18th Century Literature

1. Steele — The Spectator Club

The Spectator (1 March 1711 – 6 December 1712) is the great English periodical-essay project: 555 daily numbers, founded by Richard Steele (1672–1729) with Joseph Addison as his chief partner. Addison wrote No. 1 (1 March 1711), introducing the silent Spectator himself; Steele wrote No. 2 (2 March 1711), “The Spectator Club,” which staffs the paper with a cast of characters. The two men had been friends since Charterhouse and Oxford, and the Spectator grew out of Steele’s earlier Tatler (1709–11) and out of the coffee-house world of Queen Anne’s London, where news, gossip, and opinion were traded over a penny dish of coffee.

The Spectator himself is a deliberate fiction: a man who lives in the world “rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species” — everywhere present, nowhere committed, a silent observer with a wide acquaintance but no name, no party, and no profession. This detachment is the paper’s method. Because he belongs to no faction, he can judge them all; because he only watches, the reader trusts his record. Around him Steele assembles the club: a portable map of English society, so that a daily sheet can speak as if the whole city were sitting in one room.

Learn the members as types of the estates — land, law, trade, army, town, church:

• Sir Roger de Coverley — the country gentleman of Worcestershire: old-fashioned, honourable, humane, a Tory in politics and in weather, beloved even in his oddities. Addison would later make him the paper’s most famous character (notably No. 106, at church).
• Sir Andrew Freeport — the London merchant: industry, punctuality, a Whig faith in trade as the nation’s strength; the town’s answer to Sir Roger’s land.
• Captain Sentry — the soldier: served with distinction, modest about rank, exact about duty; the army’s representative, brave without swagger.
• Will Honeycomb — the man of town and fashion: gallantry, dress, a knowledge of the world read in wigs and women; agreeable, shallow, indispensable.
• The Templar — a young lawyer of the Inner Temple whose heart is in the theatre and in books rather than in briefs; wit joined to learning.
• The Clergyman — sound learning, a quiet life, cheerful piety; the church’s voice, never fanatical.

The method is character-sketch, not novel. Each member is recognisable at once — a “humour” in the old sense, one ruling trait displayed through anecdote — without the inwardness of fiction. Steele’s realism is the realism of type: London readers met these men every day. And the club lets the essayists dramatise opinion: Sir Roger and Sir Andrew can disagree about land and trade, town and country, Tory and Whig, while the Spectator calmly records. Argument becomes conversation.

The periodical essay as a form is defined here: a short, regular prose piece, moral and social in purpose, addressed to a mixed public of men and women — neither a private letter nor a pulpit sermon. Steele’s manner is easy, good-humoured, and practical; Addison’s, which soon dominates the paper, is more polished and philosophical. Together they pursued the famous programme — to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality — carrying rational, polite conversation into clubs, assemblies, tea-tables, and coffee-houses.

Exam tips: Name the paper, the dates (1711–12), and the numbers (Addison No. 1, Steele No. 2). List at least four members with their estates. Stress the device: why a club? Because a daily paper needs many voices and a social world in miniature. Do not confuse this public, waking-London prose with Lamb’s private reverie or Hazlitt’s personal essay — the club is the opposite of the armchair.

2. Addison — Meditations in Westminster Abbey

Joseph Addison’s “Meditations in Westminster Abbey” is Spectator No. 26 (30 March 1711): a walk among the tombs of the great London abbey, thinking about death in daylight. Where Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) walks an unnamed village churchyard at evening, Addison walks marble, names, and dates in the capital — the same climate of mortality, but in periodical prose rather than verse, and in a sociable rather than a melancholy temper.

The essay’s most famous passage is the triple meditation every answer should quote:

“When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tomb-stone, my heart melts with compassion...”

The method is observation turning into reflection. He notices dates worn off monuments, the ages of the dead, titles that once filled a room and now fill a single line. Rival statesmen, wits, and beauties lie in the same dust — ambition’s quarrels look small from the abbey aisle. One coffin without any date strikes him hardest: even the record of a name can fail, and then nothing remains but the stone’s silence. Some inscriptions boast; the stone, he feels, is quieter and truer than the words carved upon it.

Addison leaves the abbey, he says, in “serious cheerfulness” — the essay’s key phrase and its whole philosophy. Mortality here does not terrify and does not preach; it composes the mind. There is no Gray-like argument about mute Miltons or village Hampdens, yet the same democratic moral is present: death is the great leveller. The difference is temper — Addison is civil, sociable, and consoling where Gray is melancholy and indignant. The periodical essayist finds equality before the grave without leaving the town.

The style is Addison at his most characteristic — the middle style: clear, balanced, musical sentences; no metaphysical violence, no slang; politeness working as a moral instrument. His sentences move in antithesis and parallelism (“every emotion of envy dies in me... every inordinate desire goes out”), teaching the reader to feel in proportion. This is the prose of the Spectator’s larger programme, announced in No. 10: to bring philosophy “out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.”

