The Strange Career of Joseph Addison

Abstract

The Strange Career of Joseph Addison Stephen Miller (bio) Writers’ reputations rise and fall, but no English writer has suffered a greater decline in reputation than the eighteenth-century English essayist Joseph Addison, who also was a poet, playwright, travel writer, and opera librettist. For roughly two centuries Addison’s essays were required reading for an educated person in Britain and America, but in the twentieth century Addison all but disappeared from the English canon. In the early 1980s a graduate student at Columbia University told a professor: “No one reads Addison these days.” In July 2009 James Fenton claimed that “Joseph Addison, whose essays were once the fireside reading of cottagers throughout Britain, is obliterated.” Obliterated, though, is too strong, for a handful of Addison’s essays can still be found in anthologies. Addison’s fame in eighteenth-century Britain is hard to overestimate. He was both a popular and critical success. According to Pat Rogers, Addison “was regarded for many generations as one of the most significant English writers of his time.” His essays were reprinted in book form in numerous editions and were praised by the leading writers of the century, including David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and Henry Fielding. Hume said that “Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.” In 1884 a Victorian biographer, W. J. Courthope, said that Addison was the “chief architect of Public Opinion in the eighteenth century.” In America Addison was admired by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. Madison, a biographer says, “recommended the Spectator, especially Joseph Addison’s contributions, to a young nephew because it encouraged ‘a lively sense of the duties, the virtues, and the proprieties of life.’’’ Jefferson’s biographer says he ranked Addison “among the most eloquent writers in the English language.” Addison wrote essays for several publications, but the essays he composed for the Spectator, which he founded in March 1711, were the most popular in England and on the Continent—translated into French, German, Dutch, and Italian. Addison wrote essays about a wide variety of subjects—from trade to opera, from the sights and sounds of London to the sublime beauties of nature. The Spectator was also the work of Richard Steele, who contributed [End Page 650] roughly half the essays with a handful of other contributors as well, but Addison was responsible for the Spectator’s overall tone and general content. Reviewing a biography of Addison in 1843, Thomas Macaulay said “Addison is the Spectator.” The contributors wrote under the name of Mr. Spectator, but in one essay Steele tells readers that the papers appended with one of the following letters—c, l, i, o—were given to him by a certain gentleman who assisted him in publishing The Tatler. Everyone in London knew the gentleman in question was Addison. Soon selections from Addison appeared in book form. Some essays in the Spectator could have been written by either writer, yet most critics think they can distinguish between the two. Johnson told Boswell: “It is wonderful [as in, a wonder] that there is such a proportion of bad papers in the half of the work which was not written by Addison.” According to a modern critic “most of the numbers for which he [Steele] was responsible are at best second-rate. The Spectator survives in spite of Steele and because of Addison.” In an advertisement for a new edition of the Spectator (in 1776), Samuel Johnson says: “The Book thus offered to the Public is too well known to be praised. … It has now for more than half a century supplied the English nation, in a great measure, with principles of speculation, and rules of practice; and given Addison a claim to be numbered among the benefactors of mankind.” Until the end of the nineteenth century Addison’s essays continued to be popular. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton (born in 1862) notes that her father’s library contained a complete run of the Spectator. Describing the contents of her father’s library, Wharton says: “Among essayists, besides Addison, there were Lamb and Macaulay,” taking for granted that an educated person would own...