Genius Fan

In my last post I wrote about Samuel Johnson’s famous Rambler essays and my struggle to understand even the first sentence of the first paragraph of his first essay. (Ahem.) A point I didn’t make was these essays are part of an English tradition known as the British periodical essay, a literary form which appeared at the end of the 17th century and was more or less over before the 19th century dawned.

Discovering the British periodical essay

A week ago, there I was following up an entreaty by my wife to tidy away all my books. (We all know book buying has side effects.) Among the volumes littering the living room was my newly-bought The Rambler And The Idler, The Adventurer, The Connoisseur (1876, published by William P Nimmo) – containing the collection of Johnson’s Rambler essays. I found a spot in my bookcase on the shelf second from the floor…right next to a volume I’d completely forgotten I had: The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century, by George S Marr. (Yes, I buy books and forget why I bought them, and Yes, most of my books I haven’t read. It’s a reference library! Arghhhhh.)

Finding this book delayed my tidying. Of course, I know enough of marriage to put to the side distractions and examine them when the ‘pressure’s off’… yet I ignored this principle. Flicking through Marr’s book I was surprised to discover a chronological list of “Eighteenth century periodicals”, from The Adventurer to The World, taking in The Busy Body, The Citizen, The Gleaner, The Idler, The Loiterer, The Old Maid, The Spectator, The Tatler, The Universal Spy and many, many more. (Saying Johnson’s Rambler maybe at the tough end of difficulty level among periodical essays would be an understatement.)

What is a periodical essay?

A British periodical essay was an article, published in a pamphlet on its own or in a newspaper, usually anonymous or under a pen-name, of between 1,500 and 3,000 words, and light, easy-to-read and entertaining as in The Spectator, or moralising, like a sermon, written in elevated prose and therefore more difficult to read, as in…wait for it…The Rambler. (Ughh.)

The title of these essays is an easily identifiable characteristic; they usually represent an agent, that’s someone ‘doing’ something (idling, tatling, spectating, etc), so The Rambler, The Spendthrift, The Trifler and so on. The impulse behind the agent was private observation by a fictional character, turned into public commentary, and done repeatedly for an audience that’s keen to read it. Oh and it was pretty much a phenomenon of the end of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century.

The birth, life and death of the British periodical essay

There’s differing opinion on this, but Ground Zero for the periodical essay seems to have been John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette on 17 March 1691, according to Robert DeMaria Jr. Then it reached its high point of entertainment in the early 18th century with The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712), and then by 1750-1755, the genre had one last surge of expression with Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler (1750-1752). The last example may have been Oliver Goldsmith’s The Bee (1759).

Reasons why the British Periodical essay thrived

There are a few key reasons why the essay format took off.

• The print market was ‘unlocked’ when the Licensing Act (1695) lapsed – so no more government approval and a sudden spurt in entrepreneurial printing.
• Printing and paper making technology had both improved by the start of the 18th century.
• Demand for new reading material, driven by growth in literacy within the emerging new middle class.
• Coffee houses had become a venue containing all the latest newspapers, broadsheets and pamphlets, which could be read, or one could listen to them being read out, and one could see them being discussed by lawyers, businessmen, tradesmen and so on.
• Political instability of the time was reflected in a growth in the number and variety of periodicals containing these essays.

Anecdotes about the periodical essayists

Marr’s book sent me further down the rabbit hole than I intended — not just into the essays themselves, but into the lives of the people who wrote them. Their backgrounds turned out to be as varied as the papers they produced: some knew real poverty and hack work before finding their voice, others had a title somewhere in the family tree that never quite translated into money, and at least one wrote his most famous work anonymously for decades before anyone knew his name. Here’s what I found.

• Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): Johnson wrote the Rambler essays anonymously twice a week for two years, a huge undertaking because he was also compiling his Dictionary, at the same time. He was able to compose these essays in his head and often was so late in delivering that sometimes did not review them before they went to print. He was blunt about lesser rivals in the genre — when Boswell praised The Connoisseur, Johnson dismissed it flatly, saying it wanted matter. Johnson also wrote The Idler.
• James Boswell (1740-1795): Boswell secretly authored two satirical newspaper columns, The Hypochondriack and The Rampager, and his anonymity remained until the 20th century. In one surviving Rampager essay, he half-jokingly proposed replacing British troops in America with Jewish soldiers armed with knives, reasoning the terror of circumcision would unsettle the colonists more than scalping!
• Joseph Addison (1672-1719): Addison and Steele’s friendship, forged as schoolboys at Charterhouse, produced two of the century’s most influential periodicals — yet it ended in cold estrangement shortly before Addison’s death, largely over politics. Contemporaries were split on which man was the better writer, and Coleridge later said he preferred “Steele with all his faults” to Addison’s colder polish.
• Richard Steele (1671-1729): Steele was the grandson of a Lord Chancellor of Ireland yet grew up poor, orphaned by both parents before the age of six and raised on his uncle’s charity. Despite co-founding two of the most morally instructive papers in English literary history, he was personally notorious for reckless debt and was frequently mocked in the London press for his own financial chaos.
• George Colman the Elder (1732-1794): Colman co-founded The Connoisseur with his Oxford friend Bonnell Thornton while still an undergraduate, running it to 140 issues despite Johnson’s verdict that it “wanted weight.” He later went on to manage two major London theatres, meaning the young periodical essayist ended up as one of the most powerful men in English theatrical production.
• Bonnell Thornton (1725-1768): Before The Connoisseur, Thornton staged an elaborate literary prank: he and fellow “Nonsense Club” members advertised and actually opened a mock “Exhibition of Sign Painting,” parodying London’s newly fashionable art exhibitions, and published a satirical catalogue to go with it. He’d already needled Johnson directly in print, having lampooned the Rambler itself in his short-lived Drury-Lane Journal two years earlier.
• John Hawkesworth (1715-1773): Hawkesworth was the man behind The Adventurer. It shouldn’t surprise you therefore that he was hired by the Admiralty to ghostwrite Captain Cook’s official voyage account despite never having been to sea himself, and he padded the narrative with invented moralizing and dramatized scenes that Cook and his officers hadn’t written. For all this he was paid the enormous sum of £6,000.
• Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774): Goldsmith wrote his Citizen of the World essays as fictional letters from a visiting Chinese philosopher observing the absurdities of English society, a device that let him satirize his adopted country as an outsider would. He was famously hopeless with money throughout his life, once reportedly pawning a favorite coat to cover a friend’s debt while still owing his own landlady rent. He also wrote The Bee – the last fully periodical essay.

Notes
The Rambler And The Idler, The Adventurer, The Connoisseur (1876, published by William P Nimmo)
The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century, George S Marr (1923)
The eighteenth-century periodical essay, (Literature and Social and Institutional Change), Robert DeMaria Jr (2008)