Notice too how the essay is built like a day's thought rather than a sermon: Addison enters, looks, reflects, and leaves — the periodical form demands a complete meditation inside a single number. The images do the arguing: worn dates (time erases even marble), the undated coffin (oblivion swallows the record itself), dust (the single substance of rival and friend). Nothing is personified into terror, as a graveyard poet might; the dead stay decently quiet, and the reader is left with proportion rather than fright. That restraint is exactly why examiners pair this essay with Steele's club paper — together they show the two poles of the Spectator project: society observed in the morning, mortality contemplated in the afternoon.

Exam tips: Quote the tombs passage accurately — it is the essay’s signature and examiners expect it. Name the number (26) and the date (1711). A strong comparative point is Gray’s Elegy, but keep the distinction sharp: verse elegy vs periodical meditation; unnamed village vs named capital; melancholy vs serious cheerfulness. Imagery to name: stone, date, dust.

3. Hazlitt — The Indian Jugglers

William Hazlitt’s “The Indian Jugglers” (in Table-Talk, 1821) is the Romantic familiar essay at full stretch: personal, digressive, combative, and built on a single seen thing. Hazlitt watches a troupe of Indian jugglers at the Adelphi Theatre in London keep balls in the air with such exactness that the body seems to have become a machine of attention. The spectator’s first feeling is wonder — and then a sting: why can a man do this with his hands, so completely, while the critic’s or the painter’s labour looks less finished?

Hazlitt does not sneer at the jugglers. He uses them to think about what excellence is. Mechanical perfection is one kind of excellence: the trick can be done exactly as it should be done, and the eye can judge it at once — the ball is caught or it is not. Fine art is another kind: its end is not a caught ball but a mind made visible, and its judgment takes longer and divides opinion. Yet both, Hazlitt insists, must answer the same question: has the thing been done as well as it can be done? That standard — doing a thing completely — is the essay’s spine.

Beside the jugglers he sets an English instance: John Cavanagh, the fives-player, whose speed, wrist, and placement made him, in Hazlitt’s judgment, the master of his game — a life spent inside one pursuit until the skill looked like nature. Excellence, for Hazlitt, is not only a poem. It is a standard of performance, and the fives court can teach the study as much as the gallery can.

Underneath runs the essay’s famous antithesis of power and habit. The juggler’s art is perfection of habit — facility acquired by endless practice, the hand trained into a machine. Genius is power — a natural force of mind that cannot be drilled into anyone. Hazlitt’s sting is personal: the critic admires the juggler because the juggler’s success is undeniable, while the writer’s own labour — trying to fix thought in prose — never lands with the same clean click. The essay is therefore also a defence of difficult, unfinishable work against the envy of the perfect trick.

The style is Hazlitt’s familiar style: “I saw,” “I felt,” then an argument — conversational and digressive on the surface, but driven by short, balanced, antithetical sentences that strike like hammer blows. Beside Steele’s club types this is wide-awake Romantic prose; beside Lamb’s reverie it is all daylight and dispute.

The essay's opening is worth studying as prose craft. Hazlitt does not begin with a thesis; he begins with seeing — the painted troupe, the brass balls, the held breath of the crowd — and lets the thought rise out of the spectacle. Only then does the argument harden into antithesis: habit against power, the perfect trick against the unfinished masterpiece. This is the familiar style in action: apparently loose and talkative, actually marching. And the standard it proposes — has the thing been done as well as it can be done? — turns back on Hazlitt himself: the essay admits that prose, unlike juggling, can never be caught cleanly in the air, and goes on writing it anyway. That honest envy is what lifts the piece above a mere sporting sketch.

Exam tips: Hold four points — (1) the juggler as perfect bodily skill, (2) mechanical skill vs fine art, (3) Cavanagh as the home example, (4) power vs habit. Do not reduce the essay to “Hazlitt likes sports.” The question it asks — what does it mean to do a thing completely? — is the line to close on.

4. Lamb — Dream-Children; A Reverie

Charles Lamb’s “Dream-Children; A Reverie” (in the London Magazine, January 1822; collected in Essays of Elia, 1823) is the personal essay in its tenderest form — Elia by the fire, not Steele’s club in the coffee-house. The subtitle is the method: a reverie. As Lamb sits dreaming, two children seem to climb upon his knees — Alice and John — and he tells them family stories while their eyes hold his.

The stories are memory made narrative. Grandmother Field, who kept the great house at Blakesware — its faded tapestries, its rumoured haunted room, her charity to the poor. Uncle John L—, brave and kind, who died. And the children’s mother, Alice W—n — the woman Lamb loved and did not marry (Ann Simmons, in life). The past returns with a warmth the present cannot give, and the dream-children listen as if it were all theirs.

Then the turn — the essay’s famous close. The little faces grow thin and distant, and they tell him the truth:

“We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all... We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.”

He wakes in his bachelor armchair. Bridget — his sister Mary Lamb, the “Bridget Elia” of the essays — sits unchanged beside him; the little ones are gone. The love-story never became a household; the children were a wish with names. Pathos and humour are inseparable here: the essay smiles through the stories and weeps at the waking, and Elia’s voice — intimate, self-accusing, tender — never hardens into moralising.

