Coins and Circulation in Addison’s Prose

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.