A Political Biography of Richard Steele
Charles Knight
Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies
978 1 85196 913 5: 216x138mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 89196 681 3
Richard Steele (1672-1729) is famous as an early writer of sentimental drama and as half of the essay-writing team of Addison and Steele. But during 1713 and 1714 he became the leading political propagandist for the Whigs, campaigning particularly for the royal succession of the house of Hanover. In the last months of Queen Anne’s reign he was expelled from Parliament for seditious libel. In the first months of George’s reign he was returned again to Parliament, made a manager of Drury-Lane Theatre, and knighted. Thereafter, Sir Richard continued to write political propaganda but took independent positions on important issues, at the expense of his friendship with Addison. As a theatrical manager he failed to effect a reformist agenda, but his final play, The Conscious Lovers, represented the exemplary drama he advocated.
Steele is notable both for the indirect propaganda he developed with Addison and for the open partisanship of his own periodicals. He wrote extensively about responsible economics but was famously irresponsible in his own economic affairs. He was a moral writer because, as he admitted, he was not a moral man. He was a strong opponent of dueling who almost killed an adversary in a duel. He was a cheerful and gregarious man who nonetheless suffered from gout and from the death of his wife and several children. A self-proclaimed Englishman, he was born in Ireland and died in Wales. He was not an original political thinker, but he was un homme engagé who thought and wrote about a very wide range of issues from a perspective that was liberal and humane, promoting shared government and religious toleration. He recognized and exploited the connections between politics and culture. A Political Biography of Richard Steele explores the political engagement of this complex and paradoxical man in terms of the events and issues about which he wrote and the experiences that shaped his character and attitudes.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies