinda unashamedly celebrates fashion: ‘Dress, be
Vain and Gay, it being the best expedient yet found to defeat the Cunning,
and defend you from the Treacherous Arts of Mankind’ (Female Tatler 111,
31 March 1710).
Both the strengths and limitations of the ladies’ feminism are most
evident in the discussions surrounding their Tables of Fame. Bickerstaff
describes a dinner table in an imaginary hall of fame and asks his readers for
suggestions of suitable guests (see Tatlers 74, 78 and 182). When two female
relatives challenge him as to his exclusion of women from this company,
suggesting Lucretia as an eminent female figure, the editor agrees to have a
‘small Tea-Table set apart in my Palace of Fame for . . . all of her Character’
(Tatler 84). The Society of Ladies inaugurate their own ‘Female Table of
Fame’ in response (Female Tatler 95, 20 February 1710), including rulers like
Deborah, Zenobia and Queen Elizabeth I, as well as connubial heroines such
as Panthea, Camma and Artemisia (Female Tatler 68, 12 December 1709;
88, 1 February 1710).
Tables of female fame were to become a convention of women’s periodi-
cals. Each issue of John Tipper’s Ladies Diary displays the portrait of a celeb-
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 63
rated woman on its cover. The Nonsense of Common Sense proposes instituting
a picture gallery of women celebrated for their actions, rather than their
appearance (no. 6). Short biographies of famous women were a common
feature of mid-century magazines. The Court Miscellany relates the lives of
Elizabeth Rowe (July 1765), Mme de Pompadour (September 1765), Susan-
nah Centlivre (August 1765), Catherine the Great (February 1766) and
Christina, Queen of Sweden (March 1766). A correspondent of the Ladies
Journal argues that women are intellectually superior to men, citing the
achievements of Sappho, Anne Dacier, Queen Elizabeth I, Katherine
Phillips, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Centlivre and Eliza Haywood (no.
3). Attitudes towards prominent women are frequently highly ambivalent,
however. A male writer for the Court Miscellany asserts that ‘Genius has no
sex’, but stresses that women ‘cannot appear on the stage [of life], but when
they are called forth by particular circumstances’ (October 1765). Those who
have taken an active part in public life, he writes, ‘shine . . . with as much
dignity as men of the greatest renown’, and he cites an impressive list of
examples ranging from Boadicea and Joan of Arc to Mme de Scudéry and
Elizabeth Carter. He ends, however, by recommending domestic virtue as ‘a
kind of heroism in private life’ (ibid.).
The Female Tatler’s heroic historical women, drawn primarily from exotic,
eastern locations and from the distant past, bear little resemblance to the
modern British women who compose the periodical’s readership. This leads
Sophronia to lament the degeneration of her sex. The thought of ‘so many
dazling Heroigns’ gives her ‘extream Delight’ and leads her to reflect that
the Greeks personified wisdom as a goddess, from whom she takes her own
name. Her pleasure is ‘short-liv’d’ however. When she turns to ‘a Considera-
tion of Womankind . . . as they deserve Applause or Reproof at the present
Hour . . . the Motives of Vanity grew weak’, and she is forced to abandon
‘all Fond Idea’s of Perfection’ (Female Tatler 89, 3 February 1710). The
historical women are further distanced from contemporary readers by being
compared with Greek goddesses: they are the stuff of legend, the inhabitants
of an idealized past. The famous women are, moreover, ‘not given as
Examples for English Women to Copy after’ (Female Tatler 95, 20 February
1710), any more than Boadicea is held up as a role model for the readers of
the Court Miscellany. The tables of fame are simply intended, Artesia claims,
to show that women possess as much ‘Intrepidity and Fortitude of the Soul’
as men (Female Tatler 90, 5 February 1710). It is a question of women’s
moral worth and potential: ‘We had a Mind for the Encouragement of our
Sex, by those Examples to demonstrate, that Women were as capable as Men
of that Sublimity of the Soul’ (Female Tatler 95). The ladies do not advocate
any form of social change. Emilia tells us that women are intelligent
and sensible enough to be capable of sitting in Parliament (Female Tatler
64 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler
101, 8 March 1710), but she does not suggest that they should actually run
as candidates.
However limited the Female Tatler’s feminist programme, its editors
always describe the essay-periodical itself as a feminine genre. An essay-peri-
odical, Mrs Crackenthorpe writes, will gain popularity in a peacetime
society, in which men have turned from the manly pursuits of politics and
war (Female Tatler 1, 8 July 1709). Steele and the editors of the Female Tatler
both emphasize the links between the essay-periodical and the ‘Conversation
Part of our Lives’ (Tatler 56). In the Female Tatler, journalism is described as
a particularly feminine activity because of women’s association with verbal
loquacity – with tattle, gossip and chit-chat. Writing a periodical is por-
trayed as a kind of written form of conversation, an activity half-way
between authorship and normal sociability, an extension of a woman’s social
intercourse at her visiting days, albeit embracing a wider circle. The paper’s
tone is colloquial and intimate: the reported conversation of the guests at
the visiting days of Mrs Crackenthorpe and the Society of Ladies often forms
the basis of the periodical. This emphasis on conversation and sociability
may be a response to contemporary anxieties about women’s writing and, in
particular, to the public aspects of publication. The Female Tatler demon-
strates that the division between public and private arenas was not always
clear-cut in eighteenth-century women’s lives or writings. Both hosting a
visiting day and writing a periodical – portrayed here as parallel activities –
straddle the divide between the public and private.
The Female Tatler’s editors adopt a more modest stance than Bickerstaff in
the Tatler. While Bickerstaff is an elderly male authority figure, Mrs Crack-
enthorpe is a loveable chatterbox, and the Society of Ladies are a group of
young women addressing their contemporaries and social peers. Bickerstaff
is an outsider, a commentator on society, while the Female Tatler’s editors are
participators in the social scene. The periodical is rarely a vehicle for their
own ideas. The Society of Ladies report a number of different and sometimes
contradictory opinions within the publication, allowing readers to feel part
of an ongoing conversation and to make up their own minds as to the valid-
ity or falsehood of individual viewpoints.
This idea of the periodical as the vehicle for conversation includes a sense
that the Female Tatler is in constant dialogue with Steele’s Tatler. Propheti-
cally, the editors of the Female Tatler regard the Tatler as the first example of
a new genre, a genre in which they stake a claim. As the title reminds us,
the periodical is a female answer to Steele’s publication and continually
defines itself in reference to the Tatler. When Sophronia joins the Society of
Ladies, she offers her readers a detailed description of her editorial policy.
Every part of her plan, from Tables of Fame to dream allegories, is modelled
‘according to the Practice of this polite Age’, that is to say on Steele’s suc-
 Female editor and public sphere in the Female Tatler 65
cessful formula (Female Tatler 87, 25 January 1710). The Society of Ladies
sometimes view the Tatler’s content ironically, as frivolous and superficial,
but they always identify it with their own strategy. Artesia sometimes sati-
rizes Steele’s aims, but she always writes in the first person plural: ‘Some
People care but little how others divert themselves, what Cloaths or Wigs
they wear . . . but we that watch and labour for the general Benefit of
Mankind, take nothing more to Heart’ (Female Tatler 74, 26 December
1709). The Ladies are constantly concerned to define the Tatler and Female
Tatler as part of a new mode of periodical writing. Steele’s publication is
seen, not as an individual work, but as the prototype of a genre. Steele and
Addison were to be invoked as talismanic figures by other periodical editors
throughout the eighteenth century and, whether or not their work actually
resembled the Tatler and Spectator in form or content, the sacred names of
Addison and Steele were cited as precedents in defence of many later writers’
own journalistic projects. This process of canonization, which makes the
essay-periodical such a conservative genre, begins early, with the Female
Tatler. Called upon to defend her writing to a sceptical friend, Lucinda vin-
dicates herself as a follower of Bickerstaff’s noble example:

What they [the ancient philosophers and moralists] cut out roughly
Tatlers endeavour to polish. Their Business was to reduce great
Numbers into a Society, and ours is to make them a Civilis’d and Polite
Society . . . That Mr. Bickerstaff has a more happy Genius this way than
anybody else yet discovered, we don’t dispute, but his being the greatest
Mastiff, proves not that all the rest are Curs.20
(Female Tatler 95)

The term ‘Tatlers’ here describes a burgeoning new genre with a number
of clearly defined features, which was to be reinterpreted throughout the
century, by male and female writers alike. It is a genre which emphasizes the
‘Civilis’d and Polite’ and which is centrally concerned with societies, both
civic society and editorial societies, a genre in which the conversation of the
drawing room appears in print. The Female Tatler ensured that the figure of
the female editor was to be an important part of that tradition.
3 ‘In Clubs and Assemblies,
at Tea-Tables, and in
Coffee-Houses’
The Spectator and the shift from the
editorial club to the club of
correspondents

Less than two months after the demise of the Tatler, the first issue of
Addison and Steele’s new periodical the Spectator appeared. The paper was an
immediate success, and contemporaries quickly attributed it to Steele (D.F.
Bond 1965: lix, xcviii; Bloom and Bloom 1980: 231–65). Addison’s associ-
ation with the paper was not widely known until after the Spectator’s original
run. The first series of the Spectator was published daily, except Sundays,
from March 1711 until December 1712, a total of 555 issues, of which
Addison and Steele each contributed 251 papers, Eustace Budgell 29, John
Hughes 6 and other contributors 18 (D.F. Bond 1965: lxv). The second
series, numbered 556–635, was published three times a week from June to
December 1714 and written by Addison, with the collaboration of Budgell
and Hughes. I will be concentrating in this chapter on the much livelier and
more varied first series.
John Gay comments on the paper’s initial reception in The Present State of
Wit in May 1711:

We were Surpriz’d all at once by a Paper called the Spectator, which was
promised to be continued every day, and was writ in so excellent a Stile,
with so nice a Judgment, and such a noble profusion of Wit and
Humour, that it was not difficult to determine it could come from no
other hands but those which had penn’d the Lucubrations.
(1711: 11)

Gay’s confidence in his estimation of the paper’s worth, and his attribution
of its authorship, just two months after the periodical’s inaugural issue, are
typical of the reactions of many contemporaries to the new paper. Its editor,
Mr Spectator, was portrayed as the opposite of Isaac Bickerstaff: not a tattler,
but a man whose most striking characteristic is his silence. Steele’s biographer
Calhoun Winton has suggested that Steele was allowed to retain his position
as Commissioner of Stamps under the new Tory government of 1712 in return
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 67
for ending the Tatler and ensuring Bickerstaff’s silence (1964: 126–7). Mr
Spectator’s taciturnity may be a sly comic allusion to this demand.
The focus in the periodical’s early issues is on creating a new kind of
persona, an editorial figure who differs in important ways from Isaac Bicker-
staff. One of the most striking differences is that Bickerstaff writes as a lone
eccentric, while Mr Spectator is part of a club, whose members are described
in detail in the periodical’s second issue.21 The Spectator Club is fore-
grounded at the opening of the periodical’s run and is equally prominent
towards the end of the first series of the Spectator. As the paper draws to a
close, the club breaks up, as each of its members in turn die, leave London to
live in the countryside full-time or decide to dedicate themselves exclusively
to their professions. Budgell later suggested that the club members were
retired and killed off in order to prevent other journalists from issuing spuri-
ous continuations of the paper. Of Sir Roger de Coverley, whose death is
reported in Spectator 517, he writes:

Mr. Addison was so fond of this Character, that a little before he laid
down the Spectator (foreseeing that some nimble Gentleman would catch
up his Pen the Moment he had quitted it) he said to an intimate Friend,
I’ll kill Sir Roger, that no body else may murder him.
(Smithers 1968: 251)

This would seem to suggest that the club was an integral part of the peri-
odical. In the final issue of the first series, Mr Spectator explains, ‘All the
Members of the imaginary Society, which were described in my First Papers,
having disappeared one after another, it is high time for the Spectator himself
to go off the Stage’ (Spectator 555).
While the club fiction, then, would appear to be central to the Spectator,
Addison and Steele make surprisingly sparing use of most of the club
members within the main body of the periodical. Of the 555 issues of the
Spectator’s first series, only 45 are either contributed by or concerned with
the doings of members of the club, compared with 250, almost half the total
number, which are largely or completely filled with readers’ letters (D.F.
Bond 1965: xxxviii). As Donald F. Bond has noted, with the exception of
Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, the club members ‘fail to play
any very lively role as contributors or stimulants to discussion’ (1965: xxii).
The second series of the Spectator does not feature an editorial club at all. In
the first half of this chapter, I’ll be examining the club motif. I’ll discuss
some of the possible reasons for Addison and Steele’s employment of
this device within the paper and suggest some reasons why they do not
make more extensive use of what appears such a promising journalistic strat-
egy. One reason for the editors’ relative neglect of the club fiction is their
68 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
increasing use of correspondents. In the second part of this chapter, I’ll
examine the role of readers’ letters in the Spectator, showing how the paper’s
correspondents come to replace the editorial club and to fulfil most of its
roles and functions.

The club fiction

The second issue of the Spectator is dedicated to detailed descriptions of the
individual members of the editor’s club. The club members – the Tory
landowner Sir Roger de Coverley; an unnamed lawyer who prefers the
theatre to the bar; Sir Andrew Freeport, an eminent merchant; Captain
Sentry, a former soldier; Will Honeycomb, an ageing man-about-town; and
an unnamed clergyman – represent a wide variety of professions, as well as
both Whig and Tory political allegiances. As Mr Spectator puts it, ‘The
Club of which I am a Member, is very luckily compos’d of such Persons as
are engag’d in different Ways of Life, and deputed as it were out of the most
conspicuous Classes of Mankind’ (Spectator 34). The editor claims that each
member of the club represents a constituency of readers:

My Readers too have the Satisfaction to find, that there is no Rank or

Degree among them who have not their Representative in this Club,
and that there is always some Body present who will take Care of their
respective Interests.
(Spectator 34)

Ronald Paulson has described the Spectator club as ‘a social microcosm,

an England in little, of which the reader is meant to think he is a part’
(1967: 210). The club’s representativeness is limited, however. As Paulson
himself notes, all the members of the club are actually ‘on closer inspection,
withdrawals or dropouts from society’ (1967: 220). The Templar does
not practise law, preferring to frequent the theatres instead; the Clergyman
is too ill to take up a living; Captain Sentry has retired from the army,
tired of his failure to advance in the military ranks; and both Will Honey-
comb, the superannuated rake, and Sir Roger de Coverley, the Tory squire,
subscribe to an outmoded Restoration code of political and ethical
values. This code teaches passive obedience to the monarch, male sexual
promiscuity and the values of land over trade. It is consistently opposed in
the Spectator. Only Sir Andrew Freeport appears to be a productive member
of his society. More importantly, the club does not contain any female
members: a striking omission in a paper which so frequently addresses a
female readership. Will Honeycomb could be seen as the women’s
representative, as ‘all his Conversation and Knowledge has been in the
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 69
female World’ (Spectator 2), but his attitudes towards women are at best
patronizing and often predatory. Towards the end of the paper, Mr Spectator
reports that his female readers have felt aggrieved by their underrepresenta-
tion in the club. After Will’s marriage and withdrawal from London the
editor reports:

the Ladies are in great Pain to know whom I intend to elect in the
Room of WILL. HONEYCOMB. Some of them indeed are of Opinion that
Mr. HONEYCOMB did not take sufficient Care of their Interests in the
Club, and are therefore desirous of having in it hereafter a Representat-
ive of their own Sex.
(Spectator 550)

The club is equally unrepresentative in its political leanings. While the

inclusion of both the Whig Sir Andrew and the Tory Sir Roger appears to
suggest that the paper will maintain a political neutrality, the Spectator con-
tains a number of essays defending the trading interest and the Hanoverian
succession, as contemporaries were quick to notice, and a number of modern
critics have pointed out.22 Sir Andrew’s personality remains undefined in the
Spectator, but his political allegiance to the interests of trade over land is
defended in a number of the Spectator papers. Sir Roger, by contrast, is a
fully-fleshed portrait of a loveable eccentric, but his political stance is never
voiced convincingly within the paper. As one reader puts it, he is a model of
virtue, but not of political prudence, he ‘cannot . . . (I mean as to his domestick
Character) be too often recommended to the Imitation of others’ (Spectator
424; my italic). At least one paper contains an argument between Sir Roger
and Sir Andrew in which each puts forward his political opinions (Spectator
174), but, on the whole, Sir Roger is far more often described than allowed
to speak for himself.
Calhoun Winton has argued that the club fiction enables Addison and
Steele to distance themselves from their political opinions: ‘Like the dia-
logue and the play, the club kept the authors safely removed from their
materials’ (1964: 141). However, Addison avoids the club device altogether
in his political periodicals. In Steele’s partisan publications, he rarely
allows his dramatis personae to voice his political views. Instead, Steele
employs the rather tortuous device of writing letters on political subjects,
signed with his own name, to his periodicals. Sir John Edgar of the Theatre,
Nestor Ironside of the Guardian and the editor of the Englishman all receive
and print letters on political topics signed by ‘Richard Steele’. This
allows Steele to maintain a fiction of editorial political impartiality, while
including political commentary within the papers. Steele frequently sug-
gests that although the use of a persona is necessary for a moral and social
70 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
commentator, it is unethical to express political opinions without owning
them. He comments in the Theatre:

If a Man is disguis’d . . . from a just and modest Reflection, that his

Personal Infirmities would tarnish his Argument, and therefore assumes,
for the sake of Virtue, an imaginary Character . . . it is laudable to wear
a Mask; but he who assumes one for any other Purpose, does a very ill
Thing.
(no. 11)

In Steele’s paper wars with the Examiner, he repeatedly challenges the

editor of that paper to reveal his or her identity and makes it a point of
honour to sign his name to his own pieces. He asks angrily in the
Englishman:

What can a Man say who owns his Name, and is abused by one who
does not own himself? Who is the more unjust, he who with his Name
defends an Argument, or he who without any Name calumniates that
Person without any Possibility of Recrimination?23
(Englishman 4)

Steele clearly separates his moral commentary, voiced by an editorial

eidolon, and his political opinions, which are stated in propria persona. In his
Review, Defoe also puts his name to his political papers: Mr Review is always
clearly identified with Daniel Defoe. Much of the Review is taken up with
refutations of personal attacks on the author, forcing the editor to apologize
for ‘the Interruptions frequently given the Reader and my self, by the
Apologies and Defences I have been Oblig’d to make’ (31 May 1705).
Taking personal responsibility for the views expressed in the paper is pre-
sented as a point of honour and a courageous stance: Defoe tells us that he
has received ‘20 to 30’ death threats (Review 7 July 1705).
The members of the Spectator Club are rarely employed as mouthpieces.
Mr Spectator imagines some readers attempting to decipher the initial
letters at the end of each paper and ascribing different issues to different
members of the club:

Some tell us, that C is the Mark of those Papers that are written by the
Clergyman, though others ascribe them to the Club in general. That the
Papers marked with R were written by my Friend Sir ROGER. That L
signifies the Lawyer, whom I have described in my Second Speculation;
and that T stands for the Trader or Merchant: But the Letter X, which
is placed at the End of some few of my Papers is that which has puzled
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 71
the whole Town, as they cannot think of any Name which begins with
that Letter, except Xenophon and Xerxes, who can neither of them be sup-
posed to have had any Hand in these Speculations.
(Spectator 221)

This playful suggestion is clearly proposed in order to demonstrate its

impossibility. The array of signature letters at the feet of the individual
papers does suggest a number of different contributors to the paper, but very
few of the numbers seem appropriate to specific members of the club.
Addison may here be attempting to encourage speculation as to the paper’s
authorship – a good way of maintaining interest in the paper – but part of
the paper’s effectiveness lies in the uniformity of its tone, the impossibility
of knowing whether authorship was single or multiple. On the whole, the
members of the club are not distinctive voices within the paper. They are
more often alluded to than discussed, more often discussed than ventrilo-
quized.
Exceptions to this rule are relatively few: Will Honeycomb contributes
long letters to the Spectator, which take up most of three issues (Spectators
499, 511 and 530); the Clergyman provides letters for Spectator 27 and
materials for two more issues (Spectators 103 and 186); Sir Andrew Freeport’s
reported conversation provides the substance of one (Spectator 232); and the
opinions of Captain Sentry and the Templar occupy one paper each (Spec-
tators 152 and 541). Despite his prominence in the club, Sir Roger de Cover-
ley does not write a paper, and it is striking how late in the periodical’s run
Captain Sentry’s and Will Honeycomb’s contributions appear. Addison
introduces Will’s first issue in a rather self-conscious manner, as if aware of
the oddness of this omission:

My Friend WILL HONEYCOMB has told me, for above this half Year, that
he had a great Mind to try his Hand at a Spectator, and that he would
fain have one of his Writing in my Works. This Morning I received
from him the following Letter, which, after having rectified some little
Orthographical Mistakes, I shall make a Present of to the Publick.
(Spectator 499)

As D.F. Bond has pointed out, the Spectator frequently handles topics
which seem particularly appropriate to one or other of the club members.
He points out that the templar ‘who might have been an obvious choice for
the expression of opinions about the drama and other literary matters’ fea-
tures seldom, as does Captain Sentry, an obvious candidate for the expression
of opinions about army life, a frequent topic in the paper (1965: xxxiii).
Will Honeycomb’s expertise in fashion – he ‘knows the History of every
72 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
Mode’ and ‘remembers Habits as others do Men’ (Spectator 2) – eminently
qualifies him to comment on dress. Mr Spectator remarks that he has
‘Thoughts of creating an Officer under me, to be entituled the Censor of small
Wares’ to critique the excesses of contemporary fashion (Spectator 16), but he
does not suggest Will for this task. The Clergyman would also seem an
appropriate persona to adopt for Addison’s more serious Saturday papers on
morality and religion.
The Spectator is not the only paper to begin with the introduction of an
elaborate club fiction which turns out to be far less prominent in the body of
the paper than the opening issues would lead us to expect. This is also true
of Steele’s other periodicals the Lover and the Theatre and Addison and
Steele’s Guardian. The first issue of the Lover (1714) introduces us to the
members of its editor’s club: each of them a man at a different stage of life
and in a different romantic situation. The editor emphasizes the distinctive
contribution which each of them makes to the conversation of the club, with
the strong suggestion that this conversation will be minuted in the periodi-
cal. Mr Oswald is a recent widower with children, who ‘is indulged by this
Company to speak of [his wife] in the Terms she deserved of him, with
allowance to mingle Family-Tales concerning the Merit of his Children’.24
Mr Mullet is a wealthy older widower, sought in marriage by many merce-
nary young ladies. Mr Johnson is happily married with many children,
leading the editor to comment that ‘the manner of subjecting his Desires to
his Circumstances, which are not too plentiful, may give Occasion in my
future Discourses to draw many Incidents of Domestick Life’. Mr Wildgoose
is a confirmed bachelor, inclined to be bitter and misogynistic, having been
disappointed in love in his youth. Mr Oswald is reintroduced in Lover 29,
with a telling preamble which must have reminded readers of the differences
between the promises of the first issue and subsequent editorial practice:
‘The Reader may remember that in my first Paper I described the Circum-
stances of the Persons, whose Lives and Conversations my future Discourses
should principally describe’. Mr Oswald is the only member of the club to
be mentioned again in the course of the paper.
Steele’s Theatre (1720) describes a similar club in its first issue, this time a
club of women who meet at the apartment of a Lady Sophronia: ‘Flavia, a
very docile and ingenious Maiden; Lysetta, a Widow . . . and Sophonisba, a
dependent Relation’ (Theatre 1). We are told that ‘Sophronia and her three
Friends are great Patronesses, and Advocates for the Theatre, and I shall
from time to time give an Account of their Sentiments relating to it’ (ibid.).
The Theatre, however, quickly becomes embroiled in political and theatrical
controversy, and the four female theatre critics are never heard of again.
The Guardian provides a particularly striking example of a similar elabor-
ate framing device, although here the club is replaced by the family, a move
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 73
which enables Steele to incorporate both male and female figures and
perhaps reflects a wish to celebrate family life. The early issues of the
Guardian describe the Lizard family, to whom the editor, Nestor Ironside,
has been an unofficial guardian for decades. The Lizards, with their interests
(on the male side) in trade and economics and (on the female side) in love
and marriage, seem to provide a plethora of opportunities for use as mouth-
pieces or for reported conversation. The editor strengthens this supposition
by telling the reader ‘that his chief Entertainment will arise from what
passes at the Tea Table of my Lady Lizard’ (Guardian 2). The Lizard family,
we are told, can provide a perspective on every subject:

There is no Circumstance in human Life, which may not directly or

indirectly concern a Woman thus related [as Aspasia, the Lizard matri-
arch], there will be abundant Matter offer it self from Passages in this
Family, to supply my Readers with diverting, and perhaps useful
Notices for their Conduct in all the Incidents of human Life.
(ibid.)

Lady Lizard’s daughters encompass a suggestive range of female types:

Jane, the good housewife; Annabella, a malicious wit; Cornelia, a bookworm
and would-be scholar; Betty, worldly wise and mercenary; and the spirited
and witty Mary, whom the editor always refers to as the Sparkler. We also
learn about their suitors: Sir William Oger (a suitor of Lady Lizard’s) and his
son Oliver; a Mr Rigburt, who wishes two of his sons to marry two of the
daughters; and Sir Harry Pandolf (in Guardian 5). Lady Lizard’s ambitious
marital plans for her daughters, coupled with the sheer number of unmar-
ried young women and their suitors, suggest tantalizing narrative possi-
bilities. Jane’s story, in particular, seems ripe for plot developments. She is
in love with a worthy, but penniless suitor, while her mother is trying to
marry her off to a wealthy boor. The editor implies that he will unfold the
details of the lives of the Lizard family members when he tells us, ‘As I write
Lives, I dwell upon small Matters, being of Opinion, with Plutarch, that
little Circumstances show the real Men better than things of greater
Moment’ (Guardian 6). There are suggestions that the periodical will be,
among other things, a group memoir.
Despite their prominence in the early issues of the Guardian, the Lizard
family increasingly fade from view as the periodical progresses. Of the
Guardian’s 175 issues, only 13 deal directly with the Lizards, and they are
alluded to briefly in only half a dozen more. Most of these issues are to be
found in the first third of the paper’s run. In particular, none of the narrative
possibilities suggested by the Lizards are developed further. We hear
nothing more of Jane’s marital prospects, for example. In Guardian 26 we
74 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
are told, tantalizingly, that Nestor is ‘in Love by Proxy for Sir Harry Lizard’,
but the periodical contains no further mention of this interesting develop-
ment. In some of the early issues, the Lizard daughters are used to illustrate
the spectrum of contrasting female views and behaviour, for example, in a
discussion of happiness (Guardian 31) and a visit to see Othello (Guardian
37), but as the periodical continues they are increasingly replaced as exempla
by readers’ letters and by frequent paraphrases of Classical literature, Eastern
tales and allegorical dream visions. Some of the later issues betray a vague-
ness as to the exact details of the Lizard family situation that suggests that
Addison and Steele had tired of this framing device. In Guardian 65, Nestor
is interrupted at divine service by a gang of giggling women, amongst
whom he spots one of Lady Lizard’s daughters. Despite his careful delin-
eation of their contrasting personalities in the early issues, he does not even
specify which Lizard daughter this is.
Defoe’s Review also introduces a club, appetizingly called ‘the Scandalous
Club’, which the editor describes as ‘a Corporation long since established in
Paris’ (19 February 1704). The ‘Advice from the Scandalous Club’ ran from
February 1704 to November 1705: as a section in the Review itself until
April 1705 and in the form of a monthly Supplementary Journal (1704–5).
The project was resuscitated in June 1705 as a separate publication, the
Little Review, which lasted for 23 issues. The Club begin by critiquing the
daily newspapers and responding to readers’ complaints of injustice and
antisocial behaviour, but by August 1704 the ‘Advice from the Scandalous
Club’ has become a forum for answering readers’ queries on subjects ranging
from marital problems to natural history, closely following the model of the
Athenian Mercury. Despite the growing size and importance of this section of
the Review, Defoe’s use of the club fiction is rather perfunctory. When Defoe
defends the Club against an accusation of libel, he refers to the ‘author’ of
the Scandalous Club, and uses the third person singular throughout (Review
29 April 1704). Introducing the first number of the Supplementary Journal, he
tells his readers that ‘the Hand that operates in this Work’ is ‘allegorically
rather than significantly call’d a Society’ (September 1704). A reader of the
Little Review, who explicitly addresses his letter to ‘Mr. de Foe’, rather than
to a fictional persona, asks ‘what Appellation the Society assumes; and whether it
consists of a Number, or a single Person’ (2, 15 August 1705). He receives the
teasing answer that ‘we are one Person, sometimes Mr. Review, sometimes
the Scandal Club, sometimes one single Body, sometimes a Body Corporate’
(Little Review 2). Charles Ranger of the Gray’s Inn Journal is also a member of
a rather shadowy club, which is only mentioned two or three times in the
course of the paper’s run; he himself points out that ‘I must consider myself
an unworthy Member, as I have not of late attended [meetings] with proper
Punctuality’ (37, 8 June 1754).
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 75
In view of this disproportion between the detail with which clubs
are described in early issues of periodicals and the relative paucity of
their role within the body of the periodicals, it seems necessary to ask why
clubs were so popular with early editors. Part of the answer may lie in
the particular demands of the periodical as a genre: periodicals could
not conform to a plan set in stone from the opening issues. Editors needed
to be able to respond to public interest in a particular current event or
fad, to answer correspondence or to pursue areas which seemed to
attract particular readerly approbation (as gauged by the volume of corre-
spondence a particular subject generated or the sales figures for an individual
issue). Perhaps readers simply did not respond with interest to the
club fiction or address their correspondence to individual members of
the club. In Lillie’s collection of original correspondence to the Tatler
and the Spectator, only one letter is addressed to Jenny Distaff, and none
are addressed to members of the Spectator club (Lillie 1725: 1.125–9).
The club fiction may have served as an editorial insurance policy, with char-
acters and storylines which could be taken up if other copy was scarce.
However, in addition to these pragmatic considerations, the club fiction
probably served at least two important structural purposes. It provided an
important middle ground between the editor as private individual and the
public world of print, and it also offered a model of sociable reading and
writing practices.
In the Tatler, Isaac Bickerstaff begins by dividing his paper into sections,
each dated from a different coffee-house, but in the course of the Tatler’s run
an increasing number of papers are headed ‘Sheer-Lane’ (where Bickerstaff
lives) or ‘From my own Apartment’, and the paper’s division into headings is
gradually phased out. Writing is presented as an essentially solitary, private
activity: the collected edition of the Tatler is subtitled the Lucubrations of
Isaac Bickerstaff Esq., suggesting that the issues were written late at night,
alone, by flickering lamplight. In the Spectator, by contrast, writing is more
sociable. Mr Spectator produces a series of papers during a visit to Sir Roger
de Coverley, for example (Spectators 106–31), and papers are sometimes
inspired by discussions in a club setting. In Spectator 99, for example, the
editor tells us:

The Club, of which I have often declared my self a Member, were last
Night engaged in a Discourse upon that which passes for the chief Point
of Honour among Men and Women, and started a great many Hints
upon the Subject which I thought were entirely new. I shall therefore
methodize the several Reflections that arose upon this Occasion, and
present my Reader with them.
(Spectator 99)
76 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
The Spectator’s presentation of public and private realms is a very unusual
one. Mr Spectator combines some of the traditional characteristics of the
retired scholarly writer with those of the clubbable man. Outside his club,
he maintains a profound silence, communicating with his landlady by
sign language, for example (see Spectator 12). In this, he is the opposite of
the traditional periodical editor, usually portrayed as a blabbermouth, a
Babler, Tatler, Parrot, Tatling Harlot or Female Tatler. Addison and
Steele’s later persona Nestor Ironside is more typical, his name alluding
playfully to Steele’s authorship but also to Homer’s ‘everlasting Story-teller’
(Guardian 121), the original literary model of the garrulous old man. As
Michael Ketcham has noted, there are two Mr Spectators (1985: 14–15): the
confident, authoritative editor who reaches a wide audience and the shy,
silent man, who rarely opens his lips outside his own club and is so incon-
spicuous that even Will Honeycomb fails to recognize him while staring
him straight in the face. ‘My Appearance before him just put him in mind
of me, without making him reflect that I was actually present’, the editor
explains (Spectator 77). His silence in company leads many to suspect that he
is a Jesuit, a disaffected courtier, a misanthropist or a white witch (see Spec-
tators 4 and 131).
Ketcham argues that the Spectator breaks down the traditional oppositions
between the retired and the active life. Mr Spectator has the shy reclusive
qualities of the retired man but he is uncomfortable in the country and
prefers to seek his solitude in a crowd. He tells us that ‘he who comes into
Assemblies only to gratifie his Curiosity, and not to make a Figure, enjoys
the Pleasures of Retirement in a more exquisite Degree, than he possibly
could in his Closet’ (Spectator 4). Mr Spectator is ‘frequently seen in most
publick Places’ and, indeed, tells us that ‘there is no Place of general Resort,
wherein I do not often make my Appearance’ (Spectator 1). He mingles freely
with every company – ‘where-ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix
with them’ (ibid.) – and manages to be sociable without opening his lips: ‘I
always make one of the Company I am in; for though I say little my self, my
Attention to others, and those Nods of Approbation which I never bestow
unmerited, sufficiently shew that I am among them’ (Spectator 77).
Ketcham’s argument centres on the Spectator’s depiction of the family,
which he claims ‘exists as a mediator between the self-display of the public
world, and the retired isolation of the private’ (1985: 105). In a similar
manner, the club provides a liminal space, one which is neither purely
public nor purely private, not a place of business dealings and political
intrigue, yet not a solitary space either. The coffee-house forms a parallel
with the family hearth or the small village community: ‘The Coffee-house is
the Place of Rendezvous to all that live near it, who are thus turned to relish
calm and ordinary Life’ (Spectator 49). The editor comments further:
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 77
You see in their Countenances they are at home [my italic], and in quiet
Possession of the present Instant, as it passes, without desiring to
Quicken it by gratifying any Passion, or prosecuting any new Design.
These are the Men formed for Society, and those little Communities
which we express by the Word Neighbourhoods.
(ibid.)

Addison and Steele equate coffee-houses and clubs with tea-tables and
assemblies, their domestic equivalents, throughout the paper. The coffee-
house may be a place only frequented by men, but, in Addison and Steele’s
vision of it as a ‘Place of Rendezvous’, they imagine the ideal coffee-house
club as one which acts as a substitute home and family for the bachelor
editor and which has an equivalent in the domestic tea table. Mr Spectator
expresses the hope:

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.
I would therefore in a very particular Manner recommend these my
Speculations to all well regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in
every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would earnestly
advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served
up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage.
(Spectator 10)

The parallel constructions here make clubs and assemblies, tea tables and
coffee-houses seem almost interchangeable terms. The passage moves easily
from the idea of the paper in the coffee-house to the particular recommenda-
tion that it should be read by families at home.
The common denominator which links the editor in his club and the
reader at the tea table is sociability, a sociability which is part of the periodi-
cal’s means of production, its consumption and its subject matter. ‘My
Paper’, Mr Spectator claims, ‘is in a Kind a Letter of News, but it regards
rather what passes in the World of Conversation than that of Business’ (Spec-
tator 468). The paper will ‘daily instil into [readers] such sound and whole-
some Sentiments, as shall have a good Effect on their Conversation for the
ensuing twelve Hours’ (Spectator 10). The editor will take it ‘for the greatest
Glory of my Work, if among reasonable Women this Paper may furnish
Tea-Table Talk’ (Spectator 4). He tells us that in an essay-periodical, ‘Know-
ledge, instead of being bound up in Books, and kept in Libraries and Retire-
ments . . . is canvassed in every Assembly, and exposed upon every Table’
(Spectator 124). Even the letters which the Spectator receives are a written
78 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
version of conversation. The editor observes that ‘it is wonderful that a Man
cannot observe upon himself when he sits down to write, but that he will
gravely commit to Paper the same Man that he is in the Freedom of Conver-
sation’ (Spectator 284).
While contemporary novels increasingly refer to their readers as silent
and solitary (see J. Paul Hunter 1977; Sitter 1982: 9), the Spectator encour-
ages group reading and reading aloud. Many of Mr Spectator’s correspon-
dents allude to these practices in their letters. The female correspondent who
reports that she is part of ‘a Company of young Females, who peruse your
Speculations every Morning’ (Spectator 319) is typical. Many readers bear
witness to the popularity of the Spectator as a topic of female conversation.
One reports that ‘the Triumph of Daphne over her Sister Letitia [in Spectator
33] has been the Subject of Conversation at several Tea-Tables where I have
been present’ (Spectator 53), while another relates that he belongs to ‘a
private Assembly of Wits of both Sexes, where we generally descant upon
your Speculations’ (Spectator 547). A male correspondent relates that at a
gathering of women he was asked to read the Spectator aloud to the assem-
bled company (Spectator 271), and groups of men also seem to be fond of
reading the paper aloud: references to reading the Spectator are frequently in
the first person plural. Many letters begin like Philo-Spec’s, who writes, ‘I
was this Morning in a Company of your Well-wishers, when we read over,
with great Satisfaction, Tully’s Observations on Action adapted to the
British theatre [in Spectator 541]’ (Spectator 542). A group of Oxford men
even gather together to read the collected Spectator aloud (Spectator 553).
While all of these letters may be fictional, the correspondents in Lillie’s col-
lection of Original and Genuine Letters bear witness to equally sociable
reading practices. The collection is peppered with references to tea table and
coffee-house readings and discussions, and many letters claim to be the
result of club resolutions. One correspondent tells Mr Spectator that, at a
regular ‘meeting of several wealthy and learned citizens’, reading the Specta-
tor aloud is always a fixed item on their agenda and that he has been ‘ordered
to send you the minutes of the board’ (Lillie 1725: 2.15). The Spectator club
mirrors and encourages the readers’ own clubs, clubs for the enjoyment of
the Spectator.
The club device provides a model of sociability, not only between editors
or between readers, but also between writer and audience. As David Shields
(1997) has argued, it is the means ‘by which an anonymous readership was
recruited into a sense of print fellowship’ (qtd. Scott Black 1999: 29). The
editor in the club is a far more accessible figure than the lone writer in the
garret, particularly as clubs generally meet in public places, such as coffee-
houses. The editor is a man-about-town, spending time in the same places as
his readers. In the opening issue of the Spectator, the editor names the places
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 79
where he is most likely to be found: at the coffee-houses Will’s, Child’s,
Jonathan’s, the Grecian and the Cocoa Tree; at the Exchange; and at the
theatres in Covent Garden and Drury Lane (Spectator 1). Similarly, during the
Guardian’s run, Steele set up a lion’s head at Button’s coffee-house that male
readers could use as a kind of post box to communicate with the editor.
Steele’s eidolon Marmaduke Myrtle of the Lover explains the main difference
between himself, a journalistic knight-errant in the Bickerstaffian mould, and
the knights-errant of old: ‘I am more accessible than any other Knights were
before me, and in plain Terms . . . there is a Coffee-house under my Apart-
ment’ (Lover 2). He tells his readers, ‘The two Theatres, and all the Polite
Coffee-houses, I shall constantly frequent, but principally the Coffee-house
under my Lodge, Button’s, and the Play house in Covent-Garden’ (Lover 5).
Knowing the editor’s haunts invited readers to guess at his real identity,
and it also held out the promise that they might be able to read about events
which they had witnessed first hand or recognize the pen-portraits of friends
and acquaintance. Frequenting the same coffee-houses as the editor made
them part of the extended club formed by the periodical’s readers. The Spec-
tator’s correspondents are used in many of the ways in which the fictional
club members are not. They frequently serve to provide different perspec-
tives and different voices. Within the periodical itself, this extended club
was gradually to replace the fictional one.

The extended club of correspondents

The most immediate difference between correspondents and members of the
Spectator club is that the club members are patently fictional, while the Spec-
tator’s letter-writers may be real. There are, of course, different degrees of
authenticity: some letters may have been printed unchanged, others may
have been heavily edited, and even where the letters are genuine, the situ-
ations they describe and the identities which the correspondents claim could
be fictions. Nearly half of all the Spectator issues are made up wholly or in
part of letters, most of them in numbers attributed to Steele. The publica-
tion of daily issues of the Spectator for a period of 22 months must have been
an onerous task, particularly for Steele, who as general editor was probably
responsible for all aspects of the paper’s publication. It seems likely that he
would have lightened this task by having frequent recourse to readers’
letters to provide copy. D.F. Bond has calculated that nearly two-thirds of
Steele’s issues contain correspondence, and many of these are exclusively col-
lections of letters.25 Steele usually presents the letters as a miscellany, rather
than grouping letters on specific themes, suggesting that he printed what-
ever correspondence he had to hand on any particular occasion. The letters
are often prefaced with little more than an introductory sentence, with the
80 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
editor pleading business or laziness in his defence: claiming to publish
letters ‘for Want of Time to substitute something else in the Room of them’
(Spectator 461); because of other duties – ‘This being a Day of Business with
me’ (Spectator 518); or merely because, as he writes in the Englishman, he is
‘at this present Writing a little touched with the Disease the Writer of the
following Letter complains of [laziness]’ (Englishman 33). It seems over-
whelmingly likely that many of these letters were genuine.
As we have seen, a number of original letters to the Spectator have sur-
vived, most of which were never published in the periodical (see R.P. Bond
1959; Lillie 1725). During the paper’s run, Addison and Steele suggest the
value which these unpublished letters might have. They print a letter from
Anthony Title-Page, a stationer who requests the use of the Spectator’s
‘Refuse Letters’, which, the correspondent claims, could at worst be sold ‘by
the Pound Weight to his good Customers the Pastry-Cooks’ (Spectator 304).
Writing in the second series of the Spectator, Thomas Tickell suggests

that if the several Letters, which are Written to me under the Character
of SPECTATOR, and which I have not made use of, were published in a
Volume, they would not be an unentertaining Collection. The Variety
of the Subjects, Stiles, Sentiments, and Informations, which are trans-
mitted to me, would lead a very curious, or very idle Reader, insensibly
along, through a great many Pages.
(Spectator 619)

The rejected letters were to be published by Charles Lillie in two volumes

in 1725. They were published by subscription, which implies that there was
considerable public interest in them. The Spectator is not the only periodical
to suggest that its correspondence is of independent worth – even if only to
‘a very curious, or very idle Reader’. John Tipper’s Delights for the Ingenious
was a repository for letters which could not be printed in his Ladies Diary.
He tells his readers that the ‘Entertainment . . . is, for the most part, of their
own providing’ (Delights for the Ingenious 1, January 1711). Edward Cave
launched the separate periodical Miscellaneous Correspondence (1742–8) to
house ‘Essays, Dissertations, etc. on various Subjects, sent to the Author of
the Gentleman’s Magazine, which could not be inserted’ (subtitle).
In addition to the Spectator’s ‘Refuse Letters’, the originals of a few letters
which appeared in the periodical have since been published. Comparing
these with the printed versions reveals that Steele usually edited the corre-
spondence, often extensively, and frequently completely rewrote the letters.
As R.P. Bond points out, when Steele claims to include a letter in its ori-
ginal form, he states this explicitly – ‘I am of Opinion that I ought some
times to lay before the World the plain Letters of my Correspondents in the
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 81
artless Dress in which they hastily send them’ (Spectator 268) – implying
that this is the exception, not the rule (1959: xlii–xliii).
In fact, Mr Spectator only occasionally singles out a letter as deserving of
publication unaltered. A description of a female paragon is prefixed by the
assertion that ‘I . . . publish it just as it came to my Hands’ (Spectator 302): it
is important that the reader should believe that the woman described is a
real person and therefore a suitable model for imitation, not a figment of the
editor’s imagination. Mr Spectator sometimes implies – though rarely
explicitly states – that emotive letters expressing readers’ grief have been
little changed; they are meant to convey pathos, to be spontaneous and
heartfelt, rather than products of careful and self-conscious artistry. In a
paper on affliction, he publishes a letter from a woman whose lover has died,
telling readers that ‘the following Letter . . . though Subscribed by a ficti-
tious Name, I have reason to believe is not Imaginary’ (Spectator 163). He
introduces a heartrending letter from a woman who has married against her
father’s will with the declaration that ‘I am more pleased with a Letter that
is filled with Touches of Nature than of Wit’ (Spectator 181). Similarly, in
Spectator 199, Steele tells us that ‘the following Letters are written with such
an Air of Sincerity, that I cannot deny the inserting of them’. Steele’s choice
of words is perhaps significant here. The letters have ‘Touches of Nature’
and ‘an Air of Sincerity’, but this does not mean that the editor has not
improved them. The only letters of this kind that we know to have been
published unchanged are the extracts from the correspondence between
Steele and his second wife, Mary Scurlock, published as ‘Genuine, and the
Images of a Worthy Passion’, as if submitted by a correspondent called
Andromache (Spectator 142; see Steele 1968: 192–200, 273).
Mr Spectator makes no secret of the fact that correspondents could expect
to see their letters appear with considerable alterations. He invites correspon-
dence from those who have good ideas, but are not skilled at expressing them:

If he [the reader] has started any Hint which he is not able to pursue, if
he has met with any surprizing Story which he does not know how to
tell, if he has discovered any epidemical Vice which has escaped my
Observation, or has heard of any uncommon Vertue which he would
desire to publish; in short, if he has any Materials that can furnish out
an innocent Diversion, I shall promise him my best Assistance in the
working of them up for a publick Entertainment.
(Spectator 16)

Hints and information will suffice: the editor will know how to tell the story
and work up the materials into something fit for public consumption. In an
issue thanking his correspondents for their contributions, Addison explains:
82 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
Sometimes indeed I do not make use of the Letter it self, but form the
Hints of it into Plans of my own Invention, sometimes I take the
Liberty to change the Language or Thought into my own way of speak-
ing and thinking.
(Spectator 271)

Correspondents frequently humbly offer to ‘submit [their letters] to your

better Judgment, to receive any other Model you think fit’ (Spectator 302). In
the preface to his collection, Lillie apologizes for what he describes as a defi-
ciency in the ‘correctness, stile, and beauty’ of the Spectator’s original corre-
spondents: ‘As they were wrote with a view of being amended, it is hoped
the reader will make allowances’ (1725: n.p.).
The question of the status of the letters – whether genuine or fictional –
is a complicated one and must have been as opaque to contemporaries as it is
to us. As critics of the novel have noted, the blurring of the boundaries
between fact and fiction is a conspicuous feature of early eighteenth-century
writing. It takes a particularly involved form here. The letters may or may
not describe real events, they may or may not have been sent in by real cor-
respondents, and they may or may not have been slightly or radically altered
by the paper’s editors. Trying to discover which letters were real and to
recognize the originals of the pen-portraits they contained must have been
part of the fun of reading the paper for many contemporaries. While later
papers were to make repeated claims for the authenticity of their letters, the
Spectator contains several playful hints that many of the letters are inven-
tions, a fact about which the editors are unapologetic. ‘Some will have it’,
writes Addison,

that I often write to my self, and am the only punctual Correspondent I

have. This Objection would indeed be material, were the Letters I
communicate to the Publick stuffed with my own Commendations, and
if, instead of endeavouring to divert or instruct my Readers, I admired
in them the Beauty of my own Performances.
(Spectator 271)

From the point of view of the periodical’s literary qualities or Addison

and Steele’s aims as writers, the question of the letters’ provenance is irrele-
vant. However, Mr Spectator describes this question as arousing a keen
interest among readers:

When I have been present in Assemblies where my Paper has been

talked of, I have been very well pleased to hear those who would detract
from the Author of it observe, that the Letters which are sent to the
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 83
Spectator are as good, if not better, than any of his Works . . . I have
heard several of these unhappy Gentlemen proving, by undeniable
Arguments, that I was not able to pen a Letter which I had written the
Day before.
(Spectator 542)

The attribution of the Spectator letters involves the question of literary

fame. Correspondents are both readers and writers, and Mr Spectator suggests
that some readers believe that they have at least as much literary talent as the
editors. Many contemporary novelists claim to be merely editors of journals
or letters – Defoe depicts himself as the editor of Moll Flanders’s autobiogra-
phy; Samuel Richardson poses as the editor of Clarissa and Lovelace’s letters –
yet it is unlikely that these claims were taken seriously. Here, however, the
question of how to ascribe authorship is more complicated.
Many correspondents claim to be writing to the Spectator in search of lit-
erary fame. Timothy Stanza, who sends in a poem to his mistress, writes can-
didly, ‘You cannot imagine how much Service it will do me with my Fair
one, as well as Reputation with all my Friends, to have something of mine
in the Spectator’ (Spectator 473). As one correspondent puts it, ‘It is no
Wonder if all Mankind endeavours to get somewhat into a Paper which will
always live’ (Spectator 78). Steele describes the Guardian as ‘a kind of Nursery
for Authors’ where a writer can see ‘if his Parts and Talents are to the
publick Taste’ before embarking on a more ambitious work (Guardian 98).
Mr Spectator imagines his neglected correspondents as ‘Writers, who impa-
tiently long’d to see them [their contributions] appear in Print, and who, no
Doubt, triumph’d to themselves in the Hopes of having a Share with me in
the Applause of the Publick’ (Spectator 442). Boswell reports that in the early
part of the century ‘there were several people alive in London, who enjoyed a
considerable reputation merely from having written a paper in “the Specta-
tor”’ (1964–71: 3.33). Books sometimes claim, on no evidence, to have been
written by contributors to the Spectator. Donald F. Bond cites the History of
Providence; or, the Six Days Work of the Creation (1723), advertised as ‘by the
Author of several Spectators’ (D.F. Bond 1965: lvii).
Johnson satirizes these pretensions to literary fame in ‘The Idler’, where
he explains that ‘he that is known to contribute to a periodical work’ may
‘grow considerable’ at very small expense and ‘by a single paper, may
engross the honour of a volume’, attributing this to the jealousy of readers
who will allow literary merit to their fellow-readers, but not to the paper’s
editor: ‘The standing author of the paper is always the object of critical
malignity. Whatever is mean will be imputed to him, and whatever is excel-
lent be ascribed to his assistants’ (no. 2).26
The fame these would-be authors lay claim to is an extremely limited and
84 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
dubious one. The final issue of the first Spectator series lists only seven corre-
spondents by name: as for the rest, the editor has ‘not been able to trace
Favours of this kind, with any Certainty’ (Spectator 555). All the letters in
the periodical are printed anonymously or pseudonymously. The authors of
the letters in Lillie’s collection also sign their epistles with colourful sobri-
quets such as Jonathan Telltruth (1725: 1.10), Obadiah Clumsey (ibid.
1.119) and Fungoso Stich (ibid. 2.214). The only way to prove authorship of
a piece in the Spectator must have been either to show the manuscript to
friends before sending it in or to insert personal details which would be
recognized. Many letter-writers tell the editor that they have included these
personal markers, particularly when their contributions are designed for the
eyes of a wayward spouse or lover. ‘They tell me’, Mr Spectator writes of
these correspondents, ‘The Persons to whom they [their letters] are
addressed have Intimations, by Phrases and Allusions in them, from whence
they came’ (Spectator 204). Of course, the correspondents would have had no
way of knowing whether Addison and Steele would retain these distinguish-
ing marks when they edited the letters for publication. These letter-writers’
literary repute must, then, have been confined to a very narrow circle or
based solely on hearsay and unsubstantiated bragging.
In the Englishman, Steele ascribes the Spectator’s popularity to its corre-
spondence: ‘The great Success of a former Paper was owing to this Particu-
lar, that from the Plan of it, it lay open to receive the Sentiments of the rest
of the World into it’ (Englishman 16). Addison and Steele do occasionally
print complaints from readers at the sheer volume of letters and their uneven
quality. One reader begs the editor ‘to pardon us such Letters of your Corre-
spondents as seem to be of no Use but to the Printer’ and to substitute
advertisements in their stead (Spectator 310), while another notes ‘that those
Spectators which are so prettily laced down the Sides with little c’s [quotation
marks], how instructive or diverting soever they may be, do not carry with
them that Authority as the others’ and urges the editor to ‘bestow one
Penful of your own Ink’ upon the malefactors he is writing in to complain
about (gentleman who drive coaches as a hobby) (Spectator 526).
These protests, however, are exceptions. Mr Spectator is far more fre-
quently occupied in pacifying disgruntled correspondents angry at the omis-
sion of their letters. ‘My Correspondents take it ill’, he tells us, ‘if I do not
from Time to Time let them know I have received their Letters’ (Spectator
48). Even if he is unable to print these missives, he sometimes offers brief
answers to them within the periodical, even when these are not of any inter-
est to his general readership. In Spectator 581, the editor proposes dedicating
one paper a month to acknowledging correspondence received and offers
brief answers to some of the letters, even though he warns that these notices
will be cryptic to most of his readers: ‘Though I appear abstruse to most
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 85
People, it is sufficient if I am understood by my particular Correspondents’.
Mr Spectator perceives a duty to deal with his correspondents – ‘I think my
self obliged to take some Notice of them’ (Spectator 566) – even at the
expense of his general audience, almost as though these were personal letters
which it would be rude not to answer.
Addison and Steele repeatedly appeal to norms of polite social interaction
in this context. ‘It would be Arrogance to neglect the Application of my
Correspondents’, we are told (Spectator 168). In a entire number dedicated to
soliciting new correspondents, Mr Spectator begins by asserting that ‘it is an
impertinent and unreasonable Fault in Conversation, for one Man to take up
all the Discourse’ (Spectator 428), and in another paper he explains that ‘it is
reckoned a Piece of Ill-breeding for one Man to engross the whole Talk to
himself’ (Spectator 613). The choice of metaphor implies that the letter-
writers and the editor are engaged in a social relationship, one modelled on
conversation, that is, personal, face to face, verbal interaction. It is a rela-
tionship characterized by mutuality, equality, sociability and civility: rather
like the relationship between Mr Spectator and his fictional club.
This idea that an editor has a moral obligation of some kind to respond to
correspondents in print is a common one among periodical writers. In his
essay-series ‘The Idler’, Johnson comments that, in most publications, ‘in a
short time, apologies have become necessary to those ingenious gentlemen
and ladies, whose performances, though in the highest degree elegant and
learned, have been unavoidably delayed’ (no. 2). This seems an odd conven-
tion, however. Why should Mr Spectator acknowledge or publish letters
which are boring, irrelevant to the topic of the day or simply superfluous?
Defoe’s attitude in the Review seems far more understandable. He claims
wearily to have ‘thrown by a monstrous Heap of such Letters, wholly un-
answer’d’ (4 October 1711).
We need to examine why Mr Spectator makes such a merit of reacting
promptly to his correspondence, particularly since many later editors were to
imitate this focus on letters. In the Review, Defoe vividly describes the pres-
sures facing an author inundated with correspondence. He tells his readers
that he has been ‘Letter baited by Querists’ (Review vol. I, Preface), forcing him
to dedicate half his publication to answering their queries, even though such
a project was ‘as remote from his Thoughts, when he began this Paper, as
making a Map of the World in the Moon’ (Supplementary Journal, September
1704). Mr Review has even taken to writing ‘civil, private Answers’ to these
letters (vol. I, Preface), even though some correspondents try to bribe him
into printing their contributions, ‘with the Prevailing Argument of Money
inclos’d’ (Little Review 1, 6 June 1705). The Examiner also notes that ‘some
Wit, and much Leisure, have made it a Fashion among ingenious Persons, to
send Letters . . . to us Weekly Writers’ and claims that the editor has been
86 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
‘rather burthened than relieved by those Intelligences’, especially since
readers take offence when he neglects to print their missives (48, 28 June
1711). He feels an obligation, however, ‘to do what lies in my Power,
towards introducing into the World, the Works of these Anonymous Persons
who are so fond of being Authors’ (Examiner 48).
The Spectator’s correspondents base their entitlement to publication on
four different kinds of claims. They claim a right to a hearing of their com-
plaints and appeals against injustice; they offer to further the editor’s know-
ledge by bringing his attention to new species of people and new kinds of
behaviour; they demand answers to queries; and they use the paper as their
only possible means of communicating with others to whom they urgently
need to convey a message.
It is striking how many of the letters to the Spectator are protests and
lamentations. One of Lillie’s letter-writers aptly describes the periodical as
‘the common repository of complaints’ (1725: 2.195). Like Dunton’s Athen-
ian Society, Mr Spectator serves as a confidant to the troubled. The fron-
tispiece to Charles Gildon’s History of the Athenian Society (c.1693) shows
desperate readers clutching knives and nooses and holding up petitions to
the periodical’s editors to save them from their despair (Figure 3.1). Mr
Spectator also has his share of unhappy readers. He comments:

Were I to publish all the Advertisements I receive from different

Hands, and Persons of different Circumstances and Quality, the very
Mention of them, without Reflexions on the several Subjects, would
raise all the Passions which can be felt by the humane Mind. As
Instances of this, I shall give you two or three Letters; the Writers of
which can have no Recourse to any legal Power for Redress, and seem to
have written rather to vent their Sorrow than to receive Consolation.
(Spectator 402)

While the editor alludes here to ‘all the Passions of the humane Mind’,
the letters he prints in this issue highlight human suffering, in particular a
letter from Sylvia whose mother wishes her to prostitute herself to a friend
of her husband’s. She urges the editor to print her letter, ‘if you have any
Compassion for Injured Virtue’. While none of the Spectator’s correspondents
are suicidal, many express a profound sense of injustice, such as the female
shopkeeper subjected to continual sexual harassment who tells the editor:

The Chearfulness of Life which would arise from the honest Gain I have, is
utterly lost to me from the endless, flat, impertinent Pleasantries which I
hear from Morning to Night. In a Word, it is too much for me to bear.
(Spectator 155)
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 87

Figure 3.1 Frontispiece of Charles Gildon’s The History of the Athenian Society (c.1693).

