A Political Biography of Joseph Addison

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Charles Knight

Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies

One of the most durable eighteenth-century writers, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) is best remembered for his sparkling and rangy entries in the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12), both co-edited with Richard Steele. Indeed, the locution 'Addison and Steele' retains a corporate familiarity unrivaled in the British literary tradition. To his contemporaries, however, Addison had a strong individual identity at odds with the genial personae of his periodical writing. His career as a partisan began inauspiciously, with A Letter from Italy (1704), drafted during a period of whig dominance, but membership of the whiggish Kit-Kat Club afforded fresh opportunities.

By the early 1710s, when the tory ascendency prompted his turn to periodical writing, Addison was a political fixture. The celebrity ensured by his and Steele’s joint enterprises, along with the success of his heroic drama Cato (1713), enabled him to flourish during a low ebb in his party’s fortunes. Enduring a surprisingly bumpy ride during the early reign of George I, Addison’s final political publication, the two-part Old Whig (1719), pitted its author against his old friend Steele in a squabble about a Bill designed to restrict new peerages. This half-hearted and nasty effort is an unfortunate end to an august career.This biography puts his literary career into a political context.

Readership

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Politics

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