18th Century Literature

Answer: (b) Richard Steele — Spectator No. 2 (2 March 1711), “The Spectator Club,” was written by Richard Steele, the founder of the paper. Addison had written No. 1 the day before, introducing the silent Spectator himself; Steele’s No. 2 staffs the paper with its famous cast — Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, the Templar, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry and the clergyman — a portable map of English society around one coffee-house table.

Answer: (b) serious cheerfulness — After walking among the tombs and reflecting that envy, desire and ambition all end in the same dust, Addison says he leaves Westminster Abbey in “serious cheerfulness.” The phrase is the essay’s key: mortality rightly considered does not crush the mind but steadies it — a sober, sociable moral instead of Gray-like melancholy.

Answer: (a) Table-Talk (1821) — “The Indian Jugglers” is the famous familiar essay in which Hazlitt, watching Indian jugglers at London’s Adelphi Theatre keep balls in the air, reflects on what excellence means. It appeared in Table-Talk (1821), the collection that shows the Romantic familiar essay at full stretch — personal, digressive and combative.

Answer: (a) Alice and John — In the reverie, two children — Alice and John — seem to climb upon Elia’s knees by the fire and listen to his family stories. Alice recalls Alice W—n (Ann Simmons, the woman Lamb loved but never married); at the close they reveal they are “nothing; less than nothing, and dreams” — the children Lamb never had.

Answer: (c) 1773 (15 March, Covent Garden) — She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night was first staged at Covent Garden on 15 March 1773. It followed Goldsmith’s 1772 Essay on the Theatre attacking sentimental comedy, and put his “laughing comedy” theory on stage — folly laughed at, not virtue wept over.

Answer: 6 December 1712 — The Spectator ran daily from 1 March 1711 (Addison’s No. 1) to 6 December 1712, completing 555 numbers. Founded by Richard Steele with Joseph Addison as chief partner, and growing out of Steele’s earlier Tatler (1709–11), it became the model of the English periodical essay — moral, social and urban, carried by the fiction of the silent Spectator.

Answer: 26 (30 March 1711) — “Meditations in Westminster Abbey” is Spectator No. 26, dated 30 March 1711. In it Addison walks among the tombs of the great London abbey and turns observation into reflection — the famous triple meditation on envy, desire and compassion — ending in the essay’s key phrase, “serious cheerfulness.”

Answer: John Cavanagh — Hazlitt sets beside the jugglers the English fives-player John Cavanagh, whose speed, wrist and placement made him, in Hazlitt’s judgment, the master of his game. Both juggler and fives-player prove the essay’s standard: has the thing been done as well as it can be done? — a life spent inside one pursuit until skill looks like nature.

Answer: Elia — Charles Lamb published his personal essays in the London Magazine under the pen-name Elia (from January 1822; collected as Essays of Elia, 1823). “Dream-Children; A Reverie” is Elia by the fire — tender, humorous and confessional — the Romantic personal essay as opposed to Steele and Addison’s sociable periodical essay.

Answer: inn — Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle’s mischievous son, tells Marlow and Hastings at the Three Pigeons that the Hardcastle house is an inn. Arriving as guests who believe they are customers, the bashful Marlow treats Mr Hardcastle as a landlord — the central “mistake of a night” from which the comedy’s title comes.

Steele’s No. 2 staffs the paper with six figures who together map Queen Anne’s England, so that a daily sheet can speak as if the whole city sat in one room. Sir Roger de Coverley, the Worcestershire country gentleman — old-fashioned, honourable, humane, a Tory in politics — stands for the land. Sir Andrew Freeport, the merchant of the City, stands for trade and Whig industry. The Templar (law student) and Captain Sentry (the army) add law and arms; Will Honeycomb, the town gallant, adds fashion; and the clergyman adds the Church. Each is drawn as a “character” in the Theophrastan manner — a type with humours, not a plot-agent — so readers recognise estates, not individuals. The device also serves the Spectator’s moral method: because the club contains Tories and Whigs, town and country, the paper can judge all parties while belonging to none. The silent Spectator presides, watching rather than joining — “rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species.”

This is the famous triple meditation from Addison’s Spectator No. 26, “Meditations in Westminster Abbey” (30 March 1711). Walking among the tombs, Addison turns three sights into three moral cures. The tombs of the great kill envy — rivalry with the dead is absurd, since greatness ends in the same dust. The epitaphs of the beautiful check inordinate desire — beauty, praised on stone, is already past. And a parent’s grief carved on a tombstone melts the heart to compassion — the one feeling death enlarges rather than ends. The structure is Addison’s method in miniature: observation becoming reflection, each clause balanced (“when I look… when I read… when I meet”), the periodical essay’s middle style at its most musical. It also states the essay’s whole argument: mortality rightly considered does not breed melancholy but proportion — hence the closing “serious cheerfulness.”