Numerous correspondents complain of pettier annoyances, such as people

who speak the priest’s part of divine service along with him – ‘a Thing
extremely offensive’ to the writer – (Spectator 236); a man who sings and
dances in a coffee-house, disturbing the other customers (Spectator 148); or a
beautiful young woman who distracts the men from their devotions at
church (Spectator 503). The writers appeal to Mr Spectator since ‘the Offence
does not come under any Law’ (Spectator 503).
Some correspondents justify their contributions both because they are
88 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
legitimate complaints against others and because of their novelty value. The
Spectator is often presented as a collection of pen-portraits of different anti-social
characters, a sort of reference work of folly. Mr Spectator explains that ‘when I
meet with any vicious Character, that is not generally known . . . I draw it at
length, and set it up as a Scarecrow’ (Spectator 205). Correspondents sometimes
sound almost gleeful at having unearthed new prey for the editor. ‘As you have
somewhere declared [in Spectator 108], that extraordinary and uncommon Char-
acters of Mankind are the Game which you delight in’, writes one, ‘I thought
this Discovery would not be unacceptable to you’ (Spectator 371).
Some readers participate enthusiastically in the project of classifying Lon-
doners, which is such a prominent feature of the Tatler. ‘You have in some of
your Discourses described most sort of Women in their distinct and proper
Classes, as the Ape, the Coquet, and many others [see Spectators 209 and 247];
but I think you have never yet said any thing of a Devotée’, writes one,
sending in a description of a woman who is immersed in gloomy piety (Spec-
tator 354). Other letter-writers claim that the characters they describe are
unique. One complains of his wife, who has become obsessed with needle-
work and cookery to the point of locking her children away in a remote
corner of the house, to prevent them disturbing her in her housewifely pur-
suits. ‘I believe this is the first Complaint that ever was made to you of this
Nature’, he tells the editor (Spectator 328). The Spectator demonstrates a
keener interest in these originals and less of a concern with sorting and cata-
loguing social types than the Tatler. Mr Spectator also relies far more heavily
on his correspondents for his information than Isaac Bickerstaff did.
In particular, since Mr Spectator is a bachelor, and the members of his
club also appear to be unmarried – there is certainly no mention of club
members’ wives – he relies on his readers for accounts of married life, a very
frequent topic in the paper. As one correspondent puts it, ‘There are very
many things which you cannot possibly have a true Notion of, in a single
Life, these are such as respect the married State’ (Spectator 176). Mr Spectator
also condemns sexual immorality on many occasions and dedicates a number
of papers to the subject of prostitution.27 His knowledge of sexual licen-
tiousness is drawn not primarily from conversation with Will Honeycomb
but from his correspondents: ‘My Reader must not make uncharitable Infer-
ences from my speaking knowingly of that sort of Crime which is at present
treated of [debauching women]. He will, I hope, suppose I know it only
from the Letters of Correspondents’ (Spectator 182).
Despite Mr Spectator’s lack of personal experience of marriage, a number
of correspondents write in to ask the editor’s advice on love matters, particu-
larly on the choice of a partner. One correspondent alludes to Mr Spectator’s
reputation as ‘the Ladies Philosopher’ dispensing ‘pretty Advice’ (Spectator
380), while another calls him ‘the universal judge of all those that cannot
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 89
bring their causes before any other court’ (Lillie 1725: 2.206). The letters on
courtship often resemble similar queries in the Athenian Mercury, which is
full of letters from readers seeking love guidance, but Addison and Steele’s
treatment of these love cases differs from Dunton’s in certain important
regards. Dunton’s correspondents are confronted with complex and tricky
dilemmas, some of which seem to have been invented to test the editors’
ingenuity. One reader asks, for example, whether he should marry the
woman he loves, in opposition to a promise made at his father’s deathbed
(Athenian Mercury XIII.5, 20 February 1694); while another wonders whether
he should betray a friend’s confidence by warning his parents that he is in
love with ‘a notorious Jilt of the Town’ (ibid. XIII.20, 14 April 1694); and a
third enquires about the ethics of breaking a rashly-made vow (ibid. VIII.16,
22 October 1692). Urmi Bhowmik has shown that the Athenian Mercury can
be seen as a journalistic extension of a seventeenth-century Protestant casuis-
tical tradition that included the work of divines such as Jeremy Taylor,
Robert Sanderson, William Perkins and Richard Baxter (2003). The Athen-
ian Mercury’s editors lay claim to an authority which is almost sacerdotal.
The love queries sent to the Spectator, however, are less complicated. Most
correspondents are simply torn between love and avarice. B.D. asks Mr Spec-
tator whether she should marry a handsome but poor lover, whose main
qualifications are shining eyes and skill on the dance floor (Spectator 475);
Biddy Loveless is ‘very amorous and very covetous’ and cannot decide
between her rich lover, Will, and her handsome lover, Tom (Spectator 196);
and an unnamed male correspondent wonders whether to marry a young
woman whom he loves but who has no fortune (Spectator 254). These are
typical examples. The letters are frequently so schematic that it seems likely
that many of them were written by Addison and Steele themselves to serve
as exempla, rather than sent in by actual readers.
Unlike a modern agony aunt, and unlike Dunton’s Athenians and their
imitators, Mr Spectator usually leaves these queries unanswered. His
response to B.D. is typical: he considers her ‘ripe for asking Advice’ but
unlikely to pay any attention to his admonitions and therefore decides to
‘communicate the Letter to the Publick, without returning any Answer to it’
(Spectator 475). In Steele’s later periodical the Lover, the editor, Marmaduke
Myrtle, also receives a number of love queries. As one reader puts it, he
‘plays the Casuist’ (Lover 31). Myrtle tells us that ‘I must confess I did not
sufficiently weigh the great Perplexity that I should fall into, from the vast
Variety of Cases, when I undertook my present Province’ (Lover 22). Strik-
ingly, however, he rarely publishes any responses to the love cases sent in by
correspondents. Unlike the missives sent in to the Athenian Mercury, these
letters do not require any answers: any right-thinking reader will quickly
deduce what the correct course of action would be. Mr Spectator and Mar-
90 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
maduke Myrtle are very different editor-personae from Isaac Bickerstaff,
with his Court of Honour and the Athenians, with their authoritative pro-
nouncements. Bickerstaff and the Athenian Society seem far more like ‘uni-
versal judges’ than Mr Spectator. Mr Spectator’s readers are not expected to
wait with baited breath for his answers to correspondents’ questions, but to
know the answers and be amused or entertained by the letter-writers, a
response they share with the editor. While the Athenian Society is an
exclusive club of especially knowledgeable men who answer questions, Mr
Spectator’s readers are part of his club and share his values.
In addition to those correspondents who write to gain Mr Spectator’s
sympathy or advice or to obtain a place in his famous paper, there are many
who use the paper primarily as a means of communicating with other
readers. Some letter-writers hope that wayward spouses, lovers or friends
will be reformed by recognizing their pen-portraits in the Spectator. This
phenomenon is also alluded to in the Athenian Mercury, where we are told
that one cruel husband, on reading the depiction of himself in the paper, ‘is
convinc’d, and almost converted from Brute to Man: He has look’d at his picture so
long that he now loaths it’ (XIX.23, 14 January 1696). Many readers hope that
Mr Spectator’s moral authority will convince, where their own pleadings
have failed. A wife, whose husband is prone to fits of rage in which he breaks
her crockery, asks the editor to publish her letter: ‘My Husband having a
great Veneration for your Writings, will by that Means know you do not
approve of his Conduct’ (Spectator 563). A woman who is plagued by the
insults of a rude houseguest tells the editor, ‘Your Printing this Letter may
perhaps be an Admonition to reform him: Assoon [sic] as it appears I will
write my Name at the End of it, and lay it in his Way’ (Spectator 508). A
husband hopes that his negligent wife will change her ways on recognizing
herself in the Spectator’s pages, since ‘she reads you, and there is a Phrase or
two in this Letter which she will know come from me’ (Spectator 194). The
most elaborate of these endeavours to use the Spectator as an instrument of
moral amendment is henpecked husband Anthony Freeman’s attempt to
tame his domineering spouse, a woman whose behaviour is so outrageous
that he tells the editor that she would ‘afford you for some Months at least
Matter enough for one Spectator a Week’ (Spectator 212). Freeman plans to
have his friend Tom Meggot read a Spectator containing a detailed character
sketch of Mrs Freeman in her presence and promises to report the results of
this experiment. Several days later, Meggot describes Mrs Freeman’s reac-
tion: ‘raging, swooning, railing, fainting, pitying her self, and reviling her
Husband’ (Spectator 216). He fears that even the Spectator cannot reform her:
‘We are upon a thing we have not Talents for’ (ibid.).
Some correspondents use the Spectator not to complain about their lovers
or to try to reform them, but simply to communicate with them. For
 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents 91
women readers, in particular, the periodical provides a possibility of address-
ing their lovers frankly without forfeiting their modesty. One impecunious
suitor asks his mistress to take this means of reassuring him of her affection.
He promises to look out for ‘any Hint in any future Paper of yours she gives
me the least Encouragement’ (Spectator 304). The correspondent Statira
encloses a letter to her lover, who is reluctant to declare himself because, she
suspects, he would rather marry a wealthier woman and take Statira as his
mistress. Her letter, she tells the editor, is ‘a Declaration of Passion to one
who has made some feint Addresses to me for some time’ (Spectator 199) – a
declaration which would surely not have been acceptable if made directly –
and she has chosen to address him through the pages of the Spectator since it
is both public and private at once: ‘I can be at once revealed to you, or, if
you please, lye concealed’ (Spectator 199). The self-confessed jilt Amoret
sends in a letter to her lover, apologizing for her previous treatment of him.
She claims to have chosen this method of communication, since her lover has
demanded that she ‘contrive a way to make your Recantation as well known
to the Publick, as they are already apprized of the manner with which you
have treated me’ (Spectator 401). A cheeky postscript reveals that the corre-
spondent’s remorse is disingenuous, however. Amoret, who is probably a
creation of Eustace Budgell’s, asks Mr Spectator to ‘assure him [her lover]
that I know nothing at all of the Death of his rich Uncle in Gloucestershire’
(ibid.). Mr Spectator proclaims himself ‘not at all displeased that I am
become the Courier of Love’ and is happy to provide a vehicle for messages
from lovers, even at the expense of other readers. ‘As to the Reader’s Enter-
tainment’, he explains, ‘he will, I hope, forgive the inserting such Particulars
as to him may perhaps seem frivolous, but are to the Persons who wrote
them of the highest Consequence’ (Spectator 204).
The later issues of the Spectator, in particular, contain the beginnings of an
inter-readerly sociability: readers who are interested in the views and writ-
ings of correspondents and who wish to communicate with each other
through the paper. The periodical does not resemble the democratic free-for-
all of a modern unmoderated Internet discussion group: readers still appeal
primarily to Mr Spectator and seek the editor’s opinions and sanction, rather
than asking other readers directly for information. However, readers of the
Spectator were involved in a relationship which was not just two-way –
between editor and reader – but also between readers. The periodical fosters
a feeling of belonging, of clubbability, within its pages. It is a club that is,
of course, both exclusive – composed of people of particular discernment –
and open – to feel part of this club you only need to regard yourself as a
regular Spectator reader. The shift from fictional club members to correspon-
dents within the Spectator also reflects a wider trend in the development of
the periodical: from the gossipy essay-periodical, which initially appealed to
92 The Spectator: from editioral club to correspondents
a small, select London audience, to the magazine with its nationwide audi-
ence and its heavy reliance on readers’ letters and contributions.
Finally, the shift from club to correspondents is symptomatic of the
increasing divergence between the aims and strengths of the periodical and
those of the novel. While novelists explored the personalities of their often
eponymous heroes and heroines in ever more precise detail, journalists
turned away from the character sketch. Addison and Steele describe letters as
the ideal way of revealing personality. ‘I have ever thought’, remarks Mr
Spectator, ‘Men were better known, by what could be observed of them from
a Perusal of their private Letters, than any other way’ (Spectator 27). He feels
confident that he ‘may pronounce their Characters from their Way of
Writing’ (Spectator 124), since ‘nothing discovers the true Temper of a
Person so much as his Letters’ (Spectator 284). While novelists also employ
letters to reveal disposition, they do so in order to explore the thoughts and
feelings of their central characters in depth. In the periodical, letters are used
rather differently. They serve as extensions of the journalistic alter ego, as
when Addison confesses to ‘casting his Thoughts into a Letter’ (Spectator
542) in order to express himself in ways that would not be appropriate to Mr
Spectator, and as depictions of the periodical’s readership. We are always
uncertain whether letters are fiction or fact, the work of the editor or a
reader. The letters present us with a dizzying array of speakers. The periodi-
cal reminds one correspondent of a magic box which contained only one face
painted on it

that by pulling some Pieces of Isinglass over it, was chang’d into a grave
Senator or a Merry Andrew, a Patch’d Lady or a Nun, a Beau or a Black-
a-moor, a Prude or a Coquet, a Country ’Squire or a Conjurer, with
many other different Representations very entertaining . . . tho’ still the
same at the Bottom.
(Spectator 134)

The Spectator’s increasing focus on correspondence foreshadows the devel-

opment of the periodical as a whole from a preoccupation with eccentric
editor-personae and their small fictitious clubs to the heterogeneity we see
in the later magazines. In the Spectator, however, this variety is still under
strict control. Unlike some of those later magazines, the Spectator’s content is
miscellaneous, but not jumbled. The correspondents do not form a cacoph-
ony of competing voices, each appealing to only a small segment of the
paper’s readership. Nor does the paper stake its reputation on the authentic-
ity of its readers’ letters. Behind the isinglass, the physiognomy of Mr Spec-
tator is always visible. Both club members and correspondents serve
ultimately to illustrate and validate the editor’s views.
4 ‘Faction and Nonsense’
The rivalry between Common Sense and
the Nonsense of Common Sense

One area of early eighteenth-century public life in which women are almost
always conspicuously absent is the political essay-periodical. Despite Delar-
ivier Manley’s fiercely Tory essays for the Examiner in 1711,28 very few of the
contributors to such papers have been identified as women, and the papers
touch on issues of specifically feminine concern only infrequently. Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu is the only woman known to have edited a political
essay-journal in London before 1770. In her journalism, she addresses the
question of women’s involvement in politics and of their representation in
the most popular political essay-paper of the 1730s, Common Sense. Attitudes
towards women in the two periodicals – whether condescending, hostile and
misogynist, or chivalrous and even feminist – are an important indicator of
the editors’ journalistic aims. Sometimes the editors choose to emphasize
their role as political commentators, their involvement in a sphere in which
women and their interests are marginal, and at other times they choose to
portray themselves as witty and literary essay-writers in the tradition of
Addison and Steele. In such a tradition, women readers and female concerns
are central.
For a brief few months at the turn of the year 1737–8, Montagu entered
the public sphere of politics as a journalist.29 Unlike almost all the major lit-
erary figures of her generation, she chose to defend Robert Walpole’s admin-
istration. Montagu wrote anonymously in the guise of a humble male hack,
scribbling her copy, she tells us, in ‘my Garret’ (Nonsense 1), and she particu-
larly cautioned her printer to ensure that the writer’s identity remain
unknown: a caution that was to prove all too successful for more than two
centuries. The paper ran for only nine issues, at irregular intervals, between
16 December 1737 and 14 March 1738. Only two incomplete print runs
have survived and the paper was not reprinted until the mid-twentieth
century (Montagu 1947). There is no mention of the Nonsense of Common
Sense in Montagu’s letters of this period, and none of her contemporaries
appear to have been aware of her authorship of this paper.
94 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
Montagu had made two previous brief forays into journalism. A letter of
hers had been printed in the Spectator: a playful description of a club of
widows and the husbands they have buried (Spectator 573). She also con-
tributed a letter to the Flying-Post (13 September 1722), in the persona of a
Turkey merchant, recommending the inoculation practices against smallpox
which Montagu had observed in Constantinople (Montagu 1993: 95–7).
Montagu’s excursion into political journalism was the only time in her life
when she was directly involved in the publication of her own work. Her atti-
tude to publication was highly ambivalent. She warns her friend Lord Corn-
bury ‘that it was not the busyness of a Man of Quality to turn Author, and
that he should confine himselfe to the Applause of his Freinds and by no
means venture on the press’ (Montagu 1967: 3.37). Montagu’s perception of
publication as unfitting for an aristocrat makes it even more surprising that
she chose to edit a political periodical. As Isobel Grundy notes, ‘This was
writing under the sign of Grub Street’, which was ‘an odd milieu for a lady
of rank’ (1999: 372). Montagu tells her daughter, Lady Bute, in 1753 that,
although ‘no body ever had such various provocations to print as my selfe’,
she has never done so, ‘having never aim’d at the Vanity of popular
Applause’ (Montagu 1967: 2.39). Towards the end of her life she assures her:

I hope you have not so ill opinion of me as to think I am turning

Author in my old age. I can assure you I regularly burn every Quire as
soon as it is finish’d and mean nothing more than to divert my solitary
hours.
(Montagu 1967: 3.19)

On the other hand, she circulated her poems, essays and letters in manu-
script and allowed friends to take copies. As Lady Bute was to complain in
later life, ‘Everything got into print sooner or later’ (Montagu 1993: 19).
Montagu might well have secretly agreed with Sheridan’s creation Lord
Sneerwell in The School for Scandal who claims that it is ‘very vulgar to Print,
and as my little Productions are mostly Satires and Lampoons on particular
people I find they circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the
Friends of the Parties’ (Sheridan 1975: 233–4).
Montagu’s attitude towards politics was equally ambivalent. Only a few
months after the last issue of the Nonsense, she writes to her friend Lady
Pomfret that she had always been merely ‘a humble spectator’ of the polit-
ical scene and that she wonders why Chesterfield’s increasing physical frailty
does not induce him to ‘quit the stage’ on which he plays ‘an under-part in a
second-rate theatre’. She apologizes for boring her friend with such a ‘trifling
subject’ as politics and describes contemporary political writing as ‘pro-
foundly dull’ (Montagu 1967: 2.126–7). Her most intimate letters – those
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 95
written to Francesco Algarotti in the early months of 1738 – do not
mention her journalistic activities directly, but hint at a profound weariness
and disillusion with politics. Montagu writes that she is unable to distance
herself from the ‘Noise, croud and Division’ of London, and, in an indirect
allusion to the title of her paper, she tells Algarotti that only the remem-
brance of him can soothe and palliate ‘the rough impressions of Faction and
Nonsense’ (Montagu 1967: 2.115).
Why, then, did Montagu enter the journalistic fray? On her manuscript
copy of the Nonsense of Common Sense she wrote, ‘All these wrote by me
M.W.M. to serve an unhappy worthy man’, i.e. Robert Walpole (Montagu
1993: 105). Since Walpole’s victory in the general elections of 1734, the
Opposition had been in some disarray. Bolingbroke returned to France in
1735 and Pulteney took an increasingly less active part in Opposition poli-
tics in the House of Commons. The government launched the Daily
Gazetteer in 1735, combining most of the ministerial writers in one paper,
which was distributed free in large quantities by Walpole’s henchmen at the
Post Office. In 1737, there was a dramatic change in the political climate
when Frederick, Prince of Wales moved into open opposition, providing a
powerful figurehead for all those opposed to Walpole. In February 1737,
Pulteney proposed a motion in Parliament to increase the Prince’s
allowance. Also, on 5 February, the new Opposition paper Common Sense was
launched, edited by Charles Molloy, probably financed and backed by the
Old Pretender, and containing contributions by Chesterfield, Lord Lyttleton
and other prominent Opposition figures (Goldgar 1976: 156–7). On 31
March, Henry Fielding’s dramatic satire on the Robinocracy The Historical
Register for the Year 1736 opened at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket to
huge popular applause. Common Sense borrows its title from the figure of
Queen Common-sense in Fielding’s popular play of the previous year,
Pasquin. In May, Pope’s vicious satire The First Epistle of the Second Book of
Horace Imitated appeared and the Opposition launched a new periodical
attack with the Alchymist: or, the Spirit of Fog Reviv’d, which was promptly
indicted by the Grand Jury of Middlesex as a ‘Scandalous, Seditious and
Treasonable Libel’ (Harris 1987: 125). Walpole responded to these literary
sallies with a tougher stance towards the journalists, a campaign of harass-
ment and prosecutions and the introduction of the Theatre Licensing Act in
June, triggering fears of similar measures to place journalistic literature
under the control of a censor. In November, however, with the death of his
ally Queen Caroline, Walpole’s position was further weakened. One month
later, Montagu, the close friend of both Walpole’s mistress, Maria Skerett,
and his chief supporter in the House of Lords, Lord Hervey, took up the
journalistic cudgel on his behalf.30
An early eighteenth-century journalist writing in a political periodical
96 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
who wished to address the concerns of women had several options. Some
editors chose to satirize women’s undue influence in political debate or their
frivolous and uncomprehending interest in party politics. In the Spectator, for
instance, Addison ridicules those women who patch according to party (Spec-
tator 81). The Whig ladies, the right-hand sides of their faces spotted with
black, glare at their feminine political rivals in the opera boxes opposite
them. For them, politics is a game: a fashion and a feminine vanity. In the
Jacobite’s Journal, Fielding mocks the Jacobite women’s party rage, which he
opposes to the moderation of female Whigs:

May you not often pass a whole Day in the Company of a Whig-Lady
without knowing her political Principles, unless indeed that her Silence
on that Head declares her not to be of our Party [the Jacobites]?
Whereas, with our Women, it is hardly possible to sit an Hour.
(2, 12 December 1747)

The editor John Trott-Plaid tells his readers that he will be assisted in
writing the Jacobite’s Journal by his wife, who is pictured in the paper’s fron-
tispiece, ludicrously mounted behind him on an ass. He tells us that his wife
will write ‘a very considerable Part of this Paper’, dedicating herself to the
concerns of her female fellow-travellers (Jacobite’s Journal 2). She is qualified
for this office by ‘a most masculine Spirit’, as well as by her mendacity,
drunkenness and stupidity (ibid.). The portrait is a damning indictment of
female political journalists as well as women readers of political papers, even
though the promised issues by Mrs Trott-Plaid were never forthcoming. The
Gray’s Inn Journal warns its women readers that an interest in politics tends
‘to inflame the Ladies with Party-Rage, to cause Heats in the Face, and to
occasion those Vibrations of the Fan, Bitings of the Lips, and Fidgets on the
Chair, which greatly discompose the whole Form’, making it a more formid-
able destroyer of female beauty than ‘a Spotted-Fever or the Small-Pox’ (6
October 1753).
Other editors take the approach of separating issues dealing with women
and their foibles from those dedicated to political questions. Women, for
them, have no connection with politics and no interest in the subject. The
correspondent Omphale in Fielding’s Champion assumes that women are
uninterested in political journalism. She complains that ‘out of so many
Daily, Evening, and Weekly Papers, not one, that we ever hear of, meddles
with any Concerns of ours. – All are devoted to Politics, nothing but Poli-
tics’ (327, 15 December 1741). She defines women’s periodicals as those
modelled on the Tatler and the Spectator and argues that similar publications
might prevent women from satisfying their thirst for printed material by
‘devouring those crude, injudicious Things in the Novel and Adventure-
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 97
Way’ (ibid.). Political periodicals are liable only to induce ‘such a Fit of the
Vapours, as Hart’s Horn, Sal-volatile, or Assa foetida itself, can hardly cure’
(ibid.).
Politics was, however, sometimes, though not frequently, regarded as a
fitting topic for both female editors and readers. The Orphan Reviv’d
(1718–20) followed a political essay-leader with foreign and domestic news,
‘Printed and Sold by ELIZ. POWELL’, and letters were addressed to ‘Mrs.
Powell’ and ‘Madam’, although Elizabeth Powell’s persona remains undevel-
oped. In the Friendly Writer (1732–3), news is reprinted with commentary
in the voice of an elderly Quaker woman. The frontispiece shows the paper’s
editor, Ruth Collins, dressed in the distinctive garb of her sect, sitting
writing at a desk, with a rather severe expression on her face (Figure 4.1).
She defiantly claims, ‘I shall despise those who take occasion to scoff at my Manner
of Writing, and scorn the Work of a weak Woman’ (1732, Preface). The Dissent-
ing tradition has always included women preachers and prophets and female
Quakers can speak at a meeting if the spirit moves them. Ruth Collins
seems to claim some of this authority for her political journalism, employing
evocatively religious diction: ‘Doth it much rejoice my Spirit, that the Work of a
poor weak Woman should find Grace and Acceptance among the Men of the World’
(February 1732). Despite the colourful language – news is reported in a
Quaker idiom throughout – Ruth Collins does not appear to be a figure of
derision, since the paper sincerely represents Dissenting interests. The issue
for February 1732, for instance, is followed by an unironic pamphlet seeking
the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The Parrot (1728) contains dis-
cussion of news under the auspices of a Mrs Prattle. The editor complains
that ‘nothing will now go down among the Women but what is somewhat
relating to State and Politicks’ (3, 9 October 1728). Eliza Haywood’s later
paper of the same name (1746), written by ‘the AUTHORS of the FEMALE SPEC-
TATOR’, incorporates a news section called the ‘Compendium of the Times’
in the form of a letter from a gentleman to his friend in the country.
In papers specifically addressed to female readers, politics was frequently
presented in dialogue form, ‘as the most easy, familiar, and natural Method
for all Capacities’ (Lady’s Weekly Magazine 1, 19 February 1747). Mrs Pene-
lope Pry’s Lady’s Weekly Magazine, ‘calculated intirely for the Service and
Amusement of your Sex’ (ibid.), communicates foreign affairs in the form of a
conversation between the well-informed editor and two female friends, as
well as printing domestic news under place headings, in the conventional
way. The editor’s young friend Miss Bloom tells her readers that women
should follow political developments: ‘I like to know what is doing in the
world, as it will furnish me with knowledge useful in conversation and
pleasing in Society’ (ibid.). Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine presents news
in the form of ‘A History of England by Question and Answer’ as the
Figure 4.1 Ruth Collins of the Friendly Writer (1732–3).
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 99
leading essay of each issue in 1751. Women were also sometimes depicted as
readers of more mainstream political essay-sheets. A correspondent of the
polemical Mist’s Weekly Journal tells the editor that ‘nothing has made your
Paper more agreeable, than the carrying it home to our Wives and Daugh-
ters, who us’d frequently to read you with Pleasure’ and warns that ‘if you
disoblige the Women . . . Your Sale will never pay Paper and Press’ (73, 3
May 1718). An elaborate satire on Walpole in Henry Fielding’s Champion,
citing Quintillion, Aeschines and Horace, is ‘sign’d by a Woman, a Spinster
. . . BELINDA’ (334, 31 December 1741).
In the Freeholder, Addison argues that ‘Ladies are always of great use to
the Party they espouse, and never fail to win over Numbers to it’ (no. 4). In
accordance with this doctrine, he devotes a number of the periodical’s issues
to attempts to persuade his female readers that loyalty to the Hanoverian
succession is in their best interests. Women enjoy greater liberties under a
Protestant than a Catholic government, he argues (ibid.); men who harbour a
wish to betray their monarch will be equally unfaithful to their wives (Free-
holder 8); and the spouses of disaffected Tories are denied the pleasure of
attending Court (Freeholder 26). He encourages the Whig ladies to express
their support for the cause by such feminine means as flirting with Whigs
and scorning Tories, barring non-Jurors from their basset tables (Freeholder
8) and sporting fans decorated with motifs ‘both of Despotick Power and of
Male Tyranny’, such as ‘a Nunnery of lively black-Eyed Vestals, who are
endeavouring to creep out at the Grates’ or ‘a Turk dropping his Handker-
chief in his Seraglio’ (Freeholder 15). Addison urges the ladies to form a vol-
untary association and suggests that in their constitution they should
promise to use their feminine charms – ‘our Tongues and Hearts, our Eyes,
Eye-Lashes, Favourites, Lips, Dimples’ – in the service of King George (Free-
holder 8).
The Freeholder essays addressed to women are bristling with double stand-
ards. The early issues are chiefly concerned with inciting the Whig ladies to
display their political loyalties and urging them to become active in national
politics. In the later issues, however, the editor concentrates on dissuading
Tory women from those same activities and demonstrating how unfeminine
it is to engage in political debate. While the Whig ladies are shown flutter-
ing fans and eyelashes, the Tories are depicted as red-faced shrews, bursting
their stays with fury: expressing ‘the most masculine Passions’, while their
bosoms are ‘heaving with such Party Rage’ (Freeholder 26). They forget their
domestic duties: they ‘are so conversant in Matters of State, that they wholly
neglect their private Affairs’ (ibid.). In his paper, Addison claims that he
wishes to ‘treat our Women as Members of the Body Politick’ (Freeholder
32), but his oscillation between praise for Whig women’s political activities
and denigration of female Tories as ‘polemical Ladies’ (ibid.) raises doubts
100 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
about how seriously we should take this political address to women. It seems
more likely that these papers are designed as comic relief from more serious
political debate, since ‘no Periodical Author, who always maintains his
Gravity, and does not sometimes sacrifice to the Graces, must expect to keep
in vogue for any considerable Time’ (Freeholder 45). Addison describes
female interest in politics as one of ‘several Objects that may very innocently
be ridiculed’ (ibid.) and concludes his papers on female Whigs and Tories
with the hope that women may soon revert to their customary lack of inter-
est in politics and that ‘the Discoursing on Politicks [among women] shall
be looked upon as as dull as talking on the Weather’ (Freeholder 38).
Women’s involvement in politics, he tells us, has led to ‘the Ruin of good
Houswifery’ and the ‘visible Decay of the National Beauty’ (ibid.). Party
rage, he warns, unsexes both female Tories and female Whigs.
Montagu may well have written the Nonsense of Common Sense partly in
response to similar satires on women and politics. The more immediate
impetus for the paper may have been provided by the 10 December 1737 issue
of Common Sense, which contains a letter from ‘NONSENSE, a Terrestrial
Goddess’ who, in a phrase which neatly unites misogyny and Opposition poli-
tics, claims to have ‘the Ladies, the Poetasters, and the M– [ministry] on my
Side’. Like Addison and the editors of Common Sense, Montagu is concerned to
expose and correct the misplaced political influence of women, but unlike
them she sees women’s political activity as not simply restricted to an addic-
tion to nonsense or to such fashion statements as anti-Papist pictures on fans.
In the very first issue of her paper, she displays her political allegiances by
criticizing those who opposed compulsory mourning for Queen Caroline.
The targets of her attack are those Opposition peers who were reluctant to
display full mourning for their sovereign because they had disliked her
political alliance with Walpole. In Montagu’s essay, however, it is the
women who are too vain to wear black and who also refuse to support the
domestic wool industry, preferring French fripperies to British manufacture:
‘Our Ladys, who are so accustom’d to shiver in silks, that they exclaim on
the Hardships of Warmth and Decency’ (Nonsense 1).31 She appeals to their
vanity in her attempts to persuade them to buy British:

I can assure them it would be highly advantageous to their complexions.

Many cold Faces that I have seen at the Opera . . . would have had an
agreeable glow . . . if their Bodys had been cover’d with the warm
product of our sheep.
(Nonsense 1)

Montagu even makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the inter-

vention of women is responsible for the war with Spain. She tells her readers
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 101
that fine ladies, who visit the opera regularly to swoon over the celebrated
castrato Farinelli, have indirectly started the clamour for war. Farinelli’s
departure from London for Spain is, writes Montagu, ‘one of the Reasons we
have for going to War, and the principal one with all polite Ladies and Gen-
tlemen’ (Nonsense 3).
The second issue of Nonsense is devoted to the proposal to reduce interest
on the sinking fund to pay off the National Debt from 4 to 3 per cent –
incidentally proving that the paper is not simply a vehicle of party rage,
since this was an Opposition policy, not a Whig one (Grundy 1999: 373).
As Grundy points out, Montagu is unusual in considering the effects of a
political measure specifically on the lives of women (1999: 373). Montagu
argues that the reduction in interest may lead fathers to apprentice their
daughters to trades, rather than relying on an income from the stock market
(Nonsense 2). She also describes the opposition to the measure as symptomatic
of women’s ability to influence parliamentary measures. Women who have
refused suitable, but humble, matches in their youth out of pride are now
forced to live on the interest of their savings and therefore oppose the rate
cut. Montagu suggests that these ladies should simply retire to the country,
instead, to save the money they spend at the London diversions (ibid.).
Commenting on women and politics, Montagu writes wryly:

I have allways been an Humble Admirer of the Fair Sex . . . and . . . am

glad they can find in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for
being excluded every part of Government in the State. But . . . I am
shock’d when I see their Influence in opposition to . . . the common
Welfare of the Nation . . . their . . . Tattle has had force enough to put
a stop to the most reasonable Design that has appear’d in public for a
long time . . . I am persuaded that the British Mothers, sisters, and mis-
trisses . . . have exerted their Authority on this occasion and have met
with astonishing Success.
(Nonsense 2)

Montagu’s paper is not a misogynistic attack on her sex’s ill-informed

meddling in a subject which they cannot understand. Instead, it is an
attempt to re-educate women politically and engage them in her own polit-
ical causes. Her political rhetoric is implicitly addressed to a female reader-
ship and presupposes that they can play a major role in national politics:
they have an ‘Authority’ which they can exert with ‘astonishing Success’,
especially when they act in unison. It is the ‘British Mothers, sisters, and
mistrisses’ to whom she appeals to put aside merely private and personal
considerations and become disinterested, politically-informed subjects and,
potentially, a powerful unofficial lobby. Furthermore, at the same time as
102 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
awakening the political conscience of her female readers and citing their
ability to influence politics, Montagu is also alerting them to their own
powerlessness in the public sphere. In a bitter aside, she professes that she is
‘glad they can find in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for
being excluded every part of Government in the State’ (ibid.). Many periodi-
calists before Montagu had wished to educate women, to inspire them with
greater moral seriousness and exhorted them to turn from beautifying their
persons to ornamenting their minds. Montagu seems to have been the first
to suggest that women might turn from dressing-tables and billet-doux to a
greater involvement in public life. She wishes them to realize the injustices
of the patriarchal system, to exercise the power which they do possess for
‘the common Welfare of the Nation’ and to increase their own status.
For the writers of Common Sense, on the other hand, women are scarcely
accessible to political reasoning. ‘I have’, the editor tells us, ‘in order to be of
some Use to them, stipulated with my Stationer, that my Paper shall be of
the properest Sort for pinning up of their Hair’ (Common Sense 5 February
1737). The joke that women use periodicals only to curl their hair is
repeated by Mr Fitz-Adam of the World: ‘Very few ladies of condition could
spare time . . . to read over a paper . . . but . . . I contented myself with
knowing that I was every week adorning their heads, though I could not be
permitted to improve their understandings’ (171, 8 April 1756). Yet, as
early as issue 4, the editor of Common Sense handles a topic of specifically
feminine interest: dress. He addresses his paper on fashion to women, ‘as
Dress is more immediately the Province . . . of the fair Sex’ (26 February
1737).
Despite attitudes towards women which are at best dismissive and at
worst deeply hostile, the editors of Common Sense often claim to be appealing
to a mixed audience, of which female readers are not the least significant
group. The paper’s statements of editorial purpose always stress the import-
ance of its female readership:

I was resolv’d . . . to make this Paper entertaining as well as Instructive

. . . As to the Design of this Paper, it is to take in all Subjects whatso-
ever . . . the Quicquid agunt Homines is my Province, and Homines com-
prehends not only all Men but all Women too . . . the Conduct of the fair
Sex will therefore come under my Consideration.
(Common Sense 11 June 1737)

The Spectator ‘of moral and facetious Memory’ is the editor’s avowed
model: ‘Whenever I take up the Spectator, I am ready every Minute to break
out . . . they have stolen all my fine Thoughts’ (Common Sense 11 June 1737).
Common Sense is presented as an essay-series, like the venerable Tatler and
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 103
Spectator, on diverse topics, both political and literary: the editor borrows the
Tatler’s motto ‘Quicquid agunt homines’. The paper is to appeal to women as
well as to men: that is, to be entertaining, as well as instructive. Women,
who are so difficult to comprehend and so inaccessible to the dictates of
political common sense, may be attracted by the paper’s variety and by the
entertainment it promises. The advertisement for the forthcoming publica-
tion of Common Sense in volume form announces grandly that ‘the Essays in
this Collection . . . have had the good Fortune to make their Way into the
Closet of the Ingenious, as well as to the Toilet of the Fair . . . they have
been the Amusement of the Grave and the Gay’ (11 March 1738). The
editors ‘cannot help bragging of the Pleasure it has given us to think, that
the finest Eyes in Great Britain should be every Week employ’d in reading
these Papers’ and make the rather surprising claim that a future historian of
the press, when he or she finds extant copies of Common Sense, will be most
struck by the fact that ‘this Work was chiefly patronized by the Women’
(ibid.).
The pose of Spectatorial editor, writing on manners and morals, was
common among political journalists who were attempting to avoid the accu-
sations commonly levelled at newspapers that they were both mendacious
and boring. In the Jacobite’s Journal, Fielding supposes that ‘few Readers
will, I believe, imagine it Presumptuous in any Author to enter the Lists
against . . . Newspapers; since his Talents must be very indifferent, indeed,
if he is not capable of shining among a Set of such dark Planets’ (1, 5
December 1747). The Gray’s Inn Journal characterizes the foreign news
section of newspapers as ‘dull Letters from the Hague, and fictitious Advices
from the Swede and Turk’ and views the domestic news as even more dreary
and irrelevant:

I could never conceive, what Kind of Advantage can redound to a ratio-

nal Creature, who can receive neither Instruction or Entertainment, in
reading that Mr. Such-a-one died at his Country House, when perhaps
the Gentleman is in perfect good Health; and if Squire Rent-Roll is
arrived in Town with a grand Retinue, I apprehend it in no way inter-
esting to any Man breathing, except his Taylor.
(29 September 1753)

Political journals often tried to escape these accusations of dullness by

including some of the topics and apparatus of the essay-periodical in their
papers. Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal combined foreign and domestic
news with ‘agreeable Letters on several Subjects’ (12 March 1720). Applebee’s
‘Muses Gazette’ became a regular feature in 1720. It contains theatre
reviews, ‘Secret History’ in the style of Delarivier Manley and tales of love and
104 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
gallantry. Mist’s Weekly Journal includes a number of humorous articles, such
as the journal of the sailor Simon Fore-Castle (12, 2 March 1716) and a
soothsayer’s prediction whose elaborate framing device recalls the subtitles
of Delarivier Manley’s novels: it is said to be ‘the Relation of an ancient Jew,
as it was printed at Rome, and sent from the Hague to a merchant in
London’ (19, 20 April 1717). The title of the Medley suggests a wide variety
of subjects. As the editor points out, ‘I can properly make use of any matter
whatsoever, whether invented by myself, or given, or lent’ (2, 11 October
1710), although the paper does not live up to its promise of diversity, being
mostly dedicated to attacks on the Examiner. Manley defends the Examiner
against the charge of tedium by telling readers that ‘my Business was to
Instruct, I would not descend to Divert’ and ‘I did not so much as pretend to
Wit’ (no. 51). These claims are somewhat undercut, however, by her claim
that ‘among all the Men of Wit, who are in the Interest of the present Min-
istry, I know not one who hath escaped some Report or Suspicion of being
the Author’ (ibid.). The Craftsman adopts an eidolon, Caleb D’Anvers, with
many Spectatorial characteristics. His age (66), ‘ancient family’ and
independent fortune, inconspicuous manners and preference for a ‘a retired
life’, education at Westminster and Oxford and ‘natural inclination to the
politer arts’ all recall Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator (1, 5 December 1726).
This presentation of Caleb D’Anvers as a disinterested, leisured gentleman
serves to distance him from what Haywood describes scornfully as ‘Hackneys
for the Publishers of News-Papers, who, by their Writings, would fain influ-
ence . . . low and unthinking . . . Readers’ (Parrot 4).
The pretence of genteel amateurism was adopted by a number of political
writers. The editor of the Old Whig; or, the Consistent Protestant hopes that his
paper will render ecclesiastical topics ‘Enquiries for Gentlemen’, rather than
‘Controversies for Schoolmen and Divines’ (160, 30 March 1738). The Daily
Gazetteer taunts its rival the Daily Post with the accusation of being the work
of a hack: ‘The Publick must judge between you and I . . . who writes most
like a Gentleman’ (2, 1 July 1735), while even an exclusively political paper
like the Remembrancer is keen to point out on its title page that its editor is
‘George Cadwallader, Gent.’. This obsession with gentility is partly a reflec-
tion of the contemporary conviction that only someone with a stake in their
country – in the form of landed property – can legitimately hold a political
opinion, a conviction which justified the fact that only those with real estate
could vote. This belief also affected the credibility of political journalists,
who waste a great deal of ink bandying about mutual accusations of poverty.
As Addison puts it in the Freeholder,

The Arguments of an Author lose a great deal of their Weight, when we

are persuaded that he only writes for Argument’s sake, and has no real
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 105
Concern in the Cause which he espouses. This is the Case of one, who
draws his Pen in the Defence of Property, without having any; except,
perhaps, in the Copy of a Libel, or a Ballad. One is apt to suspect, that
the Passion for Liberty, which appears in a Grub-street Patriot, arises
only from his Apprehensions of a Gaol.
(1, 23 December 1715)

The editor anticipates that his readers ‘will conceive a Respect for the
Author of this Paper, from the Title of it; since, he may be sure, I am so con-
siderable a Man, that I cannot have less than forty Shillings a Year’ (Free-
holder 1).
For the editors of Common Sense, this pose of gentility requires a certain
obligatory amount of what Swift, writing of Addison, described as ‘fair-
sexing it’ (1974: 2.482). This journalistic gallantry has dual implications.
On the one hand, the issues which address topics of specifically feminine
interest are not central to the periodical but allow the editor to display his or
her essayistic virtuosity. The more trivial the writer’s theme, the greater the
skill involved in producing a witty and stylish essay: ‘Writers, of such uni-
versal Talents, may draw something that is useful and entertaining from the
most barren Subject in Nature. – The Spectator . . . has been very learned
upon Dancing’ (Common Sense 11 June 1737).32
On the other hand, to address oneself to the concerns of manners and
morals, rather than the sphere of politics, was to discuss topics of
special interest to women and in which women were especially important.
To treat of such feminine topics – and hence attract a large female
readership – was to tread in the hallowed footsteps of Addison and Steele, to
write a paper of literary value, to handle topics of perennial interest, as well
as of contemporary political relevance, and to ensure a long posterity in
leather-bound volumes on library shelves. It was to distance oneself from
starving hacks and paid hirelings and to aspire to a lofty political disinter-
estedness. A writer with interests wider than politics was also thought to
have a clearer and more objective attitude towards contemporary political
issues.
There is no evidence to suggest that Common Sense really had an especially
large number of female readers. There are no letters signed with women’s
names in the first 66 issues of the periodical, and women are addressed
specifically very infrequently. Indeed, the tone of the writers of the paper,
particularly Lord Chesterfield’s, is hardly the decorous and respectful tone of
gentle rebuke adopted by Steele. Women are treated to some of the paper’s
most bitter satire. Sexual innuendo is never far from the surface. One writer
tells us, with tongue-in-cheek smuttiness, that he wishes to emulate the
Spectator’s treatment of women: ‘As to the Fair Sex, he handled them from
106 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
Head to Foot; not a Part about a fine Lady was left untouch’d’ (Common Sense
11 June 1737).
The editors frequently hint at the physical monstrosity and masculinity
of intellectual women and suggest, with glee, that ugly women ‘may more
properly be call’d a Third Sex, than a Part of the Fair one’ and that if they
‘should endeavour to be honest good-humour’d Gentlemen, they may amuse
themselves with Field Sports and a chearful Glass; and if they could get into
Parliament, I should for my own Part, have no Objection to it’ (Common Sense
26 February 1737). In a later issue, Chesterfield makes the impish sugges-
tion that all the women who have played significant roles in history were in
fact hermaphrodites:

All the reputed Female Heroes of Antiquity were of this Epicene Species
. . . the greatest Monarch that ever fill’d the British Throne . . . was
Queen Elizabeth, of whose Sex we have abundant Reason to doubt . . .
thus much is certain, that she thought it improper for her to marry a
Man . . . I therefore require that those Women who insist upon going
beyond the Bounds allotted to their Sex, should previously declare
themselves in Form Hermaphrodites.
(Common Sense 10 October 1737)

Coupled with this enjoyment of the freakishness of those women who

overstep the bounds prescribed to femininity is a deeply cynical attitude
towards the sexual and moral laxity of women in general. Addressing his
essay ostensibly to the fine ladies who are forced to leave the delights of
London for the longuers of a country existence, the author of another issue
recommends the perusal of amatory fiction to pass the time agreeably. In the
French romances a lady can find all the amusement she requires:

If intruding Nature breaks in with warmer Images, she will . . . find . . .

suitable and corresponding Passages. The pleasing Tumult of the Senses,
the soft Annihilation, and the expiring Sighs of the dissolving happy
Pair, may agreeably recall the Memory of certain Transactions of the
foregoing Winter, or anticipate the expected Joys of the ensuing one.
(Common Sense 9 September 1737)

Montagu was quick to accuse the writers of Common Sense of lewdness and
indecency. She portrays herself as the champion of women, defending them
against the unjust accusations of her rival writers:

I have allways . . . profess’d my selfe a Freind thô I do not aspire to the

character of an admirer of the Fair sex; and as such I am warm’d with
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 107
Indignation at the barbarous treatment they have receiv’d from . . .
Common Sense.
(Nonsense 6)

For Montagu, defence of women is part of her heritage as a writer of a lit-

erary essay-periodical in the mode of Addison and Steele. She disingenuously
claims to be the author of ‘short essays of Morality, without any touch of
Politicks’ and, as such, will leave ‘puns and ordures’ to the lewd authors of
Common Sense (Nonsense 7). Her papers, instead of being addressed to amateur
politicians, have a wider appeal, she claims, to ‘honest Men and modest
Women’ (Nonsense 5), whilst the authors of Common Sense are only interested
in raising mirth ‘at the expence of Decency or morality’ (Nonsense 7).
For Montagu, contemporary journalism has become inextricably linked
with indecency. She reports with indignation in one issue the (probably fic-
titious) story of her attempts to get her paper published and claims that it
was rejected by both Court and Opposition printers as too politically
neutral. The Court printer suggests that, if the writer’s taste lies not in poli-
tics, he or she might try a little pornography instead:

If you are obstinately bent not to be read by the politicians . . . you

should try to please the Ladys and the fine Gentlemen . . . I . . . told
him, my Intention was to write to . . . Honest men and modest Women
. . . However . . . the Tuesday following . . . my Ingenious printer had
thrown in a little Bawdy at the end of a Paragraph, that no way led to
any Idea of that sort [see Nonsense 2] . . . I . . . immediately sent for the
Fellow . . . ‘I’ll assure you, Sir’, (said he in a Heat) ‘I have done all I
could for the service of your paper; but ’tis a damned ministerial thing
. . . all the Bawdy in the Dunciad won’t carry it off . . . (pulling the
Common Sense of December 31. out of his pocket) ‘I’ll engage this shall
be read all over the Kingdom’.
(Nonsense 5)

