Abstract
This paper re-examines two common topics in scholarly work on The Spectator: its print circulation and its representation of public spaces, such as the coffee house, the pleasure garden and the coach. Emphasizing the degree to which sociable exchange in these venues consists of relations among strangers, it examines the ways that the anonymous, ephemeral and socially mixed nature of interaction strained more traditional understandings of politeness – such as Shaftesbury's – and enabled new ones. Recognizing strangerhood as a central dimension of sociable exchange in the coffee house and pleasure garden, it is suggested, enables us to appreciate the ways in which Addison and Steele draw analogies between the world of sociable conversation and The Spectator's anonymous print readership. Through such analogies, they mediate between kinds of detachment derived through personal, exclusive forms of sociability and those arising from the diffuse forms of relation emerging in the coffee house, the park and the paper's print public.
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