Critically
assess the prose styles of Addison and Steele as found in their essays in your syllabus.
Stories are of
abiding interest in our modern day life and while talking about the birth of
modern short story or novel, we cannot miss the immortal character sketches
of The Tatler and The Spectator essays. Notably,
these types of tales had continued to appear in the centuries that
preceded throughout the world literature. Ishap’s Tales, Yataka’s Tales, Arabian Nights, Decameron or
even Canterury Tales is more or less same in the genre. One
source of such stories was the 18th-century English magazine The
Tatler and The Spectator, where editors
Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published many semi-fictional sketches of
contemporary character types. Now, we will shift our discussion on prose
styles adopted by Addison and Steele in these periodicals.
Addison went to the
famous Charterhouse School in London, where he met Steele. When the Whigs
returned to power he regained political favour, and his writings on public
matters won him great advancement He raised rapidly. Addison had become a
frequent contributor to Steele’s The Tatler in 1709 by
the eighty-first number of the paper, and had been responsible to a large
extent for making the essay the most important constituent of the
periodical. In fact, in addition to his own essays, Steele published in
the Tatler a number of papers by the English essayist Joseph
Addison, whom he had met during his school days and who became an important
colleague and friend. This publication was succeeded on March 1,
1711, by the more famous Spectator with both Steele and Addison as
contributors. Unlike The Tatler in which social scandals,
city gossip and foreign news claimed the reader’s attention, The
Spectator was to be a number of literary pamphlets concerned only with
morals and manners. The essays that appeared in The Spectator and
particularly in the Coverley Papers have rightly been called
‘the first masterpieces of humanized Puritanism.’
The
Tatler paper contained not only political news, but also gossip from
the clubs and coffee houses, with some light essays on the life and manners of
the age. Of the 271 numbers that appeared Steele wrote the entire contents of
190 and Addison of 42, while 36 were written in collaboration. Addison was the
senior partner in The Spectator and produced 274 of its 555
members to Steele’s 240. Mixing politics, serious essays, and sly satire,
the 18th-century periodicals The Tatler and The
Spectator, founded by the statesmen and literary figures Richard Steele and
Joseph Addison, were enormously popular and influential. The Tatler and The
Spectator provide an entertaining and historically invaluable picture
of 18th-century London life, both high and low- its fashion, manners, dressing,
conversational style, jokes etc. .....................................................................................................................................
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