In fact, the issue of Common Sense in question (31 December 1737) con-
tains a satirical mock-obituary of Orator Henley’s wife, which Montagu
attacks as a heartless insult to Henley’s sincere grief. The issue is certainly in
poor taste, but it is not at all bawdy. Montagu is deliberately eliding the
distinction between pornography, political hack-work, libel and sensational-
ism. ‘Honest men and modest women’ are presented as almost synonymous
terms; modesty comes to stand in for political integrity and financial
independence. Montagu is not alone in her accusation that Common Sense is
both indecent and ungentlemanly, which she employs as roughly synony-
mous terms. The editor of the Miscellany also complains that the editor of
108 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry
Common Sense, ‘though reputed a Gentleman, an essential Part of whose Char-
acter is Good-breeding, has so superlatively offended by the fulsome Lewdness of
his Images, that it is impossible for any one, not wholly prostituted . . . to be
pleased with him’ (269, 17 February 1738). Montagu admits that there may
be a place for lewdness in political satire, but she warns the editors of
Common Sense that only a great deal of wit and skill can carry it off and tells
them to leave such methods to the petty hacks:

Leave then to the miserable writers for Daily Bread the two pences that
they collect by such little arts . . . old Hugh Spencer, first minister to
Edward the second . . . confesses that he us’d to mix Bawdy in his poli-
tick conferences . . . But . . . he gave orders to all his Authors in pay
never to talk Bawdy without mixing a great deal of Wit with it . . . If
you . . . would make the same Resolution, I am persuaded that all your
Future papers thô they might be very dull, would at least be very
decent.
(Nonsense 7)

The writer of a non-political essay-periodical is above such lewdness,

Montagu implies. She takes Steele as her model of a chivalrous champion of
women and an essayist whose papers could not raise a blush in a virgin
cheek. Her predecessor frequently describes himself as a ‘Knight-Errant to
the Fair Sex’,33 placing his eloquent pen at their service, and Montagu also
adopts this metaphor to describe her own stance:

As I profess my selfe a protector of all the oppressed I shall look upon

them as my peculiar care. I expect to be told, this is downright Quixo-
tism . . . But however, I shall keep up to the character I have assum’d,
of a Moralist, and shall use my endeavours to releive the distress’d.
(Nonsense 6)

She wishes to revive the age of Steelian fair-sexing:

that taste which was once universal when Sir Richard Steele entertain’d,
before he appear’d attach’d to any party, but that of Virtue and good
sense. That Gentleman had the Glory of pleasing without the assistance
either of Lewdness or Malice.
(Nonsense 7)

The indecency with which women are treated in Common Sense, Montagu
appears to imply, is a measure of how far the editors have wandered from the
Steelian ideal of objective, witty, decorous, moral and, indeed, apolitical,
 Common Sense and Nonsense of Common Sense: rivalry 109
writing. By attacking them for their disrespectful treatment of women, she
is also suggesting that they have no claims to the literary heritage of the
Tatler and Spectator and are merely hacks, engaged in a paper war with peri-
odicals of different political persuasions, fighting dirty with the weapons of
bad language, scatological jokes (‘ordures’) and pornography. She suggests at
one point that they keep a prostitute by them to help to provide ideas for
their papers: ‘A Girl that understands her trade . . . will furnish new hints’
(Nonsense 7), a suggestion especially apt as a literal reading of their political
and literary prostitution, as they sell their pens to the Opposition. She
herself aspires to the character of ‘a Moralist’, as Richard Steele was before he
ventured into political journalism, ‘before he appear’d attach’d to any Party’.
Montagu, the first woman known to have edited a political essay-paper,
looks back wistfully to an imaginary golden age of journalism, before polit-
ical rivalries. This enables her to suggest an alternative treatment of women:
one which is chivalrous, but not gallant – rational, rather than based on
erotic desire or admiration of beauty. She is ‘a Freind’ to women without
‘aspiring to the Character of an Admirer’, distancing herself loftily from
politics as the domain of ‘miserable writers for Daily Bread’ (Nonsense 7). She
suggests that instead of ‘amuseing them with triffles’, writers should regard
women as ‘capable of makeing . . . the most Estimable Figures in Life’ (Non-
sense 6) and begins herself by abandoning flattery and attempting to re-
educate her female readers in politics.
5 Inventor or Plagiarist?
Edward Cave and the first
magazine

The title under which Edward Cave chose to launch his new periodical in
1731, the Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer, itself
announces Cave’s self-consciousness about the status of his publication as
an example of a new genre: he is the first to use the term magazine,
which previously meant ‘a place in fortified towns, where all sorts of stores
are kept’ (Chambers 1738) or, more generally, a ‘storehouse’ (Johnson 1755),
to refer to a periodical. In addition, the title suggests both a preoccupation
with class and a confusion of traditional class boundaries, which, for many
historians and critics, characterized mid-eighteenth century English
society.34 In this chapter, I will be arguing that these two aspects of Cave’s
project are connected: the publication’s format as a compilation and the new
social and literary role assumed by Edward Cave, a role which rejects easy
classification.
Debates over copyright, sparked by the Copyright Act of 1710, led in the
early eighteenth century to a re-examination of the nature of authorship and
in particular to the question of whether a translation, adaptation or abridge-
ment could be considered an original work and fall under the protection of
the act. There was no copyright on periodical material and, indeed, the Gen-
tleman’s Magazine was explicitly an anthology of articles ‘collected chiefly
from the Public Papers’, as its title page announces.35 Yet whilst Cave bor-
rowed much of his material from other sources, he certainly considered
himself the originator of a new form of publication, and he regarded the
attempts of others to imitate his successful formula as piracy. Cave was not
the author of the material in the Gentleman’s Magazine, nor was he the Maga-
zine’s editor (Samuel Johnson, John Hawkesworth and others filled that
role), but on the other hand he was much more than simply a bookseller
financing a project overseen by others. The Gentleman’s Magazine was over-
whelmingly associated with the individual Edward Cave. The periodical was
well known to be his brain-child and his business venture, his invention and
his obsession. Cave was widely believed to exercise personal control over
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 111
every aspect of the Magazine.36 He blurs the boundaries between the writer-
editor and the bookseller-publisher, between literature and the commercial
venture. In doing so, his publication raises important questions about the
nature of literary property, legitimate and illegitimate borrowing and
authorship in this period.
In one sense, Cave’s publication was not designed to have a character of
its own, but simply to reflect contemporary interests and concerns. Johnson
defines a magazine as ‘a miscellaneous Pamphlet’ (1755), and the strength
of the Gentleman’s Magazine lay precisely in its heterogeneity: ‘greater
Variety than any Book of the Kind and Price’, as its title page announces.
Cave refused to associate his publication with one particular kind of mater-
ial, political stance or target readership and, as a result, the Magazine com-
bines many features that had previously been present only in separate
periodicals. The strength of Cave’s formula lay in its flexibility, as he himself
stresses: ‘Our Magazine . . . must necessarily bear the stamp of the times,
and the political, historical, and miscellaneous parts, dilate or contract in
proportion to . . . the reigning taste’ (Gentleman’s Magazine XVII, 1747,
Preface).
Cave’s most striking innovation in the Gentleman’s Magazine lay in his
insistence that it was not a vehicle for his own interests and opinions, but a
selection of the writings of others. Journalistic plagiarism in itself was no
novelty in 1731. Newspaper editors made a merit of having gathered their
information from as wide a variety of printed sources as possible. The first
daily paper, the Daily Courant, promises that ‘at the beginning of each
Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence ’tis taken’, without
adding any ‘Comments or Conjectures of his own’ (11 March 1702). Miscel-
lanies such as the Monthly Chronicle printed summaries of the foreign and
domestic news, drawn from the month’s press, whilst the Grub-Street Journal
reprinted passages from the daily newspapers, together with caustic
commentary on their accuracy and prose style. Annuals like the New Miscel-
lany reprinted letters and poems from other publications. In addition, ruth-
less, unacknowledged borrowing had increasingly come to characterize the
periodical press. Cave, however, was the first journalist to make a positive
feature of his lack of originality. In the ‘Advertisement’ carried in his first
issue, he envisages the editorial task as one of simply abridging and collat-
ing. Newspapers

are of late so multiply’d, as to render it impossible, unless a man makes

it a business, to consult them all . . . This consideration has induced
several Gentlemen to promote a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as
in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces.
(Gentleman’s Magazine I, 1731, Preface)
112 Edward Cave and the first magazine
Thus many of Cave’s articles were plagiarized from other papers, usually
with acknowledgement and without supplementary commentary. Cave’s
editor Samuel Johnson acknowledges this in 1741: ‘All the share of Applause
we now claim, is from a diligent . . . Endeavour to exhibit a well chosen Variety of
Subjects’ (Gentleman’s Magazine XI, 1741, Preface).
The editor depicted here is wedded to no particular political party, cause,
academic or literary interest. The collective implied by the vague pronoun
‘we’ and the allusion to ‘several Gentlemen’ in the initial advertisement
suggest a business enterprise rather than a writer. Their aim is to ‘promote a
Monthly Collection’, to ‘make it a business’ to consult the current publica-
tions and to join in a ‘diligent . . . Endeavour’. The impersonal tone of such
statements is mirrored by the paucity of our knowledge about the decision-
making structures of the Gentleman’s Magazine. It is difficult to identify any
consistent principles of selection underlying Cave’s heterogeneous collection
of monthly articles. The character of the publication changed considerably
during Cave’s lifetime, and Albert Pailler has identified no fewer than five
separate phases of the Magazine in the period 1731–54 (1975: 1.453–4). We
do not know who was behind the Magazine’s changes in direction and focus.
This obscurity is the result of a deliberate strategy on Cave’s part and is
heightened by the use of the sobriquet Sylvanus Urban to refer to the editor
of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The Gentleman’s is always described as the work
of Sylvanus Urban, but ‘Urban’ is not a pen-name adopted by a writer in the
way that Isaac Bickerstaff is Richard Steele’s pen-name in the Tatler. Urban
is a composite figure: Cave himself uses the sobriquet, but so do Johnson,
John Hawkesworth, John Nichols and other editors both during and after
Cave’s own lifetime. Urban is a personification of the Magazine itself, a kind
of journalistic genius loci. It is often impossible to tell who is behind a
particular contribution signed by ‘Urban’. The vagueness is deliberate: it
allows Cave as ‘Urban’ to assume the roles of bookseller, printer, editor and
author simultaneously.
Cave’s claims for his publication are based not so much on the high
quality of the contents, but on the originality of the concept. He prides
himself on the invention of a self-consciously new genre of periodical. The
Magazine’s enormous success inspired numerous contemporaries to adopt the
same formula. Pailler estimates that between 1732 and 1756 there were at
least 18 London papers calling themselves magazines, although not all of
them adopted Cave’s format (1975: 1.492–3). Miscellanies, museums and pal-
ladia also attempted to muscle in on Cave’s success. Cave regarded the term
magazine as his trademark and was careful to distance his production from its
myriad progeny. Johnson’s poem ‘Ad Urbanum’ depicts an editor selflessly
devoting himself to literature, in studied indifference to a host of mercenary
parasites:
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 113
What mean the servile, imitating crew
...............................
Ne’er seek; but still thy noble ends pursue,
Unconquer’d by the rabble’s venal voice.
Still to the Muse thy studious mind apply,
Happy in temper as in industry.37
(Gentleman’s Magazine VIII, May 1738)

The ‘rabble’ here refers to Urban’s rival editors and publishers, a set of
unscrupulous imitators ready to plagiarize his ideas. Plagiarism is portrayed
as the hallmark of Grub Street.
This vision of Urban contra mundum, struggling for ‘noble ends’ against
the world of commercial publishing, can be seen most clearly in the
accounts of the rivalry between the Gentleman’s and the London Magazine.
Founded only a year after the Gentleman’s, the London followed Cave’s plan
and layout very closely, as the account in the Grub-Street Journal admits:

The London Magazine . . . tho’ he ridiculed his elder brother, yet . . .

he endeavoured to establish his own credit and reputation . . .
by passing for him. To this end . . . he called himself the London
Magazine; or, Gentleman’s monthly intelligencer; containing greater variety,
and more in quantity, than any monthly book extant; only inverting his
brother’s words; and taking Multum in parvo, instead of Plurimum in
parvo for his motto.
(168, 15 March 1733)

This social impostor, a younger brother attempting to pass as the first-

born heir, is portrayed by Urban as the product of a vulgar, money-grabbing
book trade. Johnson’s ‘An account of the life of the late Mr. Edward Cave’
describes the London in similar terms as ‘supported by a powerful association
of booksellers, and circulated with all the art, and all the cunning of trade’
(Gentleman’s Magazine XIV, 1754: 57). The London was founded by a group of
publishers and booksellers, including John Wilford, Thomas Cox, John
Clarke and Thomas Astley (Sullivan 1983: 202–6). Urban is quick to
dismiss the ‘powerful association’ of booksellers in a Popeian vision of Grub
Street:

Printers and hungry Booksellers unite

Their little Wits to show one common Spite.
Dully they trace the Author’s Various Quill
And feintly imitate his well-known Skill.
(Gentleman’s Magazine II, 1732, Preface)
114 Edward Cave and the first magazine
In this description, only the Gentleman’s Magazine has the literary dignity
of being the work of an ‘Author’; the proprietors of the London are simply
impoverished and ‘hungry’ garret-dwelling hacks, morally corrupted by ‘the
art, and . . . cunning of trade’ and living off servile plagiarism. While Urban
is portrayed as a single figure – an ‘Author’ – his parasites are legion, united
in their ‘common Spite’.
The London retaliates by focusing on the ironies of defending the origin-
ality of a concept which is itself dependent on plagiarism:

Your assurance . . . is very extraordinary, in reflecting upon us for com-

piling a book from the public papers, in several of which we have a
property, when you have not a share in any one of them; which makes
your work little better than a downright piracy.
(Grub-Street Journal 124, 18 May 1732)

Of course, the London’s editors had no legal basis for their ‘property’ in
‘the public papers’, as there was no copyright on periodical material.
Anyone, Urban retorts, can own a share in a paper or reprint what he or she
pleases:

Our Right to set up and carry on a Monthly Book from old News-
Papers having been ridiculously question’d; we take this Liberty to
assert it, as the common Privilege of Authors, and if the Freedom of the
Company of Stationers can add thereto . . . that is not wanting. The
Objection – if a Man is not a Proprietor in the News-Papers, therefore
he has no Right to abridge them – is too ridiculous to deserve a serious
Answer; it being in any one’s Power . . . who has a few spare Guineas, to
qualify himself upon that Footing.
(Gentleman’s Magazine II, 1732: 732)

The contrast here between the proud dignity of the ‘Freedom of the
Company of Stationers’ and the implicit snobbery in the claim that anyone
with ‘a few spare Guineas’ can own a share in a periodical is striking. Cave
attempts to have it both ways: both to portray himself as an author defend-
ing ‘the common Privilege of Authors’ against the mercenary practices of
booksellers and to assert his right as a bookseller and a member of the Sta-
tioners Company to print what he pleases. He is asserting both a moral
(author’s) and a legal (stationer’s) right to his copy. Both these rights are
extremely dubious. Cave is evoking the Licensing Act, which granted
members of the Stationers Company a monopoly on printing; the act had
lapsed in 1695. It is perhaps for this reason that Cave falls back on the idea
of his rights as an ‘Author’.
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 115
The imprint of the Gentleman’s Magazine states that it is ‘printed for the
AUTHOR’, and when Cave writes a poem defending his Magazine and attack-
ing the London he signs the poem as ‘the Author and Printer of the Gentle-
man’s Magazine’ (‘To Mr. Bavius on his Last Paper’, Grub-Street Journal 169,
22 March 1733). In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson defines an author as ‘he to
whom anything owes its original’ (sense 1) and ‘he that effects or produces
any thing’ (sense 2) as well as the ‘first writer of any thing; distinct from the
translator or compiler’ (sense 3) and ‘a writer in general’ (sense 4). Cave is cer-
tainly the author of the Gentleman’s in the first of Johnson’s senses, but he
also profits from the unclear distinctions here between projecting a literary
work, producing a compilation or creating original literary material. In his
biography of Johnson, Sir John Hawkins uses the word author in a similarly
general way, describing Johnson’s own literary ambitions:

He had entertained a resolution to depend for a livelihood upon what he

should be able, either in the way of original composition, or translation,
or in editing the works of celebrated authors, to procure by his studies,
and, in short, to become an author by profession.
(1787: 27)

The indeterminacy of the term author is reflected in contemporary debates

about the copyright status of translations and abridgements. In 1715, in the
case of Burnet v. Chetwood, when a group of booksellers argued that an
English translation of a work previously published in Latin ‘may in some
respects be called a different book, and the translator may be said to be the
author’, the judge supported this claim, finding that a translation was ‘not
within the provision of the [1710 Copyright] act’.38 Similarly, in the case
Giles v. Wilcox in 1740, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke ruled that an abridge-
ment could constitute a new work in the terms of the act (Rose 1993: 50).
Cave uses the term author to suggest that his Magazine is the lone
upholder of literary values, battling against cabals of mercenary booksellers
and printers. He often poses as a genteel, disinterested editor in contrast to
his money-grubbing bookseller rivals. In the preface to the 1732 volume, we
are told scornfully that one imitator was ‘behind a Counter hatch’d’, whilst
Urban, by contrast, publishes his paper as a favour to the public, ‘tho’ small
Emolument to him accrue’. The following year, the preface claims loftily
that ‘no views of Gain the Editor excite’. Cave was not alone in this pretence,
of course. The editors of the Grub-Street Journal claim a similar distinction,
reporting that their paper was successful despite being ‘continually opposed
and denigrated by the generality of Book-sellers, and their hackney authors’
(Memoirs of the Society of Grub-Street 1737: 1.xi).
Urban returns to the issue of the plagiarism of his concept in the preface
116 Edward Cave and the first magazine
to the volume for 1738, which is split between a condemnation of the
London Magazine and a defence against a recent attack on the Gentleman’s in
Common Sense (11 March 1738). In a vivid piece of conspiracy theory, the
editors of the London are portrayed as a motley band of mercenary oppor-
tunists:

A Knot of enterprising Geniuses, and sagacious Inventors, assembled from all

Parts of the Town, agreed . . . to seize upon our whole Plan . . . Some weak
Objections were indeed made by one of them against the Design, as having an
Air of Servility, Dishonesty and Piracy; but it was concluded that all these
Imputations might be avoided by giving the Picture of St Paul’s instead of St.
John’s Gate [as a frontispiece].
(Gentleman’s Magazine VIII, 1738, Preface)

Stealing a rival’s concept betrays a total disregard for business ethics and
lack of literary and personal integrity. The phrase ‘enterprising Geniuses, and
sagacious Inventors, assembled from all Parts of the Town’ suggests not only book-
sellers and printers, but a far more heterogeneous and disreputable group of
projectors, ready to involve themselves in any shady dealings which might
generate capital. In their ‘Servility, Dishonesty and Piracy’ and their silencing
of the ‘weak Objections’ of the only man among them with a conscience, they
almost resemble a criminal fraternity.
If ‘the execution of another man’s design’ is treacherous and base, the
theft of individual examples of his or her writing is the prerogative of a gen-
tleman and a scholar, and the victim should be flattered by his or her inclu-
sion in the periodical. The editor of the Gentleman’s answers the complaints
of Common Sense (11 March 1738) that he has reprinted their essays without
permission:

We are sorry that by inserting some of his Essays, we have filled the Head of this
petty Writer with idle Chimeras of Applause, Laurels and Immortality . . .
Should any Mention be made of him or his Writings by Posterity, it will prob-
ably be in Words like these: ‘In the GENTLEMAN’s MAGAZINE are still preserved
some Essays under the specious and inviting Title of Common Sense. How
Papers of so little Value came to be rescued from the common Lot of Dulness, we
are . . . unable to conceive, but imagine that personal Friendship prevailed with
URBAN to admit them.
(Gentleman’s Magazine VIII, 1738, Preface)

In this grand vision, the Magazine’s survey of the month’s press has been
transformed into a treasury of the best periodical writing of the age. Common
Sense survives for posterity only by being reprinted in the Magazine, just as
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 117
Pope’s dunces could never have attained lasting fame, had they not been
immortalized in his mock-epic. This suggestion is voiced within the Maga-
zine by a correspondent who tells Urban to disregard a ‘rival’s envy’:

The cunning Ape for this would urge your rage,

To get himself recorded in your page.
(The sons of Bathos are remember’d yet,
Not for their own, but for the Dunciad’s wit.)
(Gentleman’s Magazine VIII, March 1738: 156)

Urban is motivated not by ‘rage’, like Pope, however, but by charity and
‘personal friendship’ to assist a struggling, second-rate writer with a place in
his Magazine. Inclusion in the Magazine’s pages is represented here as a
reward conferred on a sycophant by a patron.
The role of a latter-day Maecenas was one in which Cave was very com-
fortable. He offered prizes for four poetry competitions in the Magazine in
the 1730s (Pailler 1975: 1.163–214), and Samuel Johnson’s own debut in
the Magazine was the elegant Latin tribute ‘Ad Urbanum’ cited above,
which, as Robert DeMaria has pointed out, alludes to a neo-Latin ode by the
Polish writer Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, addressed to Pope Urban, which
earned Sarbiewski a Papal laureateship (1993: 46). In the same package in
which he submitted his Latin poem, Johnson sent Cave a copy of London
(1738), soliciting his aid – as a person noted for his ‘generous encourage-
ment of literature’ – for the poem’s author, a ‘friend’ for whom Johnson
claims to be merely the agent. He flatters Cave with the suggestion that he
will ‘reward it in a manner different from the mercenary bookseller’, imply-
ing that Cave is a patron, not a businessman, a kind of journalistic Pontiff
(Johnson 1992: 1.14). Cave responded appropriately: he printed part of the
poem in the May 1738 issue of the Gentleman’s, as well as arranging its pub-
lication with Robert Dodsley.
When Cave was threatened with prosecution for reprinting extracts from
Joseph Trapp’s Four Sermons (1747), he chose to describe his pilfering as that
of a scholar disseminating learning: ‘We need not tell our Readers what
useful Volumes the World must have been deprived of, had it been reckoned
unjust . . . in the Compilers of . . . Literary Journals, to make Extracts from
Books’ (Gentleman’s Magazine XVII, 1747, Preface). One of the most common
contemporary arguments against awarding authors a perpetual copyright of
their works was that it would, as John Locke argues, prove ‘very unreason-
able and injurious to learning’ (qtd. Rose 1993: 33). Johnson prepared a
kind of legal brief in defence of Cave’s abridgements of Trapp, in which he
argues that abridgements benefit readers ‘by facilitating the attainment of
knowledge, and by contracting arguments, relations, or descriptions into a
118 Edward Cave and the first magazine
narrow compass’ (Gentleman’s Magazine LVII, July 1787: 555–7). Although
he acknowledges that an abridgement may damage the sale of the
original, Johnson regards abridgements as not merely legitimate, but praise-
worthy enterprises: ‘A tedious volume may . . . be lawfully abridged,
because it is better that the proprietors should suffer some damage, than
that the acquisition of knowledge should be obstructed with unnecessary
difficulties’. As specific examples of the uses of abridgement, he cites the
abridgement of the 44-volume Transactions of the Royal Society and books
which provide ‘general systems of sciences’. Clearly, Johnson chooses
examples here that help to dignify Cave’s own publication, but elsewhere he
defends the necessity of abridgements that serve a less exalted purpose: the
labours of the ‘abridger, compiler and translator’ help to convey important
information to those incapable of appreciating the original work. Men whose
‘eyes are offended by a glaring light . . . will gladly contemplate an author
in an humble imitation, as we look without pain upon the sun in the water’
(Rambler 145).
Cave’s publication had some of the same aims as grander projects like the
Transactions of the Royal Society. Cave often presents the Magazine as a kind of
historical reference work or encyclopaedia. He is not the first editor to do so:
Daniel Defoe hopes that the collected volumes of his Review ‘will compose a
Compleat History of France’ (19 February 1704). The Gentleman’s Magazine
also contains cross-references and an index, which ‘will be extremely conve-
nient for those who may have occasion to look for any Occurrence’ (I, 1731:
508). Sylvanus Urban describes the Magazine as ‘an exact and impartial
history of the times’ that ‘will be consulted by the curious to the latest pos-
terity’ (Gentleman’s Magazine XV, 1745, Preface) and prove, as a correspon-
dent puts it, ‘an authentick Collection for Historians to refer to’ (Gentleman’s
Magazine II, April 1732, Verso of title page). In his monthly review of
books, Cave accordingly ranges the Magazine under the heading ‘History’,
rather than with other periodicals, which are registered as ‘Miscellanies’.39
The editors of the London Magazine were to claim a similar dignity for them-
selves: ‘All transactions of a Month’s standing are . . . recorded in the Secret-
ary of State’s Office . . . and all future Recitals of them, fall under the proper
and only Denomination of History’ (London Magazine II, May 1733). Any
attempt to impose stamp duty on the monthly magazines, they write,
‘might as well include Josephus, Rapin’s History and Baker’s Chronicle’ (ibid.).40
Many of Cave’s rival publications also claim to provide encyclopaedic know-
ledge, as titles such as the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure
(1747–1815) suggest.
In the 1750s and 60s, the number of magazines became so great that col-
lections began to appear that plagiarized at second hand, drawing their
material exclusively from the magazines themselves: publications such as the
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 119
Magazine of Magazines (1750–1), Grand Magazine of Magazines (1758–9) and
Beauties of All the Magazines Selected (1762–4). After 1746, in response to
these collections, the Gentleman’s began to shift focus. The reprinted articles
from the month’s press became less important, and more space was dedic-
ated to original material and to readers’ letters and contributions. At the
same time, the debate about originality and plagiarism also changed tack as
the Gentleman’s increasingly accused other periodicals of plagiarizing its own
articles, prompting a debate in the contemporary press over what consti-
tuted legitimate and illegitimate borrowing.
After 1746, the Gentleman’s no longer contains defences of the Magazine’s
practice of printing abridgements from the month’s press. Borrowing art-
icles from other journals per se appears to have become a widely accepted
practice: largely, perhaps, because of the precedent set by Cave himself. The
important issue was now the question of whether or not such borrowings
were acknowledged. The Grub-Street Journal succinctly defends ‘Abbrevi-
ations of the daily News Papers’:

There is nothing of Plagiarism or Pyracy in it. For the former is a surrep-

titious taking Passages from an Author, without naming him; and the
latter, printing another’s Property to his Detriment. But neither can be
charged upon a Work which constantly quotes the Author.
(reprinted in Gentleman’s Magazine IV, January 1734: 3)

In a similar vein, the editors of the London Magazine protest that they
‘shall never . . . pretend to palm upon the World any printed Pamphlet, Poem, or
Paper, by way of an original Manuscript of our own’ (IV, 1735, Preface). If they
were to do such a thing intentionally, ‘the Loss of all our Customers would be the
least Resentment we could expect’ (ibid.).
In the 1740s and 50s, the Gentleman’s Magazine attempts to woo readers
with the boast that it contains more original pieces than any of its competi-
tors. With so many rival magazines on offer, Cave is no longer able to
market his publication on the basis of the originality and utility of its
concept alone. He is still keen to emphasize the idea that the Gentleman’s
Magazine is an original and his competitors merely pale imitations: now,
however, these rivals have shifted from copying the Magazine’s plan to pla-
giarizing its contents. Urban claims:

We have been so fortunate as to exhibit . . . many excellent productions.

The merit of them is in some degree shewn, by their being every month
carefully copy’d into various collections, tho’, for the most part, without
any acknowledgment of their obligation.
(Gentleman’s Magazine XIX, 1749, Preface)
120 Edward Cave and the first magazine
From being a collection of the work of others, the Magazine has become a
source of material. An ample supply of original material is, in fact, a prereq-
uisite for a successful magazine, according to Urban, who writes with scorn
of those whose magazines are simply scissors-and-paste operations. Such
publications, we are told, are ‘often the last effort of disappointed writers,
whom the publick has rejected under every other appearance, and who hope,
that in a Magazine the contributions of others will supply the defects of
their own inability’ (Gentleman’s Magazine XXIV, 1754, Preface).41 Other
magazine editors also stress the originality of their material. Mrs Penelope
Pry of the Lady’s Weekly Magazine assures her readers that ‘our Essays shall
be all original’ (1, 19 February 1747). Mrs Stanhope of the Lady’s Magazine;
or, Polite Companion boasts of ‘having her essays copied over in almost every
other periodical publication’ (II.1, Preface).
The periodical press in the mid-eighteenth century presents the modern
reader with a dizzying number of accusations and counter-accusations of pla-
giarism. Articles, letters and poems are printed and reprinted, with and
without acknowledgement, sometimes with such frequency as to make it
difficult to ascertain their original source. Tracking an article through its
changes and abridgements can feel like taking part in a game of Chinese
whispers. Periodical material is, by its nature, more difficult to copyright, as
it is often anonymous or pseudonymous and frequently collaborative
writing.
Contemporaries also often claim that the writing itself is not of a high
enough quality to merit legal protection. The Grub-Street Journal is typical
in its contention that ‘no Man can assume to himself a Property by employing
Persons to collect a Heap of trivial, ridiculous, and false Paragraphs of News, and
then publishing them’ (210, 3 January 1734). Lord Camden comments in 1774
that copyright should, of course, not be extended to ‘Scribblers for bread,
who teize the Press with their wretched Productions, fourteen Years is too
long a Privilege for their perishable Trash’ (qtd. Rose 1993: 154). Copyright
confers a kind of literary dignity, a stamp of respectability denied to periodi-
cal writing.
Magazine editing, in particular, was frequently regarded as a purely
manual activity. For Johnson, the ‘abridger, compiler and translator’ are
‘manufacturers of literature’ (Rambler 145); the London Magazine refers scorn-
fully to ‘Dr. Urban, and his fellow Handicraftsmen, as they may properly be
called, for the Head seems to have very little Share in any Thing they publish’ (VI,
1737, Preface); whilst the Universal Spectator derides those who ‘collect, tran-
scribe, abridge, and raise Magazines from the Productions of others’ and whose
writings are ‘entirely Manufacture; for they are the Works of the Hand
more than the Head’ (24 August 1734). Clearly, there can be no rights to
intellectual property where there is a general belief that there has been no
 Edward Cave and the first magazine 121
intellectual activity, where a production is seen as purely mechanical,
manual labour. There are few acknowledgements that editing a periodical –
selecting materials judiciously – could be a creative activity in itself. The
correspondent who praises Urban for these skills is a rare exception: ‘You
have generally the good Fortune, it must be confessed, in sorting your Materials, to
mix the Useful with the Agreeable; which, indeed, is HORACE’s Praise of a good
Writer and belongs to you as a Good Compiler’ (Gentleman’s Magazine IX,
November 1739: 601).
The Copyright Act fixed the copyright of new material at 21 years and of
existing material at 14 years: the same lengths of time as those specified for
the patenting of inventions. As Rose and Zionkowski have shown, this led
to interesting debates about the ways in which literary work differed from
scientific invention (Rose 1993; Zionkowski 1992). Edward Cave, however,
attempted to blur these distinctions. Denied the literary dignity of author-
ship, he sought the distinction of having added to the store of human know-
ledge by the invention of a new literary genre. Cave asks us to value his
Magazine for its originality and success as a concept. By doing so, he added a
significant new dimension to the eighteenth-century copyright debate and a
new category of intellectual property.
In his Biographia Britannica, Andrew Kippis describes Cave as ‘the inven-
tor of a new species of publication, which may be considered as something of
an epocha in the literary History of this Country’ (1778: 3.315). However,
most of Cave’s contemporaries may well have been reluctant to allow him
the prestige of an inventor. The status of current journalistic material is
rarely discussed in mid-eighteenth century debates about copyright. This
silence is an eloquent one. It is probable that many contemporaries ranked
Cave among the ‘the manufacturers of literature’ whom Johnson describes as
an ‘order of men which deserves our kindness, though not our reverence’
(Rambler 145). For most, he may have been merely a humble plagiarist.
However, with its enormous popularity, the Gentleman’s Magazine exerted
a significant influence on the course of subsequent literary history. Unable to
use copyright legislation to protect original pieces – at least partly because
of Cave’s own pioneering use of extensive plagiarism in the Gentleman’s –
magazine editors in the decades after Cave’s death increasingly relied on the
anonymous unpaid contributions of their readers, contributions often so bad
that they justify Johnson’s acerbic remark that ‘no man but a blockhead ever
wrote, except for money’ (Boswell 1964–71: 3.19). The lack of copyright
protection for current journals in the eighteenth century may also have
helped to create the widening gulf between the poetry of the Romantic
period, with its premium on originality, and journalistic writing. Whilst
journalism was later awarded copyright protection, it was never to achieve
the same literary cachet as fiction, poetry and drama. To return to the
122 Edward Cave and the first magazine
question posed by the title of this chapter: was Cave a plagiarist or an inven-
tor? He was both. He was the inventor of a new kind of plagiarism and,
ironically, his novel approach helped to ensure that journalism was popu-
larly associated with second-hand material and thought to be lacking in fun-
damental originality and, within Cave’s lifetime at least, unworthy of the
dignity of copyright protection.
6 Polite, genteel, elegant
The Female Spectator and the editor’s
pretensions to gentility

Eliza Haywood’s periodical the Female Spectator opens with the statement
that ‘it is very much, by the Choice we make of Subjects for our Entertain-
ment, that the refin’d Taste distinguishes itself from the vulgar and more
gross’ (bk I: 2.17).42 In this chapter, I will explore ideas of social and cultural
refinement in Haywood’s periodical. Critics since Jürgen Habermas have
associated the periodical with middle class culture, regarding it as a public
forum for bourgeois debate (see Clery 1991). In the Female Spectator,
however, Haywood aligns her periodical with a far more socially exclusive
group, which she variously defines as polite, leisured, genteel, elegant, taste-
ful and ‘gay’. This chapter focuses on the ways in which a preoccupation
with social class influences Eliza Haywood’s literary strategies within the
Female Spectator: in her choice of persona, her depiction of her readership and
her selection of material. The chapter is divided into three sections. In ‘A
polite editor’, I examine Haywood’s use of the fiction of the editor as a
genteel lady of leisure who does not write for profit. In ‘Genteel readers’, I
turn to Haywood’s depiction of her readership. Finally, in ‘Elegant enter-
tainments’, I focus on Haywood’s prescriptions for women’s leisure pursuits
and education, which are characterized by an acute concern with social
exclusivity.

A polite editor
At first glance, the title of Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator appears to allude
to its editor’s gender, but not her social class. It suggests that the periodical
will be a female version of Addison and Steele’s earlier paper, a Spectator
written by a woman writer or one designed for women readers. The title is
deceptive, since Haywood’s heterogeneous monthly publication and the
concise essays of her male namesakes have little in common, either struc-
turally or thematically. Despite these dissimilarities, Haywood is keen to
stake her claim to an Addisonian inheritance. Thirty years after the demise
124 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
of the original Spectator, she alludes loftily to her ‘learned Brother of ever
precious Memory’ (bk I: 2.17), as though nothing significant had been pub-
lished in the interim.
Haywood follows Addison and Steele’s example by introducing the reader
to the editor and her associates in the opening number of her periodical. She
promises ‘in imitation of my learned Brother [Mr Spectator]’ to ‘give some
Account of what I am, and those concerned with me in this Undertaking’
(ibid.). The reader, the Female Spectator suggests, would only wish to read a
paper written by an editor who would be respectable enough to qualify as a
potential acquaintance. She declares, ‘I, for my own part, love to get as well
acquainted as I can with an Author, before I run the risque of losing my
Time in perusing his Work’ (ibid.). Of course, since the Female Spectator was
published anonymously, the reader is not made acquainted with ‘an Author’,
but with a fictitious persona. The polite introduction of editor to reader
serves to establish the playful pretence of mutual gentility which Haywood
will maintain throughout the publication.
Haywood’s editor is a reformed coquette who has known high society and
plans to share her insider knowledge of the social elite with her readership.
A colourful past as a social butterfly is her main qualification for writing:

I have run through as many Scenes of Vanity and Folly as the greatest
Coquet of them all . . . My Life, for some Years, was a continual Round
of what I then called Pleasure, and my whole Time engross’d by a Hurry
of promiscuous Diversions. . . . With this Experience, added to a Genius
tolerably extensive, and an Education more liberal than is ordinarily
allowed to Persons of my Sex, I flatter’d myself that it might be in my
Power to be in some measure both useful and entertaining to the
Publick.
(bk I: 2.17–18)

Haywood makes the incongruous transition from socialite to journalist

appear natural and inevitable. Too old to shine in society, the editor is
forced to seek attention and admiration through her writing. She has turned
to journalism for amusement, not for gain. Ironically, the same vices and
follies against which the editor was repeatedly to warn her female readers,
particularly an inordinate love of ‘Dress, Equipage and Flattery’, have helped
to qualify her for authorship: she is well acquainted with both the pleasures
and the dangers of affluent society. The emphasis here is not on the Female
Spectator’s folly, but on the breadth of her experience and her corresponding
broad-mindedness. Her knowledge of company has been ‘general’ and not
selective, her intelligence is ‘tolerably extensive’, her education has been
‘more liberal than is ordinarily allowed to Persons of my Sex’, and her giddy
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 125
career has provided her with ‘Knowledge of many Occurences’. The editor’s
youthful flightiness accounts for the fact that she is acquainted with most
strata of society, even though she herself is of a genteel background.
Haywood adopts a similar persona in the Parrot (1746), whose editor has
‘experienced almost as frequent Vicissitudes of Fortune as there are to be
found in the Climate, having been . . . in no less than fifty-five Families of
vastly different Ranks and Dispositions’ (no. 1). Like the Female Spectator,
the Parrot is prepared to ‘as freely lay open my Errors, as I am willing to
publish my Perfections’ (ibid.), since these ‘Errors’ – talkativeness and
inquisitiveness – are what qualify him for authorship.
The Female Spectator describes herself as having been ‘caught up in a
Hurry of promiscuous Diversions’, referring to balls, routs, masquerades and
other amusements fashionable with the leisured classes. This promiscuity
also, however, reflects the myriad and rapid transitions from one topic to
another within the periodical itself. Varied entertainments or ‘promiscuous
Diversions’ form the subject matter of the eighteenth-century periodical per
se, its vaunted multum in parvo (many things in a small space) or what one
correspondent refers to as ‘your agreeable Miscellany of beneficial and enter-
taining Topics’ (bk XX: 3.275). In John Hill’s contemporary ‘Inspector’
papers, the editor promises to ‘search . . . Routs and Assemblies . . . Mas-
querades and Ridottoes . . . Operas and . . . Playhouses’, in order to ‘bring
Entertainment from the Parties of the Great to People less exalted above the
common Level of Mankind’ (London Daily Advertiser 1, 1751). In a similar
fashion, the Female Spectator provides vicarious thrills by allowing its readers
a taste of ‘promiscuous Diversions’ at second hand.
What little we learn about the editor’s background in the course of the
periodical confirms her gentility: she claims an acquaintance with families
‘of Condition and Figure’ (bk XI: 2.385), fine ladies (bk XIII: 3.5), the daugh-
ter of ‘a dignified Clergyman’ (bk XXIV: 3.412) and with the former prime
minister Robert Harley (bk XI: 2.400). The Female Spectator demonstrates
an easy familiarity with the trappings of gentility, describing with confi-
dence the library holdings of ‘some of the ancient Nobility and Gentry of
this Kingdom’ (bk XII: 2.435) and alluding to her possession of servants (bk
II: 2.54), expensive imported ‘Ornaments of Dress and Furniture’ (bk XV:
3.98) and a greenhouse, complete with a gardener to tend it (bk XIX: 3.247).
When the correspondent John Careful describes the editor as ‘a Person who
knows the World perfectly well’ (bk VIII: 2.280), he is referring both to her
colourful past and to her experience of high life, or, as the editors of the
contemporary periodical the World put it, ‘that part of the human species
which calls itself the WORLD’ (1, 4 January 1753).
By choosing a genteel persona, Haywood was following a well-established
journalistic tradition: one which was particularly prescriptive for women.
126 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
Whilst some male editors, such as Oliver Goldsmith, could be defiantly
frank about their commercial motivations for writing (see Chapter 10), those
who wrote under female pseudonyms almost universally adopt a pose of gen-
tility. The male hack was a rather suspect figure, but the female hack was
beyond the bounds of propriety. When Goldsmith writes as a male journal-
ist, he poses as an ‘Indigent Philosopher’, but the contemporary editor of the
Lady’s Magazine (1759–63), who has sometimes been identified with Gold-
smith, writing in a female guise, adopts the sobriquet of the Hon. Mrs Caro-
line Stanhope.43 Phrases like ‘the prostitution of talents’ carried
all-too-literal connotations when used to describe women journalists.
Instead, female editors claimed to write out of vanity, coquetry and the
desire to please. Women editors denied the pursuit of profits, but still
represented writing as a para-sexual activity: as flirtation, rather than prosti-
tution. The editor of the Lady’s Magazine tells her readers, ‘She is actuated
by a more noble principle [than profit], the love of applause, from which she
has felt the most pleasing sensations’ (II.1, 1760).
The Female Spectator claims to be the work not of an individual, but of a
club. We are introduced to the Female Spectator’s ‘club’ in the first issue of
the periodical: the witty and genteel wife Mira; ‘a Widow of Quality, who
. . . continues to make one in all the modish Diversions’; and Euphrosine,
‘the Daughter of a wealthy Merchant’ (bk I: 2.19). Haywood’s club may be
modelled on Addison and Steele’s club in the Spectator, but its members are
far less individualized and differentiated than the memorable eccentrics Will
Honeychurch, Sir Roger de Coverley et al. They represent different aspects of
womanhood – wife, widow, maid and spinster44 – as well as both the
wealthy mercantile classes and the fashionable denizens of the West End
(Figure 6.1).
The club fiction serves an important purpose. It bridges the gap between
writing as an organized, professional activity and the civilized conversation
of genteel society, establishing a cosy pretence of social, rather than finan-
cial, relationships, both among editors and between editors and readers. The
Female Spectator repeatedly refers to her club as a ‘society’. The trope of
sociability originates with the Tatler, whose editor Isaac Bickerstaff wishes
to amend what he suggestively refers to as ‘the Conversation-Part of our
Lives’ (Tatler 56). Editorial clubs were to remain popular. The editors of the
Court Magazine are characteristic. They are described as ‘a Society of Gentle-
men’. In playful acknowledgement of the convention of editorial affluence,
the writers insist ‘we are all gentlemen . . . and every day in the week salutes
us with . . . a clean shirt’ (I [for 1761], 1763, Preface). The closing issue of
Haywood’s Female Spectator promises a continuation by a club composed of
men and women (bk XXIV: 3.423).
The female equivalent of the gentleman’s club night is the lady’s visiting
Figure 6.1 The Female Spectator club.
128 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
day. The title of the Female Spectator recalls the Female Tatler (1709–10),
which was set in the editor Mrs Crackenthorpe’s drawing room amid the
gossip of guests at her visiting day and then at the visiting days of an
elegant ‘Society of Ladies’. Haywood employs a similar device in her pam-
phlet The Tea-Table (1725), whose subtitle announces its elevated social
context: ‘A Conversation between some Polite Persons of both Sexes, at a
LADY’S VISITING DAY’ (Haywood 2000b). Like Mrs Crackenthorpe, the central
figure, Amiana, occupies a position in high society: she is ‘always encom-
pass’d with a Crowd of the great World’ (Haywood 2000b: 71). As women,
Mrs Crackenthorpe and Amiana cannot make forays into London coffee-
houses to eavesdrop on the capital’s inhabitants. Instead, they invite society
to come to their own well-appointed drawing rooms. They therefore interact
with a much more restricted social group than Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr
Spectator: their observations and remarks are drawn from an exclusive circle
of ‘Persons of a very elegant Taste’ (Haywood 2000b: 3). Amiana’s area of
expertise is therefore high-society gossip. Published in the same year as
Haywood’s infamous roman à clef Memoirs of a Certain Island (1725), the pam-
phlet promises its readers similar fare: ‘Where have the Curious an
Opportunity of informing themselves of the Intrigues of the Town, like that
they enjoy over a TEA-TABLE, on a Lady’s Visiting-Day? (Haywood 2000b: 3).
Haywood tantalizingly suggests, in the opening issue of the Female Specta-
tor, that she will provide her readers with scandal from political and social
high life. She invites them to read the Female Spectator as a periodical à clef by
ironically cautioning them not ‘to make what they call a Key to these
Lucubrations’ (bk I: 2.20). By choosing a genteel editor-persona, Haywood
suggests that she has first-hand knowledge of the upper echelons of society,
which she will be able to share with her readers. When the correspondent
Curioso Politico rebukes the editor in a later issue for not having elucidated
the ‘Mysteries of the Alcove, the Cabinet, or Field’ (bk VII: 2.295), he does so
in class terms. He rebukes her with being ‘an idle, prating, gossiping old
Woman, fit only to tell long Stories by the Fire-side’ (bk VII: 2.293), pre-
senting an image very different from that of the elegant hostesses Amiana
and Mrs Crackenthorpe. He dismisses her ‘Lucubrations’ as only suitable for
an unsophisticated country readership: ‘They are fit Presents for Country
Parsons to make to their young Parishioners; – to be read in Boarding-
Schools, and recommended as Maxims for the well regulating private Life;
but are no way fit for the polite Coffee-Houses’ (bk VIII: 2.294).
As Curioso Politico’s remarks suggest, for contemporaries the type of
material that a periodical contained, its target readership and the social class
of its editor were closely connected. The figure of Haywood’s editor remains
underdeveloped within the periodical. The Female Spectator is neither an
idiosyncratic, loveable and eccentric character, offering a refreshing new
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 129
perspective on events, nor a character in an elaborate frame narrative chart-
ing the editor’s adventures in novelistic fashion (by contrast with Mary Sin-
gleton of the Old Maid, for example). Instead, Haywood’s adoption of the
persona serves primarily to establish the periodical’s tone and subject matter
as one suitable to a genteel author. The pretence of gentility was more ubiq-
uitous in journalism than in any other literary form in this period – prob-
ably because journalism was a more disreputable genre than any other, more
likely to be associated with the meretricious trash produced by Grub Street
hacks than with the august tones of Addison and Steele. To write in the
persona of a genteel woman was to raise the expectation that the periodical’s
readership would be equally genteel. This suggestion of mutual gentility
must have been particularly flattering to Haywood’s readers.

Genteel readers
Little is known about the actual readership of Haywood’s periodical. At a
cost of between 1 and 3s., Haywood’s novels were beyond the price range of
those ‘of scanty means’ (Blouch 2000b: 308). Haywood’s former lover the
poet Richard Savage describes Haywood’s novels as designed to ‘teach young
Heiresses the Art of running away with Fortune-hunters and scandalising
Persons of the highest Worth and Distinction’ (qtd. Whicher 1915: 125–6).
Young heiresses and persons of ‘Worth and Distinction’ – however scandal-
ized – are the subjects of many of the Female Spectator’s tales and figure
largely in the editor’s depictions of her audience.
These descriptions of Haywood’s readership are, at best, conjectural, and
they refer in any case to Haywood’s novels, not her journalism. However,
since the Female Spectator retailed at 1s. per book – making a total cost for
the 24 books of £1 4s – it was more expensive than many other periodicals
and must have been unaffordable to many. Furthermore, Haywood distances
the Female Spectator from other periodicals: referring to its issues as ‘Books’
and her readers as ‘Subscribers’. By calling her readers ‘Subscribers’, she
links the periodical with large-scale, lavish publications boasting a substan-
tial aristocratic readership. There is no external evidence to suggest that the
Female Spectator was actually published by subscription. However, by bor-
rowing her title from the century’s most famous periodical, yet neither num-
bering nor dating her issues, but instead referring to them as books,
Haywood may be trying to have it both ways. She is simultaneously exploit-
ing the literary cachet of writing in the genteel tradition of Addison and
Steele and dissociating herself from other journalists.
In order to understand Haywood’s preoccupation with gentility more
clearly, we need to turn to the representations of her readership in the Female
Spectator. The most explicit depictions of the periodical’s audience are the
130 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
descriptions of its correspondents. Although it is impossible to know whether
this correspondence is real or fictional, the readers’ letters serve an important
purpose within the periodical by bridging the gap between literary profes-
sionalism and genteel amateurism. They suggest that the periodical is a
forum for the polite and civilized to communicate with each other. The
Female Spectator claims in book XVIII that she would have ended the periodi-
cal after three volumes, had it not been for her eminent correspondents:

That we have changed our Minds, and continue the Spectatorial Function
yet a little longer, is owing to some Hints we have lately received from
Persons of the most distinguished Capacities, on Subjects universally
interesting . . . who assure us, they would transmit their Sentiments to
the World by no other Canal.
(bk XVIII: 3.207)

Whether real or fictitious, Haywood’s correspondents are overwhelmingly

genteel. Most date their letters either from fashionable West End addresses
– Cavendish Square, Bedford Row, St. James’s Street, Hanover Square, Pall
Mall and Haymarket – or from the more upmarket coffee-houses: Giles’s,
the Bedford and White’s Chocolate House.45 The Female Spectator prints a
number of contributions from those in high life. The correspondent Anti-
quarius, for example, sends in a series of (spurious) letters between Caesar
and Livia Drusilla, which have been given to him by ‘a certain noble Earl’
(bk XX: 3.275).46 The rich nobleman Veritatus flatteringly rebukes the
editor for deciding to abandon her publication ‘just at the Time its Reputa-
tion is established; and when not only myself, but a great many others had
resolved to send you something to employ it’ (bk XXIV: 3.406). By the time
the Female Spectator ends her publication, it has become the chosen vehicle
for the contributions of people of learning, affluence and high society, thus
establishing the publication’s impeccable social and intellectual credentials.
In her opening number, the Female Spectator claims that, in writing the
periodical, ‘my Ambition was to be as universally read as possible’ (bk I:
2.18). At first glance, the readership she envisages does appear to be broad:
it includes men and women, inhabitants of the City and the West End and
urban and rural readers. Almost all of them, however, share a certain gentil-
ity. The periodical’s audience includes ‘modish fine ladies’ (bk XX: 3.256),
‘readers of a polite Taste’ (bk XX: 3.257) and people ‘who shine in what they
call High-Life’ (bk XXIV: 3.394). When the editor advises her female readers
to bear their husbands’ infidelities with patience she offers the somewhat
dubious consolation that ‘few Men of any Condition are gross in their
Amours’ (bk X: 2.348), a remark which assumes that her readers’ husbands
are men ‘of Condition’.
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 131
In the final number of the Female Spectator, Haywood reflects on the nature
and aims of her periodical. She acknowledges that she has intentionally dis-
appointed her readers’ expectations of the publication:

Many of the Subscribers to this Undertaking, I am told, complain that I

have deviated from the entertaining Method I set out with at first –
That since the Second or Third Book I have become more serious. –
That I moralise too much, and that I give them too few Tales.
(bk XXIV: 3.411)

She explains that she hoped to lure her audience with ‘such Things as I
knew would please them: Tales, and little Stories to which every one might
flatter themselves with being able to find a Key’ and only gradually reveal
her moral purpose, in order to attract a readership of ‘the Gay and Unreflect-
ing, who are indeed those for whom this Work was chiefly intended, as
standing in most need of it’ (bk XXIV: 3.412). The phrase ‘Gay and Unre-
flecting’ implies both a moral condition and a class status. Her readers are
able to be ‘Unreflecting’ because they are neither burdened by financial
worries nor obliged to earn their own livelihoods. They are ‘Gay’ because
they participate in the diversions considered appropriate to their rank. To
reach this audience, the Female Spectator has to disguise her moral purpose.
As Mira reminds the editor, ‘People, especially those of Condition, are more
easily laughed out of their Follies than reasoned out of them’ (bk XIII: 3.34).
When the Female Spectator refers to her time as ‘this laughing, hoydening,
careless Age’ (bk XXIV: 3.410) and fears ‘growing too grave for the General-
ity of my Readers’ (bk XIX: 3.233), she is alluding not just to her readers’
taste in literature but also to their class.
For Haywood, the upper classes are an important audience not only
because of their perceived need of moral guidance, but also because of their
influence over the behaviour of others: ‘As all Modes, whether good or evil,
are originally form’d by the great World, and gradually descend to their
Inferiors, there must the Rectification begin, if we would hope to see any
Amendment’ (bk XII: 2.422). The editor is sharply critical of the imitation
of aristocratic manners. In this, she follows the example of Addison and
Steele, whose aim in the Tatler was ‘to attack prevailing and fashionable
Vices’ (Tatler 271), although she expresses her concerns in a tone of more
extreme disapproval. The Female Spectator cautions that ‘whatever is done
by Persons of Quality presently becomes the Mode, which every one is ambi-
tious of apeing let it suit ever so ill with their Circumstances’ (bk V: 2.157).
Combating the pernicious influence of fashionable great ones lies at the
heart of the Female Spectator’s moral enterprise.
The Female Spectator attempts to improve her readers’ morals by making
132 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
her own publication fashionable. Her correspondent S.S.S. claims that the
Female Spectator could make even Bible reading into a modish occupation.
The periodical, he tells us, is ‘read with Pleasure by several fine Gentlemen
and Ladies, who would be ashamed to be seen with a Bible in their Hands’
(bk XXIV: 3.393). If the editor were to recommend the book, they would
soon be convinced that the Bible is full of ‘such beautiful Compliments,
such elegant Address, and such high Strokes of Politeness, as are not to be
outdone in the most refined and accomplished Circles of Conversation’
(ibid.).
The Female Spectator’s appeal to women readers was an integral part of its
status as a fashionable periodical. In eighteenth-century periodicals, address-
ing a female readership and including topics considered particularly appro-
priate for women was considered a sign of literary and social gentility.
Kathryn Shevelow has noted that the expression ‘leisured woman’ is ‘almost
. . . a tautology’ in contemporary journalism (1989: 55). The Lady’s Museum,
for example, describes its female readers as ‘undisturbed by the affairs of
business; unburthened with . . . political entanglements’ (Lady’s Museum 1:
II.129).
Almost nothing is known about the gender composition of the Female
Spectator’s actual contemporary readership. Whether or not the Female Specta-
tor’s audience was largely female, however, the editor frequently addresses
her remarks to ‘the Female Subscribers and Encouragers of this Undertaking’
(bk XVII: 3.175). She promises the correspondent Philoclites that she will
‘set [his letter] before the Ladies at the very first Opportunity’ (bk XVIII:
3.208). She tells her readers that it is ‘the Ladies (for whom I must confess
myself the most concerned)’ (bk XII: 2.414), using a term that neatly com-
bines class and gender.
The Female Spectator’s conception of her readership as female serves to
distance her publication from contemporary newspapers. When the corre-
spondent Curioso Politico writes in to complain that the periodical does not
contain enough politics, the editor replies tartly, ‘I never proposed . . . that
these Lucubrations should be devoted merely to the Use of News-Mongers:
–– A Change-Broker might, I think, have as much Cause to resent my
taking no Notice of the Rise or Fall of Stocks’ (bk VIII: 2.295). The Female
Spectator associates political coverage with disreputable ‘News-Mongers’
and mercenary change-brokers: with the grubby male world of professional
politics and finance. While newspaper readers are associated here with
tradesmen and stockjobbers, newspaper writers are portrayed as impecunious
hacks. A letter from L.D. defends newspapers on the grounds that they ‘put
Bread into Mouths which otherwise would want it. – Many a wretched
Author must starve in his Garret if Extracts of pretended Letters from
Abroad did not support him’ (bk XXIII: 3.355). The Gray’s Inn Journal offers
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 133
a further reason for the insalubrious reputation of newspapers: they usually
carried an advertising section, absent from Haywood’s publication, with
puffs for patent medicines, especially those that treated syphilis. Charles
Ranger expresses a reluctance to ‘hand up Advertisements to a Gentleman’s
Wife or Daughter, which are only fit for an Hospital or a Brothel’ (Gray’s
Inn Journal 29 September 1753).
When Haywood does introduce political debate into her periodical, it is
in a feminized and gentrified form. In response to Curioso Politico’s attack
in book VIII, book IX features a debate on Great Britain’s relationship with
Hanover. The piece is contributed by the correspondent A.B., who writes
from the fashionable address of St. James’s Street and claims to have over-
heard the debate ‘at a polite Assembly, compos’d chiefly of Ladies’ (bk IX:
2.301), at which the behaviour of debaters and audience alike was impecca-
ble. The topic gave the ladies ‘an Opportunity of exerting, in a very great
Degree, that Good Sense and Eloquence they were both possess’d of’, while
‘the rest of the Company took too much Pleasure in hearing them, to offer
any Interruption, by taking the Part either of the one or the other’ (bk IX:
2.302). Here, the Female Spectator introduces an alternative to the male genre
of the newspaper – a mercenary, commercial publishing enterprise – in the
form of an assembly of ladies, characterized by social exclusivity and good
manners. The debate itself is couched in class terms: England is described as
‘a Woman of an illustrious and ancient Descent, beautiful in her Person,
unblemish’d in her Honour, and Heiress of immense Wealth’, while
Hanover is ‘a little Mistress he [the King] had before enjoyed’ (bk IX:
2.312).