Watching Indian jugglers at the Adelphi keep balls in the air with machine-like exactness, Hazlitt feels wonder — then a sting: why does the critic’s labour look less finished? His answer distinguishes two kinds of excellence. Mechanical excellence — the juggler’s, or John Cavanagh’s at fives — can be done exactly as it should be done, and the eye judges it at once: the ball is caught or it is not. Fine art aims at something else: not a caught ball but a mind made visible, whose judgment takes longer and divides opinion. Yet Hazlitt refuses to despise the juggler. Both kinds must answer one question — has the thing been done as well as it can be done? That standard, doing a thing completely, is the essay’s spine. The sting remains deliberate: the man of letters, unlike the juggler, can always plead that his work is “not yet finished,” and Hazlitt will not let himself off so easily.

These are the closing words of Lamb’s “Dream-Children; A Reverie” (London Magazine, January 1822), spoken by the dream-children Alice and John as they fade. All evening Elia has told them family stories — grandmother Field at Blakesware, uncle John L—, and their mother Alice W—n, the woman Lamb loved and never married — while they listened as if the past were theirs. Now the reverie breaks: the children confess they were never born. “Nothing; less than nothing” — a double negative that makes the absence absolute — and “dreams,” the essay’s own substance. “What might have been” names Lamb’s bachelor life: the household that never existed. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, gives the classical frame — the unborn must wait ages for even a name. Elia wakes in his armchair; Bridget (sister Mary) sits unchanged beside him. Pathos and humour meet: the tenderest personal essay in English ends by confessing it was all a dream.

Young Marlow has two manners: struck dumb before ladies of rank, easy and forward with women he takes to be beneath him. Kate Hardcastle learns of this split and “stoops” — she meets him dressed plainly, as a barmaid-like girl of the house, so that his forward manner fastens on her. The cure works in two stages. First, the disguise lets real feeling grow: Marlow loves the “barmaid” honestly, proving his heart is sound and only his manners are diseased. Second, the revelation — Kate stepping out of the disguise as the lady he was meant to court — forces the two manners to merge; he must now speak to a lady with the ease he showed the maid. Goldsmith’s title is the moral: pride must stoop to conquer — condescension cured by a woman’s wit, not by preaching. The mistake of the night (house taken for inn) thus becomes the mechanism of the cure.

Steele and Addison founded the Spectator together (1711–12), but their gifts divide the labour. Steele is the projector and man of the town: he invents the club, supplies the characters (Sir Roger, Will Honeycomb), and writes with warmth, hurry and practical moralising — the Tatler’s bustle carried into the new paper. Addison is the stylist and philosopher: No. 1’s silent Spectator, the Westminster Abbey meditation (No. 26), the Cato-like gravity — sentences balanced, diction polished, reflection deepened into the “middle style” that taught England how to think in prose. If Steele gives the paper its company, Addison gives it its mind. Together they realise the Spectator’s programme: to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries into clubs and coffee-houses — morality made sociable, wit made useful. The partnership is the periodical essay’s perfect form: invention married to reflection.

The Spectator (1 March 1711 – 6 December 1712), 555 daily numbers by Richard Steele (1672–1729) and Joseph Addison, is the classic English periodical essay — and its achievement is best seen in two papers: Steele’s No. 2, “The Spectator Club,” and Addison’s No. 26, “Meditations in Westminster Abbey.”

First, the invention of a form. Growing out of Steele’s Tatler (1709–11) and the coffee-house world of Queen Anne’s London, the Spectator made the single-sheet daily essay — short, topical, moral — into literature. Addison’s No. 1 creates the presiding fiction: the Spectator himself, who lives “rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species” — everywhere present, nowhere committed. This detachment is the method: belonging to no party, the paper can judge all.

Steele’s No. 2 shows the social engine. The club — Sir Roger de Coverley (land, Tory country gentleman), Sir Andrew Freeport (trade, Whig merchant), the Templar (law), Captain Sentry (army), Will Honeycomb (town fashion), the clergyman (Church) — is a portable map of England. Drawn as Theophrastan “characters,” types rather than individuals, the members let one sheet speak as if the whole city sat in a room, and let moralising wear the mask of conversation.

Addison’s No. 26 (30 March 1711) shows the reflective depth. Walking the abbey, he turns tombs into the triple meditation — envy dying before greatness’s dust, desire checked by beauty’s epitaphs, compassion melted by parents’ grief — and leaves in “serious cheerfulness.” Here is the “middle style”: balanced periods, polished diction, observation ripening into reflection without preaching.

