Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0006
M. Walsh
In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary-critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularizations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades, however, been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorizing. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognizably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not only from our recognition of literature’s imitations of the natural world but also from our recognition of the contextual particulars—political, historical, literary, discursive—which inform writings of earlier times.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0007
J. Winn
There is a palpable difference between Addison’s stimulating and thoughtful remarks on literature or the visual arts and his scattered, unconvincing, and dismissive comments on music. His unease about music, the chapter argues, stemmed from ignorance, disappointment, and a tendency to link musical pleasure with secret or illicit sexual pleasure. By basing his aesthetic theory on sight, Addison was able to make contact with scientific discourse, indirectly express his political ideology, and avoid extensive discussions of music, the art about which he knew least. His attempt at an English opera (Rosamond, 1707) failed, and the libretto does not suggest that Addison gave much thought to what it might be like to set or sing his words. As a young man, he wrote two St Cecilia odes, closely following the conventions established in Dryden’s ode for 1687. Printed in the Annual miscellany for 1694 is his translation of an episode from Ovid that purports to explain ‘the secret Cause’ that makes the River Salmacis weaken those who bathe in it. Something about the power of music, its emotional and sensual influence on the body and the mind, was evidently connected in his mind with secret pleasures that he did not wish to acknowledge or reveal. Same-sex love was probably among such pleasures. While there is no definitive evidence that Addison had strong homosexual feelings, or that he acted upon them, there is reason to believe that he associated such feelings with music, an association which shaped his consciousness and therefore his aesthetics.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0016
B. Young
The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.
艾迪生笔下18世纪“文坛”的男性世界与维多利亚时代“文人”的世界相呼应，因此，19世纪的文化评论家和公众舆论的制造者(以及历史学家)对他产生了浓厚的兴趣。莱斯利·斯蒂芬(Leslie Stephen)和w·j·库索普(W. J. courtope)等人的不可知论男子气概影响了他们对艾迪生的描写，他们倾向于轻视艾迪生的基督教信仰，并将其描述为“微妙的”。麦考利更欣赏艾迪生是一位基督教绅士，而萨克雷则称赞他是一位英国幽默家。蒲柏和斯威夫特在18世纪的英国文学史上继续享有优势地位，而艾迪生和斯蒂尔更受欢迎的是他们作为那个时代的“特色”，而不是以任何方式作为智力创新的人物。马修·阿诺德(Matthew Arnold)尤其批评艾迪生，认为他既守旧又狭隘。艾迪生和他在维多利亚时代的批评者都受到了弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的女权主义批评，而伍尔夫恰好是斯蒂芬的女儿，但她却忽视了维多利亚时代早期对艾迪生最重要的研究，即一神论者露西·艾金所写的生活。因此，十八世纪英国文学史上“漫长的十九世纪”被女性对艾迪生的研究所终结，现在是时候为艾金的开创性和仍然有价值的研究付出正义了，因为它被Macaulay关于艾迪生的文章的读者所淹没，这篇文章表面上是对艾金在文学传记中的实践的回顾。
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0012
Claire Boulard-Jouslin
Born in 1672 in a climate of strong anti-Catholicism and Francophobia in England, yet aware that France was a great source of intellectual and cultural inspiration, Joseph Addison had a complex relationship with the French nation. His works reflect the tensions between his admiration for the rival country and his hatred of the French political regime. This chapter argues that French influence on Addison’s writings and Addison’s ambivalent attitude to France are nowhere more perceptible than in his way of handling the French ‘battle of the books’, the famous ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’. It also contends that Addison’s ambivalent attitude to the French was not lost on the eighteenth-century French intellectuals who, though they celebrated him as ‘a friend of mankind’, often borrowed his ideas without acknowledging them.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0005
H. Power
In his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), Addison regularly draws on his deep knowledge of Latin poetry in order to ‘compare the natural face of the country with the Landskips that the Poets have given us of it’. Less conventionally, but just as regularly, he elucidates landscape, history, and antiquities through reference to ancient coins. Roughly contemporaneously, Addison wrote a defence of numismatics in the Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (published posthumously in 1721), in which one character, Philander, seeks to persuade Cynthio from his view that numismatists are mere ‘critics in Rust’ (Cynthio’s view closely resembling the attacks on Bentley and others by satirists such as William King). Addison, through Philander’s person, sees the poems and medals he juxtaposes as representing ‘the same design executed by different hands’; ‘A reverse often clears up the passages of an old poet, as the poet often serves to unriddle a reverse.’ But coins have, for Addison, a moral as well as an explanatory function, publicizing the characters and deeds of great men and women by keeping them in circulation. This chapter explores the relationship between the moral and the fiscal function of coins, drawing out connections between Addison’s views on ancient numismatics and his approach both to modern British coinage and to the circulation of texts and ideas.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0004
P. Davis
This chapter provides an account of Addison’s poetic career—the first such account since the nineteenth century—and confronts the question of why, although Addison wrote several of the most influential and highly regarded poems of the entire eighteenth century, he is so rarely thought of as a poet. The first half of the chapter traces our received image of Addison as an inherently unpoetic figure back to Joseph Warton and the advent of ‘pre-Romantic’ aesthetics in the 1740s, before examining a number of Addison’s poems, particularly from marginalized areas of his verse canon including his neo-Latin pieces and others circulated only in manuscript, which challenge that image. The second half of the chapter explores Addison’s own reluctance to inhabit the role of poet, evident in particular in his serial uses in his verse of the classical trope of ‘recusatio’ (refusal to write a poem). Through detailed analyses of his major poems—especially A Letter from Italy and ‘Milton’s Stile Imitated’, a diptych reflecting the process of self-reassessment he went through while travelling in Italy, the land of poetry, in 1701—it argues that Addison’s serious misgivings about poetry were the making of him as a poet. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of The Campaign (1705), suggesting that Addison’s most famous poem in fact represents not the climax of his career as a poet but its epilogue; by the time he wrote it, Addison had ceased to consider it even a possibility that his future might lie in poetry, and so could versify with detached fluency.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0009
F. Parker
The disengaged position of Mr Spectator, who observes life without participating in it, is related to Addison’s interest in an inexpressive reticence or modesty in language and in manners. How can this valorization of reserve be reconciled with The Spectator’s saturation in the social scene, a scene which is everywhere held up as open to appraisal? Comparison with Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments reveals Addison’s greater emphasis on the function of the imagination, such that the spectatorial viewpoint is often felt as an imagined viewpoint, a place to visit rather than to reside. This chimes with Addison’s way of endorsing Locke as a thinker who emphasizes the role of the mind’s suppositions and projections in the construction of experience. Genial recognition of the provisionality of what is imagined is key to Addison’s celebrated humour (especially in the Roger de Coverley papers), while the sense of an elusive imaginative agency gives the apparent spontaneity of his ‘easy’ style its subtle irony and its power to delight.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0015
G. Dart
This chapter looks at the Romantic essayists as critics and emulators of Addison. It begins with ‘The Round Table’ of 1815–17 and Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s paradoxical attempt to revive the form and spirit of The Tatler and Spectator in their own time, while simultaneously attacking the polite consensus that those two periodicals had brought into being. It shows Lamb and Hazlitt seeking to discriminate between ‘Steele’s’ Tatler, in which the ‘first sprightly runnings’ of the periodical essay form had supposedly run freshest and clearest, and ‘Addison’s’ Spectator, in which that flow had been regulated and tamed. It explores how the Romantics, and Romantic-period magazine culture more generally, sought to revitalize the familiar essay form by breaking down its straitjacket of politeness with the contemporaneous cult of personality. But it also shows how a powerful nostalgia for the ‘honeymoon of authorship’ that had been enjoyed by Addison and Steele in the early 1710s continued to haunt both Hazlitt and Lamb. Finally, the chapter looks at the way in which Hazlitt made Addison’s supposed move away from conversational intimacy towards alienated sententiousness an allegory of the development of modern literature more generally, thus characterizing him as a kind of Eve in the garden of modern prose, at one and the same time its fairest embodiment and the harbinger of its ruin.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0014
F. Ogée
This chapter explores Addison’s attempt at opening new perspectives for the convocation of the work of imagination in the production and reception of representation. Developing a new, dynamic understanding of the concept of pleasure, he explains how the works of nature and art acquire more value as they allow the imagination or the fancy some scope for the picturing and mapping of new territories. The chapter then suggests how some of the new forms of expression in Enlightenment England (the novel, the landscape garden, Hogarth’s series of images), all based on a form of sequentiality similar in many ways to that present in the periodical essays, proposed progressive, enhancing apprehensions of nature which allowed the emergence of a more dynamic, less abstract sort of beauty, designed to create pleasure in the meaning defined by Addison.
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Pub Date : 2021-08-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198814030.003.0002
David Hopkins
Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell were almost exact contemporaries. Born within two years of one another, both men attended Magdalen College, Oxford, in their youth, and they both took up their studies at the college in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. From this moment onward, the lives and public careers of Addison and Sacheverell would be curiously intertwined. Scholarship and college life would bring them together as friends, but politics and public fame would pull them apart. A contrast between the agreeable Addison and the distasteful Sacheverell is commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and not without reason. As perhaps the chief proponent of a new culture of ‘politeness’ for post-revolutionary Britain, Addison is well known for his friendliness, if not perhaps for his volubility, in company. Addison’s powerful reputation as the patron saint of eighteenth-century politeness did not sit well with his ties to Sacheverell, whose firebrand reputation was deeply controversial in his lifetime and only declined further as time went by. For this reason, the youthful friendship of the two Magdalen scholars has been a source of awkwardness for later commentators. This chapter places the friendship between Addison and Sacheverell within the context of post-revolutionary political and literary culture
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