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Reading the Periodical Essay in Eighteenth-Century Britain And CONVERSING WITH BOOKS: READING THE PERIODICAL ESSAY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND JEFFERSONIAN AMERICA by RICHARD J. SQUIBBS A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of William C. Dowling and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Conversing with Books: Reading the Periodical Essay in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Jeffersonian America By RICHARD J. SQUIBBS Dissertation Director: William C. Dowling The periodical essay is the sole British literary genre to have emerged and declined within the chronological eighteenth century. It appeared in London during the reign of Queen Anne, and by the end of the century had virtually disappeared amidst a new culture of magazine publication. This study charts the various guises the genre assumed across the eighteenth century as essayists in Edinburgh, Philadelphia and Manhattan adapted the worldviews expressed in the earlier London essays to the particular circumstances of their cities. What the English essayists and their readers had regarded as timely, topical conversations in print about manners and culture became something more to their Scottish and American avatars. The periodical essay for them became a medium for witnessing historical change, a genre centrally concerned with what might have been. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a particular figure within the periodical essay tradition, showing how each one articulates a moral relationship to civil society that the essays’ authors encourage their readers to adopt. The Censor in chapter one represents ii a certain manner of reading, one that means to prompt social self-reflection in the name of a broader, more comprehensive civic awareness. Chapter two takes the whimsical essayistic persona as its subject, reading whimsicality as a principled resistance to the rationalizations of time management in a developing market society, and as a direct challenge to the herd mentality periodical writers see as the real face of liberal individualism in its consumer-market guise. My third chapter shows how the Templar, a young law student who finds himself drawn increasingly to literature, comes to figure in Scottish and American essay series a perception that belletristic writing must assume a law-like moral function in recording for posterity these writers’ exemplary resistance to civic decline. My final chapter then reads Washington Irving’s History of New York as self-consciously drawing upon these elements of the periodical tradition to create a sort of literary conscience for a new American polity seemingly intent on reducing all of civic life to an imaginatively impoverished market for consumer goods. iii Acknowledgements I have been fortunate to have received tremendous support – moral, financial, and other – from a number of people and institutions throughout my years of research and writing. Institutionally, the Rutgers English department has been a most generous source of material support. I would like especially to acknowledge the Mellon Summer Dissertation Fellowship and the Mellon Problems in Historical Method Fellowship, both of which directly hastened this project to completion. On a more personal level, I was extremely lucky to have had access to the minds, expertise, and patience of two Rutgers faculty members in particular. William C. Dowling went above and beyond the call of duty in his attention to my thinking and writing, balancing his unflagging encouragement with sustained, though always fair, criticism that has proved essential to my continued development as a scholar, critic, and author. He has kept me honest through this entire process, and his example will continue to do so through the remainder of my career. William Galperin brought his enormous intelligence, curiosity, and wit to bear on my work always in a timely fashion, and the final product bears the marks of his commentary on almost every page. I would also like to acknowledge the time and energy Brad Evans, Myra Jehlen, Jonathan Kramnick, Meredith McGill, Michael McKeon, Adam Potkay, Cheryl Robinson, and Michael Warner contributed to my development not simply as a scholar and thinker, but as a professional as well. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Ron and Mary, and my brother Ron, Jr., who rarely asked when I was finally going to finish this project, but always had faith that when I did, it would be worth all the time and effort I invested in it. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 1. Literary Citizenship 17 2. Civic Humorism 89 3. The Artful Templar 138 4. Reading Knickerbocker History 211 Bibliography 266 Curriculum vita 287 v 1 INTRODUCTION The British periodical essay has not received its due in eighteenth-century studies. Until roughly the 1980s, critics mined the genre for knowledge about the emergence of modern literary criticism in a new age of professional imaginative writing, or treated the periodical essay’s representations of fashions, customs, and commerce as more or less accurate reflections of urban English culture in the period. Proponents of “the new eighteenth century” then took a different tack, approaching the genre as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony given to disseminating the most tepid manifestations of middle- class taste. Even those studies which adopt a more positive view of the essays nonetheless tend to relegate them to the status of uninteresting ephemera, excepting the handful of regularly anthologized numbers by Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson.1 Devoid of the charge and excitement of popular radical publications, and too immediately associated with the milieu of belles-lettres to garner much notice from practitioners of the new social history, the periodical essay has yet to be studied in terms of its remarkable generic specificity. The following chapters attempt such a study. Along the way, they show how perceptions of the genre changed across the eighteenth century as essayists in Edinburgh, Philadelphia and Manhattan adapted the worldviews expressed in the earlier London essays to the particular circumstances of their cities. What the English essayists and their readers had regarded as timely, topical conversations in print about manners and culture 1 The most anthologized Spectator essays include Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” papers (411-421); the account of the Spectator Club (2); number 10, on the aims of the series; Addison’s essay on wit (62) and Addison’s remarks on Paradise Lost (267). Johnson’s Rambler essays on fiction (4), pastoral (36, 37), biography (60), and literary imitation (121) are perhaps his best known and most widely read. 2 became something more to their Scottish and American avatars. The periodical essay for them became a medium for witnessing historical change. Conceived increasingly as records of the present for the edification of future readers, these essays would chronicle habits of mind and ways of everyday being which their authors believed were at that moment vanishing from view. The periodical essay became a genre centrally concerned with what might have been. This analysis unfolds historically across approximately one hundred years, which marks a significant departure from previous studies. Criticism of the genre typically proceeds synchronically, focusing on a particular series in a particular moment. The Spectator (1711-14), written by Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and a few associates during a time of significant political unrest and cultural flux, has received the most attention of this sort, followed closely by its predecessor, The Tatler (1709-10), which began as Steele’s venture but became a collaborative effort with Addison in its final months.2 Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler (1750-51), and to a lesser degree The Idler (1758-60), have been subject to a certain amount of study.3 The Connoisseur (1755-57) 2 See chapter one, passim for examples of Spectator criticism in this mode. See also Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom and Edmund Leites, Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele, and Eighteenth-Century Culture (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1984); Richmond P. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Albert Furtwangler, “The Making of Mr. Spectator,” MLQ 38 (March 1977): 21-39; Charles A. Knight, “The Spectator’s Generalizing Discourse,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 16 (April 1993): 44- 57; Knight, “The Spectator’s Moral Economy,” Modern Philology 91 (1993): 161-179; and Neil Saccamano, “The Sublime Force of Words in Addison’s ‘Pleasures,’” ELH 58 (1991): 83-106, as well as the essays collected in The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, ed. Donald J. Newman (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 3 See Leopold Damrosch, Jr., “Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler,” ELH 40 (1973): 70-89; John Converse Dixon, “Politicizing Samuel Johnson: The Moral Essays and the Question of Ideology,” College Literature 25 (Fall 1998): 67-91; Patrick 3 was written about twice in the twentieth century, while The World (1753-56), The Adventurer (1752-54), and The Looker-On (1792-94) have not even been that lucky.4 Edinburgh’s Mirror (1775-77)
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