Place it on the paper’s map. This is the personal essay as Unit 1 distinguished it from the periodical club piece: the “I” is everything. Beside Addison’s public tombs, Lamb’s dead are private — Field, John, the Alice who was never a wife. Beside Hazlitt’s jugglers there is no skill to applaud, only a mind that almost had a family. Absence itself takes a body for a page and then drops it.

Elia's style is the essay's other half. Lamb writes in a deliberately old-fashioned, intimate idiom — half Jacobean, half fireside chat — full of parentheses, asides, and sudden tendernesses, as if the reader were sitting in the next chair. The humour is gentle and self-mocking (the great house remembered through a child's exaggerated eyes), which is why the turn lands so hard: the same voice that smiled through grandmother Field's tapestries must now report that the children were never born. Critics call this Lamb's pathos, and it is the quality that separates the personal essay from the periodical one — Steele amuses a town, Lamb confesses to a friend.

A final point for the exam: the essay's title is a small thesis in itself. “Dream-Children” names what the children are — not real, yet loved as if real; “A Reverie” names how they came — unbidden, in a half-waking hour, the way lost possibilities visit us all. Lamb does not explain the dream away, and he does not moralise it. He simply wakes, finds Bridget unchanged, and lets the empty chairs do the talking. An answer that honours both halves of the title — the tenderness of the dream and the honesty of the waking — has understood the essay.

Exam tips: Keep the title’s two halves — dream-children, and the waking that ends the reverie. Name the three memories (Field, John, Alice) and the closing quotation. Do not retell Goldsmith’s Kate as if she were Alice, and do not call this a periodical essay — Elia writes from the fireside, not from the club.

5. Goldsmith — She Stoops to Conquer

Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night (Covent Garden, 15 March 1773) is the set comedy of the paper — and a deliberate act of war. In his Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy (1772), Goldsmith had attacked the fashionable sentimental comedy (Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy was the target): plays that exhibit private virtue and ask the audience to weep. True comedy, Goldsmith argued, should make us laugh at folly — “laughing comedy.” The play is the theory put on stage.

The mistake (the plot’s engine). Young Marlow — bashful to the point of silence before ladies of rank, but easy and forward with women he takes to be beneath him — travels to the country to meet Kate Hardcastle, escorted by his friend Hastings (who loves Constance Neville). At the Three Pigeons inn they meet Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle’s mischievous son, who for sport directs them to the Hardcastle house as if it were an inn. They arrive as guests who believe they are customers.

Marlow therefore treats Mr Hardcastle — a lover of “old things” and a country house — as a landlord: orders, freedoms, the ease of a man at an inn. Hardcastle is insulted and bewildered. Meanwhile Hastings and Constance plot over her casket of jewels, which Mrs Hardcastle keeps and means to control with Constance’s marriage. Kate learns of Marlow’s two manners and resolves to stoop: she will appear as the barmaid of the supposed inn, so that the shy gentleman can speak freely. The garden is taken for a horse-pond road, the jewels are half-stolen in the confusion — the first half of the play is the mistake of place, the second the mistake of person.

The stooping and the end. As the supposed barmaid, Kate draws Marlow out: she hears both his libertine ease and his better heart, and tests him. Behind a screen, Sir Charles Marlow and old Hardcastle overhear the shy suitor’s transformation and the truth comes out. Hastings and Constance are blocked, then freed — Tony, declared of age, slips his mother’s authority over the jewels and the forced match. The night’s terrors are turned to farce: Mrs Hardcastle, lost in her own garden, takes her husband for a highwayman. Laughing comedy makes fear ridiculous instead of pious. The couples are promised — Marlow and Kate, Hastings and Constance — and Tony escapes a marriage he never wanted.

Characters to hold:

• Kate Hardcastle — witty, spirited; the stoop is her strategy, not her nature.
• Young Marlow — the split gentleman: tongue-tied before ladies, fluent before barmaids.
• Tony Lumpkin — the inn-wit and mischief-maker; “I’ll be with you in the squeezing of a lemon.”
• Mr Hardcastle — old-fashioned country honour, insulted as a supposed innkeeper.
• Mrs Hardcastle — town fashions, the jewels, the forced match for Tony.
• Constance Neville & Hastings — the second couple; love against the casket.

Genre — what to write. The comedy of manners watches social codes (inn versus house, lady versus barmaid); satire is present as social bite, not as verse lampoon. Sentimental comedy would ask you to cry at Kate’s virtue — Goldsmith asks you to laugh at Marlow’s snobbery and Tony’s tricks, and still to like them. The title comes from the proverb he that stoops to conquer: she lowers her standing so that he can raise his courage, and the house stops being an inn. Close every answer on that sentence.

Exam tips: Date and theatre (1773, Covent Garden); the Essay on the Theatre (1772) and the war on sentimental comedy; the two manners of Marlow; the jewels subplot; Tony’s “of age” escape. Never call it Restoration comedy (1670s) or a tragedy — it is 18th-century laughing comedy, and the laughter is the point.