Elegant entertainments
The activities of the political debating society largely made up of women
reported by A.B. provide one model of an ideal activity for genteel women.
In this final section, I’d like to turn to the leisure pursuits that the Female
Spectator recommends to its female readership. The periodical comments
extensively on fashionable amusements such as Ranelagh, Vauxhall, mas-
querades, operas, gambling and private parties. It also offers a model for a
system of female education. These projects are intricately linked: the editor,
together with her correspondent Philenia, advocates combining pedagogy
with diversion. Haywood not only addresses her readership as genteel, but
also provides a model for genteel behaviour. I will end by looking at the
ways in which the periodical itself offers an education in miniature to its
female readers.
Book I of the Female Spectator is full of dire warnings against the dangers
of frequenting pleasure gardens and masquerades. The Female Spectator
134 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
relates, for example, the cautionary tale of Flavia who attracts the attention
of a pimp on a visit to Vauxhall in the company of some female friends and
is later exposed to the machinations of the vicious nobleman Rinaldo (bk I:
2.45–51). Haywood’s interest in this subject probably reflects the increasing
number of pleasure gardens and open-air entertainments available in mid-
century. Vauxhall Gardens enjoyed a revived popularity after extensive
restoration work in 1737; Marylebone Gardens were opened to the public in
1738; Ephraim Evans erected his open-air orchestra in Cuper’s Gardens in
Lambeth in 1740; and the famous Rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens was erected
by William Jones in 1741 (see Sands 1987 and Wroth and Wroth 1979).
Haywood is at pains to point out that it is the commercial character of
these entertainments – not the pursuits themselves – that renders them dan-
gerous. The Female Spectator assures us that there is no harm in those mas-
querades held by ‘some great Families’ at their country retreats for the benefit
of themselves and ‘a select Company’ (bk I: 2.33). What the editor deplores
are ‘mercenary Entertainments’ where ‘the most abandon’d Rake, or low-bred
Fellow, who has wherewithal to purchase a Ticket, may take the Liberty of
uttering the grossest Things in the chastest Ear’ and where respectable
women are forced into proximity with prostitutes. ‘I wonder’, she exclaims,
‘Ladies can reflect what Creatures of their own Sex they vouchsafe to blend
with in these promiscuous Assemblies, without blushing to Death’ (ibid.).
Most of the visitors at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the editor tells us, are
motivated primarily by ‘the Vanity every one has of joining Company, as it
were, with their Superiors’, the wish to boast of ‘the Notice taken of them
by such a Lord, or such a great Lady’ and ‘to descant upon their Dresses,
their Behaviour, and pretend to discover who likes who’ (bk V: 2.157). By
taking part in these entertainments, the nobility make themselves the object
of gossip and slander, spread by those ‘by whom it is unbecoming of their
Characters even to be mention’d’ (bk V: 2.168). These social melting pots
are particularly dangerous for women, for whom class and sexual reputation
are intricately connected. The men at Ranelagh, the editor warns, ‘look upon
all those of our Sex, who appear too much at these public Places as setting
themselves up for Sale, and, therefore, taking the Priviledge of Buyers,
measure us with their Eyes from Head to Foot’ (bk V: 2.171).
While the editor highlights the dangers of socially indiscriminate gather-
ings, she is anxious to ensure that young women have access to leisure pur-
suits suitable to their social rank. The cautionary tales of young women
seduced at Ranelagh and Vauxhall are outnumbered in the periodical by
stories of the dangers of denying women the pleasures their class status and
wealth entitle them to. The expense of such diversions is not mentioned in
the Female Spectator, nor is there any suggestion that men who accompany
their wives or daughters to public amusements are losing valuable time in an
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 135
office or behind a counter. The Female Spectator represents these diversions as
not only harmless, but necessary. Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued that ‘the
governing idea of the Female Spectator is the urgency of experience for middle-
class women’ (1999: xiii). While I would take issue with Spacks’s stress on
the middle class here, the phrase ‘urgency of experience’ evocatively describes
Haywood’s preoccupation with the perils facing spirited young aristocratic
women who are denied appropriate access to the society of their peers.
In Haywood’s later periodical the Young Lady (1756), the editor censures
those parents who ‘debar them [their daughters] from a free conversation
with the polite world’ (6, 10 February 1756). In the Female Spectator, tales of
the ill effects of such seclusion abound. The correspondent Sarah Oldfashion
decides to cure her niece Biddy of her passion for Ranelagh by sending her
to live with a remote aunt in Cornwall, where she is set the singularly inap-
propriate task of embroidering a hanging. Biddy rebels against this regime
by marrying her aunt’s groom (bk XV: 3.100). An even worse catastrophe
ensues when Manilius refuses his wife, Sabina, permission to attend assem-
blies, card parties and ‘Public Diversions’ (bk X: 2.351). Sabina’s resentment
of this treatment makes her vulnerable to the attentions of a lover, with
whom she elopes to France. The Female Spectator defends Sabina’s conduct
as the inevitable result of her husband’s prohibitions, remarking ‘it is Pity a
Mind of itself not disposed to ill, should receive any Provocations to be so’
(bk X: 2.354).
When Sarah Oldfashion asks the Female Spectator for advice on curing
Biddy of her addiction to Ranelagh, the editor suggests that the best remedy
for young ladies ‘too much bigotted to any one Pleasure’ would be to send
them to ‘that polite Country’, France (bk V: 2.167). French aristocratic
society is held up as a model because it is far more socially exclusive than
English. In France, according to Haywood, balls, assemblies and masquer-
ades take place ‘in the Palaces of Princes, and Houses of Persons of the first
Quality’, by contrast with the English ‘mercenary Places of Resort; where
all, without Distinction, are admitted for their Money’ (bk V: 2.167). Most
importantly, Frenchmen, we are told, treat aristocratic women with respect
and engage in lively, flirtatious conversation with them without ulterior
sexual motives: ‘without Danger to their Virtue, or Prejudice to their Repu-
tation’ (bk V: 2.169). The women respond to this intellectual and social
freedom by behaving with impeccable sexual propriety:

Tho’ no Place affords Scenes of Gallantry equal to it in any Degree of

Proportion, yet I believe there is none where fewer false Steps are made,
or Husbands have less Reason to complain of the want of Chastity in
their Wives.
(bk I: 2.28)
136 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility
Haywood repeats this assertion in the Parrot, where she tells us that French
women ‘give into a Spirit of Gallantry’, yet remain ‘free from those guilty
Emotions which agitate the Mind of the more warm’ (no. 7).
In French aristocratic society, mixed-sex socializing is not associated with
sexual misconduct, and for this reason it provides an ideal model for female
education. The correspondent Philenia sends in a letter on women’s educa-
tion in France, which echoes the Female Spectator’s views on French society
closely. She claims that in France ‘all Men of Learning, Wit, and Genius,
have not only a free access to the Ladies, but are received by them with
particular Marks of Distinction’. The men provide them with continual
tuition, in the guise of flattery and flirtation:

All they say is a continual Round of Gaiety and sprightly Wit; yet is
their very Raillery on such Subjects, as mingle Information with
Delight; and I protest to you, Madam, I have been sometimes more
edified by a single Sentence laugh’d out, than by a formal, stiff,
pedantick Harangue of an Hour long.
But this is the least Advantage a French Lady reaps from her Regard
for Men of Learning. – Had she an Inclination to Philosophy, Theology,
History, Astronomy, or in fine, any particular Study, she has only to
make Mention of it, and is sure of receiving a Letter the next Day, in
which is contained the whole Pith and Marrow of that Science.
(bk XII: 2.417)

In this society, according to Philenia, learning forms an integral part of the

leisure pursuits of both sexes of the upper classes. In the French salons, aris-
tocratic women patronize men of learning and spend time in their company
without compromising their sexual reputations.
The Female Spectator commends this idea, but comments wryly that
similar customs could never be introduced into England: ‘What in France is
looked upon as no more than, what it indeed is, innocent Gallantry, might
here be censur’d as unbecoming Familiarity’ (bk XII: 2.418). A desire for
learning would be misinterpreted, the editor warns, as sexual desire for the
scholar himself. Haywood restates this idea in Epistles for the Ladies, where
four women write to a scholar, asking him to send them each a letter on a
different intellectual topic. He interprets this request as a ‘pretty Stratagem
. . . contrived on purpose to catch the Secret of my Heart’ and airily refuses
to write to any of them (Haywood 2000a: 319).
While her readers may not be able to implement Philenia’s suggestions,
however, the Female Spectator herself does. The editor combines learning
with sociability in a manner close to Philenia’s Francophile ideal when she
and her club visit Mira’s husband’s country seat. They take advantage of his
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 137
extensive grounds to make botanical observations and conduct experiments
on snails. The Female Spectator recommends the study of zoology to those of
her own class: ‘Ladies, and those Gentlemen who have many vacant Hours
upon their Hands’ (bk XVII: 3.163). The editor and her companions also visit
a neighbouring gentleman’s private observatory where the women view the
planets through a telescope and listen to their male companions debate the
possibility of extra-terrestrial life. The gentleman-astronomer promises to
contribute a letter on astronomy to the Female Spectator (bk XVII: 3.175). The
letter is never forthcoming, but the exchange neatly models Philenia’s dual
scheme of learning through a combination of polite conversation and more
detailed letters.
In her description of French society, Philenia describes the scholars as
‘industrious Bees, which suck the Sweets of many Author’s Works, and
having collected whatever they find worthy, present it in the most concise
and briefest Manner possible to the Lady’ (bk XII: 2.416). There is an
implicit parallel here between these men of letters and the editors of maga-
zines. The image of the editor as an ‘industrious Bee . . . sipping honey from
every flower’ (Universal Magazine XXXVIII, Preface), buzzing among the
monthly press and gathering the choicest articles, was a very common one.
At least four periodicals of the first half of the eighteenth century chose to
call themselves the Bee,47 whilst beehives appear on the title pages of
publications such as the Orphan Reviv’d and the Compleat Library (Figure
6.2), with its motto:

All plants yeild honey as you see

To the industrious Chymick Bee

In the Female Spectator, private correspondence between men and women

has been replaced by a printed exchange, mediated by the author. The peri-
odical offers a free commerce between the sexes that is both public and
modest, free from the dangers of gallantry and flirtation.
Male correspondents introduce most of the scholarly subjects tackled in
the Female Spectator. Philo-Naturae writes on botany and extra-terrestrial life
(bk XV: 3.82–9 and bk XIX: 3.234–42), Acasto sends in a critique of Mark
Akenside’s recently published Pleasures of Imagination (1744) (bk XX:
3.257–62),48 Antiquarius presents Classical correspondence (bk XX:
3.275–81) and Extratellus examines Lucretius’s views on immortality (bk
XXIII: 3.356–61). The Female Spectator’s women readers may not be able to
request personal letters on subjects of intellectual interest, but they can read
such letters in the periodical. The female editor has replaced the aristocratic
salon hostess, and her correspondents are the learned men whom she patron-
izes by printing their contributions. The Female Spectator provides its readers
Figure 6.2 Frontispiece of John Dunton’s Compleat Library (1692–4).
 The Female Spectator: editor’s pretensions to gentility 139
with a virtual salon, which forms a replacement for the French aristocratic
society to which those readers had no access, allowing them to become
members of high society by proxy. By doing so, Haywood makes her
persona, her readers and her periodical genteel.
Haywood’s persistent focus on gentility within the Female Spectator has
wider implications for our understanding of class issues in eighteenth-
century women’s writing. Haywood was a seasoned writer with a subtle
grasp of public opinion, and her literary strategies often indicate wider social
and cultural trends. This appears to be true of her pretence of mutual read-
erly and editorial gentility within the periodical. Haywood’s work can be
read as a particularly interesting case study of the literary strategies open to
those who chose to write journalism under female pen-names, strategies that
were profoundly influenced by the necessity of maintaining female decorum.
Haywood’s periodical sheds interesting light on the ways in which women
writers were perceived in mid-century and on their attempts to gain a new
literary respectability. The Female Spectator is a particularly skilful example
of the ways in which the feminization of the eighteenth-century periodical
led also to its gentrification, as female writers laid claim to a form of writing
– journalism – previously perceived as louche and disreputable and
attempted to portray it as decorous and even socially exclusive. In a period
which was increasingly anxious about the possible ill effects of women’s
reading habits, Haywood offers a form of reading matter which is entertain-
ing and accessible, but which will not compromise her readers’ morals or
their social standing. Just as a woman’s sexual reputation was fragile, so her
gentility needed to be equally carefully defended. Haywood flatters her
readers by implicitly including them among the upper echelons of society.
For those who are not already part of this polite society, the periodical holds
out the promise that reading the Female Spectator will make them genteel.
The difference between the Female Spectator’s title and the title of Cave’s Gen-
tleman’s Magazine reveals an important, but silent, assumption of mid-
century journalism. Gentlemen may be a subgroup of male readers, but all
female readers are ladies.
7 ‘Writing like a teacher’
Johnson as moralist in the Rambler

Few eighteenth-century journalists can have approached the writing of a

periodical with a deeper sense of moral responsibility than Samuel Johnson,
a feeling evidenced by the prayer recorded in Johnson’s diary on beginning
the Rambler: ‘Grant, I beseech thee, that in this my undertaking . . . I may
promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others’ (1969:
1.43). In the Rambler, Johnson attempts to use the literary essay-periodical,
which – unlike the essay tout court – was traditionally the vehicle of wit, pri-
marily as a means of moral instruction.
In this chapter, I will begin by examining the ways in which Johnson’s
conceptions of the duties of a moralist influenced his approach to the essay-
periodical. The most important features of Johnson’s publication all shed
light on Johnson’s moralism: the Rambler’s uniformity of tone; its adoption
of a persona who is a representative figure, rather than an eccentric indi-
vidual; its focus on the universals of human behaviour, rather than current
affairs or the fashions and follies beloved of Richard Steele; together with its
didactic tone. In the second half of this chapter, I will turn to an examina-
tion of Johnson’s aims as a moralist and look at three specific groups of
essays which illustrate this ethical programme. Both Johnson’s methods and
his message reflect his desire to unify a readership and a society which he
saw as increasingly split into mutually hostile groups based on profession
and class.

Uniformity
The most immediately striking difference between Johnson’s periodical and
those of Addison and Steele is its consistency of tone, presentation and
subject matter. Johnson acknowledges that ‘among the various censures,
which the unavoidable comparison of my performances with those of my
predecessors has produced, there is none more general than that of unifor-
mity’ (Rambler 107). The Rambler is Johnson’s longest work, and only four of
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 141
its 208 essays are by other writers,49 while three contain further brief contri-
butions.50 Johnson makes no attempt to vary his style or disguise the fact
that he frequently makes use of the editor’s time-honoured privilege of
writing to himself. The fictional letters, whether they are from educated
gentlemen or giddy young girls, are all written in Johnson’s unmistakable
sonorous, polysyllabic prose, leading Boswell to regret that the style of the
Rambler’s female correspondents is ‘strangely formal, even to ridicule’
(1964–71: 1.223).
Johnson’s refusal to print readers’ letters in his publication was a very
unusual one for a mid-century journalist. Many editors presented their
papers primarily as vehicles for publishing the letters, essays and poems of
their readers. The Gentleman’s Journal describes itself as ‘chiefly a Collection
of other men’s Works’ (1, February 1692), referring to its readers’ contribu-
tions. Eliza Haywood promises that those who send contributions to her
Young Lady ‘may depend upon seeing them faithfully inserted’ (1, 6 January
1756). Magazine editors, in particular, found it cheaper to accept the unso-
licited contributions from readers that flooded their desks than to pay staff
writers. Their critics feared that the work of professional writers might soon
be crowded out altogether by the meretricious contributions of readers. Cor-
respondents were eager to see their own work in print, but understandably
less willing to read the productions of their fellow literary dilettanti. A
reader of the Lady’s Museum complains that ‘without foreign assistance your
Museum would be much more to the pleasure of your readers’ (I.4: 290). A
correspondent of the Court Magazine complains that ‘the Magazine . . . is so
crouded with . . . those authors who write . . . for the sake of indulging
their vanity’ that there is no room for ‘the traders in real wit and genius’
(September 1761). One writer to the Covent-Garden Journal sheepishly apolo-
gizes for his own contribution, since ‘in this very learned and enlightened
Age, in which Authors are almost as numerous as Booksellers, I doubt not
but your Correspondents furnish you with a sufficient Quantity of waste
Paper’ (33, 25 April 1752). He hopes that he himself is not motivated by
‘the same Sort of Vanity as other puny Authors have been, to desire to be in
Print’ (ibid.). Johnson notes this phenomenon in the Adventurer, where he
describes his time as ‘the Age of Authors’, in which ‘writers will perhaps be
multiplied, till no readers will be found’, making particular mention of ‘the
innumerable correspondents of public papers’ (115, 11 December 1753). At
several points in the Rambler, Johnson apologizes for neglecting his corre-
spondents. He imagines ‘the . . . sorrow, impatience, and resentment, which
the writers must have felt’ (Rambler 56) and warns them wryly not to expect
better success in future.
The lack of stylistic variety in the Rambler is mirrored by a lack of them-
atic variety. In the Spectator, serious moral remonstrations on the evils of
142 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
gambling jostle with disquisitions on dancing and deportment. Almost all
Johnson’s Ramblers, by contrast, focus on timeless and universal elements of
human motivation and behaviour. He includes very little local colour, as
well as very few explicit references to current affairs.51 For Johnson, the
moralist’s view of life must be comprehensive, since ‘there is scarce any . . .
good or ill, but is common to human kind’ (Rambler 60).
The universality of the human experience is a frequent theme in the
Rambler. Johnson tells his readers that ‘a few pains, and a few pleasures are all
the materials of human life’ (Rambler 68). This paucity of subject matter
seems inimical to the periodical as a genre, with its aspirations of providing
‘variety of the most entertaining Subjects’ (Ladies Journal 1). Richard Steele tells
his readers that he chose to adopt the alter ego of Isaac Bickerstaff partially in
order to ‘allure my Reader with . . . Variety’ (Tatler 271); the Gentleman’s
Magazine announces proudly on its title page that it contains ‘greater Variety
than any Book of the Kind and Price’. The Gentleman’s Journal bears the same
motto and emblem as Cave’s publication: ‘E Pluribus Unum’ (many united in
one) and a hand holding a bouquet, perhaps alluding to the idea of the publi-
cation as an anthology, which literally means a gathering of flowers. The Lit-
erary Magazine defines a magazine as a ‘MONTHLY COLLECTION’ consisting ‘of
many Articles unconnected and independent of each other’ (I, Preface). The
Lady’s Magazine asserts that ‘the most laboured performances, even of genius,
are insipid when compared to that agreeable medley composed by a variety of
talents and tempers’ (II.1, November 1761).
Not only are the topics suitable for a moralist few in number. Even the
treatment of these subjects, according to Johnson, ‘can admit only of slight
. . . diversities’. All moralists ‘lament the deceitfulness of hope, the fugacity
of pleasure . . . and the frequency of calamity; and . . . concur in recom-
mending kindness . . . and fortitude’ (Rambler 143). Clearly, the moralist
will have difficulty making his work entertaining to his or her readership,
since, as Johnson writes, ‘Nothing can strongly strike or affect us, but what
is rare or sudden’ (Rambler 78). The moralist must precisely interest his or
her readers in the duties of common life, in ‘things which nothing but their
frequency makes considerable’ (Rambler 60).
The uniformity of the Rambler’s tone and subject matter does not simply
reflect the narrowness of the range of topics and approaches available to the
moralist. It is also the result of Johnson’s attempts to reunite a society which
he regarded as deeply divided. Addison and Steele’s periodicals also aimed to
provide a unifying focus for their society. By concentrating on manners and
morals, rather than on partisan politics, they attempted to heal the deep
political rifts caused by the aftermath of the Civil War and the Glorious
Revolution. Johnson, by contrast, portrays a society divided not by political
allegiances, but primarily by occupation.
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 143
The division of mankind into different professions leads to narrow-
minded partiality: ‘Most men’, Johnson writes, ‘have a very strong and
active prejudice in favour of their own vocation, always working upon their
minds, and influencing their behaviour’ (Rambler 9). Johnson envisages a
society of warring factions. The distinctive characteristics of each profes-
sional group, he claims, ‘have been of great use, in the general hostility
which every part of mankind exercises against the rest, to furnish insults and
sarcasms’ (Rambler 173).
The most dangerous result of this minutely subdivided society, for
Johnson, is the erosion of fellow-feeling for those of a different background
or lifestyle from our own. Friendship, writes Johnson, is rare for this reason:

We are by our occupations, education and habits of life divided almost

into different species, which regard one another for the most part with
scorn and malignity. Each of these classes of the human race has . . .
cares which another cannot feel; pleasures which he cannot partake; and
modes of expressing every sensation which he cannot understand.
(Rambler 160)

In this nightmarish vision, the different segments of society are separated

by a profound failure to recognize the marks of a common humanity in the
experiences of others. Inability to comprehend others’ ‘modes of expressing
every sensation’ impedes friendship. It is as though a crucial faculty of
sensory perception were missing or damaged. Just as John Locke’s blind man
cannot form an idea of the colour scarlet without comparing it to something
from his own realm of experience, the sound of a trumpet (1975: 126), so
each individual can only feel and comprehend the pleasures and pains inci-
dent to his or her own particular situation. Mr Rambler’s correspondent Vic-
toria makes a similar point: ‘We can scarcely communicate our perceptions
to minds preoccupied by different objects, any more than the delight of well
disposed colours or harmonious sounds can be imparted to such as want the
senses of hearing or sight’ (Rambler 130). One of the moralist’s most import-
ant tasks, then, is to translate the language of individual experience into
terms which every reader can understand.
While this fragmentation of society renders the moralist’s task more
necessary, it also makes it more difficult. Johnson’s potential readers are pre-
occupied by their own concerns. Even those who have the leisure and incli-
nation to dedicate themselves to knowledge are generally only interested in
one specific branch of learning: ‘The naturalist has no desire to know the
opinions or conjectures of the philologer: the botanist looks upon the
astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard: the lawyer scarcely hears the
name of a physician without contempt’ (Rambler 118). Readers absorbed by
144 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
their own specialized pursuits will afford only a ‘cold reception’ to the writer
who attempts to interest them in questions not immediately relating to
their ‘favourite amusements’ (Rambler 118).
While essay-periodicals attempt to appeal to the general reader (a reader
who, in this society, scarcely seems to exist), contemporary magazines claim
to appeal to many different sub-categories of readers. The London Magazine
imagines different sections of the magazine appealing to different sectors of
its readership: ‘one apt to be taken with Politicks, another with History, another
with Poetry; one with serious and grave Subjects, another with humorous and comical
ones; they may find all these in this Collection’ (1732, Preface). The Gentleman’s
Magazine describes its readership as divided into separate special interest
groups:

The Scholar instructs himself with Advice from the literary World; the
Soldier makes a campaign in safety . . . The Politician . . . unravels the
. . . Intrigues of Ministers; the . . . Merchant observes the Course of
Trade . . . and the . . . Shop-keeper . . . the Price of Goods.
(vol. X, 1740, Preface)

Cave’s publication carries a wealth of specialized and technical informa-

tion on subjects ranging from politics to natural science, catering to coffee-
house newspaper readers, as well as electrifiers of bottles. Magazines often
define themselves as sources of vocational information for professionals. The
Universal Magazine, for example, promises its readers that ‘the adventurous
merchant, the industrious tradesman, the skilful mechanick, the toilsome farmer,
and the careful housewife, shall never want some helps in their respective sta-
tions’, while the magazine also caters to the more scholarly with articles on
‘natural or experimental philosophy, mathematical problems, poetry or musick’
(1747, Preface). The Royal Magazine promises that ‘the Statesman may be
here instructed, the Philosopher satisfied, the Merchant and Tradesman
improved, and the Polite agreeably amused’ (1, October–December 1760,
Preface). The bulky magazines of the 1750s could run to as many as several
hundred pages in length: clearly they were not designed to be read cover to
cover. Each issue of the quarterly Royal Magazine, for example, is 480 pages
long. In the miscellaneous contents pages of publications such as the Grand
Magazine of Universal Intelligence, articles on the cultivation of pineapples and
the treatment of equine illnesses jostle treatises on the nature of sin and dis-
sertations on English property law (see June 1760). The magazines repro-
duce in print the fragmentation of Johnson’s society and the isolation of each
group from the others, as each reader only peruses the one section of the
magazine which is of interest to them. The editor of the Imperial Magazine
comments that writing a periodical ‘is attended with circumstances of pecu-
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 145
liar difficulty, to those who are either under a real or supposed necessity, of
addressing themselves to a community, made up of such different jarring
members’ (March 1760: 143). He advises editors to address each segment of
the readership separately, since ‘universal approbation . . . is no more to be
expected, than indeed it is to be wish’d’ (ibid.).
By contrast with the editors of magazines, Johnson encourages his readers
to define themselves primarily as members of a larger body, which he vari-
ously refers to as ‘the great republick of mankind’ (Rambler 81) and ‘the
great republick of humanity’ (Rambler 136) and describes as united by ‘the
universal league of social beings’ (Rambler 81), using the imagery of politics
and law to suggest a relationship of co-operation and mutual interest. The
enormous success of the magazines, coupled with the paltry sales of the
Rambler, must have led Johnson to fear that by attempting to appeal to all
readers, he would risk capturing the attention of very few.

The Rambler and its readers

One of the most striking features of the Rambler is Johnson’s constant aware-
ness of the relative ineffectiveness of the periodical as a vehicle for teaching
ethics. Addison and Steele regarded the essay-periodical as a medium that
would enable them to reach a relatively large audience that could be
addressed more effectively from the press than from the pulpit. Dread of the
editor’s satire has more power over readers’ imaginations, Steele tells us,
than the fear of hellfire: ‘Though Men [do not] regard any mention either of
Punishments or Rewards, they will listen to what makes them inconsider-
able or mean in the Imaginations of others, and by Degrees in their own’
(Tatler 205). Addison and Steele’s approach requires a light touch, an
ability, as Addison expresses it in the Spectator, to ‘enliven morality with wit,
and to temper wit with morality’ (Spectator 10). In the opening issue of the
Rambler, Johnson wishes that an author might ‘glide imperceptibly into the
favour of the publick’ (Rambler 1) – a phrase that could aptly characterize
Addison’s suave geniality – and he later advises the man who ‘wishes to
attain an English style’ to ‘give his days and nights to Addison’ (Boswell
1964–71: 2.150). Johnson’s own publication, however, is characterized by a
solemnly didactic tone and by the use of ‘so many hard words’ that Mar-
chioness Gray complained that she almost ‘broke her teeth’ when she
attempted to read the Rambler aloud (Clifford 1980: 80). Boswell describes
Addison as writing with ‘the ease of a gentleman’, while Johnson ‘writes like
a teacher’ and ‘dictates to his readers as if from an academical chair’
(1964–71: 1.224). If Addison and Steele brought philosophy, as they claim,
‘out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and
Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses’ (Spectator 10), Johnson
146 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
reintroduces the spirit of ‘Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges’ into
the essay-periodical.
Addison’s gentlemanly ease stems partially from his conception of his
persona. Mr Rambler is a writer; Mr Spectator, by contrast, is a genteel
amateur, ‘born to a small Hereditary Estate’. His name itself indicates that he
is not a member of any profession, but ‘a Spectator of Mankind . . . a Specula-
tive Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with
any Practical Part in Life’ (Spectator 1). As a professional writer, Mr Rambler’s
social standing is lower than that of Mr Spectator. He complains that those
whom he wishes to admonish for fashionable follies regard him as ‘a wretch of
low notions, contracted views, mean conversation, and narrow fortune’, who
wishes to hinder ‘those whom their birth and taste have set above him, from
the enjoyment of their own superiority’ (Rambler 14).
Johnson’s refusal to pander to the snobbery of readers by adopting a more
genteel persona may also be a reaction against a growing trend in mid-
century periodicals. Their editors frequently lay claim to an intimacy with
polite society. The Royal Magazine promises to relate ‘all the Affairs of the
Beau Monde’ (I, October–December 1750, Preface), and the Court Magazine
claims to provide an account of ‘the transactions of the Court’ (September
1761). The Adventurer mocks these hollow pretensions to gentility with a
proposal for a ‘a new paper calculated solely for high life’, entitled ‘The
BEAU-MONDE: Or, The Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Intelligencer’, which is
to contain reports from the horse races, masquerades, playhouses and gam-
bling dens, obituaries of lapdogs and accounts of the fluctuations of fashion
(35, 6 March 1753).
Mr Spectator, then, displays a confidence in his social status which Mr
Rambler lacks. In addition, Addison’s tone reflects a buoyant reliance on his
ability to attract a substantial readership. In the Spectator, he envisages his
readership as a listless and unoccupied group of Londoners: ‘mere Blanks’
until ‘set a going by some Paragraph in a News-Paper’. They look to his
publication to provide them with a raison d’être. ‘Such Persons’, he
announces gleefully, ‘are very acceptable to a young Author’ (Spectator 4).
Johnson, by contrast, imagines a London full of bustling people, wholly pre-
occupied by their own petty concerns. He depicts a young author going out
to the coffee-houses to hear news of the reception of his publication:

He . . . hears in one quarter of a cricket-match . . . is desired to read a

ludicrous advertisement; or consulted about . . . a favourite cat. The
whole world is busied in affairs, which he thinks below the notice of
reasonable creatures, and which are nevertheless sufficient to withdraw
all regard from his labours.
(Rambler 146)
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 147
Johnson’s readers, unlike Addison’s, are too busy to pay attention to an
essay-journal. Johnson’s perception of the difficulty of finding a substantial,
receptive audience for the Rambler reflects the contemporary status of the
essay-periodical. By the time of the Rambler’s publication, magazines had
eclipsed essay-periodicals in popularity (see Mayo 1962 and Taylor 1993).
Very few essay series were published independently in the 1750s and 60s – I
am not aware of any which were launched in the 1760s – and those that did
appear were quickly appropriated by the magazines, which incorporated
them into their pages, a practice which may have accounted for the Rambler’s
own low sales figures. Issues of the Rambler were, in fact, reaching a very wide
readership, though not in their original form, but reprinted in the maga-
zines. Paul Korshin has pointed out that some of the individual Rambler
papers were more widely distributed in the 1750s than the Tatler and the
Spectator were during their original runs in the 1710s, when there were no
magazines to reprint articles (Korshin 1989: 92–105; see also McKeen
Wiles 1968: 155–72). Charles Ranger of the contemporary Gray’s Inn
Journal complains that, unlike other journalists, he has not ‘stood well
enough with the Conductors of our Magazines, to be admitted to the
Honour of furnishing them with an Essay once a Month, in order to display
some select Lucubrations to the great Multitude, who purchase those
monthly Miscellanies’ (21 September 1754). Johnson must have been aware
that his essays were being reprinted in the contemporary magazines. The
Gentleman’s Magazine, with which Johnson himself had been closely
involved, frequently reprinted Rambler papers.52 However, even as the maga-
zines were disseminating some of Johnson’s work to a larger audience, these
popular, bulky publications were driving his essay-paper out of business.
While for Addison and Steele the essay-periodical was an exciting new
medium of communication, for Johnson it was a moribund form competing
in a crowded literary marketplace with other, far more successful forms of
writing.

The character of Mr Rambler

Before we explore the nature of Johnson’s moralism in greater detail, we
need to consider the persona through which he chose to present his ideas.
The use of a journalistic eidolon is one of the conventions of periodical
writing which Johnson inherited from his predecessors. Mr Rambler is
particularly reminiscent of Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff, another elderly
and eccentric, but high-minded, bachelor. However, Johnson’s treatment of
his alter ego is subtly, but crucially, different from Steele’s, and this dif-
ference in approach is symptomatic of Johnson’s views on the function of the
moralist.
148 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
Paradoxically, in the opening issue of the Rambler, Johnson appears to
reject the convention of writing in the guise of a persona. He claims that
‘the epic writers’ have ‘almost unanimously adopted the first lines of
Homer’, but that ‘such ceremonial modes of entrance’ do not exist for those
writing outside the genre of heroic poetry (Rambler 1). ‘The ostentatious and
haughty display of themselves has been the usual refuge of diurnal writers’,
Johnson writes, rejecting the colourful sobriquets and fictitious personae of
his contemporaries who wrote in the guise of hermits, devils, lovers, moun-
tebanks, Quakers, whores and old maids (Rambler 1). However, as Johnson
was aware, there were ‘ceremonial modes’ of introduction for essay-periodi-
calists, for whom Addison and Steele’s example was almost as prescriptive as
Homer’s had been for the Classical poets. As Daniel Defoe puts it, ‘when
Authors present their Works to the World, like a Thief at the Gallows; they make a
Speech to the People’ (Review vol. I, Preface). At a later stage in the publication,
Johnson tells us that readers ‘were angry that the Rambler did not, like the
Spectator, introduce himself . . . by an account of his birth and studies . . .
and a description of his physiognomy’ (Rambler 23).
Johnson rarely invites us to focus on the idiosyncrasies of his persona. We
are given very little explicit information about Mr Rambler, except that,
like Bickerstaff, he is an old man. He has known his acquaintance Suspirius,
we are told, for ‘fifty-eight years and four months’ (Rambler 59), and this
unflattering friend describes the editor as ‘tottering on the edge of the grave’
(ibid.). Mr Rambler’s age does not endow him with special wisdom. Old age
is always depicted in the Rambler in strikingly uncomplimentary terms. Old
men, Johnson tells us, are choleric, censorious, peevish, devoid of compas-
sion, unfit for friendship, vulnerable to flattery and avaricious.53 Johnson
never invites us to blindly venerate the old, suggesting instead that ‘age is
rarely despised but when it is contemptible’ (Rambler 50).
Mr Rambler is also, of course, in possession of an inextinguishable pes-
simism. The correspondent Florentulus imagines Mr Rambler, on receipt of
his letter, ‘snuffing his candle, rubbing his spectacles, stirring his fire . . .
and settling himself in his easy chair, that he may enjoy a new calamity
without disturbance’ (Rambler 109). The Mr Rambler depicted in Florentu-
lus’s letter is a carefully constructed comic persona, but also, with his
gloomy temperament and ponderous style, a playful Johnsonian self-por-
trait. Johnson’s writing here, as elsewhere, is profoundly, yet subtly, autobi-
ographical; he repeatedly invites us to identify the writer himself with his
alter ego.
It is when Johnson is describing the compositional process that we most
frequently glimpse the author behind the mask. He appears to be confiding
his own difficulties to us when he tells us that, for ‘the authors of these petty
compositions’, ‘The imagination ranges from one design to another, and the
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 149
hours pass imperceptibly away till . . . necessity enforces the use of those
thoughts which happen to be at hand’ (Rambler 184). It is clear that, despite
the use of the third person, it is his own writing that Johnson is describing.
The passage closely resembles the celebrated description of writer’s block, in
an issue on the theme of procrastination:

I sat yesterday morning employed in deliberating on which, among the

various subjects that occurred to my imagination, I should bestow the
paper of to-day . . . I grew every moment more irresolute, my ideas
wandered from the first intention, and I rather wished to think, than
thought, upon any settled subject; till at last I was awakened from this
dream of study by a summons from the press.
(Rambler 134)

The use of the first person gives the passage a confessional quality, while
it also has a striking immediacy, reminiscent of Richardson’s technique of
‘writing to the moment’. It is the composition of ‘the paper of to-day’ which
Johnson is describing, that paper which his readers have in their hands on
that specific date. The words ‘I was now necessitated to write’ introduce the
subject of the essay, the theme of indecision and delay: he passes from the
description of his mental inertia to the actual writing in the main part of the
essay, just as he passed from bewilderment to resolution in reality. We sense
from the passage that it is Johnson, not Mr Rambler, who sits daydreaming
over his copy, unable to think of a topic for that day’s paper.
There are dangers, however, in identifying a writer with his or her
didactic alter ego, as Steele acknowledges in the Tatler, where he tells his
readers that Bickerstaff is able to attack vices ‘with a Freedom of Spirit that
would have lost both its Beauty and its Efficacy had it been pretended to by
Mr. Steele’ (Tatler 271). Clearly, to write a moral periodical is to expose
oneself to the charge of hypocrisy. Within the periodical, Johnson repeatedly
reminds his audience of the personal fallibility of the moralist. ‘Few men’, he
writes, ‘celebrated for theoretic wisdom, live with conformity to their pre-
cepts’ (Rambler 77): in his or her private life, the moralist is to be found
‘acting upon principles which he has in common with the illiterate and
unenlightened’ (Rambler 54) and even ‘swelling with the applause which he
has gained by proving that applause is of no value’ (ibid.).
These repeated warnings of ‘the manifest and striking contrariety
between the life of an author and his works’ (Rambler 14) keep the reader
aware of the writer behind the mask. Johnson is constantly vindicating his
action in assuming the mantle of the moral teacher, in a way that seems
almost defensive. He tells us that ‘nothing is more unjust . . . than to charge
with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for . . . virtues, which he neglects to
150 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
practise’ (ibid.). The writer’s personal life, Johnson assures his audience,
should not be permitted to detract from his or her writings: ‘Argument is
only to be invalidated by argument, and is . . . of the same force, whether or
not it convinces him by whom it is proposed’ (ibid.). By comparison with
the easy charm and quirky and loveable eccentricities of Bickerstaff and Mr
Spectator, the character of Johnson’s eidolon is scarcely developed. The focus
is not on Mr Rambler’s personality, but on the arguments which he
proposes.
Despite a few comic touches, we learn nothing about Mr Rambler’s back-
ground and very little about his friends, associates and habits. Mr Rambler
is a representative figure whose fears, weaknesses and failings are typical of
humanity. Johnson is keen to emphasize that the moralist does not have
access to superior strength of character, but understands, because he or she
feels, the same temptations and perplexities as his or her readers. He speaks
throughout the periodical most frequently in the second person plural. Even
when he writes of moralists, he describes their work as ‘a taper, by which we
are lighted’ (Rambler 77; my italic).
In matters of morality, according to Johnson, ‘Men more frequently
require to be reminded than informed’ (Rambler 2). The moralist’s task, in
Johnson’s vision, is to voice the reader’s own inner convictions, to repeat the
prompting of his or her conscience. For this reason, Mr Rambler is an every-
man, in whose voice each reader should recognize a mirror of his or her own
mind and to whose sentiments ‘every bosom returns an echo’ (Johnson 1905:
3.441–2). The reader’s identification with Mr Rambler is crucial to
Johnson’s moral project; his aim is that the reader should find moral pre-
cepts not only reinforced, but should ‘persuade himself that he has always
felt them’ (ibid. 3.441).

Creating empathy
Harnessing the power of empathy is one of Johnson’s central concerns in the
Rambler. Comedy of the form most frequently practised in the eighteenth
century involves distance: the distance, for example, between the writer and
his or her persona, between Swift and Gulliver, Steele and Bickerstaff, a dis-
tance far greater than that between Johnson and Mr Rambler. Johnson,
instead, continually creates proximity, encouraging us to recognize our simi-
larity with others.
Johnson paints a vivid pen-portrait of Suspirius the ‘screech-owl’ (Rambler
59), who tires out his friends with his ceaseless pessimistic whining. The
paper’s moral is not directed at the unfortunate Suspirius, however, but at
us, in our haste to judge him. We are told that ‘to hear complaints with
patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship’
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 151
(ibid.). Hearing complaints with patience is, in the Rambler, one of the
editor’s most important tasks. Johnson’s extensive use of correspondence is
one of the features which most clearly marks his work as a periodical, rather
than simply a collection of essays. Almost all Mr Rambler’s correspondents
write in a tone that is characterized, as one letter-writer admits, by ‘lamenta-
tion and complaint’ (Rambler 147). The letters allow Johnson to comment on
the full range of human experience and to model for his readers a compas-
sionate response to human suffering in every form.
This tradition of the distressed reader appealing to the editor for relief
dates back to John Dunton’s epistolary periodicals of the 1690s, in which
the editors, in the guise of the Athenian Society, claimed to provide a
resource for the suicidal and prevent the ‘desperate Hand, which . . . else
might attempt upon the Breast’ (Gildon c.1693: 5). Steele’s Bickerstaff
offers his paper as ‘the Patron of Persons who have no other Friend to com-
plain to’ (Tatler 245), and other editors were to follow this model. The
editor of the Visiter promises, ‘Whoever is pleased to make a Friend of me, I
shall consider their Sorrows as my own’ (1, 18 June 1723).
What distinguishes Johnson’s correspondents is that the sufferings which
they describe would be more likely to excite risibility than commiseration.
As Johnson reminds us, ‘There are many vexatious accidents and uneasy
situations which raise little compassion for the sufferer’ (Rambler 176). One
correspondent appeals to Mr Rambler for a sympathetic response to ‘a ludi-
crous persecution’, which, despite its seemingly petty nature, ‘wears away
my happiness’ (Rambler 147). His complaint is that he is constantly teased
about his lack of assurance by his more worldly uncle. While the pages of
the magazines of the 1750s and 60s also contain many sorrowful letters to
the editor, they are of a very different nature from those in the Rambler. A
letter from Evander in the Lady’s Magazine is characteristic: ‘There is a satis-
faction for which I cannot account, and that too not a small one, which
results from imparting our distresses to a person who has sensibility to
discern their poignancy, and humanity to compassionate the suffer [sic]’
(July 1761). Evander’s plangent tones echo those of many of Mr Rambler’s
correspondents, yet he is a far more obviously deserving object of readerly
sympathy than the figures who inhabit Johnson’s periodical. Evander is
about to retire from the world on the death of his beloved wife, who died of
grief after the demise of their only child, a 6-year-old boy.
In the Rambler, the satirical character-sketch, beloved of periodical editors
since Addison and Steele, is often transformed by Johnson into a compas-
sionate appeal for sympathy with the distresses of others. A witty paper on
the bankrupt virtuoso Quisquilius (Rambler 82) is followed in the next issue
by a more balanced appraisal of the activities of collectors as a group.
Johnson warns that it is not easy ‘to forbear some sallies of merriment . . .
152 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
when we see a man wrinkled with attention . . . in the investigation of ques-
tions, of which, without visible inconvenience, the world may expire in
ignorance’ (Rambler 83). The editor discourages his readers, however, from
regarding Quisquilius simply as a figure of ridicule. He points out that the
virtuoso’s pastime keeps him from idleness, brutality and vice. He later
prints a letter from the fictional correspondent Vivaculus, satirizing the
activities of a club of virtuosos, and follows it with the comment, ‘It may . . .
somewhat mollify his anger to reflect . . . that he who does his best, however
little, is always to be distinguished from him who does nothing’ (Rambler
177). Describing pedants, Johnson carefully analyses the various motives
that may lead ‘the harmless collegiate’ to hold forth on academic topics in
inappropriate situations. He explains that the pedant is always characterized,
often unjustly, as ‘arrogant and overbearing’, since ‘we are seldom so far
prejudiced in favour of each other to seek out palliations’ (Rambler 173).
Rather than apportioning blame, the moralist’s task, for Johnson, is to
‘mollify’ and ‘seek out palliations’. As a moralist, Johnson sets out to investi-
gate the motivations of the foolish or futile human behaviour, which most of
us are inclined to condemn without examination.
Johnson asks us to empathize not only with those who seem to invite
derision, but also with those who, like the prostitute Misella, are scorned by
‘the rigour of virtuous indignation’ and from whom it is even considered
‘meritorious to withhold relief’ (Rambler 170). Johnson’s descriptions of the
sufferings of the most unfortunate members of society are written with force
and passion. He exhorts us to oppose capital punishment, citing Herman
Boerhaave’s question on witnessing an execution, ‘Who knows whether this
man is not less culpable than me?’ (Rambler 114).54 Johnson depicts the
plight of the London prostitutes, ‘covered with rags, shivering with cold,
and pining with hunger’. The prostitutes would not need an advocate, he
writes, ‘if none were to refuse them relief, but those that owe their exemp-
tion from the same distress only to their wisdom or their virtue’ (Rambler
107).
Johnson’s writings have little in common with the sentimental novels of
Henry Mackenzie or Frances Brooke, whose aristocratic protagonists are
moved to displays of sentiment or acts of charity by innocent or repentant
victims of misfortune. He does not simply appeal to the reader’s own good
nature and pity, presenting spectacles of the deserving poor for the audi-
ence’s edification. Instead, he points out his readers’ kinship with some of
the most hated and feared members of their society: prostitutes and con-
demned criminals.
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 153
Moderating desires
Johnson’s tone of ‘dolorous declamation’, as a correspondent aptly describes
it (Rambler 109), together with his unrelenting focus on human sorrow, are
intrinsic parts of what he regards as the moralist’s most important duty:
teaching ‘the art of moderating the desires’ (Rambler 180). One crucial way
of moderating desires, for Johnson, is to take comfort in our distresses by
comparing our own state with that of those unhappier than ourselves: ‘Few
are placed in a situation so gloomy and distressful, as not to see every day
beings yet more forlorn and miserable, from whom they may learn to rejoice
in their own lot’ (Rambler 186). At first glance, Johnson may appear here to
be advocating a smug satisfaction bordering on schadenfreude, but in fact he
is recommending a habit of mind which he regards as all too rare, since we
always regard others as more fortunate than ourselves:

If the general disposition of things be estimated by the representation

which every one makes of his own state, the world must be considered
as the abode of sorrow and misery . . . If we judge by the account which
may be obtained of every man’s fortune from others, it may be con-
cluded, that we are all placed in an elysian region . . . since scarcely any
complaint is uttered without censure from those that hear it.
(Rambler 128)

Not only are Johnson’s readers unable to appreciate the specific sorrows of
others, but they seem unwilling even to acknowledge that anyone else has
any ‘troubles and distresses’. ‘Complaint’ of the kind so often voiced by Mr
Rambler’s correspondents meets only with ‘censure’ and impatient disbelief.
While Johnson frequently portrays a society in which members of different
genders, professions or age groups fail to understand each other’s pleasures
and miseries, in this vision society is even more deeply segmented. Empathy
and compassion are impossible when each individual believes that he or she
is the only one to suffer. The moralist can offer no mitigation of the very real
sorrows experienced by his or her readers – Johnson is always sceptical of the
Stoics’ philosophy of the unreality of suffering – but ‘the business of moral-
ists’, Johnson tells us, is ‘to detect the frauds of fortune’ and show that even
greatness ‘has far fewer advantages, and much less splendour, when we are
suffered to approach it’ (Rambler 58).
Comparison of our state with that of others, for Johnson, is almost always
delusive and morally damaging. The erroneous belief that others experience
a happiness denied to us leads to three different forms of behaviour explored
extensively in the Rambler: indecision, competition and dependency.
154 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
Indecision, procrastination and idleness
We might expect a moralist to emphasize the necessity of exercising great
care in all our choices: instead Johnson almost always stresses the dangers of
long consideration. Polyphilus in Rambler 19 possesses a ‘powerful genius,
which might have . . . benefited the world in any profession’, but he vacil-
lates between a variety of different callings, dabbling in medicine, law,
scholarship and the military by turns. His tale warns us, Johnson concludes,
‘That of two states of life equally consistent with religion and virtue, he who
chuses earliest chuses best’ (Rambler 19). Johnson frequently cautions his
readers against Polyphilus’s error:

To let loose the attention equally to the advantages and inconveniences

of every employment is not without danger; new motives are every
moment operating on every side; and mechanicks have long ago dis-
covered, that contrariety of equal attractions is equivalent to rest.
(Rambler 153)

As we have seen, in the Rambler Johnson portrays a society split along

professional lines into warring factions. This conflict appears particularly
futile in light of the arbitrary nature of most of our choices, including that
of a profession. We are unable to comprehend any state of life which we have
not experienced at first hand: ‘Of the state with which practice has not
acquainted us, we snatch a glimpse, we discern a point, and regulate the rest
by passion, and by fancy’ (Rambler 63).
Every situation, Johnson writes, has its attendant evils, yet we can under-
stand and feel only the disadvantages of our own condition: ‘No man is
pleased with his present state’ (ibid.). We are all engaged in a restless search
for a condition of greater ease and happiness:

Thus the married praise the ease and freedom of a single state, and the
single fly to marriage from the weariness of solitude. From all our obser-
vations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man,
but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most
alleviations.
(Rambler 45)

The moralist, by depicting the miseries of every condition of human life,

prevents us from wasting our lives seeking an amelioration which no change
can bring, so that we may ‘be freed from the temptation of seeking by per-
petual changes that ease which is no where to be found’ (Rambler 66).
While not everyone spends their life, like Polyphilus, frequently chang-
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 155
ing their career, for Johnson, the ‘insatiable demand for new gratifications
. . . seems particularly to characterize the nature of man’ (Rambler 80).
While here Johnson associates the desire for novelty with a search for pleas-
ure, he more often characterizes it as a desire to ‘find alleviations’, to avoid
pain. The poet Abraham Cowley’s longing to emigrate to America exempli-
fies this universal wish in one of its simplest forms, according to Johnson:
‘The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is
change of place’ (Rambler 6).
While Cowley’s emigration scheme is portrayed by Johnson as childish
and futile, the search for novelty is not merely an example of human delu-
sion. Pleasure, by its nature, Johnson claims, is evanescent, while pain is
lasting:

It seems to be the condition of our present state, that pain should be

more fixed and permanent than pleasure. Uneasiness gives way by slow
degrees, and is long before it quits its possession of the sensory; but all
our gratifications are volatile, vagrant, and easily dissipated.
(Rambler 78)

Our sensory organization only allows us to experience the advantages and

beauties of any situation briefly. Only in a new situation are there real possi-
bilities of pleasure.
The perpetual desire for novelty, together with the weariness which
accompanies large enterprises, combine to make sustained work very diffi-
cult. Indecision can lead to a kind of mental paralysis which renders real
achievement impossible, even for those of ‘active faculties and more acute
discernment’: ‘He to whom many objects of persuit arise at the same time,
will frequently hesitate between different desires . . . and harrass himself
without advancing’ (Rambler 134). Wide-ranging talents and insatiable
intellectual curiosity often lead, for Johnson, to perpetual procrastination.
‘Acute discernment’ and ‘active faculties’ are at odds with each other:
Johnson insists upon the shortness of the time apportioned us and the neces-
sity for less thought and more action.
This focus on action, rather than thought, is an unusual one for a moral-
ist. Moral writing usually invites us to consider potential outcomes carefully
before embarking on a course of action. As Johnson points out, temerity has
frequently been the object of censure, while few moralists have warned
against timidity (Rambler 129). Yet, for Johnson, diffidence prevents many
from undertaking anything at all, since ‘whatever is proposed, it is much
easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing’ (Rambler 39).
Idleness is, for Johnson, one of the most constant features of the human
mind and possesses a force stronger even than desire: ‘We every day . . . find
156 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
multitudes repining at the want of that which nothing but idleness hinders
them from enjoying’ (Rambler 134). Johnson describes idleness almost as if it
were an impersonal physical force, defining it as ‘the vis inertiae, the mere
repugnance to motion’ (ibid.). We are neither driven to idleness by the hope of
pleasure or by the wish to avoid pain. It offers no clear benefits: ‘To neglect
our duties, merely to avoid the labour of performing them . . . is surely to sink
under weak temptations’ (ibid.). Here, as elsewhere in the Rambler, Johnson
acknowledges the inadequacy of reason to explain human motivation.
However weak the allurements which idleness offers, it is one of the strongest
of our impulses: ‘one of the general weaknesses, which . . . prevail to a greater
or less degree in every mind’ (ibid.). In the world of the Rambler, any action not
outrightly criminal is preferable to this state of total inactivity.
Idleness, in the Rambler, is often accompanied by a retreat into daydreams
and fantasy. Johnson diagnoses daydreaming as a ‘formidable and obstinate
disease of the intellect’ and prescribes a strict regimen of constant activity as
a remedy: ‘[It is essential that] no part of life be spent in a state of neutrality
or indifference; but that some pleasure be found for every moment that is
not devoted to labour’ (Rambler 89). For Johnson, daydreaming represents a
complete abdication of moral responsibility, a relinquishment of our duties
as social beings and a retreat into a solipsistic mental universe. Johnson’s
language when describing daydreaming is extreme. It is a ‘frigid and nar-
cotick’ condition (ibid.): to live in a world of fantasy and wish-fulfilment is,
for Johnson, scarcely to be alive at all.
Many of the characters who inhabit the Rambler are afflicted with this
mental malady. The unreliable Aliger is a particularly vivid example of the
moral degeneracy of those who surrender themselves wholly to the power of
their own imaginations: ‘It was so pleasant to live in perpetual vacancy, that
he soon dismissed his attention as an useless incumbrance . . . The hopes or
fears felt by others, had no influence upon his conduct’ (Rambler 201). Aliger
defrauds his creditors, deceives his friends and jilts his bride, without pre-
meditated malice, simply out of a kind of mental frigidity which prevents
him from acknowledging that anything outside his own mental world could
have a substantial reality.
A number of the Rambler’s correspondents live in a state of complete
mental torpor. Euphelia, exiled to the country for the summer, gives a vivid
description of this condition:

I am forced to be awake at least twelve hours . . . I walk because I am

disgusted with sitting still, and sit down because I am weary with
walking. I have no motive to action, nor any object of love, or hate, or
fear, or inclination.
(Rambler 42)
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 157
Indecision, which often begins as the confusion of an active and intellec-
tually curious mind, faced with a plethora of choices, can lead, in Johnson’s
world, to procrastination and idleness, the solipsistic world of fantasy and,
finally, to this condition of mental vacuity.
Johnson offers an escape from this nightmarish trajectory in those Rambler
papers which discuss the proper uses of time. ‘The great incentive to virtue’,
Johnson tells us, ‘is the reflection that we must die’ (Rambler 78). The
reminders of the brevity of life are designed to urge us to action. Always a prac-
tical, not a speculative, moralist, Johnson suggests that thinking too long or
too deeply is liable to lead to moral confusion and mental lassitude. Indecision,
for Johnson, is one of the greatest obstacles to the fulfilment of moral duties.