Together the two papers state the Spectator’s programme — to bring philosophy out of closets into coffee-houses, to make morality sociable and wit useful. Steele supplies company and invention; Addison supplies mind and style. The periodical essay after them — down to Hazlitt and Lamb, who rebel against it even as they inherit it — is unthinkable without this partnership: the daily sheet raised, for the first time, to the dignity of literature.

William Hazlitt’s “The Indian Jugglers” (Table-Talk, 1821) takes a single seen thing — Indian jugglers at London’s Adelphi Theatre keeping balls in the air with machine-like exactness — and stretches it into a meditation on excellence, the Romantic familiar essay’s characteristic move: personal, digressive, combative.

The argument turns on a distinction. Mechanical excellence — the juggler’s, or John Cavanagh’s at fives, whose speed and wrist made him master of his game — can be done exactly as it should be done; the eye judges at once, ball caught or not. Fine art aims otherwise: not a caught ball but a mind made visible, judged slowly and variously. Yet Hazlitt will not sneer at the juggler. Both answer one question — has the thing been done as well as it can be done? That standard, doing a thing completely, is the essay’s spine, and it carries a sting for the man of letters: the juggler cannot plead his trick “not yet finished,” while the critic always can — and Hazlitt refuses himself that excuse.

The style is the argument’s vehicle. Hazlitt writes in the familiar manner — as if talking — but the talk is weaponised: short hammer-blows of antithesis (“we do not… they do”), long periodic sentences that gather and crash, sudden aphorisms. He digresses — to Cavanagh, to painters, to himself — yet every digression returns to the standard. The “I” is everywhere: Hazlitt’s envy, his admiration, his self-accusation are the essay’s evidence. This is what makes it Romantic rather than Augustan: where Addison generalises from the coffee-house, Hazlitt generalises from his own nerves.

Hence the essay’s lasting force. It defends manual, bodily excellence against the prejudice that only “mental” work matters, while subjecting mental work to the juggler’s harder test. “The Indian Jugglers” remains the familiar essay’s showpiece: one evening’s spectacle turned, by force of style, into a complete theory of doing things well.

Finally, the essay’s place in the tradition matters for the exam. The familiar essay descends from Montaigne through Cowley and Addison, but Hazlitt remakes it: where Addison’s Spectator generalises from the coffee-house in the balanced middle style, Hazlitt generalises from his own pulses in a style that fights. “The Indian Jugglers” is thus both homage and rebellion — it keeps the periodical essay’s occasion (a daily spectacle, a London evening) while replacing its sociable moral with a personal standard. To call it the familiar essay “at full stretch” is exact: every resource of the form — anecdote, digression, antithesis, aphorism, confession — is extended to its limit, and the limit holds.

Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night (Covent Garden, 15 March 1773) is theory put on stage. In An 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 as the target — plays that exhibit private virtue and ask the audience to weep. True comedy, he argued, should make us laugh at folly: “laughing comedy.” The play is the demonstration.

The engine is the mistake. Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle’s mischievous son, tells the travellers Marlow and Hastings at the Three Pigeons that the Hardcastle house is an inn. They arrive as guests believing themselves customers — and the bashful Marlow, dumb before ladies of rank but forward with supposed inferiors, treats Mr Hardcastle, lover of “old things,” as a landlord: orders, freedoms, inn-yard ease. Hardcastle is insulted and bewildered; the audience, knowing the truth, laughs at folly, not at virtue.

Kate’s stooping is the cure and the title’s moral. Learning of Marlow’s split manners, Kate meets him plainly dressed, as a barmaid-like girl, so his forward manner fastens on her; real feeling grows, proving his heart sound and only his manners diseased; then stepping out as the lady, she forces the two manners to merge. Pride must stoop to conquer — condescension cured by wit, not sermon.

Around this run the subplots that keep the laughter moving: Hastings and Constance Neville scheming over her casket of jewels against Mrs Hardcastle’s control; Tony’s own rebellion. The five-act structure, the night’s unities, the gallery of humours — all serve Goldsmith’s programme: character drawn from life, folly exposed by situation, feeling earned rather than exhibited. Against sentimental comedy’s weeping virtue, She Stoops to Conquer restores comedy’s proper business — to make an audience laugh, and, laughing, recognise itself.

The characters carry the theory in flesh. Hardcastle, lover of “old things,” is the plain country sense against which folly is measured; Mrs Hardcastle’s jewels-and-marriage scheming gives the subplot its mercenary comedy; Tony Lumpkin — all mischief and good nature — is the folk engine who sets the mistake rolling and then enjoys it. Even the servants’ drinking scene keeps the laughter democratic: folly belongs to no single rank. The play’s afterlife proved Goldsmith right — it has held the stage ever since 1773, while the weeping comedies it mocked are footnotes. For the exam, hold the formula: sentimental comedy exhibits virtue and asks tears; laughing comedy exhibits folly and earns laughter — and She Stoops to Conquer is the textbook case.