The Journalistic Critic from the Gentleman’s Journal to the Spectator

Abstract

Modern scholars have long recognized the importance of newspapers and periodicals in the early history of English criticism.1 In particular, Addison’s Spectator essays on Paradise Lost, early English ballads, and the pleasures of the imagination are heralded for their departure from the pedantic neoclassicism of earlier criticism and for their contribution toward the rise of aesthetic theory in England.2 The Tatler and Spectator are also praised for their emphasis on the reader: not only is their criticism reader friendly in terms of style and tone, but it also privileges the role of the reader in the act of interpretation.3 Nevertheless, such emphasis on Addison and Steele has also tended to eclipse the efforts of other earlier, equally important literary periodicals, which are often regarded merely as forerunners to the Tatler and Spectator. As a result, landmark literary periodicals, such as Peter Motteux’s The Gentleman’s Journal (1692–94) and John Oldmixon’s The Muses Mercury (1707–08), have received relatively little attention. Contemporary and current high regard for Addison’s and Steele’s criticism has also allowed modern scholars to neglect the process by which the discipline of criticism became so dignified in the pages of the Tatler and Spectator as to earn “a Place among the politest Parts of Learning.”4 How did Addison and Steele—or, indeed, any journalistic critic—overcome the resistance to criticism and the theater that characterizes critical discourse in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England?