Competition, envy and fame

In the Rambler, Johnson portrays a world of fierce, relentless competition.
The urge to continually compare our condition with that of others is not
restricted to the consideration of whether others are happier or more fortu-
nate than ourselves. According to Johnson, we are constantly measuring our
accomplishments against those of others: ‘All human excellence is compara-
tive’ (Rambler 127). Johnson uses the term ‘excellence’ in the Rambler to
denote both great achievements in themselves and the act of surpassing
others. As Isobel Grundy has shown in her book Samuel Johnson and the Scale
of Greatness (1986), for Johnson, all who aspire to honour or reputation must
battle with a horde of eager competitors.55 For Johnson, ‘Most of our enjoy-
ments owe their value to the peculiarity of possession’ (Rambler 66). Johnson
portrays each of us as striving for a solitary eminence: we wish not just to be
good, but to be the best.
Johnson uses the word ‘distinction’ in the Rambler in a similar manner to
‘excellence’: it conflates absolute and comparative merit. To be distinguished
is precisely to be different from others, therefore ‘distinction’ is a scant
resource. ‘Every one wishes for the distinctions for which thousands are
wishing at the same time’, Johnson tells us. Life, in the Rambler, is a con-
stant series of competitions:

A great part of the pain and pleasure of life arises . . . from the success
or miscarriage of secret competitions. . . . we seldom require more to
the happiness of the present hour, than to surpass him that stands next
before us.
(Rambler 164)

Success, in itself, is inadequate if it is not accompanied by victory over

others. The affluent trader Serotinus, on returning to his native town, finds
158 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
his happiness soured by the death or absence of those before whom he hoped
to flaunt his superiority. Their place, he tells us, has been ‘filled by a new
generation with other views and other competitions’ (Rambler 165). Denied
the taste of victory over old antagonists, Serotinus concludes that wealth
‘conferred upon me very few distinctions in my native place’ (ibid.). Seged
the king also discovers how little success can be enjoyed without victory. He
offers rewards to those courtiers who can provide the best ‘festive perfor-
mances’, but awards the same prizes to everyone. His guests ‘departed unsat-
isfied, because they were honoured with no distinction, and wanted an
opportunity to triumph in the mortification of their opponents’ (Rambler
205).
Since our own happiness bears an inverse relationship to the success of
others, there are clearly many incentives to envy. Yet envy, for Johnson, goes
beyond self-interest: ‘The great law of natural benevolence is oftner violated
by envy than by interest’ (Rambler 183). Envy is ‘mere unmixed and genuine
evil; it . . . desires not so much its own happiness as another’s misery’ (ibid.).
Every successful man ‘will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence’
(Rambler 172), and ‘he that has given no provocation to malice, but by
attempting to excel, finds himself pursued by multitudes whom he never
saw with all the implacability of personal resentment’ (Rambler 183).
The malice which envy inspires, in the Rambler, most often takes the form
of calumny. Johnson catalogues the various means by which we attempt to
damage the reputations of others in Rambler 44. The whisperers, roarers and
detractors whom Johnson describes are very effective at propagating misery,
since they strike at fame, the desire of which Johnson describes as ‘the ori-
ginal motive of almost all our actions’ (Rambler 193). For Johnson, fame is a
commodity in limited supply. He tells us:

There is never room in the world for more than a certain quantity or
measure of renown.... When this vacuity is filled, no characters can be
admitted into the circulation of fame, but by occupying the place of
some that must be thrust into oblivion.
(Rambler 203)

As Grundy (1986) has argued, we can become famous only by supplant-

ing someone else, elbowing them out of a crowded space. Successive genera-
tions cannot add new names to the roll call of the famous: each accession to
fame must be balanced by a loss in an act of aggression. While fame is diffi-
cult to obtain, its possession is also insecure.
While Johnson envisages a society in which most people are motivated by
a struggle for renown in some form, he continually reminds his readers just
how little fame anyone can obtain. In the highly specialized, divided and
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 159
divisive society portrayed in the Rambler, each individual is too exclusively
preoccupied with his or her own concerns, to think much of others:

The truth is, that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world . . .
While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one
appears to deserve our notice, or excites our sympathy, we should
remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng.
(Rambler 159)

Like other contenders for fame, writers are often neglected and ignored.
They also, however, frequently arouse an active hostility on the part of their
potential readers. The act of publication is a bid for fame and presupposes,
on the author’s part, a provocative confidence in his or her own abilities. Jus-
tifying his own criticism of Milton’s faults, Johnson writes:

He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom

every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life,
steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the publick judg-
ment. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly
aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.
(Rambler 93)

As Mary van Tassel has shown, Johnson repeatedly uses military images
to characterize the relationship between himself and his readers (1988:
461–71). The writer, like the candidate for fame, thrusts himself or herself
aggressively upon potential readers’ notice, challenges all who wish to read
him or her to an intellectual battle. Issuing a general challenge implies
supreme confidence in one’s abilities to defeat all comers. Writers who fail
in this bid for applause are exposed to the ‘unbounded contempt’ of readers,
enjoying what they regard as ‘an honest triumph over unjust claims, and
exorbitant expectations’ (Rambler 1).
By openly courting admiration, writers lay themselves open to a charge of
arrogance. For this reason, even when a writer attains literary success, he or
she is unlikely to enjoy personal popularity. In fact, Johnson suggests that
the more we admire an author’s work, the less we will enjoy his or her
company, since ‘few spend their time with much satisfaction under the eye
of uncontestable superiority’ (Rambler 188). Writers in the Rambler are often
portrayed as arrogant. The successful author Misellus ascribes his unpopular-
ity to envy: he is ‘too eminent for happiness’ (Rambler 16). When he
describes his behaviour in company, however, it is clear that he treats others
with contemptuous rudeness. Similarly, Didaculus, a malicious wit, makes
himself universally feared and hated: ‘The natural pride of human nature
160 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
rises against him, who by general censures lays claim to general superiority’
(Rambler 174).
‘General censures’ are clearly not the subject matter of the Rambler.
Johnson far more frequently explains or palliates, than outrightly condemns
behaviour. Nor does he lay claim to a ‘general superiority’, reminding us,
instead, that the moralist shares many of his or her reader’s failings. Johnson
does, however, stake a subtler claim to a superiority over his readers, as he
has assumed ‘the office of a periodical monitor’ (Rambler 15). A monitor is
one who inspects and regulates the behaviour of others. The pen-portrait of
Nugaculus in Rambler 103 demonstrates how easily a monitor can become
trapped in ‘the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness’. Nugaculus has an interest
in human motivation which mirrors Mr Rambler’s. He quickly degenerates,
however, into a busybody, a gossip and a ‘a perpetual spy’ (Rambler 103).
The duty of a periodical monitor is twofold: to detect faults and to offer
advice on their reformation. The giving of advice, Johnson writes, is a
particularly delicate task. To advise someone implies superior knowledge
and, like any other assumption of superiority, is liable to be rejected:

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the
most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate
enquiry whether it is right. It is sufficient that another is growing great
in his own eyes at our expence, and assumes authority over us without
our permission.
(Rambler 87)

The moral writer faces an insoluble dilemma. In order to learn from the
moralist, readers must ‘not only confess their ignorance, but, what is still
less pleasing, must allow that he from whom they are to learn is more
knowing than themselves’ (Rambler 3). They are unwilling to allow the
moralist’s superiority to themselves – understandably unwilling, since, as
Johnson so frequently reminds us, moralists are as fallible as their readers.
On the other hand, in order to benefit from the moralist’s teachings, they
must accept his or her authority: ‘Men would not more patiently submit to
be taught, than commanded, by one known to have the same follies and
weaknesses with themselves’ (Rambler 14). In the universal battle for prece-
dence, the moralist is in competition with his or her own readers. The com-
petitions, rivalries and struggles for superiority which Johnson sees as
characterizing human society are not only the targets of the moralist’s criti-
cism, but threaten to make that criticism itself ineffective.
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 161
Patronage and dependence
In the Rambler, Johnson portrays a society in which we are constantly com-
paring ourselves with others. While in the Rambler papers on competition,
envy and fame he focuses on the comparative estimation of abilities, achieve-
ments and renown, in the papers on patronage and dependence Johnson
examines the ways in which wealth and class are used as markers of superior-
ity and inferiority in a society obsessed with status.
A number of Rambler papers portray the arrogance of the rich towards
their social inferiors: Prospero (Rambler 200) and Trypherus (Rambler 98) are
only particularly striking examples of a behaviour which Johnson finds
almost universal: ‘It is scarcely possible to find any man who does not fre-
quently . . . indulge his own pride by forcing others into a comparison with
himself, when he knows the advantage is on his side’ (Rambler 98). Like
fame, wealth is relative and, Johnson implies, cannot be fully enjoyed
without the gloating satisfaction of seeing others poorer. The arrogant rich
are continually undoing the moralist’s work of moderating desires, as they
encourage us to make our happiness dependent on our place in a scale of
prosperity.
In this world of continual comparisons, friendship is a rare quality: ‘The
greatest part of mankind content themselves without it, and supply its place
as they can, with interest and dependence’ (Rambler 64). Friendships
between rich and poor, in particular, are almost impossible. Even the most
altruistic friendship is based, Johnson argues, on reciprocal benefits: ‘We are
desirous of pleasing others, because we receive pleasure from them’. We are
unwilling to acknowledge the benefits which we have received from social
inferiors: ‘To be obliged, is to be in some respect inferior to another; and few
willingly indulge the memory of an action which raises one whom they have
always been accustomed to think below them’ (Rambler 166). Even in friend-
ship we are anxious to maintain or enhance our status. In the universal tend-
ency to categorize others as inferiors or superiors, all relationships tend
towards a model of patronage and dependence: ‘We see every day men of
eminence followed with all the obsequiousness of dependance, and courted
with all the blandishments of flattery, by those who want nothing from
them but professions of regard’ (Rambler 166).
While these unequal relationships are so common, they are deeply dam-
aging to the moral character of both parties. A number of Rambler papers
vividly describe the misuse of power over others. The petty tyrants who
inhabit the periodical’s pages range from the terrifying to the despicable.
Among the more egregiously wicked are the extortionate landlord Squire
Bluster (Rambler 142) and Misella’s wealthy guardian, who seduces and then
abandons her (Rambler 170). Few of the characters portrayed in the Rambler
162 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
display such extreme cruelty, however. Most content themselves with a con-
tinued series of small insults designed to keep the victim painfully aware of
his or her own dependence. Hyperdulus describes this treatment vividly:
‘petulance of accent, or arrogance of mien, some vehemence of interrogation,
or quickness of reply, that recalls my poverty to my mind’ (Rambler 149).
The pen-portraits within the Rambler are of representative, rather than
extreme, characters. It is important that the reader should recognize his or
her own failings in the behaviour of these oppressors, so that he or she may
be shocked by ‘the contemplation of his own manners’ (Rambler 208) into
reform. When Johnson wishes to remind us of the full human capacity for
evil, he does so in an essay rather than a character sketch. In Rambler 148,
Johnson portrays paternal tyranny. Within his own home, the father pos-
sesses a power far greater than that of even the most arbitrary rulers: ‘Seldom
any prince, however despotick . . . [will] venture upon those freaks of injus-
tice, which are sometimes indulged under the secrecy of a private dwelling’
(Rambler 148). No possible motive of self-interest can explain why a father
would be cruel to his children ‘who can disturb him with no competition,
who can enrich him with no spoils’ (ibid.). A situation of dominance over
others, for Johnson, has a power to corrupt which goes beyond rational
explanation.
Although Johnson frequently portrays the oppressions of those in power,
he also defends patrons against accusations of injustice. Portraits of negli-
gent patrons (such as Liberalis’s patron in Rambler 163) are balanced by
Johnson’s contention that many complaints of neglect are fictitious: ‘Among
wretches that place their happiness in the favour of the great . . . nothing is
more common than to boast of confidence which they do not enjoy’ (Rambler
189). Many expect financial support who do not deserve it, Johnson argues.
Johnson claims, for example, that when the behaviour of learned writers is
‘impartially surveyed’, it will be found that they ‘seldom wanted friends, but
when they wanted virtue’ (Rambler 77). In Johnson’s allegory of Patronage,
he portrays the goddess’s moral degeneration as simultaneous with the
increasing impudence of those who do not deserve her favour and block the
entrance to her palace from the more deserving (Rambler 91).
A number of Rambler papers depict the vices incident to dependency. All
too often, Johnson claims, the dependent relinquishes moral responsibility,
since his or her only rule of conduct is the desire to please: ‘The greatest part
of human gratifications approach so nearly to vice, that few who make the
delight of others their rule of conduct, can avoid disingenuous compliances’
(Rambler 160). One of the most dangerous of these compliances is flattery.
The dependent, by contrast with the moralist, attempts to strengthen his or
her patron’s ‘weaknesses and follies, regales his reigning vanity, or stimu-
lates his prevalent desires’ (Rambler 172). The dependent must therefore bear
 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler 163
at least partial responsibility for his or her patron’s vices. The ugly heiress
Turpicula would never, Johnson tells us, have become vain, had she not been
‘animated and emboldened by flattery’ (Rambler 189).
The learned are far from immune to this almost universal tendency to
court the favour of the great, Johnson argues. On the contrary, ‘the most
obsequious of the slaves of pride, the most rapturous of the gazers upon
wealth . . . are collected from seminaries appropriated to the study of
wisdom and of virtue’ (Rambler 180). Scholars, however, are singularly ill
qualified to shine in company. Vivaculus exemplifies this social awkward-
ness. Years of solitary devotion to learning have left his mind ‘contracted
and stiffened’ and his manners ‘sullen and malignant’ (Rambler 177). He
goes to London to polish his social graces only to fall into the company of a
society of antiquarians even more ill-mannered, morose and socially inept
than himself.
Dusty pedants like Vivaculus are outnumbered in the Rambler by scholars
who, like the frigid Gelasimus in Rambler 179, aspire to be wits. ‘The airi-
ness and jocularity of a man bred to severe science and solitary meditation’ is
more likely to provoke contempt than hilarity, Johnson tells us (Rambler
173). The wish to be regarded as a wit is a particularly misguided one. The
wit, Johnson writes, is ‘a character, which, perhaps, no man ever assumed
without repentance’ (Rambler 194). The wits portrayed in the Rambler are
consumed by nervous apprehension, entering each company ‘with a beating
heart, like a litigant on the day of decision’ and carefully calculating their
nightly ‘loss or gain of reputation’ (Rambler 128). The wit’s predicament is
exacerbated by the fact that anxiety is incompatible with humour. Papilius,
in Rambler 141, manages to retain an appearance of spontaneity only
through painstaking study. Hilarius, in Rambler 101, however, finds that the
ardour of his ‘ambition of shining’, coupled with his anxiety to maintain his
reputation, combine to ‘freeze his faculties’. The wit resembles the writer of
an essay-periodical in the necessity that they are both under of providing
regular entertainment and in their subjection to the never-ceasing ‘call for
novelty’ (Rambler 141). We can sense, in these portraits of anxious wits,
Johnson’s consciousness that the essay-periodical as a form must have led his
readers to expect twice-weekly specimens of wit. No wonder he describes
journalism as ‘the anxious employment of a periodical writer’ (Rambler 208),
a sentiment echoed in the Gray’s Inn Journal, whose editor describes ‘the
anxious Character of a public Writer’ (14 September 1754).
While Johnson never advocates assuming the role of a wit, he does recom-
mend that scholars improve their social graces. He numbers ‘an early
entrance into the living world’ (Rambler 137) as one of the most important
qualifications for authorship. Johnson never recommends isolation or
segregation. When scholars are gauche or boorish in company, they bring
164 Johnson as moralist in the Rambler
learning and moral wisdom into disrepute, leading most people to ‘quickly
shake off their reverence for modes of education, which they find to produce
no ability above the rest of mankind’ (ibid.). What is important for Johnson
is not simply the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing, but its potential to
reach an audience.
The Rambler was published at a time of rapidly changing patterns of
ownership and control of periodicals, in which booksellers and printers,
rather than writers, often determined the contents of publications. Essay-
periodicalists were an increasingly endangered breed. In this context, the
Rambler can be seen as an anachronistic project. The magazines ascribed their
popularity to the heterogeneity of their contents, to the variety of their con-
tributors and to their appeal to a segmented readership, divided by interest,
profession and gender. Johnson, by contrast, wrote in a uniform tone, on a
limited number of subjects, included very few readers’ letters and attempted
to appeal to a general readership.
Johnson’s publication is a collection of his own moral ideas and a place in
which to express his Christian ethics. While the Rambler is not a systematic
treatise, the essays express a coherent moral vision. In the Rambler, Johnson
attempts to combat the fragmentation of his society by diverting our atten-
tion from the specific to the general, from those things whose value is com-
parative to the fundamentals of human behaviour which we all share. He
appeals to common interests and to a common culture which he regards as
endangered. The essay-periodical had traditionally been written in the voice
of the quirky individual, by cranks and spinsters who traced their lineage
back to the loveable eccentricities of Isaac Bickerstaff. Johnson, by contrast,
created in Mr Rambler a representative of humanity in whose essays he
could voice the common concerns of all mankind.
8 ‘A becoming sensibility’
The Old Maid and the sentimental
periodical

Anne Laurence claims that, during the eighteenth century, two thirds of
adult women were single at any one time, many of them as widows, some as
spinsters (1999: 56). However, as Bridget Hill has pointed out, society had
‘no acknowledged place for the single woman’ (2001: 11). Spinsters living
alone were particularly financially and socially vulnerable: ‘The most invisi-
ble women of all are the older unmarried women, with no family and less
opportunity for employment in domestic service. Their disadvantaged status
is emphasised by their high rate of early death’ (Laurence 1999: 56). In addi-
tion to their social deprivation, old maids were the targets of some of the
mid-eighteenth century’s harshest satire. Contemporary old maids repo t
being subjected to frequent public insults. The correspondent Constantia
Issolea complains to the Auditor, ‘If I walk in publick the Women cast a dis-
dainful Stare at me; and the Men cry with Contempt, What an old Hag’ (33,
1 May 1733). In similar fashion, a correspondent reports to the Universal
Spectator that as she was passing two gentlemen in the Strand one com-
mented, ‘That is an Old Maid, poor Wretch! . . . in a sneering contemptu-
ous Manner’ (3 September 1737). Contemporaries often argue that the worst
part of an old maid’s situation is her exposure to ‘the incessant impertinence
of indelicate ridicule’ (A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old
Maids 1786: 1.17). ‘Every one . . . knows’, one writer claims, ‘the sneers, the
twits, the sarcasms, the toasts, and wishes that never fail accompanying an
old maid upon all occasions’ (A Practical Essay on Old Maids (n.d.): 33).
This chapter will focus on Frances Brooke’s periodical the Old Maid,
written in the persona of Mary Singleton, spinster. The paper was published
weekly from 15 November 1755 to 4 July 1756: a total of 37 issues. As old
maids were notorious for their peevishness and bitchy jealousy of other
women, an old maid scarcely seems an appropriate choice of persona for the
editor of an essay-periodical. The title of her publication must have led
readers to expect satire and raised specific expectations about Brooke’s treat-
ment of her eidolon. The author of a proposal to establish a college for old
166 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
maids acknowledges these preconceptions when he fears that ‘the term Old
Maid will probably be considered as a term of derision, and turn the serious reader
away in disgust’ (Considerations for Establishing a College for Old Maids in
Ireland 1790: 3). One of Brooke’s readers contends that there is ‘no character
so generally the same, and concerning which the opinions of mankind do so
perfectly agree, as that of an Old Maid’ (Old Maid 6, 20 December 1755). In
the first part of this chapter, I will examine Brooke’s unusually sympathetic
portrayal of female spinsterhood, by placing her depiction of Mary Singleton
in the context of other contemporary representations of old maids.
Some essay-periodicalists before Brooke had chosen outré figures such as
harlots, mountebanks and devils as their eidolons. These editorial personae
were, however, either undeveloped or used as the objects of satirical
attack; Brooke, by contrast, uses her periodical to elicit our sympathy for the
figure of the spinster. Brooke’s persona was probably not autobiographical.
Born in 1724, she was 31 or 32 when she began writing the periodical and
had married Henry Brooke at the latest by the end of the journal’s run and
probably at around the time she began the journal.56 Mary Singleton, by
contrast, is a spinster of at least 56.57 Brooke chose a persona who would
normally arouse readerly disdain and scorn in order to reinterpret the figure
of the old maid and attempt to portray female celibacy in a more positive
light.
It is not only her surprising choice of alter ego, however, that demon-
strates Brooke’s unusual approach to literary journalism. In the Old Maid,
she combines features of the essay-periodical with those of fictional writing.
Her frame narrative of the editor’s niece, Julia, anticipates her later novels:
not only in her use of character and plot, but also in the style and tone of her
writing, which moves from journalistic suavity to the emotional language of
the sentimental novel. In Brooke’s paper, the older genre of the Spectatorial
essay-periodical merges with the sentimental novel to create a new hybrid:
the sentimental periodical. These two unusual aspects of her periodical – her
choice of persona and her novelistic approach – are closely related. Writing
in the style of sentimental fiction enables Brooke to champion female
celibacy more effectively by placing her eidolon in a literary tradition in
which empathy is more important than satire.
To appreciate my argument regarding Brooke, it is important to under-
stand the satirical journalistic tradition in which she found herself, by exam-
ining the work of her close contemporaries Eliza Haywood, Christopher
Smart and Bonnell Thornton. In some ways, an old maid is an obvious
choice of persona for a female writer. Authorship and celibacy were often
associated with each other, as eccentricity, irascibility and fierce pride were
considered to be common to both. A male correspondent of the Lady’s Mag-
azine comments wryly, ‘The greatest reproach of an old maid . . . is her ill
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 167
humour . . . There is no race of men more apt to . . . remit their natural
good humour, than authors’ (November 1761). The writer who has failed to
attract readers and the old maid who has failed to attract men are depicted as
suffering from a very similar disappointment, one particularly guaranteed to
sour the temper: ‘The fair sex may be considered as students in the most
important and most delicate of all arts, the art of pleasing; and, of course,
the Old Maid may be reckoned in the number of unsuccessful artists’ (A
Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay 1786: 85). In this context, it is
unsurprising that in her periodical the Female Spectator Eliza Haywood chose
to portray her editor as a single woman who turns in middle age from
attempts to attract lovers to attempts to please readers.
Brooke’s choice of a female editor-persona may well have been influenced
by Haywood’s. Published in 1744–6, when Brooke was entering her twen-
ties, Haywood’s Female Spectator went through six collected editions by 1756
and is one of very few essay-periodicals known to have been written by
women. Brooke may have also read the parody ‘The New Female Spectator’,
published as a series in the Spring-Garden Journal (1752), which mimics
Haywood’s elevated moral tone and educational material. Haywood does not
develop the character of her alter ego further in later issues of the periodical,
however, nor is there any discussion of spinsterhood within the pages of the
publication. The only account of incidents from the narrator’s personal life
we are given is a visit to the country (Female Spectator bk XVII: 3.161–75), in
which her conduct is exemplary.
The Female Spectator’s decorous behaviour and the moral focus of her
periodical are all the more striking because it is precisely the former
coquette turned old maid who attracts the harshest contemporary criticism
and most clearly embodies the stereotype of old maidism: ‘The superannu-
ated beauty turns into the sharpest and most acrimonious Old Maid’ (A
Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay 1786: 88–9). ‘Involuntarily [sic]
celibacy is principally occasioned by our own vanity and conduct, and too
highly estimating the value of our personal accomplishments’, the narrator
of A Practical Essay on Old Maids tells her readers (p. 44). Cautionary tales of
haughty beauties who have left hordes of weeping discarded suitors in their
wake, only to be rejected in their turn, abound in the contemporary press.
An anonymous poet who writes in to the Gentleman’s Magazine envisages old
maids in the afterlife remembering with bitter regret

ev’ry youth that sought their love

.............................
All whom a guilty pride and coy disdain,
Frown’d from their arms, and doom’d to sigh in vain.
(XIX, March 1749: 131)
168 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
Contemporary attitudes towards the causes of female celibacy are suc-
cinctly summarized in the chorus of a late eighteenth-century popular song:

no never nor cost a fond Lover a tear,

’Tis pity to die an old Maid.
(Willson 1795)

The underlying suggestion here that every woman has it in her power to
marry unless she is flighty or perverse is explicitly asserted by a number of
contemporary writers. The self-professed old maid Lucinda in The Mysteries
of Virginity tells us that ‘there are no Women so ordinary, or ill shaped, but
there are Men as uggly, and deformed’ (1714: 33). The author of A Satyr
Upon Old Maids, after describing the repellent physical characteristics of old
maids with a Swiftian attention to disgusting detail – ‘rank Hide’, ‘putrid
Lungs’, pestilential breath and ‘pendant Pearls’ of snot – goes on to assure
the spinsters that they can, nevertheless, find husbands (1713: 7–8). He or
she suggests night soil collectors, ‘whose Nature is by Custom fed with
Stinks’, as well as ‘Lepers and Leachers [sic]’ and ‘Zanies, Idiots, Dolts’ (A Satyr
Upon Old Maids 1713: 10–11). A contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine
has a further practical suggestion: the ‘Tar indelicate’ will be pleased to
marry any willing white woman when he returns from India ‘and negros
please no more’ (XIX, March 1749: 131).
These caricatures of repulsive spinsters are less pernicious than the subtler
criticisms contained in works such as the Philosophical, Historical and Moral
Essay on Old Maids since, unlike the Essay, these works were clearly not
intended to be understood literally. In this context, however, an old maid
seems an odd choice of journalistic alter ego for Brooke who claims that her
periodical owes a debt to ‘the admirable author of the RAMBLER’ (Old Maid
26, 8 May 1756) and was written in emulation of the ‘lucubrations of this
. . . genius’, which she has ‘studied . . . as a model of writing’ (Old Maid 8, 3
January 1756).
Johnson’s depictions of old maids within the Rambler may have influenced
Brooke’s portrayal of Mary Singleton. Comments on older spinsters are rare
within the Rambler and express a careful mixture of criticism and praise.
Johnson asserts that those who grow old ‘in a single state’ are generally
‘morose, fretful and captious’, but this statement refers equally to men and
women (Rambler 112). In an essay on marriage and celibacy, he argues that
single women ‘seldom give those that frequent their conversation, any
exalted notions of the blessing of liberty’, but he goes on to enumerate the
miseries of an unhappy marriage (Rambler 39). He portrays the choice
between marriage and celibacy for women as a choice between Scylla and
Charybdis. There are only two pen-portraits of old maids within the periodi-
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 169
cal: the bad-tempered Tetrica and the sensible Tranquilla (Ramblers 74 and
119). Despite having been ‘subject for many years to all the hardships of
antiquated virginity’, Tranquilla is cheerful, sensible and virtuous. She has
chosen to remain single because she has never been courted by a man of
sense and virtue and is later rewarded with marriage to the correspondent
Hymenaeus (Rambler 167).
Johnson’s balanced and sometimes sympathetic portrayals of old maids
are characteristic of his treatment of those who were traditionally the
victims of satire but they are very unusual in the context of mid-eighteenth
century journalism. Most of the journalistic representations of spinsters in
mid-century focus on the physical repulsiveness, pride, bad temper and
moral turpitude of old maids. The editor of the World, to which Mary Sin-
gleton herself subscribes (see Old Maid 2, 22 November 1755), describes
aged spinsters pooling their resources in order to afford to share ‘a neat little
house, a light-bodied coach, and a footboy’ but in this struggle to maintain
their gentility ‘quarreling every day’ (151, 20 November 1755). The barely
disguised sexual rapaciousness of Martha Single is characteristic. A shrewish
spinster of 55, she writes unconvincingly in the Lady’s Curiosity of her deter-
mination to reject all offers and ‘laugh with contempt on the prettiest fellow
in Great Britain’ (no. 8). Brooke’s title would probably have reminded
contemporaries less of Haywood’s Female Spectator than of the grotesque and
ludicrous creations of Christopher Smart and Bonnell Thornton.
Thornton portrays the editor of his Drury-Lane Journal (1752) as a widow
who has turned to hack writing in desperation. While not strictly speaking
an old maid, his eidolon Roxana Termagant, ‘a female, and witty, and much
above the age of eighteen’ (Drury-Lane Journal 1, 16 January 1752) epito-
mizes many of the ascribed characteristics of the single woman journalist.
The associations of women’s writing with prostitution are underlined not
only by her place of residence, a street infamous for its brothels, but also by
the ‘five wooden pictures, half-torn, of the Harlot’s Progress’ which decorate
her walls (Drury-Lane Journal 3, 30 January 1752). Her own life, like the
harlot’s, is a cautionary tale. Her ‘early propensity to learning’ leads her to
neglect feminine accomplishments and, in a parody of male education, she
first becomes a school usher and is then taught the Classics for four years by
her lover, a student at Cambridge. When she is deserted by her lover, she
becomes first a bit-part actress and then the wife of a strolling player, before
she is finally forced to enlist as a bookseller’s hack (ibid.). Roxana’s life is a
course of progressive moral degeneration as she becomes first an actress, then
an actor’s wife and finally reaches the nadir of female respectability when she
descends to journalism.
When Roxana dies, her niece Priscilla launches a new publication, the
Spring-Garden Journal. Despite her youth, Priscilla is clearly an old maid in
170 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
the making. The life of ‘Vanity and Folly’, which inevitably leads to old
maidism in later life and which is only discreetly hinted at in the Female
Spectator, is detailed here with relish. Like her aunt, Priscilla is characterized
by her vanity and sexual notoriety. She writes her periodical from a room
overlooking a park frequented by soldiers, above a subscription library, thus
combining the dangers of female leisure, sexual over-exposure, literary
ambition and indiscriminate novel-reading. The midwife Mrs Minnim has
already offered to take Priscilla on as her apprentice, warning her that mid-
wifery ‘is likely to be my last and dernier Resort’ (Spring-Garden Journal 4, 7
December 1752).
The associations of ‘OLD MAIDISM’ with female pretensions to learning,
sexual promiscuity, poverty, prostitution and midwifery are manifest in
Christopher Smart’s periodical the Student (1750–1) in the figure of the
‘Female Student’. Smart’s alter ego has received a Classical education from
her father, ‘a grave fellow of a college’ who sired her in a clandestine mar-
riage (Student II: Polyhymnia).58 Having ‘made much greater progress in aca-
demical erudition, than many of your matriculated dons’, she progresses
sexually up the academic ranks, the mistress first of undergraduates, then of
Fellows, and finally of a College Master (Student II: Calliope). When her
charms fade, she is forced to take a lover without a degree, the bookseller Mr
Brevier, publisher of Smart’s periodical the Midwife, who, in a parody of a
marriage proposal, has ‘very lately honour’d me with the offer of a garret at
the easy rate of writing sixteen hours a day’ (Student II: Euterpe). Despite
being ‘a fusty OLD MAID’, she assures the reader that she does not ‘write out
of pique, peevishness and resentment’ (Student II: Polyhymnia). The implica-
tion, however, is clearly that she is a frustrated spinster, turning to scrib-
bling for income when her sexual charms lose their force and writing attacks
on men to revenge herself on those who have rejected her. The ‘Vanity’
which leads the old maid to flirt with men until it is too late to receive an
honourable proposal is the same sentiment which leads her to value herself
upon her education and her literary abilities; hence, the female writer is
more likely to be an old maid than any other woman.
It is surprising, then, that Frances Brooke chose Mary Singleton as her
eidolon when she launched her new periodical in 1755. Her publication
demonstrates a deft awareness of the satirical tradition of scribbling old
maids. How, then, does Brooke attempt to transform the hated and derided
figure of the old maid into a persuasive spokeswoman for respectable values?
In her opening paper, Mary Singleton offers her readers a whimsical
account of her motives for writing:

In defiance of all criticism I will write: every body knows an English

woman has a natural right to expose herself as much as she pleases . . .
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 171
since I feel a violent inclination to show my prodigious wisdom to my
cotemporaries . . . [I] hope, by giving to the public the observations my
unemploy’d course of life has enabled me to make, to obtain pardon for
leading my days in a way so unserviceable to society.
(Old Maid 1, 15 November 1755)

Mary Singleton’s vanity is apparent when she boasts of her ‘prodigious

wisdom’ and the associations of women’s writing with sexual looseness are
underlined by the idea that editing a periodical is a form of self-exposure.
Mary Singleton’s tone, however, is confident – she defies criticism – and the
writing of a periodical is depicted as a public duty. Her literary progeny
compensates society for her biological sterility. The absence of marital
responsibilities has enabled her to make observations which qualify her as a
writer and her freedom from domestic cares leaves her the liberty to publish
a periodical if she wishes. Her independence is highlighted: she ‘feels an
inclination’ and is free to follow it, and she has ‘a natural right’ to launch her
own periodical venture. There is no suggestion that the paper is written for
financial gain; she is free, financially as well as morally, to dedicate herself to
the service of the ‘public’.
Mary Singleton does possess several of ‘the follies of superannuated vir-
ginity’ (Old Maid 36, 17 July 1756), although Brooke’s depiction of them is
mildly humorous, rather than ferociously satirical. Old maids were fre-
quently satirized for their sexual desperation. The anonymous editor of the
Connoisseur describes an allegorical dream-vision of the Temple of Marriage,
in which an ‘old woman, fantastically dressed . . . ran raving up to the Altar,
crying out, that she would have a husband’ (Connoisseur 95, 20 November
1755). Unable to persuade any of the assembled company to marry her, she
seizes a bride cake and – ‘furious with rage and despair’ – crams it down the
editor’s throat, in token of their matrimony (ibid.). He wakes to find
‘the nauseous taste of it still in my mouth’ (ibid.). Published only five days
after Brooke launched her periodical, the dream-vision may be an attack
on the Old Maid and the sexually rapacious old woman, an image of Mary
Singleton.
Brooke’s eidolon bears only faint and disarmingly innocuous traces of the
characteristics of the spinster as sexual predator, however. She delights in
reading her love letters ‘once a year on my birth-day, by the help of spec-
tacles’ (Old Maid 1, 15 November 1755) and the periodical enables her to
receive male correspondence again. Her correspondent Virginius, who, as his
name suggests, is ‘an Old Maid of the masculine gender’ (Old Maid 6, 20
December 1755), relies on at long last seeing a letter in print which has
been rejected by every other periodical. He rests his faith on ‘that obliging
willingness, with which Ladies of your distinction have always been observed
172 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
to admit the addresses of those, who have the appearance of any thing mascu-
line about them’ (ibid.). Mary Singleton assures readers that, ‘I shall expect to
hear from [Virginius] again, with all the impatience of a virgin of fifty, who
must not hope for civilities every day’ (ibid.). To show him, however, that ‘I
have more than one string to my bow’, Mary Singleton prints a letter from
the ‘jovial old Bacchanalian Batchelor’ Tom Bumper, who sends her a poem
inspired by her charms, together with ‘a gallon of Claret’, and promises to
toast her at his club (ibid.). The editor is able to receive epistolary gallantries
from male correspondents who cannot see her wrinkles. Nevertheless, Mary
Singleton’s tone is not one of sexual desperation: she light-heartedly teases
Virginius and thanks Tom Bumper politely for his offer, but refuses the
present of claret, as she is a teetotaller.
Little is known about the actual contemporary audience of Brooke’s peri-
odical. However, she prints a number of letters from old maids – whether
real or fictitious – within the pages of her publication. Some of the old
maids who feature in Brooke’s paper closely resemble the misogynistic
stereotypes depicted by Smart and Thornton. Brooke’s most lurid creation is
Sarah Whispercom, a nosy busybody who has grown a beard as a result of
attempting to copy male behaviour by shaving her chin (Old Maid 24, 24
April 1756). Mrs Singleton’s correspondent Cana Greypate, a ‘maiden lady’
living in Oxford, has many obvious similarities with Roxana Termagant and
the Female Student (Old Maid 9, 10 January 1756). Cana had herself ‘formed
a design to entertain the public with periodical lucubrations’ (ibid.). Cana’s
pride in her erudition does not disguise her sexual desperation – she wishes
to change her condition ‘upon the first offer’ – or her volatile temper (ibid.).
Her letter is blotted with the marks of ‘vehemency of passion’ (ibid.). Instead
of publishing a moral periodical, Mrs Singleton advises her to find an
equally sour old Fellow with whom she can descant in private on the vices of
the age (ibid.). The elderly bachelor, the editor implies, will be as sullen and
cantankerous as the old maid.
These negative images of the old maid are more than balanced in the
periodical by more positive portrayals of female celibacy. Cana Greypate’s
letter is immediately followed by one from Marian Doubtful who wonders
why Mary Singleton does not offer ‘encouragement to your own sex to live
single’, since ‘a single life must be much less disagreeable, than . . . union,
with one, who . . . excite[s] . . . loathing and contempt’ (ibid.). Another of
her correspondents views the ‘choice of a single life’ as a natural response to
‘generous indignation at the insolencies of modern husbands’ (ibid.). The
idea of the single life as the choice of a generous nature, rather than the
result of rejection, is reflected in the comments of some of Mary Singleton’s
male correspondents. E.F. praises women ‘like you, Madam’, who, by
remaining single, have been enabled to devote their talents to society and
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 173
‘have passed their early time in improving themselves, and their latter days
in improving others’ (Old Maid 11, 24 January 1756).
The most striking vindication of the single life within the periodical is
Mary Singleton’s allegorical Choice of Hercules, a dream vision of the choice
between marriage and celibacy (Old Maid 21, 10 April 1756). In her dream,
Mary Singleton is restored to youth and beauty by the gods and allowed a
second chance to choose her way of life. She is led to the fane of Marriage,
fragrant with myrtles and orange blossom, but flees when she sees Care,
Discord and Jealousy seated behind the goddess’s throne. Celibacy’s haunt at
first appears dreary by comparison, and Neglect, Contempt and Derision
support her train, but on a nearer approach she sees Tranquillity at her side.
A captivating youth then approaches, whom Mary Singleton soon recognizes
as Liberty, a companion more attractive to her than any other lover. She
enlists as a votary of Celibacy and is conducted by Peace and Contentment
to the Temple of Happiness, equidistant from the two deities. When Mary
Singleton awakes:

I have the satisfaction to find myself really accompanied by Peace and

Contentment . . . I am . . . in a state generally attended with spleen and
Illnature, one of the best tempered creatures breathing . . . very inoffen-
sively blotting paper in the service . . . of my fellow citizens.
(ibid.)

For Mary Singleton, the periodical is not a vehicle in which to vent the
‘spleen and Illnature’ generally seen as inseparable from an old maid’s char-
acter, but a therapy to ward off depression and envy. Every old maid, she
suggests, has something to contribute to society, in a public, if not in a
domestic, capacity. The spinster Abigail Easy tells Mary Singleton that her
depiction of the pleasures and freedoms of celibacy has convinced her that
the editor is not, like Roxana Termagant and the Female Student, simply
‘some fellow who had taken the petticoat in disguise’, but ‘one of the sister-
hood’ (Old Maid 23, 17 April 1756). She recognizes herself in the sensible
and light-hearted editor, as she could not do in the monstrous satirical cre-
ations of earlier writers. Whilst ‘growing daily more in love with that liberty
and independency I made my choice, I am as chearful and happy a creature as
yourself’ (ibid.).
Brooke’s positive attitude towards old maids not only characterizes her as
‘a feminist with a strong sense of decorum’ (McMullen 1983: 61). It
also reflects her attitude to the periodical as a genre. Like Haywood,
Brooke rejects the practice of making the periodical editor an outlandish
comic figure. Mary Singleton is strikingly restrained, lacking in eccentricity
and only mildly whimsical. As Min Wild has shown, she is a credible
174 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
spokeswoman for the values of civic humanism (1998: 421–36).59 Like
Johnson’s Mr Rambler, she functions far more as a representative of good
sense than as a figure of fun. Although it incorporates elements of the peri-
odical tradition which included an idiosyncratic editor-persona, Brooke’s
publication is not primarily a vehicle of satire, but instead shares many fea-
tures with her later novels, in particular the novels of sensibility The History
of Julia Mandeville (1763) and The History of Emily Montague (1769).
The Old Maid is exceptional among contemporary periodicals in the
amount of space it dedicates to its frame narrative. Almost half the issues
deal in some way with the Old Maid’s personal life and the love affairs of her
niece, Julia, and Julia’s friend Rosara. She announces her design ‘to present
my readers . . . with such real events of my life, and the lives of my friends
as are particularly interesting’ and adds, almost apologetically, that ‘I shall
also think myself obliged to intermix with these such subjects as shall
appear to me either useful or entertaining, tho’ they have no connection
with the affairs of Mrs. Singleton’ (Old Maid 28, 22 May 1756). The ‘affairs of
Mrs. Singleton’, the editor suggests, are to be at least as important as the
miscellaneous ‘useful or entertaining’ subjects which usually comprise the
bulk of an essay-periodical.
Mary Singleton’s past is colourfully novelistic. Born to a fortune of £400
per year, she falls in love with a young man who ‘had not a shilling’. They
become secretly engaged and plan to marry on her father’s death. When her
lover inherits an estate, however, he immediately informs Mary Singleton
that he is to marry the appropriately named Miss Wealthy. Less typically for
the plot of a novel, Mary Singleton sends him a spirited reply and then goes
on a four-year tour of the Continent with her sister and brother-in-law. She
returns, heart-whole, to find that her lover has been ruined by his wife, an
extravagant ‘city fortune’ corrupted by novel-reading into a love of gaming
and intrigues. Two years after their return to England, Mary Singleton’s
sister dies in childbirth. Mary Singleton adopts her sister’s daughter and
decides to remain celibate for the child’s sake. The penniless lover, sudden
deaths, vicissitudes of fortune and poetic justice all recall the plots of
contemporary novels. These plot twists also provide ample justification for
the editor’s marital status. Jilted by a mercenary lover, Mary Singleton’s
own behaviour has been irreproachable: circumstances, rather than tempera-
ment or behaviour, have made her an old maid.
Mary Singleton’s maternal duties make her in some senses an exception to
the general run of old maids and somewhat counteract her praise of the self-
sufficiency of the celibate life. Within the periodical, Brooke champions
celibacy as a choice, but, within the novelistic frame narrative, she makes it
a question of duty, rather than inclination. In order to retain our sympathies
for Mary Singleton, Brooke feels the need to explain the reasons behind her
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 175
failure to get married. ‘If any old maid is excusable’, Mary Singleton tells us,
‘I hope I am: for tho’ I have not had the honour of being a mother, I have
had all the cares of one’ (Old Maid 1, 15 November 1755).
It is not merely in the description of Mary Singleton, however, that
Brooke evokes the traditions of the novel. In the second issue of the Old
Maid, Mary Singleton describes her niece, Julia, in explicitly novelistic
terms, beginning with her appearance, ‘as . . . it is the fashion to describe
the persons of all modern heroines’ (Old Maid 2, 22 November 1755). The
insipid Julia has ‘such inexpressible sweetness in her countenance, it has
often occasioned a doubt of her understanding’, together with a shyness
which occasions her ‘propensity to be silent in company’ (ibid.). Like the
protagonists of The Excursion (1777) and Julia Mandeville, she is at a crucial
stage of her development, having ‘just turned eighteen’, and is, in addition,
an orphan with a fortune of £15,000 (Old Maid 2). Julia’s friend Rosara is
equally a lady of sentiment, since ‘from passing the greatest part of her time
in the country’ she is ‘inclined to be romantic’ (Old Maid 7, 27 December
1755). Rosara is secretly engaged to a rich lover, Wilmot, who plans to
marry him on her father’s death, whilst Julia, by a neat contrast, is in love
with a poor soldier called Bellville. In her timidity and fragility, Julia antic-
ipates the female figures in Julia Mandeville. The eponymous protagonist of
that novel is ‘delicate and feminine to the utmost degree’ (Brooke 1763: 42),
while her friend Emily Howard, ‘delicate almost to fragility’, inspires ‘that
instinctive fondness one feels for a beautiful child’ (Brooke 1763: 109).
Brooke’s novels usually pair a high-minded heroine, who is the focus of
the plot, with a witty, irreverent commentator, in a structure which echoes
the contrast between Clarissa Harlowe and the lively Anna Howe in
Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8). In Julia Mandeville, the sensible widow
Anne Wilmot provides a foil to the saccharine heroine; in Emily Montague,
the self-confessed coquette Arabella Fermor is contrasted with the scrupu-
lous Emily; whilst in The Excursion the picaresque heroine Maria is opposed
to her pale, timid twin sister, Louisa. In the Old Maid, Mary Singleton is the
Anna Howe figure: a detached and ironic narrator, involved in, yet not
central to, the action, with less beauty and delicacy but greater strength of
character than her niece. It is an unusual role for a confirmed spinster. While
Anna Howe possesses an independent spirit, it is clear throughout Clarissa
that she will eventually marry the long-suffering Hickman. Arabella Fermor
and Maria are also destined for happy marriages.
Brooke borrows some of the devices of the novel in her periodical. When
Mary Singleton relates her own story, she prints the correspondence between
herself and her faithless lover, giving her tale greater immediacy and bring-
ing the periodical closer to an epistolary novel. The periodical approaches
even closer to this model when the editor introduces us to a new set of
176 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical
characters: Dr. Hartingley and his wife and their young protégé Sir Harry
Hyacinth (Old Maid 29, 29 May 1756). Dr. Hartingley gives Julia’s friend
Rosara a poetry album which had belonged to his daughter. When she takes
it home, an intimate letter drops out, in the best traditions of the novel,
offering a glimpse of Sir Harry’s personality. Sir Harry hints tantalizingly
that he has already chosen his future bride. Dramatic future plot develop-
ments are suggested when he tells his correspondent that his future wife’s
character should be tested before he will marry her: ‘I must see her in
danger, and I must see her in sorrow’ (ibid.).
When news arrives of Rosara’s mother’s illness, the periodical’s style
changes from journalistic ease to breathless, Richardsonian writing-to-the-
moment:

This moment whilst I am writing, a servant of Mrs. Montague’s, Rosara’s

Mother, is arrived, with the unpleasing intelligence, that his Lady is ill
of a fever, and desires to see her Daughter immediately: the poor tender
Rosara is half distracted; Julia is in Tears; nor can I myself help sympa-
thising in the distress of this amiable young woman . . . Rosara will set
out to night; I hear her ordering a Post-Chaise, I tremble for them.
(Old Maid 28, 22 May 1756)

The shift into the present tense, the short, disjointed clauses designed to
express agitation and the abrupt ending on a cliff-hanger are all characteris-
tic of the epistolary novel. In Julia Mandeville, Lady Anne Wilmot receives
the news of Harry Mandeville’s imminent death whilst writing to her lover:

The surgeon is come; he is now with Mr. Mandeville; how I dread to

hear his sentence! the door opens – he comes out with Lord Belmont:
horror is in the face of the latter – oh! Bellville! my presaging heart –
they advance towards me – I am unable to meet them – my limbs
tremble – a cold dew –
Bellville! his wounds are mortal – the pen drops from my hand.
(Brooke 1763: 197–8)

Mary Singleton’s use of this style transforms her from the journalist address-
ing her public to the writer of an emotional letter to an intimate friend or
lover within the epistolary novel.
It is not only within the periodical’s frame narrative that we find
representations influenced by the novelistic tradition, but also in the Old
Maid’s correspondence. The periodical’s most explicitly feminist statement,
on the disparity between the treatment of sons and daughters (Old Maid 11,
24 January 1756), also reveals the influence of the sentimental novel. The
 The Old Maid and the sentimental periodical 177
correspondent E.F. writes in emotive language of the misplaced affection of
fathers for a ‘blockheadly son’, whilst neglecting ‘the modest, agreeable, and
beautiful daughter’ (ibid.). He assures fathers, ‘Women communicate joy and
happiness, from the time they come into the world, to the time they leave it’
(ibid.). E.F’.s emotive appeal to other men to appreciate the sheer natural
virtue and loveliness of women anticipates the letters of Ed Rivers in Emily
Montague and Harry Mandeville in Julia Mandeville, the sensitive men who
are able to appreciate and cherish these female paragons. Such rapturous
appreciation of female merit would not be possible in most essay-periodicals
of the mid-eighteenth century, unless accompanied by a heavy dose of irony.
By introducing the language and plots of the sentimental novel into her
periodical, Brooke attempts to endow the single life with dignity. It is
significant, though, that Brooke chose to do this in a periodical, not in a
novel. Novels of this period generally centre on a courtship plot and end
with the female protagonist’s marriage: the periodical, by contrast, is both
more miscellaneous and more open-ended.
Frances Brooke’s interest in periodical writing spans her career. The Old
Maid was her first full-length publication. The correspondence between
Brooke and Frances Burney shows that in 1783, towards the end of Brooke’s
life, she was planning another periodical in collaboration with the younger
novelist (McMullen 1983: 205). It is tempting to speculate on the style of
publication which the two women novelists together might have produced.
Whilst women writers dominated the contemporary market for novels,
within the periodical tradition women editor-writers are something of an
anomaly. Only five women – Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke and Charlotte Lennox – are
known to have edited periodicals between 1690 and 1770.60 Three of these
five women chose to write under female pseudonyms (Montagu poses as an
anonymous male journalist in her publication the Nonsense of Common Sense,
as does Delarivier Manley in the Examiner). One of the essay-periodical’s
most important features was its use of a quirky but charming editorial
persona, a practice inaugurated by Richard Steele with his portrait of Isaac
Bickerstaff in the Tatler. However, whilst the elderly bachelor eschewing
domestic life in favour of journalism could be seen as a loveable eccentric,
the old maid writer was more frequently portrayed as a monstrosity whose
literary activities compromised her respectability and her femininity. By
combining elements from the novel and the periodical, Brooke helped to
link the female journalist with the more widely accepted female novelist and
to infuse the more charitable attitudes of the sentimental novel into the
essay-periodical, with its heavy reliance on the misogynistic stereotypes of
satire. She feminizes the essay-periodical and, as she does so, champions both
the old maids of her title and female journalists in general.
9 ‘Studies proper for women’
The Lady’s Museum and the periodical
as an educational tool

Before 1760, there were very few, if any, magazines specifically addressed to
women readers, although Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6) antici-
pates many of the features of the genre, including a pronounced interest in
women’s education. In the 1760s, at least four such publications appeared:
the Court Miscellany (1765–71), the Royal Female Magazine (1760) and the
Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63), in addition
to Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum. The Lady’s Museum attempted to
endow the magazine with moral and intellectual respectability by present-
ing itself as a pedagogical work for women. This chapter will examine the
strengths and limitations of the mid-century magazine as an informative and
instructive publication for women.
Women’s need for greater access to education is a recurrent theme of peri-
odical editors throughout the century. Those who claim to champion
women’s cause do so by demonstrating their educability and calling for a
more ambitious programme of female study. The editor of the Free-thinker
proposes to set women ‘upon the Level with my own Sex, in our boasted
Superiority of Reason’, commenting wryly that ‘every Kind of Knowledge,
will be much better comprehended over a Pot of Tea, than . . . a Bottle of
Wine’ (3, 31 March 1718). The Visiter would not wish its female readers to
‘sit down with knowing how to make a Pudding . . . as the only Knowledge
necessary for them’, adding provocatively that ‘a University erected for their
Use’ would ‘produce much fewer Female Blockheads, than Oxford or Cam-
bridge does of the Masculine’ (2, 25 June 1723). A correspondent of the
Ladies Magazine complains that her education is shamefully neglected
because she is a beauty: ‘What Opportunities have we of improving, when
Men talk nothing but Nonsense to us; or what Encouragement to cultivate
our Minds, when we are assured that Nobody will ever concern themselves
about them?’ (III.6, 8 February 1762). Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, a publica-
tion which contains many positive portrayals of women, claims that women
have ‘a finer Genius, and generally quicker Apprehensions’ than men and
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 179
encourages them to be ‘as learned now, as . . . Madam Philips, Van Schurman,
and others have formerly been’ (I.18, 23 May 1691).61 The Ladies Journal
asserts that ‘there is an absolute necessity, for the ladies being as learned as
the Gentlemen’ (no. 2) and cites a list of learned women for their emulation
(no. 3). John Tipper’s publications the Ladies Diary and Delights for the Inge-
nious encourage female interest in mathematics, telling readers that ‘there is
no Thoughtful and Contemplative Person, but wou’d find unspeakable
Pleasure and Satisfaction in the Study of it’ (Delights for the Ingenious January
1711). Priscilla Termagant of the Spring-Garden Journal argues that women
‘have a more delicate and penetrating Understanding’ than men, using her
own authorship of the periodical as an ironic proof of female genius (3, 30
November 1752). She cites Classical precedents for female aptitude for
learning: ‘Was not Aspasia so excellent in Philosophy, that Socrates attended
her Lectures . . . Tullia shone in Oratory; and Cornelia taught Eloquence to
the Gracchi . . . Sappho excelled in Poetry and one of the Corynnae overcame
Pindar’ (ibid.).
The Court Magazine contains articles on the house of Mecklenburg
(September 1761), the island of Hispaniola (April 1762) and on British
geography (September 1762), which are of pedagogical interest, but
other educational material is scanty within the publication. However, the
Court comments indirectly on the extent of the vogue for female learning
by including a letter from a servant who has become learned from
reading Milton, Otway and Locke aloud to her mistress and debating
philosophy with the chaplain (October 1761). The magazine also dramatizes
the contemporary interest in female education with an article entitled
‘The History of Amanda’ (Court Magazine September 1761), which relates
the story of a 17-year-old woman who loves reading (the Spectator is one
of her favourite books). She frequents the company of educated men,
partly out of a love of learning and partly from pride in her own erudition:
‘Tho’ this desire [of male company] might in some measure arise from
a laudable intention of improving by the conversation of the ingenious,
I will not positively affirm that it had not its share of vanity too’ (ibid.).
One of these scholarly men flatters Amanda’s pride in her intellect and
persuades her to have an affair with him. After he deserts her, she marries a
virtuous man, who is convinced of her fundamental innocence, despite
the affair: ‘I do not see’, he tells her, ‘your conduct was the effect of
levity; but an unguarded greatness of soul’ (ibid.). The couple live happily
ever after, thereby proving, perhaps, that a woman with an education is
worthy of a good husband, even when she has lost her virginity to another
man.
Christopher Smart’s publication the Midwife treats the contemporary
obsession with female education in a comic manner. The editor, Mother
180 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
Midnight, argues that ‘the Mind of Woman is capable of the same Improve-
ments as that of Man’ and exclaims, ‘How greatly it is to be lamented, that
the Female Sex should be in a Manner disinherited from their Right of
common in the Fields of Learning?’ (Midwife II.5). Smart surrounds his
persona with an elaborate apparatus of pseudo-erudition. Mother Midnight
has published an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Midwife II.6) and a
14-volume Treatise on Perspective (Midwife II.2). She corresponds regularly
with the College of Physicians, the Royal Society, to whom she sends a pro-
posal for the invention of an organ driven by cats (Midwife I.3), as well as
with the Society of Antiquarians, to whom she donates an essay on a piece of
petrified excrement (Midwife I.4). The editor also receives letters from other
learned women. The correspondent Mrs Susannah Coxeter, for example, has
prepared her son for university and compensates for the deficiencies of his
schoolmasters with her own extensive learning: ‘[I] retaught him his Latin,
and Greek, and English, together with as much of Logic, Rhetoric, Geography,
Astronomy, Mathematicks and Morality, as learned Men generally know, and
more of Divinity than they practise’ (Midwife II.5). Mary Midnight provides
the second volume of the periodical with garbled mottoes in Greek, Latin
and Hebrew and corrects the Classical scholarship of ‘all the Universities in
Europe’ (Midwife I.2). Smart’s primary purpose in the Midwife seems to be to
satirize the incompetence of the male intellectual establishment, rather than
to champion the cause of female education, however. His satire is also
directed in part at John Hill’s pretensions to disseminate learning to both
male and female readers in his ‘Inspector’ papers in the Daily Advertiser.
Hill’s journalistic alter ego is a keen amateur scientist and polymath. A
contemporary pamphlet satirizes Hill as ‘a Chymist, Critick, Journalist,
Physician /. . . / A Farinelli, actor, and a poet’ (The Inspector’s Rhapsody 1752).
The Inspector regales his readers with such fare as an account of embalming
(no. 11), a critique of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (no.
2), a description of the microscopic creatures found in pond water (no. 8)
and a proposal for mining (no. 7).
The concern with female education evinced by so many editors is closely
connected with contemporary anxieties about women’s novel-reading habits.
Editors often attempt to find safe alternative reading material for women.
The Lady’s Museum comments:

There is scarcely a young girl who has not read with eagerness a great
number of idle romances, and puerile tales sufficient to corrupt her
imagination and cloud her understanding. If she had devoted the same
time to the study of history, she would . . . have found . . . instruction
which only truth can give.
(1: I.13)
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 181
The editor of the Oxford Magazine tells his female readers, ‘Your minds
are as capable of more rational studies as ours, and could we but once fix
your education upon a more rational plan, your sex would not be the only
one that would receive the benefits from it’ (no. 2, supplement to vol. for
1768). He exhorts women to turn from perusing novels to emulating schol-
ars such as Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay, who are ‘of late, the
glories of your sex’ (ibid.). Periodical editors often provide reading lists or
recommendations for study, such as Steele’s Ladies Library (1714), whose
forthcoming publication is announced, somewhat prematurely, in Tatler
248. Eliza Haywood provides an impressive programme of reading in the
Female Spectator. She recommends the study of botany, history – including
the Old Testament, Cicero’s correspondence, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust,
Herodotus, Thucydides, Dion, Xenophon, Herodian, Suetonius, Plutarch,
Josephus, Livy, Justinus, Publius Annius Florus and Tacitus (all in transla-
tion) – as well as poetry and travel writing – including Aubry de la Mot-
traye, Bernard de Montfaucon, William Dampier, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde,
François Misson, Cornelis de Bruyn, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean
Chardin (bk XV: 91–8). The editor, we are told, could have continued this
list, but her friend the ‘noble Widow’ interrupts to warn her that ‘the
Crowd of Authors I have mentioned will be apt to fright some Ladies from
taking up any one of them’ (bk XV: 3.98). In a later issue, the Female Specta-
tor goes on to recommend astronomy, suggesting the study of the works of
Pierre Gassendi, Joseph Privat de Molières, Domenico Cassini, Euclid,
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed and
Edmund Halley (bk XVII: 3.168–9). The editor also appears to recommend
the study of medicine, citing the example of an aristocratic Lancashire lady
who cures patients ‘judged incurable by the Faculty’ (bk XVII: 3.174).
While not explicitly an educational periodical, the Female Spectator has
been aptly described by Kathryn King as ‘something of an omnium gatherum
for mid-century intellectual life’ (Haywood 2001: 5). The periodical
includes articles on politics (bk IX: 309–22, 329–33), literary criticism (bk
XX: 3.257–62), astronomy (bk XVII: 3.167–75), zoology (bks XV: 82–90,
XIX: 239–42) and theology (bk XXIII: 356–61), as well as suggestions for a
new system for educating women. Throughout her publication, Haywood
stresses the importance of female education. She proposes reading as a cure
for female aversion to solitude (bk IV: 2.119–27). She attributes women’s
restlessness and melancholy to their lack of intellectual stimulation – ‘those
Vapours, those Disquiets we often feel . . . would be no more, when once the
Mind was employ’d in the pleasing Enquiries of Philosophy’ (bk X: 2.359) –
and claims that the study of philosophy ‘corrects all the vicious Humours of
the Mind, and inspires the noblest Virtues’ (bk X: 2.358). Her correspondent
Cleora claims that education also improves women’s morals: the errors they
182 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
commit, she argues, are ‘most commonly the Fault of a wrong Education’
(bk X: 2.354). The editor diagnoses ‘Want of something else wherewith to
employ ourselves’ as the source of women’s propensity towards gossip,
slander and jealousy (bk XIII: 3.5). More practically, Haywood also suggests
that a good education will enable women to escape being married off against
their will, since it will give them the ability to earn an independent living
(bk XX: 3.275). The Female Spectator herself provides a role model for her
readers: offering her own disquisition on the immortality of the soul (bk XI:
2.389–96, 399–404), observing the planets through a telescope (bk XVII:
3.168–73) and conducting zoological experiments (bk XVII: 3.161–5).
Haywood’s recommendation of astronomy as a suitable subject for female
study reflects contemporary interest in popularizing the work of natural sci-
entists in books specifically aimed at a female audience. We have no record
of the actual readership of these works, and they may have appealed at least
equally to men wishing to broaden their knowledge, but they always repre-
sent their ideal reader as a young woman. The most well-known of these are
translations of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des
mondes (1686), first translated into English in 1687, and Francesco Algar-
otti’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737), translated into English by Eliza-
beth Carter as Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies
(1739). A 1737 edition of Fontenelle, entitled A Week’s Conversation on the
Plurality of Worlds, sports a frontispiece showing a young lady and gentle-
man conversing in a formal garden, the lady listening attentively, while the
young man, gesticulating with both hands, explains an element of
Fontenelle’s thought. ‘I have introduced a LADY’, the author tells us, ‘to be
instructed in Things of which she never heard; and I have made use of this Fiction, to
render the Book the more acceptable, and to give Encouragement to Gentlewomen, by
the Example of one of their own Sex’ (Fontenelle 1737: iv). Haywood satirizes
the vogue for Fontenelle in her conduct book The Wife (1756), where she
describes women ‘with a kind of philosophic turn, who have their minds
strangely busy about the planets’ and ‘would fain know whether those vast
and luminous orbs . . . are habitable worlds or not’ (2000c: 102). Algarotti
cites Fontenelle as the inspiration behind his own approach in Isaac Newton’s
Philosophy Explain’d. In terms remarkably similar to Addison’s in Spectator
10, in which he hopes that the periodical has brought philosophy ‘out of
Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assem-
blies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses’, Algarotti claims that Fontenelle
‘first softened the savage Nature of Philosophy, and called it from the soli-
tary Closets and Libraries of the Learned, to introduce it into the Circles and
Toilets of Ladies’ (Algarotti, trans. Carter 1739: ii). Like Fontenelle’s work,
Algarotti’s takes the form of a dialogue: between the author and a mar-
chioness, whom he entertains with disquisitions on Newtonian physics,
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 183
interspersed with poetry, as they stroll through her beautiful and extensive
grounds.
Fontenelle, Algarotti and the magazine editors who imitate them, all
claim that women have a special aptitude for the natural sciences because
they are based on observation and experiment, rather than on theoretical
knowledge. Haywood’s correspondent Philo-Naturae writes that biology
requires no special study – ‘we need but look to be informed’ (Female Spectator
bk XV: 3.89) – and makes the exciting suggestion that women might be able
to make a significant contribution to human knowledge in that field: they
‘would doubtless perceive Animals which are not to be found in the most
accurate Volumes of Natural Philosophy; and the Royal Society might be
indebted to every fair Columbus for a new World of Beings to employ their
Speculations’ (bk XV: 3.88). The Female Spectator demonstrates her own
aptitude for scientific observation. She notices an alteration in the pigmenta-
tion of some caterpillars. A male friend, relying on his theoretical know-
ledge, suggests that the caterpillars change colour with changing weather
conditions, but the editor ascribes the caterpillars’ colour to their diet and
plans an experiment to test her thesis (bk XVII: 162), pitting female empiri-
cism against male learning. Benjamin Martin also claims that women may
be as capable of understanding the natural sciences as men because of their
empirical nature: ‘The Senses are the general Inlets and Means of Know-
ledge, and are formed as accurately and just as perfect, in one Sex as the
other, therefore these philosophical Subjects must be, in this Way, equally
intelligible to both’ (General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Preface: vi).
Martin’s General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–66) adopts a similar
format to the works of Fontenelle and Algarotti. Its title page promises ‘a
particular and accurate SURVEY of the WORKS of NATURE, by way of DIA-
LOGUE’, a ‘NATURAL HISTORY of the WORLD’, a ‘compleat SYSTEM of all the
PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES’ and ‘A BODY of MATHEMATICAL INSTITUTES’. The
frontispiece shows a young gentleman and lady sitting in a well-appointed
library, by a globe of the skies and a telescope. She is holding a book and lis-
tening intently as the young man explains something, one hand poised on
the globe and the other gesturing through the window at the starry night
sky (Figure 9.1). We later learn that the couple are Cleonicus, newly
returned from college, and his sister Euphrosine. Cleonicus gives his sister a
copy of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to read and supple-
ments her reading by conducting discussions with her on scientific subjects
as they ‘walk round the Park, or over the Fields and Meadows’ on moonlit
‘vernal Evenings’ (‘The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy’, dialogue
I, General Magazine of Arts and Sciences: 4). Martin claims that the work is the
first of its kind – ‘a Body of Arts and Sciences has never yet been attempted in
any monthly periodical Publication, under the Title of a MAGAZINE’ (General
Figure 9.1 Frontispiece of Benjamin Martin’s ‘Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philo-
sophy’ in the General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–66).
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 185
Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Preface: iv). He claims that the periodical is a
particularly convenient way of publishing educational material,

not only as it suits with the Humour and Taste of the present Age, but
also because it will be the easiest Way to communicate Subjects of this
Sort, and attended with less Expence and Trouble as well to the Pub-
lisher as the Reader; not only so, but a whole Body of Arts and Sciences
poured out on the Public at once, might not perhaps be quite so pleas-
ing and acceptable as when retailed out in monthly Portions.62
(ibid.)

The magazine is aimed at both men and women and defines its audience
as those who do not have the time or money to obtain a more extensive edu-
cation and who do not have the patience or aptitude to read large volumes of
science. It is clearly of special relevance to female readers, however, since, as
Martin points out, ‘Gentlemen have generally an Opportunity of coming to
the Knowledge of these Things, in a Way different from that of the Fair Sex’
(ibid.). The periodical will form a means of self-education for those women
who are not lucky enough to have a brother to expound science to them and
who are not normally privy to conversations on scientific topics. As Martin
points out, ‘Such Subjects . . . come but too rarely on the Carpet in any Con-
versation, especially that of your Sex’ (‘The Young Gentleman and Lady’s
Philosophy’, dialogue I: 1). Cleonicus reassures his sister that the study of
science will not compromise her femininity: ‘It is now growing into a
Fashion for the Ladies to study Philosophy; and I am very glad to see a Sister
of mine so well inclined to promote a Thing so very laudable and hon-
ourable to her Sex’ (ibid. 1–2).
The General Magazine’s scientific syllabus is an impressive one. Cleonicus
teaches his sister to calculate an eclipse (dialogue VI) and to use an ephemeris
(dialogue XIII: 85–94), a stellated planetarium (dialogue XIV: 95–9), an
Orrery (dialogues VII–XIII: 198–254) and a barometer (dialogue VIII,
327–37). The siblings cover an extensive range of subjects including astron-
omy, meteorology and fluid mechanics and conduct a number of experi-
ments, for example with an air pump (dialogues XI–XIII: 357–407). Despite
the poetry and digressions on Classical mythology interspersed throughout
to provide light relief, this isn’t easy science. The magazine is bristling with
diagrams, calculations and mathematical formulae.
While few publications are as ambitious as Martin’s, many lay claim to
similar aims. The Young Misses Magazine (c.1760) and its sequel the Young
Ladies Magazine (1760) ‘by Mrs. Le Prince de Beaumont’ also take the form
of educational dialogues, this time between ‘a Discreet Governess and Several
Young Ladies of the First Rank Under her Education’, according to the subtitle
186 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
of the Young Ladies Magazine.63 As the Critical Review points out, the Young
Misses Magazine aims to instruct governesses as much as their pupils: ‘It will
be equally useful to the pupil and the tutress. The ignorance of the latter is
often very lamentable’ (August 1757). The magazine offers a series of con-
versations between a small group of 12-year-old girls with allegorical names
such as Lady Witty, Lady Trifle and Lady Sensible. The first half of the mag-
azine contains a number of moral reflections on the correct form of female
education and shows Lady Trifle being weaned off dolls onto books and Lady
Witty learning the difference between ‘two kinds of sense’, the first of which
will make women vain, proud and pedantic, while the second ‘renders us
mild, amiable and virtuous’ (Young Misses Magazine I.7), underlining the fact
that the Magazine is at least as concerned with teaching women how to
behave as it is with academic knowledge. The lessons taught are largely
ethical ones. The governess relates Oriental tales and fairy tales, carefully
pointing out their morals. The stories are interspersed with very brief and
elementary lessons in geography, such as recognizing geographical features
such as islands and continents on a globe (I.131), identifying the main
British rivers and cities (I.14) and learning the history of the Roman occupa-
tion of France (II.101–4). There is a very strong emphasis throughout on
religious knowledge. The girls are taught their catechism (II.169–74) and
told a number of Biblical stories, beginning with Adam and Eve (I.33–6)
and ending with the worship of the golden calf (II.287–98). The first volume
alone narrates the tales of Cain and Abel (I.40–2), Noah’s ark (I.72–5), Ham,
Shem and Japheth (I.97–9), the Tower of Babel (I.100–5), Sodom and
Gomorrah (I.122–5), Abraham and Isaac (I.125–6, 143–9), Jacob and Esau
(I.161–5), Joseph and Pharaoh (I.179–86, 197–202), Moses and the flight
out of Egypt (I.220–7, 234–9, 247–55, 270–6, 287–94) and Balaam’s ass
(I.297–9).
The Young Ladies Magazine offers a similar, but more ambitious pro-
gramme. Aimed at girls of ‘about fourteen or fifteen’ (Young Ladies Magazine
xiii), it combines snippets of natural science and philosophy with ‘the
wholesome maxims of Jesus Christ’ (p. xvi). The editor comments approv-
ingly on the current vogue for female education and hopes to provide young
women with a companion to their academic reading: ‘Now-a-days ladies
read all sorts of books, history, politicks, philosophy and even such as
concern religion. They should therefore be in a condition to judge solidly of
what they read and able to discern truth from falshood’ (p. xxi–xxii). The
lessons the governess offers her pupils include French language, French and
English history, Biblical history, moral philosophy and geometry. The
editor encourages independent thought among her charges – expressing
approval when her pupil Mrs Rural disagrees with some of the ideas pro-
posed by John Locke, for instance (p. 38) – and commends women who
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 187
attend lectures on philosophy (ibid.). She particularly recommends geometry
as a science which ‘accustoms the mind to a regular process, to an exact cal-
culation’ (p. 46), qualities not usually associated with women at this period.
She also teaches her pupils creative writing, in order to ‘form a stile, and
accustom you to write your thoughts in some order’ (p. 140). However, the
magazine’s educational aims have serious limitations. For one thing, the
women’s use of their learning is to be confined to the home. They are being
educated because they are to be married to ‘gentlemen of great study’ (p. 93)
whom they must be able to entertain with intelligent conversation. The
editor warns them against displaying their knowledge indiscriminately: ‘We
must conceal these little studies that are the subject of our meetings and
behave with the ignorant, as if we were so’ (p. 47). More importantly, while
the publication repeatedly praises female education, the actual academic
content of its pages is disappointing and largely restricted to pious maxims,
Biblical tales, moral fables and analyses of the young ladies’ characters.
The annual Ladies Complete Pocket-Book (1769–78) carries a series on
female education, written by ‘A MOTHER’. It is concerned, however, with the
education of young children, rather than of the periodical’s own female read-
ership. The series comprises advice on breast feeding (1771), how to treat
infants (1772), school education and, in particular, the importance of teach-
ing grammar (1773), the dangers of boarding schools (1774, 1776) and of
French governesses (1775) and ends with two poems (1777). The leader is
very short (only two or three out of 45 pages) and is largely aimed at women
as educators, rather than as recipients of education. It does, however, incul-
cate the importance of female education, though of a very limited kind. It
advocates a knowledge of English grammar and encourages female reading,
though not of ‘novels and romances’ or of ‘French authors’ whose lax prin-
ciples might ruin a ‘character for delicacy and virtue’ (1775). In addition to
discouraging a knowledge of French, the author of the series disapproves of
boarding schools, since their curricula do not sufficiently inculcate female
duty. Girls should be taught at home, she writes, since ‘female education
can have respect to little beyond the discharge of female duty, (the sphere of
which is far from being extensive) all the knowledge necessary for the
acquittal of such duty is contained in very narrow limits’ (1776). In view of
the strict boundaries which the periodical sets for female learning, its con-
tentions that women are ‘at least equally capacitated with men to excel in
arts and sciences’ (1773) and warnings against the dangers of female igno-
rance – ‘an unedified, unprincipled woman being the most random, precari-
ous being in the whole creation’ (ibid.) – ring rather hollow.
The Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion (1759–63) also claims to be an
educational work suitable for young women of quality. The paper’s social
and pedagogical pretensions are revealed in a letter dated from St. James’s,
188 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
in which the writer claims that the publication has been recommended to
her by a duchess ‘as a performance admirably calculated to form the minds
of young ladies’ (Lady’s Magazine June 1761). A great deal of space in the
Magazine is devoted to the subject of women’s educability. The series
‘Feyjoo’s Defence of Women’ (see Feyjóo y Montenegro 1760) lists a ‘cata-
logue of learned women’ and asserts that ‘there is no inequality at all in the
capacities of the one or the other sex’ (January 1761). The editor argues that
‘our sex are more pliant to instruction even than the other’ (ibid.). The Lady’s
Magazine repeatedly celebrates female accomplishments, mainly through the
gallant praises of male readers. One male reader reminds the editor, Mrs
Stanhope, that ‘it is incumbent on you, in a particular manner, to celebrate
those, whose superior endowments are an ornament to their sex’ (April
1761). He encloses a poem by a female friend, who is presumably too
bashful to submit her own contribution. There are many thumbnail sketches
of accomplished women within the magazine, usually submitted by men.
The learned Hortensia is one such paragon, well read in the English and
French historians and poets, but eminently modest: ‘[She] esteems it even a
point of decency to throw a veil over the superior charms of her understand-
ing’ (Lady’s Magazine June 1761). The Lady’s Magazine is portrayed here as a
forum in which Hortensia’s accomplishments can be publicized, without
violating her modesty. The magazine protects the individual woman’s
anonymity, while providing a framework within which to celebrate women’s
achievements as a group. Its tone is self-congratulatory, without being
immodest or unfeminine.
While magazines do not always address the question of women’s educa-
tion directly, many provide numerous articles on a variety of scientific or lit-
erary subjects, which are often of academic interest. As Goldsmith
sarcastically writes, ‘History, politics, poetry, mathematics, metaphysics,
and the philosophy of nature are all comprized in a manual not larger than
that in which our children are taught the letters’ (1966: 2.124). John
Tipper’s annual Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium, an offshoot of his Ladies
Diary, includes mathematical questions, articles on astronomy and explana-
tions of elementary French grammar ‘for the Pleasure and Service of Both
Sexes, and proper for Schools’ (1753, Preface). The editors of the Oxford Maga-
zine claim to write out of ‘a desire of dispersing, more effectually, the seeds
of knowledge’ and wish to provide ‘complete systems of every branch of
useful learning’ (July 1768, Preface), while the Scots Magazine describes its
aim as ‘to suit the learning of the times to the purchase and opportunity of
persons of every station’ (vol. I, Preface). The editors of the Imperial
Magazine, which has a strong focus on the natural sciences, promise to
include ‘whatever is either useful or entertaining in the circle of sciences’ (June
1762: 7). The magazine offers series of articles on geography and natural
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 189
history, giving, for example, an account of terms such as equator, horizon,
ecliptic, meridian, continent, island and promontory (ibid. 7–12). The ambitious
Royal Magazine reprints the publications of foreign universities and learned
societies, the Board of Longitude and the Society for the Encouragement of
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and includes mathematical theories,
accounts of scientific and medical experiments, book reviews, poetry, foreign
affairs and Parliamentary reporting (see October–December 1750). The
editors claim that in their publication female readers ‘will find an inex-
haustible Fund of Knowledge . . . for the Improvement of their Mind’,
enabling them to participate in male conversation ‘on most Subjects’ (ibid.
Preface). They warn that women whose education is neglected may meet the
fate of Theodora, who ‘fell a victim to the illiberal machinations of a villain’,
causing her mother and father to die of grief (Royal Magazine August 1765).
The attitudes of magazine editors towards women’s education are often
more ambivalent, however. In an article deceptively entitled ‘The female
genius equal to the male’, a correspondent of the Lady’s Curiosity claims that
‘Learning is so far from improving a lady’s understanding, that it is likely to
banish the most useful science out of it, making her know nothing at all of
what she is most concern’d to know’ (no. 6). The knowledge which
contemporary magazines provide is often of the pudding-making kind. The
series ‘The Compleat English Housewife’ in the Universal Magazine is
designed ‘to assist our Female Readers with . . . Receipts in Cookery . . . and . . .
other Branches of good Housewifery’ (June 1747). The annual Ladies Complete
Pocket-Book offers such domestic advice as ‘An easy BILL of FARE for Dinner
and Supper every Month in the Year’ (1769) and a ‘Method of rearing Turkies’
(1769), as well as moral precepts such as verse hints ‘for conjugal Happiness’
(1769). The Pocket-Book does also contain an article which extols ‘the Pleasure
and Advantages of Reading’ (1770), but it does not recommend any specific
reading material. Readers clearly regarded the publication as a collection of
recipes and household hints; a contemporary has written a recipe for laven-
der water in the margin of the British Library copy of the 1771 volume. The
World scornfully describes magazine editors as having ‘ransacked the records
of pastry-schools, and the manuscript cookery collections of good house-
wives’ (147, 23 Oct. 1755).
When it is not purely domestic, educational material for women often
takes the form of moral instructions and cautionary tales. The Ladies Complete
Pocket-Book defines ‘female Education’ as ‘some anecdote, fable, character,
&c. tending to the edification . . . of the sex’ (1771), whilst the Monthly
Review praises the Magazin de Londres (1749) as an educational periodical
because it contains ‘reflexions and maxims of decency and good-breeding’
(June 1749). The Royal Female Magazine does not harbour pretensions to
pedagogy: the editor tells us that ‘Entertainment . . . alone is my humble
190 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
design’ (1, March 1760). Instead, he promises to focus on ‘THE MORAL AND
PRUDENTIAL DUTIES OF LIFE’, specifically to provide ‘a recreative unbending,
to minds intent upon the more abstruse and weighty studies’ (ibid.). The
editors of the Universal Museum argue that a monthly magazine should aim
to ‘dissert, rather agreeably than deeply, upon the topic of the day’, provid-
ing material which will appeal to ‘those who desire to know the world, and
mix with life’, rather than those interested in ‘deep research’ (vol. I, 1765,
Preface).
Many magazine editors present their periodicals as organs for the publica-
tion of the work of others, rather than vehicles for their own writing or col-
lections of informative and educational articles. The editor of the Ladies
Complete Pocket-Book is afflicted by poor health and old age and relies upon
her correspondents to provide material: ‘I most heartily subscribe to the
superior geniuses of my livelier correspondents, whom I am extremely glad
to patronize’ (1778). The Universal Museum tells its readers that ‘our
Museum now almost entirely consists of voluntary contributions’ (vol. I,
1765, Preface). The Lady’s Magazine also presents its correspondence as its
main selling point:

The readers may be said in some measure to entertain each other,

and write their endeavours in one single Magazine for their mutual
instruction . . . Here we . . . read the world without the danger of its
conversation.
(January 1761)

The editor is one genteel amateur among others, without pretensions to

high literary merit; she simply provides a safe public space for her readers to
interact with each other, a written form of conversation, which lacks the
sexual temptations and perils of society. The Lady’s Magazine’s emphasis on
the importance of correspondence undercuts its authority as an educational
work. The editor does not claim any specialist knowledge or particular
expertise and, instead, expects her readers ‘to entertain each other’ and to
provide ‘mutual instruction’. The slippage here from entertainment to
instruction indicates that the editor has no clear educational programme: the
‘instruction’ will be fortuitous, rather than planned, and is more likely to
consist of lessons of moral conduct – of how to behave in ‘the world’ – than
it is of more scholarly material.
In the Female Spectator, correspondents frequently write in to provide art-
icles of scholarly interest, such as Classical (or pseudo-Classical) texts,
remarks on botany or astronomy or disquisitions on the immortality of the
soul. Other mid-century editors also express the hope that their magazines
will serve as vehicles for learned contributions. The Gentleman’s Magazine
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 191
prints letters on medicine, archaeology, astronomy, mathematics, optics,
mechanics, veterinary medicine, electricity, biology and zoology. Pailler
(1975) has shown that Cave’s correspondents included at least two university
professors and five Fellows of the Royal Society, as well as other eminent
scholars.64 As Pailler points out, the Secretary of the Royal Society also
received a large volume of miscellaneous correspondence from amateur sci-
entists hoping to see the results of their observations, theories or experi-
ments published in the Philosophical Transactions (1975: 1.350). The editors
of the Imperial Magazine ‘invite the Learned and Ingenious to become Con-
tributors to their Magazine’ (January 1760, Introduction). Mark Akenside
hopes that his Museum (1746–7) will attract similar correspondents, express-
ing the hope that ‘the MUSEUM may become a general Vehicle by which the Literati
of the whole Kingdom may converse with each other, and communicate their Know-
ledge to the World’ (vol. for 1746, Preface).
In many of the magazines of the 1750s and 60s, however, the correspon-
dence is of a much more personal, less scholarly, nature. Editors frequently
act as agony aunts. Both the Court Miscellany and the Universal Museum
feature sections called ‘The Oracle’, which answer questions on love and
marriage from readers, in a format modelled on Dunton’s Athenian Mercury.
Mrs Stanhope’s readers in the Lady’s Magazine confide their most intimate
and inconsolable sorrows to her. A woman whose lover has been killed in
action is certain that the editor ‘will not disdain the correspondence of a
person, who has no other qualifications to recommend her . . . but nature
and sincerity’, since the only pleasure left to her is the ‘small satisfaction of
communicating my sorrows’ (Lady’s Magazine January 1760). A correspon-
dent of Johnson’s ‘Idler’ requests ‘the common permission, to lay my case
before you and your readers, by which I shall disburthen my heart, though I
cannot hope to receive either assistance or consolation’ (no. 95; 1969:
2.292). Even some primarily political publications are vehicles for similar
declarations. A correspondent of Fielding’s Champion, who has been jilted by
his mistress, tells the editor that his motive for writing is that ‘my Heart
swells with Resentment, and I cannot be at Peace till I have discharg’d it’
(325, 10 December 1741).
Mrs Stanhope of the Lady’s Magazine clearly feels a moral obligation to
print confessional letters of this kind and believes that their expressions of
sincere feeling will appeal to her readership. She reprints the correspondence
which passed between a soldier and his sweetheart, shortly before his death
in battle, adding the editorial note, ‘Mrs. Stanhope has not attempted to change a
single word in the above letters, sensible that their natural simplicity must be more
truly pleasing, than the most laboured accuracy’ (Lady’s Magazine January 1761).
The emphasis on ‘laboured accuracy’ may be a response to the popularity of
Johnson’s Rambler, which was by now a widely read work. Mrs Stanhope’s
192 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
comments valorize the communications of genuine readers above the artistry
of professionals, the ‘laboured performances, even of genius’ (Lady’s Magazine
Jan. 1761). Her magazine is clearly ‘calculated both for the head and the
heart’, as Goldsmith sarcastically expresses it in Lloyd’s Evening Post (1 Feb.
1762; Goldsmith 1966: 3.188), rather than primarily for the former.
The high value which she places on authenticity, rather than wit and liter-
ary polish, is characteristic of editors of the mid-eighteenth century. The
editor of the Royal Female Magazine is unusual in his frank assumption of ‘the
priviledge, which my periodical predecessors have always assumed, of writing
to myself, particularly as the epistolary style is so much easier than the strict
rule of a regular essay’ (5, July 1760). The editor of the World reprints a letter
on the dangers of ambition which ‘has so genuine and natural an air’ that he
will print it without attempting to correct or refine it: ‘without the alteration
of a single word’ (174, 29 April 1756). The Imperial Magazine prints a letter
which ‘may be depended on as genuine’, adding that ‘though the Stile is not
elegant, the Sentiments are pathetic’ (January 1760). Mary Midnight of the
Midwife includes a letter reporting the sad story of a man imprisoned for
debt, leaving his wife to die of grief and his children penniless. She com-
ments, ‘I have inserted this Letter . . . verbatim, without the least Alteration:
Her Diction is the pure Language of Nature; and her Sentiments carry more
Weight in her own Words, than they would do mangled by the most mas-
terly Hand’ (Midwife I.1). This focus on authenticity – on the emotive, rather
than the learned, on readerly experience, rather than editorial instruction, on
‘simplicity’ rather than ‘accuracy’ – detracts considerably from any educational
aims which these periodicals might have and seems to suggest that subject-
ive, personal communications are more valued than objective, scientific or
learned articles. If readers are to be educated, it will be a sentimental educa-
tion, not a bookish one. In this context, Lennox’s at times unrelentingly ped-
agogical focus in the Lady’s Museum is even more striking.
The Lady’s Museum, which combined the essay-serial ‘The Trifler’ with
articles of educational interest and instalments of the novel ‘The History of
Harriot and Sophia’, appeared monthly from March 1760 to January 1761
and was subsequently published in two bound volumes. The title page
advertises the publication as ‘By the Author of the Female Quixote’. Lennox
appears to have written the periodical single-handedly and probably
obtained a royal licence to protect the copyright of her serialized novel,
which was republished as Sophia in 1762, since the publication’s title page
contains the royal arms of the lion and unicorn, with the motto Dieu et mon
droit. Sophia is one of the first two novels to be initially published in instal-
ments within a periodical. Tobias Smollett’s The Life and Adventures of Sir
Launcelot Greaves (1762) was also serialized in 1760–1, in his British Maga-
zine (January 1760–December 1761).
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 193
The Lady’s Museum’s preoccupation with women’s education is immedi-
ately evident in the periodical’s frontispiece.65 A young and pretty woman is
seated at a desk with her books before her, one open under her hand. Behind
her are three semi-nude women in Classical garb – probably the Graces.
Another female figure, dressed in a toga and wearing a crested helmet, prob-
ably Pallas Athena, stands protectively by her side, pointing towards a Clas-
sical temple, while at the same time a Cupid flies towards her, accompanied
by a semi-naked youth, perhaps a suitor, who offers her a garland of roses. A
woman is standing in front of the Cupid and appears to be disarming him of
his bow and quiver. The image is a complex one, but seems to suggest a
Choice of Hercules between love and learning. The presence of Pallas
Athena, patron of scholars, and the disarming of the Cupid imply that the
editor has chosen learning.
The opening issue of the Lady’s Museum offers its readers three different
portrayals of its editor: this frontispiece, an editorial preface and the intro-
duction of the eidolon of an essay-series called ‘The Trifler’. The editor dis-
tances herself from the essay-series, as if it were written by another hand,
telling us that ‘as I have but too much reason to distrust my own powers of
pleasing, I shall usher in my pamphlet with the performance of a lady’
whose ‘sprightly paper’ will, she hopes, meet with ‘encouragement enough
to dispel the diffidence natural to a young writer’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.1).
Like the woman depicted in the frontispiece, Lennox’s eidolon in ‘The Trifler’
is young, pretty and sexually available. She portrays reading as a virtuous
occupation and associates writing with coquetry, describing it in sexual
terms as a ‘darling end’ and a ‘passion’:

Cast your eyes upon paper, madam; there you may look innocently, said a polite
old gentleman of my acquaintance to me one day . . . It is indeed very
clear . . . that my friend . . . recommended reading to eyes which he
probably thought too intent upon pleasing; but I, with a small devia-
tion from the sense, applied it, to what I freely own my predominant
passion; and therefore resolved to write, still pursuing the darling end,
though by different means.66
(Lady’s Museum 1: I.2)

This portrayal of the female editor turning to journalism as an alternative

means of ‘pleasing’ or as a kind of implicit flirtation with male readers was a
common one. The Female Spectator, Mrs Crackenthorpe of the Female Tatler
and Mary Singleton of the Old Maid all suggest that periodical writing can
be an alternative to direct flirtation and a way of seeking admirers through
print. Surprisingly, this sexualization of women’s journalistic writing served
to make female editorship of periodicals more, not less, respectable, since it
194 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
implied that the journalism was not undertaken for money. The passage
above clearly suggests that the Lady’s Museum was launched to gratify a ‘pre-
dominant passion’, not from any financial motive. The portrait is far from
being autobiographical: Charlotte Lennox seems to have struggled with
poverty throughout her working life. In 1760, Andrew Millar, who had
published Lennox’s novels The Life of Harriot Stuart Written by Herself (1750)
and The Female Quixote (1752), together with all her other works between
1750 and 1759, was declared bankrupt. John Newbery appears to have lent
Lennox money at the outset of this crisis, which may have acted as an
advance for her services as editor of the Lady’s Museum (Small 1935: 29–30).
Lennox is probably alluding to her Museum when she writes in October 1760
of her ‘present slavery to the Booksellers, whom I have the more mortifica-
tion to see adding to their heaps by my labours, which scarce produce me a
scanty and precarious subsistence’ (qtd. Small 1935: 27–8).
Lennox’s visual and verbal portrayals of the editor of the Lady’s Museum
suggest more than simply a pose of gentility, however. While Brooke and
Haywood present their eidolons as turning from attempts to attract men in
their youth to attempts to please readers in their maturity, Lennox’s editor-
persona is notably young – she is 18 (Lady’s Museum 1: I.4) – and for her
writing forms an alternative to love, rather than something to resort to in
later life after admirers have become scarce. Brooke and Haywood contrast
writing with coquetry and stress that writing is less dangerous and more
useful to society. Brooke’s Mary Singleton describes herself as ‘very inoffen-
sively blotting paper in the service . . . of my fellow citizens’ (Old Maid 21,
10 April 1756); Haywood’s Female Spectator has turned from ‘Vanity and
Folly’ to a project which she describes as ‘both useful and entertaining to the
Publick’ (Female Spectator bk I: 2.17–18). Lennox, however, depicts reading
here as a respectable male-sanctioned activity, in explicit contrast to writing,
which, she tells us, it is ‘very clear’ that the ‘polite old gentleman’ had no
intention of encouraging. Periodical writing is depicted here as both more
transgressive and more scholarly than it is in either Haywood or Brooke’s
publications. The editor dedicates herself to writing, rather than love, out of
choice, not necessity. Although the Trifler describes herself as ‘young,
single, gay, and ambitious of pleasing’, she makes it clear that her primary
aim is not to gain the hearts of men. She is indeed ambitious – for her ‘the
desire of pleasing’ is synonymous with the ‘desire of fame’. The ‘desire of
pleasing’, she writes, ‘is the poet’s inspiration, the patriot’s zeal, the
courtier’s loyalty, and the orator’s eloquence’, as likely to result in ‘the
thunder of eloquence in the senate’ as ‘the glitter of dress in the drawing
room’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.2–3). It is also women, rather than men, whose
approbation the editor seeks: ‘I shall be contented, if [the periodical] finds
only a favourable acceptance with my own sex’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.4).
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 195
Unlike Haywood and Brooke, she also sees herself as part of a tradition of
female editors, expressing the weary sense of the saturation of the periodical
market shared by many editors of the 1750s and 60s: ‘I should indeed have
thought some apology necessary for an undertaking of this kind, had I not
been persuaded, it was a mighty easy one, from its being so frequently
attempted, and by persons too of my own sex’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.4).
The Trifler is the elder of two sisters and, despite her name, the less
frivolous and more scholarly of the two. Her mother, who was forbidden
reading as a girl because of a minor eye condition, has a

high contempt for reading . . . those of her female acquaintance who

had made any proficiency that way were sure to be distinguished by her,
with the opprobrious term of being book-learned, which my mother
always pronounced with a look and accent of ineffable scorn.
(Lady’s Museum 1: I.5)

The Trifler’s mother neglects her in favour of her pretty, but shallow and
uneducated, sister, but the author reads her way through her brother’s
library and is given ‘a right education’ by him when he returns from univer-
sity (Lady’s Museum 1: I.8). On her mother’s death, she goes to live with and
keep house for him. The image of the editor as a young woman who turns to
literary pursuits because of parental neglect and lack of beauty echoes
Haywood’s portrait of the editor Euphrosine in her Young Lady. Euphro-
sine’s beauty is marred by an early bout of smallpox, and her mother’s atten-
tions are exclusively lavished on her frivolous, but pretty, sister. Euphrosine
tells us that she ‘betook myself to reading’, which enables her to ‘despise the
ridiculous pursuits with which so many of my sex are infatuated’. The death
of her parents leaves her free to ‘pass the greatest part of my time among my
books’ (Young Lady 1, 6 January 1756), whilst a modest fortune in the
stocks (see Young Lady 4, 27 January 1756) enables her to finance the publi-
cation of her periodical. The Trifler’s scholarly bent is more pronounced than
Euphrosine’s, however: she has not had the smallpox and dedicates herself to
writing because of a ‘strong passion for intellectual pleasures’ (Lady’s Museum
1: I.4).
The Trifler’s name does not reflect her character, as her correspondents are
quick to point out. A letter from Penelope Spindle urges her to follow Bick-
erstaff’s example in the Tatler and provide a genealogy of her lineage as a
trifler, but fears that ‘you are claiming a character without right’ (Lady’s
Museum 3: I.162). She notes that, unlike most essayists, the Trifler has not
even attempted to justify her choice of a sobriquet: ‘None ever started from
her own purpose so soon as the Trifler’ (Lady’s Museum 3: I.163). In fact, the
Trifler’s name describes not her own personality, but that of the majority of
196 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
her female contemporaries. As a letter from Anoeta, a genuine trifler, puts it,
‘A greater consonancy between the title of this essay and the present com-
plection of females, cannot well be imagined’ (Lady’s Museum 8: II.561). The
Trifler’s name also reflects the derision that she imagines her paper will meet
with from her fellow-women. The correspondent Maria, another self-
confessed trifler, tells her,

In this polite age, love and courtship are meer trifles, marriage is a trifle;
virtue is an egregious trifle; wisdom, morality, religion, all are trifles . . .
when you talk of wit, learning, economy; when you recommend
reservedness, and a contempt for fashionable amusements, there is not a
fine lady in town who does not acknowledge the propriety of your title,
and declare that you are an intolerable trifler.
(Lady’s Museum 4: I.242)

The pages of ‘The Trifler’ are filled with letters from frivolous, ignorant,
superficial women, such as Parthenissa, who thinks ‘a spelling dictionary,
and Grey’s Love Letters very ample furniture for a lady’s library’ (Lady’s
Museum 9: II.644),67 and Grace Pythoness, who wishes to teach her grand-
daughters to believe in ‘spirits, hobgoblins, fairies, death-watches, and Will
i’the wisp’ (10: II.723). It is this ‘numerous and powerful generation of Tri-
flers’ (Lady’s Museum 3: I.161) – women who are ‘too solicitous about their
personal charms to attend to the improvement of their minds’ (2: I.82) and
have ‘never been accustomed to bestow the least attention upon any thing
but the adorning and exhibiting our dear persons’ (9: II.643) – whom the
magazine explicitly sets out to educate and reform. They are childlike in
their ignorance and need to be coaxed into learning through the ‘pretty
stratagem’ of capturing their wayward attention through what appears to be
a witty Spectatorial essay-series, a method, as Parthenissa puts it, ‘like teach-
ing children their letters by gingerbread alphabets’ (Lady’s Museum 9:
II.641).
The Trifler does not express the confidence of Bickerstaff and Mr Specta-
tor that her educational programme will take effect. Her column is full of
letters from women who defiantly declare themselves uneducable. The
Trifler seems to be urging these women to leave something other than off-
spring for others to remember them by. It is not clear what form this contri-
bution should take – perhaps a literary work, or a discovery in botany or
zoology – but there are hints that women’s education should lead to some-
thing more than simply self-improvement. Anoeta says of herself and her
fellow-triflers that ‘unless we should be encumbered by a few brats, can it be
said of any of us, when we quit the scene, that we have left any monuments
of our existence?’ (Lady’s Museum 8: II.564), while Penelope Spindle tells the
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 197
editor that her ‘grand-mother was a country gentlewoman, and has left little
behind her except a scented paste’ (3: I.162). The Trifler is, perhaps, offering
indirect encouragement to women to publish periodicals themselves.
The theme of female education is also central to Lennox’s serialized novel
‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’. Like the Trifler, Sophia, whose name, of
course, appropriately means wisdom, is a scholarly young woman who lost
her father at an early age and has been educated by a male mentor; the
family friend Mr Herbert supplies her with books. She too is disliked by her
mother, who prefers her ignorant and coquettish sister, Harriot. By the age
of 13, Sophia is fluent in French and Italian, but also acting as a housekeeper
for her lazy mother and sister, proving that ‘the highest intellectual
improvements were not incompatible with the humblest cares of domestic
life’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.19).
The novel is a fable of an educated middle-class girl who marries an aris-
tocratic reformed rake. Her learning is a crucial factor in securing and
retaining his affections, something which Lennox is at pains to underline. In
a plot which echoes Richardson’s Clarissa, Sir Charles Stanley at first hopes
to make Harriot his mistress, inflamed by her beauty, but on meeting
Sophia he quickly transfers his attentions to her and woos her, fittingly, by
buying her books. Lennox makes the implications of Sir Charles’s preference
crystal clear:

No one could think it surprising that a man of sense should make the
fortune of a woman who would do honour to his choice, and where there
was such exalted merit as in Sophia, overlook the disparity of circum-
stances.
But justly might it be called infatuation and folly, to raise to rank
and influence a woman of Harriot’s despicable turn; to make a compan-
ion for life of a handsome ideot.
(Lady’s Museum 1: I.39)

When the couple finally marry, at the end of the novel, Sir Charles con-
fesses to Mr Herbert that it is Sophia’s ‘charming mind’ which keeps him
faithful: ‘Had my passion for Sophia been founded only upon the charms of
her person, I might probably e’er now have become a mere fashionable
husband; but her virtue and wit supply her with graces ever varied, and ever
new’ (Lady’s Museum 11: II.826). Like Lennox herself and the Trifler, Sophia
is a writer, as well as a reader. On one occasion, Sir Charles visits her rooms
in secret in her absence:

Several compositions of her own now fell into his hands; he read them
with eagerness, and, charmed with this discovery of those treasures of
198 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
wit, which she with modest diffidence so carefully concealed, he felt his
admiration and tenderness for her encrease every moment.
(Lady’s Museum 8: II.581)

In ‘The Trifler’ and ‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’, the Lady’s
Museum offers its readers educated women as role models. The magazine also
tackles the subject of women’s education on a more theoretical level. A series
of extracts from Fénelon’s Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687), described as
translated by ‘a Friend of the Author of the Museum’ (Lady’s Museum 4: I.294),
in issues 4–11, offers advice on education. The series opens with the claim
that ‘nothing is more neglected than the education of daughters’ (ibid.) and
promises to redress this imbalance. The ‘Treatise’ addresses a perceived need
to reform women’s own practices as educators. In the Lady’s Museum, it is
mothers who neglect their daughters’ education. The Trifler, disregarded by
her mother, is educated by a man instead, as is Sophia. The Trifler’s corre-
spondent Perdita has a similar history. Her mother cuts short her education,
removing her from boarding school at the age of 16 to give her ‘a commerce
with the fashionable world’, but she learns far more from her father ‘who was
a man of sense and learning, and who took pleasure in cultivating my mind’
(Lady’s Museum 5: I.323). A letter from the correspondent Agnes Woodbine
relates how a female cousin neglected her daughters’ education: their only
reading material was the newspapers ‘when the upper servants had done
with them’, and they were never taught to write (Lady’s Museum 4: I.291).
She has recently learnt that the elder girl has run away with a soldier, and
the younger has had a child by the butler, causing their mother to die of a
broken heart (Lady’s Museum 4: I.292).
However, the recommendations made in the ‘Treatise’ series bear little
resemblance to the ambitious educational programmes outlined in the
Female Spectator, the General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, the Young Ladies
Magazine and other sections of the Museum itself. The ‘Treatise’ focuses pri-
marily on very young children and seems to be addressed more to the maga-
zine’s readers as educators of their own children, than as people in need of
education themselves. During most of the series, the author talks of children
in general and uses he as the generic pronoun. When the ‘Treatise’ does
discuss issues of specific relevance to women, its injunctions are mainly
negative. The writer stresses the dangers of over-educating a woman: ‘We
ought to be very careful of making pedantick ladies’, he tells us, and must
avoid ‘studies likely to disturb their heads’ (Lady’s Museum 4: I.295), such as
those concerned with politics, military strategy or religious affairs. A young
woman, we are told, should modestly conceal the extent of her knowledge:
‘As to subjects out of the reach of women in general, she should not speak
upon them at all, though well informed’ (Lady’s Museum 11: II.846). We are
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 199
told that ‘the education of her children . . . the government of her domestics
. . . the disbursements of house-keeping, the method of living with oecon-
omy . . . the letting of farms, and receiving rents’ should form ‘the bounds
of female information’, even though this focus on domestic affairs will lead
women of lively intellectual curiosity to feel dissatisfied and ‘put under great
restraints’ (Lady’s Museum 11: II.847). Education is described not as a means
to develop women’s mental capacities, but to restrain and correct their bad
tendencies. The writer views the most important objective of female educa-
tion as correcting female narcissism: ‘There is nothing we ought so much to
guard against as vanity in young ladies’ (Lady’s Museum 11: II.840).
The emphasis is on curbing, not exciting, female imagination. Pre-
dictably, the writer proposes that ‘the pleasures which the understanding
affords, as conversation, news, histories, and divers games of application’
(Lady’s Museum 8: II.631) will prevent young women from becoming
addicted to what he calls ‘dangerous entertainments’ exciting ‘violent pas-
sions’ (ibid.). The most perilous of these imaginative stimulants is, of course,
fiction – ‘all the books that can feed their vanity . . . romances . . . plays . . .
stories . . . chimerical adventures’ (Lady’s Museum 5: I.370):

A poor girl, full of the tender and the marvellous . . . is astonished not
to find the world afford any real personages resembling her heroes. She
fain would live like the imaginary princesses . . . alas! what mortifica-
tion for her to descend from a state of heroism to the little cares of
domestic life.
(Lady’s Museum 5: I.370–1)

Arabella, the protagonist of Lennox’s The Female Quixote, is one such

woman. Her reading has been entirely confined to her late mother’s library
of French romances and her inflated perception of her importance borders
on psychosis. Education is portrayed both in Lennox’s periodical and her
Female Quixote as designed to humble women and deflate their exaggerated
pretensions.
The presence of the ‘Treatise’ within the Lady’s Museum reveals the
ambivalence and confusion which often characterizes attitudes towards
women’s education in this period. On the one hand, it could be seen as justi-
fying the periodical’s pedagogical content, offered as an antidote to more
frivolous and treacherous forms of female reading. On the other hand, the
magazine features a novel within its own pages. The novel is not stuffed
with ‘the tender and the marvellous’, nor does it feature ‘princesses’ or
describe ‘a state of heroism’. However, it does encourage women to think
that education may enable them to better themselves socially and finan-
cially, an ambition which may prove just as chimerical as that of becoming a
200 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
princess. The correspondent W.M. claims that a woman’s chances of upward
mobility through marriage are slender, the rich marrying each other ‘it has
been computed’ 19 times out of 20 (Lady’s Museum 3: I.183). The magazine
also contains several serialized biographies, which are sensational and lurid,
full of aristocratic family feuds, sexual intrigues and sudden and violent
deaths (see ‘The history of the Dutchess of Beaufort’ (Lady’s Museum 1–2);
letters from A.B. on the trial and execution of Lord Ferrers (no. 4); ‘The
history of the Count de Comminge’ (nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11); ‘The history
of Bianca Capello’ (nos. 5, 6, 7); and a history of Castruccio Castracani, sent
in by the correspondent E.F. (no. 7)). Each issue of these features ends on a
cliff-hanger, a method suggested in the ‘Treatise’ as an effective way to teach
history (Lady’s Museum 10: II.776–7). The magazine’s narrative content
seems designed to pique female curiosity and encourage female ambition.
In addition, the Museum’s educational articles span a wide range of acade-
mic subjects, and there is no mention of the domestic topics which the
‘Treatise’ recommends as the most suitable subjects of female study. Instead,
the Lady’s Museum offers its readers such fare as a history of Great Britain
from prehistoric to early medieval times (in nos. 3, 4, 6, 8 and 11), a
description of the solar system (in no. 2), descriptions of the islands of
Amboyna (in no. 2) and Sri Lanka (in nos. 9, 10 and 11), an account of
animal metamorphoses (in no. 2) and of the behaviour of predatory insects
(in no. 4) and a life of Van Dyke (in no. 10).
The importance of allowing women access to a wide range of academic
disciplines is discussed in the periodical’s opening issue in an article entitled
‘Of the studies proper for women’, ostensibly written by a male correspon-
dent, perhaps to lend these thoughts more authority. While the editor
herself offers us narratives of educated women – in ‘The Trifler’ and ‘The
History of Harriot and Sophia’ – it is men who offer the more general, theo-
retical commentary on the issue. Like the editors of the Lady’s Magazine, the
writer of ‘Of the studies proper for women’ is keen to emphasize the female
potential for intellectual development: ‘When we consider the happy talents
which women in general possess . . . we cannot without indignation observe
the little esteem they have for the endowments of their minds’ (Lady’s
Museum 1: I.9). The correspondent recommends history and natural science
as the female fields of study, assuring the Museum’s female readers that
history is of direct relevance to their concerns: ‘Women have at all times had
so great a share in events . . . that they may with reason consider our
archives as their own’ (1: I.13). He goes on to name women who have
written histories themselves – Monpensier, Nemours, Motteville, Christine
de Pisan and Anna Comnensus68 – and suggests that such subjects might be
discussed at salons modelled on those of the Sevignés, Lafayettes and
Rochefoucaults, where ‘ladies of the first rank’ could mingle with ‘men of
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 201
sense and learning [who] would then frequent their assemblies’ (Lady’s
Museum 1: I.15). Like the Female Spectator, the Lady’s Museum advocates
mixed-sex social gatherings, in which scholarly subjects are discussed in a
relaxed domestic setting, and learned men are encouraged to disseminate
their wisdom. In addition, the Lady’s Museum seems to wish to offer readers a
salon within the periodical, where history and the natural sciences are to be
given special prominence.
‘Of the studies proper for women’ does not express many overtly feminist
views. Nothing is said about personal fulfilment or individual rights.
Women are to be educated for social reasons. As in ‘The History of Harriot
and Sophia’, education will enable women to attract men – ‘something more
than beauty is necessary to rivet the lover’s chain’ (Lady’s Museum 1: I.9–10)
– and retain their affections – ‘barrenness of ideas in women . . . renders
men unfaithful’ (1: I.10). As a poem sent in by a reader puts it, ‘wit, and
virtue’ are more captivating than ‘mere outward charms’ (Lady’s Museum 1:
I.48). The correspondent is keen to stress that he does not propose that
women should write history themselves:

If their sex has produced Daciers and Chatelets, these are examples
rarely found, and fitter to be admired than imitated: for who would
wish to see assemblies made up of doctors in petticoats, who will regale
us with Greek and the systems of Leibnitz. The learning proper for
women is such as best suits the soft elegance of their form, such as may
add to their natural beauties, and qualify them for the several duties of
life.
(Lady’s Museum 1: I.11)

This passage seems at first to be warning against female pedantry and, in

particular, female learning in the Classics and natural sciences. There is a
cautionary portrait of a woman who has pretensions to Classical learning in
‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’. In her affectation and ignorance, she
‘murdered so many hard words, that her discourse was scarcely intelligible’
(Lady’s Museum 6: II.417), and her suggestion that a farmer ‘“ought to have
taught his daughters a little Greek and Latin, to have distinguished them
from meer country girls”’ (6: II.424) is treated with derision. However, foot-
notes in the magazine carefully identify the allusions in the above passage to
Anne Dacier (1651–1720), translator of and commentator on Terence and
Homer, and Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Bréteuil du Châtelet
(1706–49), exponent of Leibnitz and Newton. These scholarly women are
not held up to ridicule. They may not be presented as models for imitation,
but they are, explicitly, fit for admiration. It is in itself very unusual for a
periodical to have footnotes, and their presence strengthens its claims to be
202 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
an educational publication. The footnotes are used here to make women
aware of a tradition of female learning. While the Museum stops short of sug-
gesting that its readers become scholars, the ‘Daciers and Chatelets’ prove
that the female sex is capable of understanding academic subjects.
The reader is offered a preview of the Museum’s educational programme in
the opening issue of the series ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’, where we are told
that the editor will always concentrate on matters of human interest: in
history ‘those movements of the human heart on which depend the happi-
ness or ruin of individuals’; in geography ‘human nature diversified by dif-
ferent laws, by different constitutions, and different ideas’ (Lady’s Museum 2:
I.131). The editor stresses that the publication will not be dry and pedantic.
She wishes

to obviate the horrid idea which the word philosophy might otherwise
impress on the minds of our female readers, who might from that term
expect to find a work . . . loaded with dry and abstruse investigations
. . . which if they were attained would stand a chance of more than ten
to one of exciting the outcry of the world against them.
(Lady’s Museum 2: I.131–2)

The Lady’s Museum, she reassures her readership, will render women ‘con-
versable rather than scientific’ (2: I.130). Yet at the same time, very grand
claims are made for the periodical’s all-embracing subject matter:

One Number of our work perhaps shall leave us admiring the stupen-
dous fabric of the immense extended universe; the next shall find us
aiding our limited sight by the help of glasses in observations on a
world of unknown beings contained within a drop of fluid.
(Lady’s Museum 2: I.133)

The periodical, rather than encouraging its readers to carry out experi-
ments (as the Female Spectator does) is itself both telescope and microscope: it
offers descriptions both of the entire universe ‘as considered under a general
view’ (Lady’s Museum 2: I.134–44) and a tiny parasite which lives on cater-
pillars (6: II.471–3). The women’s scientific studies are to be conducted at
second hand, through the descriptions contained in each ‘Number of our
work’, making them ‘conversable, rather than scientific’. No single subject
will be entered into in depth, we are told: ‘The plan we have determined to
proceed on, [is] of not dwelling too long on any one subject’ (Lady’s Museum
5: I.388).
The monthly perusal of the magazine’s educational articles is designed,
we are told, to allay female sexual appetite and encourage devotion: ‘to calm
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 203
our ruffled passions, and, by a regular transition, convey our contemplations
from the creature to its Creator’ (Lady’s Museum 2: I.136). Female learning is
frequently recast as piety by periodical editors, in an attempt to allay anxi-
eties about the moral effects of female interest in the Classics or natural sci-
ences. Nestor Druid, for example, recommends Homer to his women readers
for ‘his piety . . . and strict morality’ (Lady’s Curiosity 9), and includes a
description of Newtonian physics in the form of ‘Sir Isaac Newton’s Creed’
(Lady’s Curiosity 11). One of the Female Spectator’s correspondents tells
readers that ‘the Study of Nature is the Study of Divinity’ (bk XV: 3.89). The
Lady’s Museum tells us ‘in defence of the study of philosophy’ that ‘the obser-
vations we cannot avoid making in the course of it, may be employed with
great propriety towards humanizing the heart, and producing the most
amiable effects in the general oeconomy of life and government’ (3: I.233).
Studying the metamorphoses of insects, for example, ‘might form to us, by
analogy, the idea of a future and more exalted state’ (Lady’s Museum 3:
I.234).
The educational articles in the Lady’s Museum do not simply serve a moral
purpose, however. The editor is keen to emphasize the accuracy of her
reports and the extent of her research. In her series on early British history,
for example, she tells us that she has consulted ‘biographical lexicons’ (Lady’s
Museum 8: II.593) and offers readers two different accounts of the Picts, from
the works of Bishop Stillingfleet and ‘Tyrrhel’, giving a page reference and
also referring readers in a footnote to Innes’s Essays (8: II.605).69 She encour-
ages further reading on the topic and offers tips to readers wishing to
conduct independent research, telling us that ‘dictionaries are always volu-
minous, but always useful; they are lesser libraries, and the compilers of
them are entitled to the highest acknowledgements from all lovers of learn-
ing’ (Lady’s Museum 8: II.593).
In the periodical’s most daring statement of female intellectual capacity,
the editor suggests history and natural philosophy as areas in which women
may equal and even excel men:

Undisturbed by the more intricate affairs of business; unburthened with

the load of political entanglements; with the anxiety of commercial
negotiations; or the suspence and anguish which attend on the pursuit
of fame or fortune, the memories of the fair are left vacant to receive and
to retain the regular connection of a train of events, to register them in
that order which fancy may point out as most pleasing, and to form
deductions from them such as may render their lives more agreeable to
themselves, and more serviceable to every one about them. Their more
exalted faculties, not being tied down by wearisome attention to math-
ematical investigations, metaphysical chimeras, or abstruse scholastic
204 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool
learning, are more at liberty to observe with care, see with perspicuity,
and judge without prejudice, concerning the amazing world of wonders
round them than those of men.
(Lady’s Museum 2: I.129–30)

This passage bears the hallmarks of a separate spheres philosophy, in

which women are regarded as having no part to play in the male worlds of
business, politics and commerce and as excluded from the ‘fame and fortune’
that reward male successes. Drawing on a traditional view of scholarship as a
way of life opposed to active involvement in state politics, a view in which
learning is incompatible with political or financial ambition, Lennox por-
trays women as more natural scholars than men. Their minds are ‘more
exalted’, ‘more at liberty’ – they have both the time and the mental disinter-
estedness required by serious study. Rather than describing women’s studies
as more limited than men’s, Lennox makes male intellectual activity seem
pointless, pedantic, obscure and esoteric: a ‘wearisome’ pursuit of ‘abstruse’
and ‘scholastic’ ‘chimeras’. Like Eliza Haywood, Benjamin Martin and other
writers, Lennox praises women’s capacity for empirical science based on
observation: they ‘observe with care, see with perspicuity’. She goes further
than Haywood and Martin, however, in her claims for the female intellect.
While Haywood depicts women as acute observers, she regards women’s
minds as lively, rather than well-disciplined, with a ‘Vivacity’ and ‘Quick-
ness’ which excel men’s, but a tendency towards confusion. Women’s
thoughts, Haywood writes, can rush to an object ‘like a Crowd of Mob
round the Stage of a Mountebank, where all endeavouring to be foremost,
obstruct the Passage of each other’ (Female Spectator bk X: 2.360).70 Lennox,
by contrast, emphasizes not only women’s quick apprehensions and powers
of observation, but also their skills in logic: their understanding of ‘a regular
connection’, ability to make ‘deductions’, to ‘see with perspicuity’ and
‘judge without prejudice’, in explicit contrast with men. Most strikingly,
Lennox suggests that women’s intellects, by contrast with men’s, have a very
wide field in which to range. Far from being confined to domestic concerns,
women can mentally explore ‘a world of wonders’. In the final issue of the
Lady’s Museum, she proposes an unbounded programme of natural science for
women:

Could the prosecution of our plan have been pursued . . . even to the
farthest stretch of time, our researches into the wonders of Nature’s
inexhaustible storehouse, would have been no other than the pursuance
of an apparent horizon, the boundaries of which are ever flying before
us.
(11: II.857)
 The Lady’s Museum: periodical as educational tool 205
Whatever the limitations of the magazine itself, the potential subjects for
female study are ‘inexhaustible’.
Lennox’s statements of women’s intellectual potential, together with her
portrayals of educated women and her more theoretical articles on female
education, are intended to flatter, coax and reassure her female readers into
study. Above all, in all its rhetoric on education, the Museum is simply
attempting to create a demand and then satisfy it. It tells women to educate
themselves and then provides the necessary material within its pages. With
their aspirations towards universality and comprehensiveness, mid-century
magazines aimed to provide both a microcosm of society and a complete
course of reading in themselves: grandiose aims which were seldom fulfilled.
Often, magazines express grand ambitions for women’s education, but fail to
deliver on these promises. The Lady’s Museum is typical in that in devotes as
much space to discussing the need for female education as it does to educa-
tional material itself. Mid-eighteenth century journalism often contains
lively debate about women’s education and vociferous expressions of support
for it, but the provision of a substantial academic programme of learning for
women was a long way off. In the later years of the century, as women’s need
for education became a more pressing concern and magazines were increas-
ingly segregated into publications aimed at a specific gender, most periodi-
cal publications also gradually abandoned their pedagogical focus and
intellectual ambitions. The wishes of Lennox and some of her contempor-
aries to turn the magazine for women into a serious educational vehicle were
to be disappointed. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, magazines
specifically aimed at women were to specialize in fashion plates, recipes and
household hints, a trend which continues to this day.
10 ‘Buried among the essays upon
liberty, eastern tales, and cures
for the bite of a mad dog’
Oliver Goldsmith and the essayist in
the age of magazines

In his essay ‘The state of literature’, published in Lloyd’s Evening Post (1 Feb-
ruary 1762), Oliver Goldsmith vividly describes the state of the contempor-
ary periodical press:

Never was the publication of periodical works, calculated for both the
head and the heart, so frequent before; more than ten agreeable Maga-
zines in a month came flying abroad fraught with instruction and enter-
tainment. The Gentleman’s Magazine, remarkable for its gravity and
age. The London Magazine, judiciously compiled from compilations;
the Universal Magazine, fricasseed from Dictionaries; the Royal Maga-
zine, written by a Society of Gentlemen; the Imperial Magazine . . . the
sensible British Magazine, the orthodox Christian’s Magazine; the
Lady’s Magazine . . . the Library Magazine . . . the Court Magazine . . .
all serious, chaste, temperate compilations, calculated to instruct
mankind in the changes of the weather and to amuse them with eastern
tales, replete with grave essays upon wit and humour, and humorous
essays upon the cultivation of madder and hemp.71
(Goldsmith 1966: 3.188–9)

In the years between the launch of Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine in

1731 and Goldsmith’s article a plethora of publications appeared, exploiting
what seemed to be an insatiable demand for magazines. The editors of the
Literary Magazine (1756–8) admit that ‘there are already many such periodi-
cal compilations’ and hope modestly only to engage those who are not
already regular readers of a rival magazine (vol. I, Preface). Although some of
these periodicals were short-lived, most ran for at least a year, and many
were to continue in print for half a century or more. Cave’s own publication,
which appeared until 1907, J. Wilford’s London Magazine (1732–97), the
Scots Magazine (1739–1826) and the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and
Pleasure (1747–1815) were to enjoy particular longevity. Bonnell Thornton
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 207
comments 10 years before Goldsmith that ‘the very name [magazine] will
secure to you the custom of the country’ (Drury-Lane Journal 3, 30 January
1752). By the 1760s, the term magazine, as Goldsmith’s comments demon-
strate, announced a well-defined formula. Travel accounts, Oriental tales and
allegories, serialized novels, sentimental fragments, Biblical commentary
and practical articles on such topics as gardening, furniture making and
cures for common ailments take their place beside political essays and news
items in these bulky publications. Their title pages usually voice grandiose
claims to inclusiveness. Each issue of the quarterly Royal Magazine is 480
pages long, with its own index. The editors announce, ‘No Performance can
justly lay Claim to the Title of MAGAZINE, but that which gives a full and complete
Collection . . . of all the Pieces of Knowledge, Religion, Policy, Art, Wit, Humour,
Love, Gallantry, Satire, &c. printed in the Period preceeding its Publication’ (I,
October–December 1750, Preface). The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and
Pleasure (1747–1815) aspires to the comprehensiveness of its title, promising
readers ‘News, Letters, Debates, Poetry, Musick, Biography, History, Geography,
Voyages, Criticism, Translations, Philosophy, Mathematicks, Husbandry, Garden-
ing, Cookery, Chemistry, Mechanicks, Trade, Navigation, Architecture, and Other
Arts and Sciences’ (subtitle). Christopher Smart satirizes the extravagant
claims of these bulky publications in his parody the Midwife (1750–3),
whose grandiose subtitle announces:

Containing all the Wit, and all the Humour, and all the Learning, and all the
Judgement, that has ever been or ever will be Inserted in all the other Magazines,
or the Magazine of Magazines, or any other Book Whatsoever: so that those who
Buy this Book will Need no Other.

Priscilla Termagant makes a similarly sarcastic claim when she tells

readers, ‘This Journal should be an Epitome of Mankind’ (Spring-Garden
Journal 2, 23 November 1752). The magazines’ grand pretensions often
resulted in a jumble of material: ‘incongruous Hashes of Gazette-Accounts,
and News-paper Essays, Plagiarisms from Books, and a few flimsy, unim-
proving, and unmeaning Productions from Men of little Learning, and less
Knowledge of the World’, as the Imperial Magazine puts it (January 1760,
Introduction).
The magazines’ increasing success was at least partly due to the Stamp
Tax on newspapers. In 1757 an act was passed which doubled the rates of
the 1725 Stamp Tax. Although there was no clear legal definition of a news-
paper, in practice the regulations were only applied to weekly or semi-
weekly publications, making monthly magazines an even more attractive
alternative to consumers and leading to a further expansion in their numbers
and sales figures.
208 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
The essay-periodical is a genre overwhelmingly associated with the
sophisticated world of London society. Whilst Cave adopted the pseudonym
of Sylvanus Urban, emphasizing the breadth of his readership, editors like Mr
Town of the Connoisseur (1754–6) and Adam Fitz-Adam of the World
(1753–6) stressed their metropolitan affiliations. Magazines had always held a
particular appeal for provincial readers. The Royal Magazine promises to keep
‘Gentlemen who live in the Country’ informed ‘(tho’ perhaps at a great Distance
from the Metropolis) in all the Affairs of the Beau Monde’ (I, October–December
1750, Preface). The correspondent T.H. tells the editor of the Court Magazine
that ‘particular advantage arises to your country readers from this work . . . as
the transactions of the Court must be a very agreeable part of an evening’s
conversation, and with which the generality of Magazine readers have been
hitherto totally unacquainted’ (September 1761: 18). Country-dwellers did
not have the same easy access to a wide range of daily and weekly publica-
tions as the clientele of the London coffee-houses and were far more willing to
wait until the end of the month to read summaries of the news, since they
had always received news and current affairs publications far later than their
metropolitan counterparts. Improved transport and communications enabled
magazine editors to distribute their publications throughout the country.
Magazines were often associated with a naïve and ill-informed rural audience.
Thornton comments that ‘a professing to contain more in quantity than any other
work of the same kind, has doubtless had its weight with many a prudent
country person, who thought he got a great bargain every month for his six-
pence’ (Drury-Lane Journal 3, 30 January 1752).
In view of an expanding national readership and a demand for greater
variety, the essay-periodical, modelled on the works of Addison and Steele,
had begun to appear outdated. As Robert D. Spector has shown, during the
Seven Years War (1756–63) short essay-papers with a purely literary content
became increasingly unpopular with a reading public hungry for foreign
news (1966). Essayists failed to adapt to the changing political and literary
climate and continued to take the Tatler and Spectator as their models,
although both publications were nearly half a century old by 1760. Maga-
zines were able to swallow essay-series whole, reprinting them in their pages
as a regular feature. Addison and Steele’s contemporaries read the Spectator in
single sheets. Johnson’s Rambler, in 1750–2, on the other hand, sold less
than 500 copies in its original format, but was widely plagiarized by the
London and provincial press. It reached a very large audience, but it was an
audience of magazine readers.
For professional journalists who wished to make a living, contributing to
the magazines was the only viable option. Despite his satirical comments,
Goldsmith supplied essays to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines in
the 1750s and 60s. Richard Taylor has traced Goldsmith’s contributions to
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 209
at least 15 publications of this period. These range from the daily newspaper
the Public Ledger (1760–1837), to the pious and didactic Christian Magazine
(1759–67) and include four of the periodicals – the Royal, British, Christian
and Lady’s magazines – lampooned in the article cited above.72 As Taylor
notes, as a poor, unknown Irish writer in London, the periodicals provided
Goldsmith with an opportunity to earn money and attract the attention of
the capital’s publishers and booksellers, yet his journalistic work is marked
by ‘the unavoidable tension created by the author’s expressed contempt for a
profession in which he hoped to achieve fame’ (1993: 76). Goldsmith’s work
for the Critical Review in 1757–8 marked the beginning of a lifelong associ-
ation with the powerful bookseller John Newbery who introduced him to a
circle of writers which included Johnson and Smollett (Taylor 1993:
89–103). Despite his own involvement with both major reviewing journals,
the Critical and the rival Monthly Review, Goldsmith was to depict ‘book-
answerers’ in his ‘Chinese Letters’ of 1760–1 as ‘wretches . . . kept in pay by
some mercenary bookseller . . . as all that is required is to be very abusive
and very dull’ (1966: 2.60). As Taylor has shown, this is a very distorted
portrayal of Ralph Griffiths’ and Tobias Smollett’s professional staff, who
enjoyed considerable independence and whose reviews were more often char-
acterized by modest praise than by rancorous attacks (1993: 32–8, 100).
Goldsmith’s bitterness reveals his deeply ambivalent attitude towards his
journalistic career. His essays contain both defiant vindications of the profes-
sional writer and attempts to distance himself from what he viewed as a
degrading and servile occupation. This chapter will explore the tensions and
contradictions of Goldsmith’s depictions of himself as a periodical writer.
Goldsmith’s complaints of his dependence on the booksellers reflect
changing patterns of ownership and control of periodicals. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu complains in 1737 that printers and booksellers refuse to
accept publications which threaten to be unprofitable and her own ‘Inge-
nious Printer’ has made unauthorized alterations to her copy, adding, as she
exclaims indignantly, ‘a little Bawdy at the end of a Paragraph, that no way
led to any Idea of that sort’ (Nonsense of Common Sense 2). These were only
minor infringements, however: the concept and material were supplied by
Montagu. Addison and Steele had been personally responsible for the con-
tents of the Spectator, while magazine writers like Goldsmith and Lennox
were in the hands of a publisher who dictated the shape of each issue. The
editor of the Court Magazine tells his readers that it is ‘the bookseller, who
has very little literary vanity in his composition’ who ‘is generally the person
who draws it up; he is a kind of godfather to the various writers concerned
in the undertaking’ (September 1761). Goldsmith’s Bee was published by
John Wilkie, one of a number of close business associates of John Newbery,
who included the editor Griffith Jones and the printers Jonathan Richardson
210 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
and William Faden, who printed the Rambler. Newbery’s influence on the
periodicals of the 1760s can hardly be overestimated. He seems to have had
a financial stake not only in the Bee, but in most of the other periodicals
with which Goldsmith was involved: the British Magazine, Critical Review,
Literary Magazine, Lloyd’s Evening Post, London Chronicle, Public Ledger, Royal
Magazine and the Universal Chronicle, as well as the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite
Companion and Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (see Taylor 1993: 87).
Although the Nonsense of Common-Sense is not strictly an essay-periodical,
as it also contains a news section, it was primarily a vehicle for Montagu’s
writing. Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’ were published in very different cir-
cumstances. They appeared irregularly at the average rate of 10 letters each
month between 24 January 1760 and 14 August 1761 in the Public Ledger,
published by Newbery and edited by Griffith Jones. The Ledger is a daily
paper, dominated by military, shipping and domestic news, as well as fea-
turing an index to the advertisements in other periodicals, which must have
been of particular interest to a mercantile readership. Goldsmith’s was only
one of a number of leaders, some of which were literary, like the series ‘The
Visitor’, published under the nom de plume of Philanthropy Candid. In other
issues, foreign news or shipping lists replaced the essays on manners and
morals. Goldsmith produced 119 letters in all, for which he was paid the
not miserly stipend of £100 p.a. His reliance on Newbery was more than
symbolic: during the publication of the ‘Chinese Letters’, Goldsmith, who
was constitutionally financially inept, seems to have lived with Newbery and
his relatives. The costs of room and board were subtracted from his salary
(Kirk 1967: 33). When the ‘Chinese Letters’ ended on 14 August, Gold-
smith immediately began the new ‘Series of Literary Essays’, the first of
which appeared on 19 August.
Many of Newbery’s ventures were highly successful. They anticipate the
periodicals of the twenty-first century in many respects. Their length made
it impractical for any single person to provide all the copy, whilst their
longevity meant that successive generations of writers and publishers would
become involved in the production of the same title. As with most modern-
day periodicals, individual writers were expected to conform to a house
style. For Goldsmith, these publications provided a vital livelihood and
vehicle for his writings, yet on the other hand they were commercial enter-
prises that compromised his desire for literary respectability. Goldsmith did
not want to be merely another hack. His journalism constantly responds to
this perceived threat to his artistic integrity.
Goldsmith comments extensively on the new position of the Addisonian
essayist in an age of magazines. He is very untypical in this respect. There
were many essay-serials within newspapers and magazines, but most writers
chose discreetly to ignore the context of their publication. The essay-series as
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 211
a genre relies heavily on the persona of its narrator, usually portrayed as a
gentleman (sometimes as a lady) and an eccentric who writes out of a
mixture of pique, personal vanity and public spirit, with little or no profit
motive. Female editors were frequently described as indulging their consti-
tutional loquacity. The editor of the Parrot, a ‘single Woman possess’d of a
good Fortune’ (3, 9 October 1728), confesses, ‘I cannot hold my Tongue; for
I must speak and write when the Humour takes me’ (1, 25 September
1728). Similarly, the editor of Eliza Haywood’s Parrot (1746) declares that
he wishes ‘to gratify my own insatiable Itch of talking’ (no. 1). Nicholas
Babble of the Prater has turned to writing a periodical because he ‘was
always of an inquisitive, communicative disposition’ and has been persuaded
that he would make a good journalist: ‘My friends have at last flatter’d me
into a belief that I have as much right to attract the attention of the Town as
the daily, weekly, and monthly chatterers of the age’ (1, 13 March 1756).
Mr Babble is a denizen of fashionable society: ‘Sometimes I have the honour
to breakfast with a Lady of Quality before she is up, and to be taken notice
of by a Great Man before he goes to Court’ (Prater 3, 27 March 1756). He
possesses ‘a great deal of . . . public-spiritedness’ and plans to ‘scribble away
. . . for the good of my Country’ and give them the benefit of his lucubra-
tions ‘pro bono’ (Prater 1). His 16-year-old cousin Martha Chatter makes occa-
sional contributions to the paper, motivated by the ‘excessively delightful’
opportunity of talking ‘in Print’, since all her personal acquaintances are
weary of her incessant prattle (Prater 6, 17 April 1756).
Frontispiece illustrations, like that of the 1747 volume of the Universal
Magazine, often depict editors seated pensively at desks in libraries, quill pen
in hand (Figure 10.1). ‘The Meddler’, in the contemporary Royal Female Mag-
azine, a widely travelled gentleman of leisure educated at Eton and Oxford, is
a typical specimen of the financially disinterested editor. The ‘title of this
paper’, he confesses, ‘is the characteristic of my mind, the ruling passion of
which, now that I have arrived at that stage of life, wherein ability for active
meddling fails me, irresistibly impells me to this speculative indulgence of it’
(1, March 1760). Adam Fitz-Adam, the editor of the World, is a gentleman
who has access to polite society: both the metropolitan assemblies of people
like the urbane Lady Townley, who prides herself on being a woman of
fashion (151, 20 November 1755), and the estates of country squires like Sir
John Jolly (153, 5 December 1755), whose aim is to make his country estate
a copy of London society, with the addition of constant hunting parties.
This pretence of financial and intellectual independence is difficult to
maintain if the writer admits that his essays were commissioned by a maga-
zine editor. Steele comments playfully on every aspect of the Tatler from its
poor quality paper to its advertisements and its publisher, Charles Lillie.73
The contributors to the magazines are unable to maintain such a consistent
Figure 10.1 Frontispiece of the Universal Magazine, vol. for 1747.
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 213
character, and the Steelian persona frequently appears to be merely an
outworn convention. The writer of ‘The Meddler’ tells his readers that ‘the
usual way, with my periodical predecessors, has been to give . . . [a] history
of themselves’, but laments that ‘many lamentable miscarriages . . . have
long since made that method ineffectual’ (Royal Female Magazine 1, March
1760). However, he does adopt a persona: that of a melancholy traveller
nursing a secret sorrow. Mark Akenside does not adopt an editorial persona
of any kind in his Museum. In the Town and Country Magazine, correspon-
dence is simply addressed ‘To the Printer’. Mrs Stanhope of the Lady’s Mag-
azine remains a shadowy, undeveloped figure, and correspondents often
unselfconsciously address her as ‘Sir’. Likewise, the editor of the annual
Ladies Complete Pocket-Book is simply and anonymously ‘a LADY’, while the
editors of the Court Magazine and Matilda Wentworth of the Court Miscellany
are never described to the reader. The editors of the Universal Magazine
refrain from taking a stance on any issue, declaring, ‘It is not our business to
form any discussion . . . our principal concern is to find matter of good
entertainment for our Readers’ (XXXVIII, 1766, Preface). We sense a weari-
ness and impatience with the Spectatorial conventions in Goldsmith’s Bee:

There is not, perhaps, a more whimsically dismal figure in nature, than

a man of real modesty who assumes an air of impudence; who, while his
heart beats with anxiety, studies ease, and affects good humour. In this
situation, however, a periodical writer often finds himself, upon his first
attempt to address the public in form.74
(1, 1 October 1759; Goldsmith 1966: 1.353)

Goldsmith’s work for the magazines was anonymous and had no copy-
right. His work is often obscured by the sheer mass of other material con-
tained in the magazines, coming forth, as he writes in The Vicar of Wakefield,
‘in the mist of periodical publication, unnoticed and unknown’ (Goldsmith
1966: 4.111). Essayists frequently describe the magazines as merely
‘Monthly Heaps of second-hand, damag’d and stolen Goods’ (Daily Post 23
February 1737), while readers like Tim Lovelady request ‘more original
pieces . . . than I have yet met with’ (Lady’s Curiosity 6). Goldsmith com-
plains that his essays have been so extensively plagiarized that they have
become hackneyed and outdated even before publication in volume form:

Most of these essays have been regularly reprinted twice or thrice a year,
and conveyed to the public through the kennel of some engaging com-
pilation . . . I have seen some of my labours sixteen times reprinted, and
claimed by different parents as their own.
(Goldsmith 1966: 3.1)
214 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
Goldsmith’s own journalism is highly plagiaristic (see Taylor 1993: 81),
yet he is concerned to protect his intellectual property and even envisages a
critical edition of his journalism. He writes in a letter of 1758, ‘There will
come a day . . . when the Scaligers and Daciers will . . . give learned editions
of my labours, and bless the times with copious comments on the text’ (Gold-
smith 1928: 38–9). This semi-serious joke is repeated in the fourth issue of
the Bee (27 October 1759) where the author imagines ‘Scaligers, Daciers, and
Warburtons of future times commenting with admiration upon every line I
now write’, adding the wry comment that ‘the world may forsake an author,
but vanity will never forsake him’ (Goldsmith 1966: 1.416). These grand
visions of posterity poring over an established Goldsmith canon contrast with
the fragmented and depersonalized world of magazine publication, where
writings are continually borrowed, adapted and distorted.
Goldsmith describes the production of a magazine as a highly mecha-
nized process. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu also complains in 1737 that ‘the
Art of Poetry is now grown so thoroughly Mechanical, that, if my Con-
science would suffer me, I would bind my youngest Son ’Prentice to an
eminent Poet’ (Nonsense of Common Sense 9). Whilst for Montagu, however, it
is the financial motive which demeans poetry, for Goldsmith, it is the
extreme division of literary labour. In the Bee (1, 6 October 1759), a book-
seller explains:

One writer excels at a plan, or a title-page, another works away the body
of a book, and a third is a dab at an index. Thus a Magazine is not the
result of any single man’s industry; but goes through as many hands as a
new pin, before it is fit for the public.
(Goldsmith 1966: 1.354)

Goldsmith’s views are confirmed by the Court Magazine, which describes

how ‘a few authors’ specialize in ‘Introduction writing’ and ‘receive half a
crown . . . for three or four preparatory pages at the head of a performance’
(September 1761). The mechanized nature of magazine publication is
further emphasized when T.D. offers his services as a journalist on the
strength of having ‘wrought for several magazine-shops’ (Court Magazine
October 1761). The editor tells his readers ‘we consider the republic of
letters as a commercial state and look upon the different professors as a kind
of mechanics’ (Court Magazine November 1761).
For Goldsmith, the magazine is a huge, bland, anonymous, money-
making venture. The individual writer’s personality is swamped by the sheer
mass of other material. Writers of essay-periodicals might have had to try to
attract a readership in an overcrowded market, but for the modern magazine
writer, the competition is from other articles within the magazine itself.
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 215
Each reader turns to his or her own favourite section and ignores the rest.
The essayist’s work is packaged for an audience of magazine-readers, that is,
for a readership below his or her dignity and unappreciative of his or her
merits. Later in the same issue, Goldsmith warns that ‘should the labours of
a writer who designs his performances for readers of a more refined appetite
fall into the hands of a devourer of compilations, what can he expect but
contempt and confusion’ (1996: 1.356). Writing for the magazines is
regarded as in itself demeaning. In his essay-series ‘The Indigent Philo-
sopher’, Goldsmith laments:

Alas! how ill do I support the dignity of a Scholar or a Gentleman, by

thus consigning my little acquirements to the same vehicle that must
too often necessarily convey insipidity and ignorance! How cold a recep-
tion must every effort receive that comes thus endeavouring to regulate
the passions, in a place where almost every paragraph tends to excite
them; where readers of taste seldom seek for gratification; and where
readers of politicks and news seldom require more than the objects of
their peculiar curiosity.
(Lloyd’s Evening Post 22 January 1762; Goldsmith 1966: 3.182)

The audience of Lloyd’s Evening Post, the essayist argues, have bought the
publication primarily for its focus on current affairs and trading reports. Pre-
occupied by ‘politicks and news’, they lack the detachment and disinterest-
edness requisite for the appreciation of philosophy. Political polemic and
controversy, together with reports which stimulate mercantile hopes and
fears, ‘excite’ the passions, and moral essays are disregarded as irrelevant.
Readers of sufficient taste and discernment to appreciate Goldsmith’s work
would never, he claims, stoop to buying such a publication. In the Bee (1, 6
October 1759), he writes that ‘if . . . like labourers in the Magazine trade, I
humbly presume to promise an epitome of all the good things that were ever
said or written, those readers I most desire to please may forsake me’ (Gold-
smith 1966: 1.353–4). Goldsmith sometimes seems to suggest that even an
essay-periodical is a demeaning medium for his writing. His own persona
Lien Chi Altangi of the ‘Chinese Letters’ declares that ‘essays upon divers
subjects can’t allure me’ (Goldsmith 1966: 2.388). Goldsmith’s fears that
the medium in which his essays appeared would affect their reception appear
to have been justified. A contemporary reviewer of the collected version of
the ‘Chinese Letters’, published in book form as The Citizen of the World in
1762, comments:

Were we to examine these reflections of our Citizen of the World by the

standard of originality, our pleasure would be greatly diminished . . .
216 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
these letters, if we mistake not, made their first appearance in a daily
news-paper, and were necessarily calculated to the meridian of the
multitude.
(Critical Review May 1762)

Goldsmith’s attempts to distance himself from these mechanical ‘labour-

ers’, denied originality and forced to ‘eccho the million’ (Chinese Letter LI;
Goldsmith 1966: 2.214), can be most clearly seen in his periodical the Bee
(1759). The weekly publication is a hybrid of the essay-periodical and the
magazine, a kind of miniature magazine without the news section. Its polit-
ical essays, allegories, Oriental tales, biographies and poems are typical mag-
azine fare, and many of them were recycled by Goldsmith during his
probable editorship of the Lady’s Magazine, as well as plagiarized by other
contemporary magazines. Only about half of the material is original, the rest
compiled by Goldsmith, or translated from French sources (see Taylor 1993:
81). Yet the Bee is full of hostile comment on magazines and constantly
claims not to be one itself. It is portrayed as far more exclusive and indeed
unpopular than the magazines:

Should I estimate my fame by its extent, every News-Paper and every

Magazine would leave me far behind. Their fame is diffused in a very
wide circle, that of some as far as Islington . . . while mine . . . has
hardly travelled beyond the sound of Bow-bell.
(Bee 4, 27 October 1759; Goldsmith 1966: 1.414)

The writer is depicted as a disinterested essayist in the Addisonian mould

who has fallen upon evil times, in a degenerate age in which the essay-
periodical is no longer appreciated. He complains:

The Spectator, and many succeeding essayists, frequently inform us of

the numerous compliments paid them in the course of their lucubra-
tions . . . I have received my letters as well as they; but alas! not congrat-
ulatory ones . . . One gentleman assures me, he intends to throw away
no more three-pences in purchasing the BEE . . . Were my soul set upon
three-pences, what anxiety might not such a denunciation produce! But
such does not happen to be the present motive of publication! I write
partly to show my good-nature, and partly to shew my vanity.
(ibid.; Goldsmith 1966: 1.419)

The essayist is presented here as a disinterested, genteel amateur, writing

for his own personal satisfaction. Goldsmith claims that the very form of his
publication proves it was not written for money, since no publication mod-
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 217
elled on the Spectator could be expected to make a profit in the 1760s. If he
had wished to accumulate three-pences, the editor writes, ‘I should have
written down to the taste and apprehension of the many’, or, in other words,
produced a magazine:

I had thought of changing the title into that of the ROYAL BEE, the ANTI-
GALLICAN BEE, or the BEE’S MAGAZINE.75 I had laid in a proper stock of
popular topicks, such as encomiums on the king of Prussia . . . the
history of an old woman whose teeth grew three inches long . . . a rebus,
an acrostic . . . and a journal of the weather.
(ibid.; Goldsmith 1966: 1.418)

Goldsmith’s flippant summary implies that magazines are both easy to

produce and all alike. His list of topics echoes the heterogeneous contents
pages of many contemporary publications. A letter from a repentant former
prostitute follows an account of a scientific experiment in the Imperial Maga-
zine, for example (January 1760).
Although, in the Bee, Goldsmith distances himself from the mercenary
hack, he often defends the professional writer. He introduces his ‘Series of
Literary Essays’, a sequence of brief book reviews and extracts printed in the
Public Ledger, in a defiant manner:

In the execution of a task of this nature neither great abilities nor pro-
found learning will be exerted by the writer, and no great discernment
or sagacity will be required on the part of the reader. I could wish that
we both brought only our common-sense to the business.
(Public Ledger 19 August 1761; Goldsmith 1966: 3.159)

The preface to his Essays defends them against the charge of being ‘tri-
fling and superficial’ with the admission that ‘in some measure . . . the
charge is true . . . but I would ask whether in a short essay it is not necessary
to be superficial?’ (Goldsmith 1966: 3.2). Goldsmith implies that journal-
ism must be judged by its own set of standards. He reminds his readers that
even such a humble profession requires care and skill. However low its
status, journalism is a competitive field: ‘It is not every scholar who pretends
to despise this prostitution of talents, whose works have sufficient beauty to
allure our employer to propose terms of similar prostitution’ (Lloyd’s Evening
Post 22 January 1762; Goldsmith 1966: 3.182). The bitterness of Gold-
smith’s sarcasm reveals the tensions between his desire to elicit sympathy for
journalists and his shame at his own involvement in the profession.
Claims of editorial gentility are ubiquitous in mid-eighteenth century
journalism. The editors of the Court Magazine complain of ‘the insolent
218 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
claim, every little pretender to genius, shall make to the character of a gen-
tleman. From the writer of an humble Acrostic in the Daily Gazetteer, to
the sensible compiler of an Evening’s Essay in the St. James’s Chronicle’
(November 1761). The Court’s editors are themselves described as ‘a Society
of Gentlemen . . . Who have generously united their Abilities for . . . the
Benefit of Mankind’ (I [for 1761], 1763, Preface). Magazine editor Nestor
Druid is proud to be ‘of no Profession’ (Lady’s Curiosity 1, Introduction), while
Jeffrey Broadbottom of the political journal Old England tells his printer
‘your profession is getting Money, and mine getting Fame’ (20, 18 June 1743).
Jeoffry Wagstaffe of the Batchelor claims to have ‘an easy competency, so as
to make me independent’ and to write ‘meerly to gratify my humour, or for
amusement’ (1, 29 March 1766). In his Covent-Garden Journal, Fielding,
writing as Sir Alexander Drawcansir, sarcastically claims that matters of
profit are ‘infinitely below my Consideration’, since he wished ‘to distribute
these Papers gratis’, but was dissuaded by his profit-hungry bookseller (1, 4
January 1752).76 The editors of the Scots Magazine feel obliged ‘to offer our
motives, as to our performance, to the judgment of our readers’ (vol. I, Preface).
They admit that they do not ‘pretend to be free from all desire of gain’, but
promise that any profit will be ‘carefully applied toward making this Maga-
zine more acceptable’ (ibid.).
The Universal Visiter claims to have been written by ‘a society of gentle-
men’ (subtitle). The frontispiece to vol. 1 for 1756 shows a man sitting con-
templatively at a desk in a library. The room is decorated with the busts of
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Waller and Dryden, and the shelves above
contain volumes of English authors from Gower to Tillotson. The picture
suggests that the periodical is the work of a single, leisured gentleman, an
amateur who writes from the well-appointed library in his own spacious
home. The reality behind the image was very different: Christopher Smart
and Richard Rolt signed a notorious contract which bound them to provide
one third of the magazine’s copy and to write for no other publication for a
term of 99 years (see Gedalof 1983: 349–54) (Figure 10.2).
In Goldsmith’s writing, the figure of the poor author starving in his
garret is not always satirized. He makes an implicit distinction between
writing for profit and writing for subsistence. Goldsmith mocks the genteel
pretensions of magazine editors in ‘The Indigent Philosopher’ with an adver-
tisement for an imaginary Infernal Magazine written by ‘a Society of Gentle-
men of distinction’, who ‘disdain to eat or write like Hirelings . . . and . . .
are resolved to sell our Magazine for sixpence merely for our own amuse-
ment’ (Goldsmith 1966: 3.192). By contrast, Goldsmith’s indigent philo-
sopher makes a bargain with his readers which seems frank and fair: ‘Let the
reader then only permit me to eat, and I will endeavour to encrease his plea-
sures’ (Lloyd’s Evening Post 22 January 1760; Goldsmith 1966: 3.183).
Figure 10.2 Frontispiece of the Universal Visiter, vol. I, 1756.
220 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
Goldsmith’s ‘Indigent Philosopher’ is a latter-day Diogenes, recalling
Classical Athens, rather than Grub Street. Like the narrator of the ‘Chinese
Letters’, he is an impoverished, but wise and disinterested, philosopher. He
is fiercely independent and proud, despite his poverty, a neglected genius
publishing his moral wisdom for the benefit of a sadly unappreciative world.
He makes a passionate appeal to our sense of justice, exclaiming, ‘And shall
I be ashamed of being paid a trifle for doing this, when Bishops are paid for
scarce preaching on Sundays! . . . By Heavens I . . . glory in it’ (Lloyd’s Evening
Post 22 January 1762; Goldsmith 1966: 3.183). In his ‘Chinese Letters’, he
voices the view that professional writers have far greater artistic freedom
than their predecessors who were forced to become the sycophants of aristo-
cratic patrons: ‘At present the . . . poets of England no longer depend on the
Great for subsistence, they have now no other patrons but the public, and
the public, collectively considered, is a good and generous master’ (Gold-
smith 1966: 2.344). In the ‘Chinese Letters’, Goldsmith describes ‘a polite
age’, in which ‘almost every person becomes a reader’ (1966: 2.311), and
every ‘polite member of the community by buying what he [the professional
author] writes, contributes to reward him’ (1966: 2.344). The necessity of
earning money, rather than restricting a writer, acts as a spur to creativity.
He assures readers that professional writers are far from being a manifesta-
tion of modern depravity: ‘Homer is the first poet and beggar of note . . .
Terence was a slave, and Boethius died in a jail’ (Goldsmith 1966: 2.342).
Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher asserts proudly that ‘almost all the excel-
lent productions in wit . . . were purely the offspring of necessity; their
Drydens, Butlers, Otways and Farquhars, were all writers for bread’ (Gold-
smith 1966: 2.376).
Goldsmith’s ambivalence towards his occupation as a professional jour-
nalist is symptomatic of a larger problem confronting the periodicalists of
the mid-eighteenth century. In the late 1750s and early 1760s, periodical
essayists and editors were forced to redefine themselves and adopt new liter-
ary strategies. In a market dominated by newspapers and magazines, the
essay-periodical seemed threatened with extinction. Essayists continued to
invoke the sacred names of Addison and Steele in defence of their undertak-
ing, but these had lost a lot of their talismanic power. The essay-serial
seemed like a quaint period-piece from Queen Anne’s reign, within the
more modern idiom of the magazine or newspaper. The changes which had
taken place were to have lasting consequences. Like the magazines of the
1760s, most modern periodicals are published by a complex hierarchy of
publishers, editors, sub-editors and staff writers. The material submitted by
individual contributors is carefully edited and is usually expected to conform
to a house style. Editorials and regular columns have come to replace the
Spectatorial essay, occupying only a small proportion of space in most
 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines 221
publications. Whilst some columnists express outspoken or maverick views,
very few adopt a fictional persona. Less precedence is given to readers’
letters, yet they remain a persistent feature of journals, and women’s maga-
zines, in particular, place a high premium on authenticity. Publications like
Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire feature confessional first person accounts of
traumatic events in their readers’ lives, surveys and problem pages, as well as
letters to the editor. Readers are encouraged to identify with their staff
writers, who present themselves not as professional journalists, but as ordin-
ary people sharing the troubles and pleasures of their audience. It is often
difficult to tell whether their correspondence is genuine or fictional. Whilst
a number of men’s magazines were launched in the 1980s and 90s, maga-
zines are still associated primarily with women readers and have been unable
to lose their frivolous and trivial image. Newspapers have diversified to
include articles on travel, the arts and entertainment, particularly in their
Sunday supplements, which carry a slim glossy magazine folded in their
pages. Whilst eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines have evolved
into current-day forms, the essay-periodical, with its colourful fictitious
editor, was already moribund in 1760 and was never to recover its original
vitality.
In the Bee (5, 3 November 1759), Goldsmith describes a vision of the
future, which he calls a ‘Resverie [sic]’, an allegorical fantasy. The essayist
has been considering the growing commercialization of literature, reflecting
that although ‘every writer who now draws the quill seems to aim at profit,
as well as applause, many among them are probably laying in stores for
immortality’ (Goldsmith 1966: 1.444). He allows his mind to wander and
daydreams of a coachyard full of vehicles, each symbolizing a different moti-
vation for writing. Passing by the ‘pleasure stage-coach’, the ‘waggon of indus-
try’, the ‘vanity whim’ and the ‘landau of riches’, the writer eagerly approaches
a coach with the inscription the ‘fame machine’. The coachman has just
carried a generation of writers – Addison, Swift, Pope, Steele, Congreve and
Colley Cibber – to the Temple of Fame and has returned to collect their suc-
cessors. The editor offers a copy of the Bee as his credentials, but the driver
‘assured me he had never heard of it before’. Samuel Johnson soon
approaches, weighed down by the bulky volumes of his Dictionary, but the
coachman refuses to take him on board until he spots a ‘little book . . .
peeping from one of his pockets’. On asking to see it, he is told it is a ‘mere
trifle . . . it is called the Rambler’. On hearing this, the driver exclaims in
rapture:

The Rambler! . . . I beg, sir, you’ll take your place; I have heard our
ladies in the court of Apollo frequently mention it with rapture; and
Clio, who happens to be a little grave, has been heard to prefer it to the
222 Oliver Goldsmith: the essayist and the age of magazines
Spectator, though others have observed, that the reflections, by being
refined, sometimes become minute.
(Goldsmith 1966: 1.447–8)

Ironically, it is a periodical, that most ephemeral and fragile of publica-

tions, written hurriedly and for money, that provides a passport to posterity
where lengthy volumes fail. Even the Rambler, the most earnest and didactic
of periodical papers, is considered by its own author as a ‘trifle’ and is
depicted as a work of entertainment for a female audience: it is the ladies of
the court of Apollo who are keen Rambler readers. Johnson’s periodical pro-
vides, for Goldsmith, decisive proof of the literary worth of journalism:
‘Their Johnson’s and Smollet’s are truly poets; though for aught I know they
never made a single verse in their whole lives’ (Chinese Letter XL; Goldsmith
1966: 2.171). While Goldsmith’s evaluation of the Rambler has been vindi-
cated by posterity, few other eighteenth-century periodical writers have
retained their seats in the fame machine, not, in any case, for their journalis-
tic work. This study has attempted to show that it is time to revise that
judgement, to return to a unique moment in literary history and reappraise
the work of eighteenth-century periodical editors.
Notes

1 The New Royal and Universal Magazine; or, the Gentleman and Lady’s Companion
(1751–9), Universal Museum; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Magazine of History,
Politics and Literature (1762–72), Curiosity; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Repository
(1740) and Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium (1750–79).
2 For more detailed information on reviewing periodicals, see Donoghue 1996
and Roper 1978.
3 There were at least two periodicals of this name: the Court Miscellany in Prose and
Verse (1719) and Court Miscellany; or, Ladies New Magazine (1765–71), continued
as Court; or, Gentleman and Lady’s New Magazine.
4 One important exception is Laurence Sterne, whose writing was heavily influ-
enced by Addison and Steele in particular (see Golden 1987).
5 Hugh Kelly’s ‘Babbler’ essays appeared in Owen’s Weekly Chronicle (1758–70)
between 1761 and 1767 and were reprinted as a collection in 1767.
6 See the bibliography of periodicals for publications of these names, with epony-
mous editor-figures.
7 The character ‘Euphrosine’ first appears in Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6),
where, however, she is rather different from her incarnation in the Young Lady.
8 See the advertisement for Smart’s show in the Public Advertiser (13 March 1753),
as well as ‘The prologue to Mary Midnight’s Oratory’ in the Ladies Magazine
(III.6, 8 February 1752).
9 The OED does not cite any examples of the word museum used to signify a type
of periodical.
10 For further details about Steele’s life, see Winton 1964 and 1970.
11 The sexual mores of the Restoration theatre, with its ubiquitous rakes and cuck-
olds, are also challenged in plays like Steele’s The Tender Husband (1705) and The
Conscious Lovers (1722). In The Tender Husband, the young aristocrat Clerimont
marries the city girl Biddy Tipkins, rather than attempting to seduce her. Her
uncle-guardian, a rich banker, is happily married to a faithful wife. The aristo-
cratic Bevil jr. of The Conscious Lovers is a morally exemplary young man, who
wishes to marry Indiana, even though he believes that she is penniless and of
low birth.
12 For Addison’s papers on wit, see Spectators 58–65.
13 For places where Bickerstaff does categorize women, see Tatlers 4, 17 and 67.
14 Steele does occasionally satirize individual women in the Tatler. Tatler 63 con-
tains a veiled attack on Mary Astell, Elizabeth Elstob and Delarivier Manley.
224 Notes
15 Deborah Payne has questioned the assumption that Restoration and early eight-
eenth-century actresses were regarded primarily as sex objects. However, she
still sees them as, at best, a ‘social group on . . . precarious social footing’ (Payne
1995: 20).
16 One issue is unaccounted for here: I have been unable to locate a copy of Female
Tatler 63.
17 Manley’s novel The New Atalantis (1709) attacks Steele as Monsieur L’Ingrate
(see Manley 1992: 101–5). She claims that he was the father of her illegitimate
child. Steele retaliates in Tatlers 63, 167 and 229.
18 Mrs Crackenthorpe alludes to the Society for the Reformation of Manners,
which printed inspirational tracts and a broadside Black List, containing the
names of people allegedly punished by the Society for such misdemeanours as
drunkenness, swearing and violating the Sabbath. In 1709, the Black List was
replaced by Accounts, which recorded 10,000 names in 1708–9 (R.P. Bond
1971: 72).
19 The British Apollo retaliates with satirical verse (nos. 45, 47, 49, 50 and 51).
20 Lucinda alludes to Bickerstaff’s description of himself as a mastiff in Tatler
115.
21 Isaac Bickerstaff is also a member of a club: he attends a nightly meeting of
elderly men at the Trumpet tavern, where the monotony of the club’s proceed-
ings acts as a natural soporific, enabling Bickerstaff to drop off to sleep easily
afterwards. This club, however, features in only one issue (Tatler 132) and is
pointedly not a source of writerly inspiration or lively discussion.
22 For a clear and succinct account of the Spectator’s politics and contemporary reac-
tions to them, see Smithers 1968: 213–6 and Winton 1964: 138–50.
23 Quotations from the Englishman are taken from Steele 1955.
24 Quotations from the Lover are taken from Steele 1725.
25 Bond has calculated that Addison’s papers contain 202 independent essays and
49 made up wholly or in part by contributed material or letters; Steele’s 89 and
162 respectively (D.F. Bond 1965: lix).
26 Quotations from ‘The Idler’ are taken from Johnson 1969.
27 For papers on prostitution in the first series, see, for example, Spectators 182,
205, 266, 274, 276, 286 and 410. For those on other forms of sexual immoral-
ity, see Spectators 151, 154, 156, 190, 203, 260 and 298.
28 Examiners 46 (14 June 1711) to 52 (27 July 1711) have been attributed to
Delarivier Manley (Burke 1983: 113–19).
29 For an excellent biographical account of the relationship between the Nonsense of
Common Sense and Montagu’s life and political convictions at this period, see
Grundy 1999: 371–8.
30 For a further account of the journalism of this period, see Goldgar 1976:
134–62; Harris 1987: 21–7 and Hanson 1936: 114–17.
31 This is an issue also broached by Steele in the Spinster (1719).
32 See Spectators 67, 334 and 376.
33 See Tatlers 19, 41 and 195.
34 From 1732 onwards, the title was the Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Monthly
Chronicle. In 1738, this was changed to the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical
Register.
35 This rubric was omitted after 1731.
36 For contemporary evidence of this, see Grub-Street Journal 353 (12 October
 Notes 225
1736), which records the complaints of former staff-writer Joseph Ilive, and
Boswell 1964–71: 3.332.
37 ‘Ad Urbanum’ first appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine VIII, March 1738, in
Latin. I am citing an anonymous translation.
38 The judge ruled against allowing the booksellers to publish the translation,
however, as the work, Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologica Philosophica (1685), con-
tained ‘reflections against religion’, unfit for the perusal of the uneducated who
could not read the Latin original.
39 The division of the book review into headings began in April 1732.
40 For an interesting discussion of the implications of the Stamp Tax for the estab-
lishment of a distinction between journalism and history, see Davis 1983:
95–100.
41 This preface was written after Cave’s death: he died in January 1754.
42 Issues of the Female Spectator were neither numbered nor dated, but published in
‘Books’. References to the Female Spectator are to the book nos. of the original
1744–6 collected edition of the periodical, followed by volume and page no. in
Haywood 2001.
43 The editorship of the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex
(1759–63) has been tentatively attributed to Goldsmith, writing under the alias
of ‘the Hon. Mrs Caroline Stanhope’ (see Taylor 1993: 87).
44 While it is never explicitly stated, I assume that the Female Spectator is a spin-
ster, since she conforms closely to the stereotype of the coquette-turned-old
maid (see Chapter 8).
45 See bk XX: 3.253; bk XXIII: 3.361; bk IX: 2.302; bk V: 2.156; bk VIII: 2.288; bk
XVI: 3.111; bk XX: 3.276; bk XII: 2.422; and bk VIII: 2.294.
46 I am indebted to Boulard for pointing out the spurious nature of these letters
(2000: 187n33).
47 The Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet (1733–5), the Bee Reviv’d; or, the Prisoner’s
Magazine (1750), the Royal Magazine; or, Quarterly Bee (1750–1) and the Bee
(1759).
48 Republished in 1756 under the more familiar title The Pleasures of the Imagina-
tion.
49 Ramblers 30, by Catherine Talbot; 44 and 100, by Elizabeth Carter; and 97, by
Samuel Richardson.
50 Ramblers 10, with contributions by Hester Mulso, later Chapone; 15, with a
letter attributed to David Garrick; and 107, with a letter from ‘Amicus’, attri-
buted to Joseph Simpson (see Bate and Strauss 1969: xxin1).
51 James Woodruff has shown that a number of the Rambler papers do refer implic-
itly to contemporary events. These allusions remain veiled, however: the Rambler
does not invite its readers to make connections between the editor’s subject
matter and topical concerns (see Woodruff 1982: 27–64).
52 See Gentleman’s Magazine March 1750 (Rambler 11); January 1751 (Rambler 83);
February 1751 (Rambler 91); March 1751 (Rambler 107); June 1751 (Ramblers
130 and 133); October 1751 (Rambler 161); December 1751 (Ramblers 186 and
187); January 1752 (Rambler 191) and March 1752 (Rambler 208).
53 See Ramblers 11, 50, 74, 79, 160, 162 and 196, respectively.
54 ‘The Life of Dr. Herman Boerhaave, Late Professor of Physic in the University of
Leyden in Holland’ first appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine 9 (January–April
1739). See Murphy (ed.) 1825: 6.238–55.
226 Notes
55 This section of my chapter is indebted to Grundy’s remarks on the importance
of competition in Johnson’s thought.
56 The Dictionary of National Biography (1997) entry on Frances Brooke dates her
marriage as ‘around 1756’. However, as Lorraine McMullen has noted, since
Brooke signs her contributions ‘B’, she was probably married before she began
the paper in November 1755 and certainly before it ended in July. Letters of
this period, signed with her married name, confirm this (McMullen 1983: 30).
57 Mary Singleton claims to remember Marlborough’s campaigns in the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–14) (Old Maid 35, 10 July 1756).
58 The issues of the Student are neither numbered nor dated, but organized in
volumes. Each issue of each volume is named after one of the Muses.
59 The Old Maid was published at a time of heightened political interest, on the
eve of the Seven Years War. Wild points out that Brooke’s confident appropria-
tion of political discourse is unusual for a woman writer of this period. I would
argue that it is even more surprising in a writer who has adopted the persona of
an old maid. A discussion of Mary Singleton’s politics is beyond the scope of
this chapter. See Wild 1998: 421–36.
60 Delarivier Manley briefly assumed the editorship of the Examiner (1710–16) in
1711. See also Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Nonsense of Common Sense
(1737–8), Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6), Parrot, With a Compendium
of the Times (1746) and Young Lady (1756) and Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum
(1760–1). In addition, some critics have attributed the Female Tatler (1710–11)
to Delarivier Manley. See Anderson 1931: 354–60 and Morgan 1992: vii–viii.
61 The writer is probably referring to the poet Katherine Philips, often known as
‘Orinda’ (1632–64), and the Dutch painter and Classical scholar Anna Maria
van Schurman (1607–78).
62 Quotations from the General Magazine of Arts and Sciences are taken from the
1755 bound edition of the first part of the periodical, ‘The Young Gentleman
and Lady’s Philosophy’.
63 References to the Young Ladies Magazine are taken from the 1760 collected
edition of the periodical, which is not divided into separate numbers. Quota-
tions from the Young Misses Magazine are taken from the two-volume second
edition of 1767. I have not been able to locate an earlier edition.
64 According to Pailler, these correspondents were Charles Alston, Regius Profes-
sor of Botany (1683–1760); Benjamin Kennicott, Fellow of Exeter College,
Oxford (1718–83); an unnamed ‘Professor of Poetry at Oxford’; N. Duillier
Facio F.R.S.; Stephen Hales (1677–1761) F.R.S., foreign associate of the Royal
Academy of Paris; Alexander Monro, F.R.S.; J.H. Winkler F.R.S., ‘Professor at
Leipzic’; and Samuel Sharpe, F.R.S., surgeon at Guy’s Hospital. See Pailler
1975: 2.660.
65 This frontispiece was unavailable for inclusion in this book. It can be viewed in
the British Library copy of the Lady’s Museum (classmark C.175.n.15).
66 References to the Lady’s Museum are by issue number, followed by volume and
page number in the two-volume collected edition of 1761. The page numbering
is continuous through both volumes.
67 Parthenissa is probably referring to Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman
and his Sister (1684–7), which purported to be an edition of the real letters of
Ford Grey, Earl of Tankerville, and his sister-in-law Lady Henrietta Berkeley.
68 The writer is referring to Anne-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Monpensier
 Notes 227
(1627–93), author of Mémoires (1637–43); Marie d’Orléans-Longueville,
duchesse de Nemours (1635–1707), author of Mémoires (1718); Françoise
Bertaut de Motteville (c.1621–89), author of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire
d’Anne d’Autriche (1723); Christine de Pisan (c.1364–c.1430); and Anna
Comnena (1083–c.1153), Byzantine historian and author of the Alexiad
(c.1148).
69 Lennox is probably referring to Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines Britannicæ (1685),
reprinted in his Works (London, 1710); James Tyrrell’s General History of
England, both Ecclesiastical and Civil (London, 1696–1704); and Thomas Innes’s
A Critical Essay on the Original Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain or Scot-
land (London, 1729).
70 For a fuller discussion of Haywood’s interesting theories of the female mind, see
Female Spectator bk X: 2.358–64 and Mullan 1993.
71 Goldsmith refers to the Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer
(1731–1907), London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (1732–97),
Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (1747–1815), Royal Magazine; or,
Gentleman’s Monthly Companion (1759–71), Imperial Magazine (1760–2), Tobias
Smollett’s British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Ladies and Gentlemen
(1759–67), the Christian Magazine; or, a Treasury of Divine Knowledge (1759–67),
Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion to the Fair Sex (1759–63), Library; or, Moral
and Critical Magazine (1761–2) and Court Magazine; or, Royal Chronicle (1761–5).
72 Publications to which Goldsmith contributed include the Bee (1759), British
Magazine, Busy Body (1759), Critical Review (1756–1817), Christian Magazine,
Christian’s Magazine; or, the Sunday Entertainment (n.d.), Grand Magazine of Uni-
versal Intelligence (1758–60), Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion, Lloyd’s Evening
Post (1757–1808), Monthly Review (1749–1844), Public Ledger; or, Daily Register
of Commerce and Intelligence (1760–96), Royal Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly
Companion, Royal Magazine; or, Quarterly Bee (1750–1) and the Weekly Magazine;
or, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Companion (1759–60).
73 On the quality of the paper see Tatlers 101 and 160; on advertisements see
Tatler 224 and for Charles Lillie see Tatlers 92, 94, 96, 101, 103, 110, 129, 138,
140, 142, 166, 200, 213, 250, 252, 257, 259, 264 and 265.
74 I am quoting from the original Bee. The passage printed in Friedman (1966) is
slightly different, but he includes this version in 1.353n.
75 Contemporary publications with similar names include the Bee Reviv’d; or, the
Prisoner’s Magazine (1750), New Royal and Universal Magazine; or, the Gentleman
and Lady’s Companion (1751–9), Royal Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Compan-
ion, Hugh Kelly’s Court Magazine; or, Royal Chronicle (1761–5) and the Royal
Westminster Journal (1741–1825). The ambivalence of Goldsmith’s attitude
towards the magazines is vividly illustrated by the fact that he himself con-
tributed to several similar works, including the Royal Magazine; or, Quarterly Bee
and the Royal Female Magazine (1760).
76 At 3
 pence per issue, the Covent-Garden Journal was, in fact, particularly expen-
sive. Most weekly journals cost 2 pence.
Bibliography

Periodicals
Adventurer (1752–4).
Alchymist; or, The Spirit of Fog Reviv’d, or an Atonement for the Loss of that Late Hero
(1736).
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal (1713–37).
Athenian Gazette, Resolving Weekly All the Most Nice and Curious Questions Propos’d by
the Ingenious, later the Athenian Mercury (1691–7).
Athenian News; or, Dunton’s Oracle (1710).
Auditor (1733–4).
Batchelor (1769–73) Dublin.
Beauties of All the Magazines Selected (1762–4).
Bee (1759).
Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet (1733–5).
Bee Reviv’d; or, the Prisoners Magazine (1750).
British Apollo; or, Curious Amusements for the Ingenious (1708–11).
British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies (1760–7).
Busy Body (1759).
Censor (1715–17).
Champion; or, British Mercury (1739–43).
Christian Magazine; or, a Treasury of Divine Knowledge (1759–67).
Christian’s Magazine; or, the Sunday’s Entertainment (n.d.).
Common Sense; or, the Englishman’s Journal (1737–43).
Compleat Library; or, News for the Ingenious (1692–4).
Conjuror (1736), Edinburgh.
Connoisseur (1754–6).
Country Magazine; or, the Gentleman and Lady’s Pocket Companion (1736–7).
Court and City Magazine; or, a Fund of Entertainment for the Man of Quality (1770–1).
Court Magazine; or, Royal Chronicle (1761–5).
Court Miscellany in Prose and Verse (1719).
Court Miscellany; or, Ladies New Magazine (1765–71). Continued as Court; or, Gentle-
man and Lady’s New Magazine.
Covent-Garden Journal (1752).
 Bibliography 229
Craftsman, Being a Critique on the Times (1726–50).
Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature (1756–1817).
Curiosity; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Repository (1740).
Daily Courant (1702–35).
Daily Gazetteer; or, London Advertiser (1735–96).
Daily Post (1719–46).
Delights for the Ingenious; or, a Monthly Entertainment for the Curious of Both Sexes
(1711).
Devil (1755).
Dreamer (1754).
Drury-Lane Journal (1752).
Edinburgh Review (1755–6).
Englishman (1713–15).
Evening Post (1709–33).
Examiner; or, Remarks upon Papers and Occurences (1710–16).
Female Spectator (1744–6).
Female Tatler (1709–10).
Flowers of Parnassus; or, Lady’s Miscellany (1734–6).
Flying-Post from Paris and Amsterdam (1695–1753).
Freeholder (1715–16).
Free-thinker; or, Essays on Ignorance (1718–21).
Friendly Writer and Register of Truth (1732–3).
General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical, Philological, Mathematical, and
Mechanical (1755–66).
General Postscript (1709).
Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium (1750–79).
Gentleman’s and London Magazine (1741).
Gentleman’s Journal; or, the Monthly Miscellany (1692–4).
Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer (1731–1907).
Grand Magazine of Magazines (1758–9).
Grand Magazine of Universal Intelligence (1758–60).
Gray’s-Inn Journal (1753–4).
Grouler; or, Diogenes Robb’d of His Tub (1711).
Grub-Street Journal (1730–8).
Grumbler. By Squire Gizzard (1715).
Guardian (1713).
Heraclitus Ridens (1703–4 and 1718).
Hermit (1711–12).
High-German Doctor (1714–15).
History of the Works of the Learned; or, an Impartial Account of Books Lately Printed in
All Parts of Europe (1699–1712).
Humours of a Coffee-House (1707–8).
Hyp Doctor (1730–41).
Imperial Magazine; or, Complete Monthly Intelligencer (1760–2).
Jacobite’s Journal (1747–8).
230 Bibliography
Jesuite (1719).
Knight-Errant (1729).
Ladies Complete Pocket-Book (1769–78).
Ladies Diary; or, the Women’s Almanack (1704–1871).
Ladies Journal (1727) Dublin.
Ladies Magazine (1749–53).
Ladies Mercury (1693).
Lady’s Curiosity; or, Weekly Apollo (1752).
Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832).
Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63).
Lady’s Museum (1760–1).
Lady’s Weekly Magazine (1747).
Lay-Monk (1713–14).
Library; or, Moral and Critical Magazine (1761–2).
Literary Magazine; or, Universal Review (1756–8).
Little Review; or, an Inquisition of Scandal (1705).
Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle (1757–1808).
London Chronicle; or, Universal Evening Post (1757–1823).
London Daily Advertiser (1751–3).
London Gazette, also Oxford Gazette (1665–present day).
London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (1732–97).
Lover (1714).
Magazin de Londres (1749).
Magazine of Magazines (1750–1).
Medley (1710–12).
Memoirs for the Ingenious (1693–4).
Memoirs of the Royal Society (1665–1735).
Midwife; or, the Old Woman’s Magazine (1750–3).
Miscellaneous Correspondence (1742–8).
Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern (1731–2).
Miscellany [also Weekly Miscellany] (1732–41).
Mist’s Weekly Journal (1716–28).
Momus Ridens; or, Comical Remarks on the Public Reports (1690–1).
Monthly Chronicle (1728–31).
Monthly Entertainments (1713).
Monthly Review (1749–1844).
Mountebank (1732).
Museum; or, the Literary and Historical Register (1746–7).
New Miscellany (1734–9).
New Royal and Universal Magazine; or, the Gentleman and Lady’s Companion (1751–9).
News from the Dead (1715–16).
Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737–8).
Norwich Post (1708), Norwich.
Observator; or, a Dialogue Between a Countryman &c. (1705–6).
Old England; or, the Constitutional Journal (1743–53).
 Bibliography 231
Old Maid (1755–6).
Old Whig (1719).
Old Whig; or, the Consistent Protestant (1735–8).
Orphan Reviv’d; or, Powell’s Weekly Journal (1718–20).
Owen’s Weekly Chronicle; or, Universal Journal (1758–70).
Oxford Magazine; or, University Museum (1768–76), Oxford.
Parrot (1728).
Parrot, With a Compendium of the Times (1746).
Patrician (1719).
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665–present day).
Phoenix Britannicus (1731).
Pilgrim (1711).
Plain Dealer (1724–5).
Plebeian (1719).
Post-Angel; or, Universal Entertainment (1701–2).
Post Boy Foreign and Domestick (1695–1735).
Prater (1756).
Prattler (1747).
Projector (1721).
Prompter (1734–6).
Public Advertiser (1752–94).
Public Ledger (1760–1837).
Rambler (1750–2).
Reader (1714).
Records of Love; or, Weekly Amusements for the Fair (1710).
Remembrancer; or, National Advocate (1747–51).
Review (1704–13)
Rhapsodist (1757).
Royal Female Magazine (1760).
Royal Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Companion (1759–71).
Royal Magazine; or, Quarterly Bee (1750–1).
Royal Westminster Journal and London Political Miscellany (1741–1825).
Scots Magazine; or, General Repository of Literature, History and Politics (1739–1826).
Spectator (1711–12, 1714).
Spinster (1719).
Spring-Garden Journal (1752).
St. James’s Magazine (1762–4).
Student; or, the Oxford (and Cambridge) Monthly Miscellany (1750–1) Oxford.
Supplementary Journal of Advice to the Scandalous Club (1704–5).
Tatler (1709–11).
Tatling Harlot (1709).
Theatre (1720).
Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Enter-
tainment (1769–95).
True Patriot and the History of Our Own Times (1745–6).
232 Bibliography
Universal Chronicle; or, Weekly Gazette. Continued as Payne’s Universal Chronicle
(1758–60).
Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (1747–1815).
Universal Museum; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Magazine of History, Politics and
Literature (1762–72).
Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal (1728–46).
Universal Visiter and Monthly Memorialist (1756–8).
Visiter (1723–4).
Weekly Amusement; or, the Universal Magazine (1734–6).
Weekly Comedy (1699).
Weekly Magazine; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Companion (1759–60).
Weekly Miscellany – see Miscellany.
Weekly Oracle; or, Universal Library (1734–7).
Weekly Pacquet (1678).
World (1753–6).
Young Ladies Magazine; or, Dialogues between a Discreet Governess and Several Young
Ladies of the First Rank under her Education (1760).
Young Lady (1756).
Young Misses Magazine (c.1760).

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Index

Note: References to illustrations are in italic.

Addison, Joseph 13, 14–15, 65, 69, Berry, Helen 4, 11

100, 105, 142, 145; see also Freeholder; Bhowmik, Urmi 89
Guardian; Spectator Bickerstaff, Isaac 23, 26, 36, 38–43, 57,
Adventurer 39, 141, 146 58, 62, 75, 90, 142, 149, 151, 224
advertisements 8, 12, 133 n21
Akenside, Mark 18, 21, 22, 24, 191, Blair, Hugh 14–15
213 Bloom, Edward A. 15, 20
Alchymist 95 Bloom, Lillian D. 15
Algarotti, Francesco 95, 182–3 Blouch, Christine 55–6
Anderson, Paul Bunyan 50–1 Boerhaave, Herman 152
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal 103–4 Bond, Donald F. 67, 71, 79, 83, 224
Artesia 49, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65 n25
Athenian Mercury 4, 11, 44, 54, 59, 74, Bond, Richmond P. 9, 13, 80
89, 90, 178–9, 191 booksellers and bookshops 8, 209
Auditor 165 Boswell, James 83, 121, 141, 145, 225
Austen, Jane 15 n36
authorship: and celibacy 166–7; Bragge, Benjamin 49
definition 115, 121; essay-periodicals Braithwaite, Mary 51
148, 171; professionalism 7, 20, 54, Brevier, Mr 170
94, 104–5, 208–9; readers’ Brewer, John 10
contributions 79, 82–3, 84, 89, 92, British Apollo 11, 50, 54, 60
141; see also copyright; editors; Female British Magazine 20, 192, 206, 210,
Tatler; fictional personae; Lady’s 908
Magazine; Rambler; Spectator; Tatler Broadbottom, Jeffrey 218
Brooke, Frances 16, 22, 152, 166, 174,
Babble, Nicholas 36, 211 175, 177, 226 n56; see also Old Maid
‘Babbler’ 16, 223 n5 Bruyère, Jean de la 34
Baker, Thomas 50 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of
Baldwin, Ann 49 39
Ballaster, R. et al. 11 Budgell, Eustace 66, 67, 91
Batchelor 36, 218 Burnet, Thomas 225 n38
Bee 20, 137, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, Burney, Frances 177
216–17, 221 Bute, Lady 94
 Index 241
Camden, Lord 120 Daily Gazetteer 95, 104
Canidia, Succubus 17, 19 Daily Post 104, 213
Carter, Elizabeth 181, 182, 225 n49 De Coverley, Sir Roger 16, 67, 69
Cave, Edward 18, 20–1, 80, 121, 122, De la Crose, Jean 8, 54
225 n41; see also Gentleman’s Magazine Defoe, Daniel 54, 59–60, 70, 74, 83,
celibacy 36, 166–8, 172–3, 174 85, 118, 148; see also Little Review;
Censor 15, 24, 36, 39 Review
censorship 12–13, 24–5 Delights for the Ingenious 5, 45, 80, 179
Centlivre, Susannah 50, 51–2, 63 DeMaria, Robert 117
Chambers, Ephraim 110 Distaff, Jenny 26, 37, 38, 43–8, 61, 75
Champion 6, 15, 16, 22, 96, 99, 191 Dodsley, Robert 9, 21, 117
Chesterfield, Lord 9, 94, 95, 105, 106 Drawcansir, Sir Alexander 15–16, 39,
‘Chinese Letters’ 20, 209, 210, 215, 218
216, 220, 222; see also Citizen of the Druid, Nestor 203, 218
World Drury-Lane Journal 5, 169, 207, 208
Christian Magazine 209 Dunciad 1, 2, 117
Citizen of the World, The 215–16; see also Dunton, John 10–11, 54, 59, 151; see
‘Chinese Letters’ also Athenian Mercury
Clarissa 175, 197 D’Urfey, Thomas 50
Clifford, James L. 145
club fictions 68–9, 70–9, 126–8 Edinburgh Review 8
coffee-houses 10, 76–7, 79 editors: as admirers of women 40;
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34 anonymity 16; essay-periodicals 13,
Collins, Ruth 54, 97, 98 14, 16–17, 76, 83, 148, 220; as
Common Sense 93, 95, 100, 102–3, knights-errant 38–9, 79; magazines
105–9, 116 20–1, 120–1, 137; mock-heroic 22;
Compleat Library 137, 138 social class 53–4, 94, 104–5, 128,
Connoisseur 6, 25, 171, 208 139; women 43, 65, 125–6, 139,
Considerations for Establishing a College for 177, 193–5, 211; see also fictional
Old Maids in Ireland 165–6 personae: editors
Cooper, John Gilbert 14 education 11, 23, 25–6, 118, 187, 188,
copyright 15, 20, 110–11, 114, 115, 198; see also women
117–18, 120, 121–2, 192, 225 n38 eidolon see fictional personae
Court Magazine 11, 126, 141, 146, 179, Emilia 49, 63–4
208, 209, 213, 214, 217–18 empathy 150–2, 153, 166, 169, 177
Court Miscellany 11, 63, 178, 191, 213, Englishman 69, 70, 80, 84
223 n3 Epistles for the Ladies 136
Covent-Garden Journal 1, 15, 22, 25, 39, essay-periodicals: authorship 148, 171;
141, 218, 227 n76 conservatism 15, 65; influence
Cowley, Abraham 155 14–15; lifespan 7, 9–10, 147, 221;
Crackenthorpe, Mrs 42, 49, 50, 51, and the novel 15; popularity 13, 147,
52–3, 54, 55–8, 57, 64, 128, 224 208, 220; production costs 12;
n18 reading lists 181; reprinting of
Craftsman 4, 9, 104 material 20, 21, 147, 208; social class
Critical Review 8, 186, 209, 210, 54–6, 139, 161; terminology 3–4;
215–16 women 93; see also editors; Female
Spectator; Female Tatler; fictional
Dacier, Anne 201 personae; Old Maid political journals;
Daily Courant 8, 111 readership; Spectator; Tatler
242 Index
essay-series 193, 210–11, 220 Flowers of Parnassus 4, 45
Euphrosine 17, 195, 223 n7 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 182,
Examiner 22, 70, 85–6, 93, 104, 224 183
n28, 226 n60 Free-thinker 6, 178
Freeholder 99–100, 104–5
Faden, William 210 Freeport, Sir Andrew 68, 69, 71
fashion 30–1, 62, 71–2, 102 Friendly Writer and Register of Truth 54,
Female Quixote, The 194, 199 97, 98
Female Spectator 129, 167, 223 n7, 225
n42; aims 131; club 126–8, 127, 225 Gay, John 66
n44; content 3, 45, 52, 125, 133–7, General Magazine of Arts and Sciences
139, 181; correspondence 5, 203; 183–5, 184, 226 n62
editor 123–6, 128–9, 194; gentility General Postscript 51
123, 124, 128–30, 131, 133, 134, genres 1, 3–4, 6, 7–8, 18, 20, 112, 121,
137, 139; morality 131–2, 167, 166
181–2; politics 132, 133; gentility 146, 208, 217–18; see also
readers/Subscribers 129–33; reading Female Spectator: gentility
lists 181; and women’s education Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium 5,
133, 136–7, 181–2, 183, 190 188
Female Tatler 43, 49–52, 57; authorship Gentleman’s Journal 27, 141, 142
5, 16, 49–52, 53, 226 n60; content Gentleman’s Magazine 224 nn34–5; aims
45, 52–3, 55–6, 59, 60, 62–4; court 20, 115, 118; book reviews 118, 225
case 50; morality 59; readers’ n39; content 20, 110, 111, 116–17,
contributions 11, 55, 58, 59, 61; 119, 142, 144, 147; correspondence
readership 58, 59, 63; sexual 80, 190–1, 226 n64; editors 110–13,
innuendoes 54, 58, 59; snobbery 117, 121; genre 18, 20, 110, 112,
54–6; Society of Ladies 49, 51, 121, 206; and the London Magazine
58–62, 64–5; and Tatler 64–5; 113–14, 116; on old maids 167, 168;
writing for women 56, 57, 62–4; see readership 144; see also plagiarism;
also Crackenthorpe, Mrs Urban, Sylvanus
Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Gildon, Charles 28–9, 54, 59, 86, 87
Motte 198–9, 200 Goldsmith, Oliver: on essay-periodicals
fictional personae: correspondents 79, 215; essays 3, 4–5, 208–9, 213–14,
82–3, 84, 89, 92, 141, 172, 221; 227 n72; on gentility 218; on
editors 13, 15–18, 21, 36, 49, 69, 79, journalism 126, 209, 210, 213,
104, 112, 147–8, 166, 169–70, 193; 216–17, 220, 221–2; on magazines
modern periodicals 221; see also 188, 192, 206, 214–15, 216–17, 227
Bickerstaff, Isaac; club fictions; n75; ‘Resverie’ 221–2; ‘Series of
Crackenthorpe, Mrs; De Coverley, Sir Literary Essays’ 210, 217; see also
Roger; Distaff, Jenny; Freeport, Sir ‘Chinese Letters’; ‘Indigent
Andrew; Honeycomb, Will; Philosopher, The’
Midnight, Mary; Rambler, Mr; Goodwill, Jasper see Ladies Magazine
Singleton, Mary; Sophronia; Gray’s Inn Journal 6, 14, 74, 96, 103,
Stanhope, Mrs Caroline; Urban, 132–3, 147, 163
Sylvanus Griffiths, Ralph 209
Fielding, Henry 1, 15, 22, 34, 39, 95; Grub-Street Journal 15, 60, 111, 113,
see also Champion; Covent-Garden 114, 115, 119, 120, 224–5 n36
Journal; Jacobite’s Journal Grundy, Isobel 94, 101, 157, 158
Fitz-Adam, Adam 6, 102, 208, 211 Guardian 69, 72–4, 76, 79, 83
 Index 243
Harris, Michael 11–12, 95 Ketcham, Michael 76
Hawkesworth, John 39, 110, 112 Kippis, Andrew 121
Hawkins, Sir John 115 Knight-Errant 39
Haywood, Eliza 1, 5, 45, 128, 129, Korshin, Paul J. 147
135–6, 137, 166, 177, 182; see also
Female Spectator; Parrot, with a Ladies Complete Pocket-Book 45, 187, 189,
Compendium of the Times; Young Lady 190, 213
Hermit 17 Ladies Diary 5, 62–3, 80, 179, 188
High-German Doctor 17 Ladies Journal 4, 39, 40, 44, 63, 179
Hill, Aaron 15, 29, 30 Ladies Library, The 37, 181
Hill, Bridget 165 Ladies Magazine 4, 97, 99, 178
Hill, John 125, 180 Ladies Mercury 45
History of Emily Montague, The 174, 175, Lady’s Curiosity 169, 189, 203, 213, 218
177 Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining
‘History of Harriot and Sophia, The’ Companion for the Fair Sex 4, 21–2
192, 197–8, 200, 201 Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for
History of Julia Mandeville, The 174, 175, the Fair Sex 210; authorship 4–5,
176, 177 126, 209, 216; correspondence 151,
History of the Athenian Society 54, 59, 86, 166–7, 190, 191–2; and education of
87 women 178, 187–8; see also Stanhope,
Hogarth, William 18 Mrs Caroline
Honeycomb, Will 67, 68–9, 71–2, 76, Lady’s Museum 210, 226 n66; contents
88 200, 201, 202, 203, 204–5;
house styles 210, 220 correspondence 17, 141, 195,
Hughes, John 13, 66 196–7, 198, 200, 201; editor 192,
Hunter, J. Paul 34 193, 194; on female intellect 197,
Hunter, Jean E. 4 203–4, 205; footnotes 201–2, 203;
frontispiece 193; morality 203;
‘Idler, The’ 83, 85, 191 ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’ 202;
imagination 33, 34, 156, 157 readership 132; on reading 193, 194,
Imperial Magazine 144–5, 188–9, 191, 199; on social gatherings 200–1;
192, 207, 217 ‘The Trifler’ 192, 193, 194–6, 198,
‘Indigent Philosopher, The’ 215, 218, 200; ‘Treatise’ 198–9, 200; women’s
220 education 178, 180, 193, 196, 197,
Ironside, Nestor 69, 73, 74, 76 198–200, 201–5; on writing 193,
194; see also ‘History of Harriot and
Jacobite’s Journal 14, 15, 16, 25, 96, 103 Sophia, The’
Johnson, Samuel 32, 140, 145, 209; Lady’s Weekly Magazine 16, 97, 120
Adventurer 141, 146; on authorship Laurence, Anne 165
117–18, 120, 121, 148–9, 159; Lennox, Charlotte 18, 177, 192, 194,
Dictionary 33, 110, 111, 115, 221; 199, 209; see also Lady’s Museum
Gentleman’s Magazine 20, 110, 112, letters to periodicals see readers’
117; see also ‘Idler, The’; Rambler contributions
Jones, Griffith 209, 210 Licensing Act (1662) 8, 114
journalism: journalists 22, 61; Lillie, Charles 75, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89
terminology 3–4; values 1, 21, 34; vs. literacy 10
history 118, 225 n40; vs. poetry 121 Literary Magazine 142, 206, 210
judgment 33, 34 literary periodicals 9
Julia 166, 174, 176 Little Review 59–60, 74
244 Index
Lloyd’s Evening Post 192, 206, 210, 215, modern periodicals 220–1
217, 218, 220 Molloy, Charles 95
Locke, John 33, 117, 143 Momus Ridens 27
London Daily Advertiser 125, 180 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 13, 93–5,
London Gazette 8, 9, 22 100–2, 106–9, 108, 177, 209, 214
London Magazine 20, 113, 114, 116, Monthly Chronicle 111
118, 120, 144, 206 Monthly Entertainments 5
Lover 72, 79, 89 Monthly Review 8, 189, 209
Lucinda 49, 61, 62, 65 Moore, Edward 9
morality 26, 103, 105, 155, 169, 223
Macaulay, Catharine 181 n11; see also Female Spectator; Female
McMullen, Lorraine 173, 226 n56 Tatler; Lady’s Museum; Nonsense of
Magazin de Londres 189 Common Sense; Rambler; Spectator;
magazines: ‘agony aunts’ 191; content Steele; Tatler
20, 21, 92, 121, 144–5, 188, Morgan, Fidelis 50, 51, 58–9
189–90, 207, 214–15, 220–1; Motteux, Peter 27
contributors 211; definitions 3, 18, Museum 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 191, 213
110, 207; fiction 15; gentility 146, museums (journalism) 18, 20, 112
208, 217–18; indexes 118, 207; for Myrtle, Marmaduke 79, 89–90
men 221; popularity 13, 112, Mysteries of Virginity, The 168
118–19, 147, 164, 206; production
214, 220; readers’ contributions 20, natural sciences 137, 182–3, 186,
21–2, 141, 190–2; readership 132, 188–9, 200, 201, 203, 204
144–5, 208; reprinting of material New Atalantis, The 50, 51, 58, 224 n17
20, 189, 208, 213; reviews 21; staff Newbery, John 194, 209, 210
writers 20; for women 4–5, 178, News from the Dead 17
189–90, 205, 221; women’s newspapers 8, 12, 103, 111, 114,
education 178–88, 189–91; see also 132–3, 207, 221
editors; Gentleman’s Magazine; Lady’s Nonsense of Common Sense 63, 93, 95,
Museum; plagiarism 100–2, 107, 108, 210, 214
Mandeville, Bernard 51, 61 novels 6–7, 15, 21, 45, 82, 83, 174,
Manley, Delarivier 46, 49, 50–1, 93, 175–7, 192; see also Brooke, Frances;
104, 177, 224 n17, 224 n28, 226 Fielding, Henry; Haywood, Eliza;
n60 women: reading
Man’s Bewitch’d, The 51 numbers of periodicals 7–10
Martin, Benjamin 183–5
mathematics 5, 45, 179, 185, 188, 189 Observator 27
Mayo, Robert D. 9, 11, 15, 21 Old Maid 165; celibacy 172–3, 174;
Medley 14, 104 Choice of Hercules 173;
Midnight, Mary 17–18, 19, 179–80, correspondence 171–3, 176–7;
192 devices of the novel 175–7; empathy
Midwife 17–18, 19, 170, 179–80, 192, 166, 177; frame narrative 166,
207 174–5; on old maids 165, 166, 167,
Millar, Andrew 194 172, 173; politics 174, 226 n59;
Miscellaneous Correspondence 80 readership 172; see also Julia; Rosara;
Miscellaneous Observations 7 Singleton, Mary
miscellanies 12, 20, 111, 112 old maids: celibacy 166–7, 168; as
Miscellany 107–8 editors 167, 169–70, 177;
Mist’s Weekly Journal 99, 104 journalistic representations 167–70,
 Index 245
171; status 165–6; stereotype 167, price of periodicals 10, 12, 129, 227
168; see also Old Maid n76
Old Whig 54 printers and printing 8, 12, 13, 209–10,
Old Whig; or, the Consistent Protestant 104 218
‘Old Woman’s Concert, The’ 18 Prompter 16, 30, 39
Orphan Reviv’d 5, 97, 137 Pry, Mrs Penelope 16, 97, 120
Owen’s Weekly Chronicle 223 n5 Public Ledger 210, 217, 908
Oxford Magazine 181, 188 publishers 13

Pailler, Albert 112, 191, 226 n64 Quakers 97, 98

palladia 112
papers: terminology 3–4 Rambler 221–2; on authorship 118, 120,
parliamentary debates 12–13 121, 148–9, 159–60, 163–4; on
Parrot 6, 16, 97, 104, 211 competition 157–8, 160; contributors
Parrot, with a Compendium of the Times 140–1, 225 nn49–50; correspondence
97, 125, 136, 211 141, 143, 151, 191; current affairs
Patrician 54 142, 225 n51; on daydreaming 156,
Paulson, Ronald 68 157; on empathy 150–2, 153, 169;
Payne, Deborah C. 224 n15 on envy and fame 158–9; on
periodicals: as business enterprises 12, fragmentation of society 143–4, 164;
209–10; terminology 3–4 on friendship 161; on idleness 155–6,
Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay 157; on indecision 148–9, 154–5,
on Old Maids, A 165, 167, 168 156–7; on moderating desires 153; as
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal monitor 160; moralism 140, 142,
Society 8, 183, 191 145–6, 147, 149–50, 152–4, 155,
philosophy 8, 27, 145, 182, 186, 203, 160, 161, 162, 164; on old age 148;
215 on old maids 168–9; on patronage
Phoenix Britannicus 7 and dependence 162–3; on pessimism
plagiarism 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 148; on pleasure 155; on power
115–20, 121, 208, 213–14 161–2; on procrastination 149, 155,
Plain Dealer 36, 40, 54 157; readers 20, 145–7, 164;
pleasure gardens 134 reprinting of material 20, 147, 208;
Plebeian 54 satire 151–2; on social class 161;
Plumb, J.H. 10 subject matter 141–2; Suspirius 148,
poetry 4, 45, 117, 121, 214 150; uniformity 140–4, 145, 164; on
political journals 93, 103, 108, 191, wealth 161; on wit 163; writing for
218; see also Common Sense; Freeholder; women 6; see also Rambler, Mr
Nonsense of Common Sense; Orphan Rambler, Mr 146, 147–50, 164
Reviv’d Ranger, Charles 6, 74, 147
politics 95, 104, 142; see also Female readers’ contributions: authorship 79,
Spectator; Montagu, Lady Mary 82–3, 84, 89, 92, 141, 172, 221;
Wortley; Old Maid; political journals; fame 83–4, 158–9; gender 4, 5; inter-
Spectator; women reader communication 91–2;
Pope, Alexander 36, 95, 117; see also magazines 20, 21–2, 141, 190–2;
Dunciad modern periodicals 221; right to
Post-Angel 11 publication 86; subject-matter 11,
Practical Essay on Old Maids, A 165, 167 86, 87, 89–91; value 80; see also
Prater 16, 36, 211 Female Spectator; Female Tatler;
Prescott, Sarah 52 Gentleman’s Magazine; Lady’s
246 Index
readers’ contributions continued 139, 161; magazines 146, 208,
Magazine; Lady’s Museum; Old Maid; 217–18; readers 6–7, 10–12; see also
Rambler; Spectator; Tatler gentility
readership: essay-periodicals 9, 20, 64, societies, learned 59–60
144, 208; gender 4–7, 10, 102–3, society, fragmentation of 143–4, 164
105, 132; literacy 10; magazines 132, Society for the Reformation of Manners
144–5, 208; social class 6–7, 10–12; 224 n18
see also Female Spectator; Female Tatler; Sophronia 49, 60, 61, 63, 64
Old Maid; Rambler; Spectator; Tatler Spacks, Patricia Meyer 135
Records of Love 25, 45 Spectator: authorship 66, 71, 79, 224
Remembrancer 104 n25; coffee-houses 76–7;
Review 70, 74, 85, 118 correspondence 67, 77–8, 79–83,
reviews 8, 21, 118, 225 n39 84–5, 86, 87–92, 94; influence
Richardson, Jonathan 209 14–15, 102–3, 104, 105, 123–4; on
Richardson, Samuel 15, 83, 175, 225 love 88–91; on marriage and family
n49 76, 77, 88; on morality 88, 90, 103,
rise of the periodical 1–7 105–6, 145; philosophy 27, 145;
Rolt, Richard 218 politics 68, 69, 96; readership 9,
Rosara 174, 175, 176 68–9, 78, 146; reading aloud 78;
Rose, Mark 121 reprinting of material 21, 147;
Royal Female Magazine 178, 189–90, sociability 77–9; taxonomy 88; tea-
192, 211, 213 tables 77; theatre 27–8; value 15; wit
Royal Magazine 11, 144, 146, 189, 207, and judgment 33, 34; see also De
208, 210, 908 Coverley, Sir Roger; Freeport, Sir
Royal Society 59, 60, 118, 191 Andrew; Honeycomb, Will;
Spectator, Mr; Spectator Club
Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz 117 Spectator, Mr 5, 14, 66–7, 70–1, 75–6,
satire 36–7, 44, 46, 151–2, 223 n14 77, 78–9, 81, 82–3, 84, 86, 88,
Satyr Upon Old Maids, A 168 89–90, 92, 146
Savage, Richard 129 Spectator Club 68–9, 70–2, 75, 76,
Scandalous Club, The 74 78–9
Scots Magazine 8, 20, 188, 206, 218 Spector, Robert D. 208
sentimental periodicals 166; see also Old Spencer, Jane 52
Maid Spring-Garden Journal 167, 169–70,
sexual innuendoes 27, 54, 58, 59, 179, 207
105–6 stamp duty 12, 118, 207, 225 n40
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 94 Stanhope, Mrs Caroline 5, 120, 126,
Shevelow, Kathryn 132 188, 191–2, 213
Shields, David 78 Stationers’ Company 8, 114
Singleton, Mary 42, 165, 166, 169, Steele, Richard: essay-periodicals 13,
170–2, 173–5, 194, 226 n57 142, 150, 224 n31; influence 14–15,
Smart, Christopher 17–18, 166, 169, 65; and Manley 51, 224 n17;
170, 179–80, 207, 218 morality 26, 70, 108, 109, 223 n11;
Smith, John Harrington 50 plays 23, 26, 223 n11; politics
Smithers, Peter 67 69–70; see also Bickerstaff, Isaac;
Smollett, Tobias 192, 209; see also Guardian; Lover; Spectator; Tatler;
British Magazine Theatre
social class: editors 53–4, 94, 104–5, Sterne, Laurence 15, 41, 223 n4
128, 139; essay-periodicals 54–6, Student 170, 226 n58
 Index 247
subscriptions 10, 129 Pleasure 20, 137, 144, 189, 206, 207,
Supplementary Journal of Advice to the 211, 212, 213
Scandalous Club 74, 85 Universal Museum 190, 191
Swift, Jonathan 13, 105, 150 Universal Spectator 120, 165
Universal Visiter 218, 219
Tables of Fame 62–4 Urban, Sylvanus 112–14, 115–16, 117,
Tatler 3, 36; authorship 16, 23; Censor- 118, 120
General 13–14, 24, 25–6, 31;
contributors 13, 211; ‘Conversation-
Van Tassel, Mary M. 159
Part of our Lives’ 32–3, 48, 64, 126;
Visiter 6, 16, 39, 54, 151, 178
‘Court of Honour’ 25, 30; on ‘dead
men’ 35–6; didactic aims 23, 25–6;
on eccentricities 30–2, 34–5; Wagstaffe, Jeoffry 36, 218
influence 15, 23, 32, 64–5, 102–3, Walpole, Robert 93, 95, 99, 100
104, 105; on love 44, 45–6; on Ward, Ned 8, 27
marriage 38–9, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47; Weekly Amusement 11
morality 26–7, 29–30, 32, 48, 131, Weekly Comedy 27
145; ‘Office of Prompter’ 30; prose Weekly Magazine 4
style 25; readers’ contributions 34, Weekly Oracle 60
35, 75; readership 9, 37, 38, 41, 48; Weekly Pacquet 11
reprinting of material 21, 147; satires Wentworth, Matilda 213
36–7, 44, 46, 223 n14; Sophronius Whicher, George Frisbie 1
32–3; taxonomy 24, 26, 33, 34–5, Wife, The 182
36–7; on the theatre 26, 27–8, Wild, Min 173–4
29–30, 31–2, 37; writing for women Wilford, John 113, 206
6, 37–8, 42–4, 45–7, 48; see also Wilkie, John 209
Bickerstaff, Isaac; Distaff, Jenny Willson, Joseph 168
Tatling Harlot 17 Winton, Calhoun 66, 69
taxation see stamp duty wit 33–4, 163
Taylor, Richard C. 208–9 women: actresses 37, 224 n15;
Tea-Table, The 128 education 133, 136–7, 178–88,
Teiman, Gillian 58 189–91, 193, 196, 197, 198–200,
Termagant, Roxana 5, 169, 172 201–5; entertainments 133–7, 139,
terminology 3–4 200–1; fictional personae 17–18;
Theatre 69, 70, 72 intellect 197, 203–4, 205; literacy
theatre, Restoration: metaphors 27–8; 10; magazines for 4–5, 178, 189–90,
morality 26, 223 n11; theories of 205, 221; politics 6, 93, 96–7,
acting 28–9; women 37, 224 n15; see 99–103; reading 139, 180, 193, 194,
also Tatler 199; satires on 36–7, 223 n14; Tables
Theobald, Lewis 16, 24, 39 of Fame 62–4; writing by 4–6, 43,
Thornton, Bonnell 166, 169–70, 44, 61–2, 65, 93, 94, 125–6, 139,
206–7, 208 177, 193–5, 200, 211, 226–7 n68;
Tickell, Thomas 80 writing for 4–7, 37–8, 42–7, 56, 57,
Tipper, John 5, 45, 179, 188 62–4, 68, 78, 96–7, 100–3, 105,
Town and Country Magazine 213 107, 109, 132, 133, 178; see also old
Trapp, Joseph 117 maids
Trott-Plaid, John 14, 16, 96 Women’s Worlds 11
Woodruff, James F. 225 n51
Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Woolf, Virginia 1
248 Index
World 6, 9, 11, 14, 102, 169, 192, 208, Young Lady 17, 135, 141, 195, 223 n7
211 Young Misses Magazine 185–6, 226 n63

Young, Edward 14 Zionkowski, Linda 121

Young Ladies Magazine 185–7, 226 n63