Essay series: The Tatler

Overview

The Tatler was a pioneering periodical launched in 1709 that fused news, social observation, and moral criticism into short, urbane essays. Though founded and chiefly edited by Richard Steele, it quickly became a joint enterprise with Joseph Addison, whose clear prose, classical learning, and gentle humor helped to define the paper’s tone. Appearing thrice weekly during the last years of Queen Anne’s reign, The Tatler addressed the habits and ideals of polite society, seeking to reform manners, elevate taste, and cultivate a rational, sociable public.

Origins and Form

Written under the persona Isaac Bickerstaff, a name borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s satirical hoax, The Tatler adopted a playful device: reports from London’s coffeehouses, each associated with a domain of life. St. James’s supplied political intelligence, White’s offered accounts of gallantry and gaming, Will’s yielded news of poetry and the stage, and the Grecian addressed learning and science. This framework let the paper range from parliamentary debates and campaign news to theater reviews, fashion notes, and scientific curiosities, while preserving a coherent voice. It mixed editorial essays with letters from fictional and real correspondents, character sketches, and vignettes of city life, turning the coffeehouse into an emblem of the new public sphere.

Addison’s Contribution and Style

Addison joined soon after the paper’s inception and contributed dozens of essays that were central to its character. He favored calm reasoning over invective, preferring to correct folly with wit and to recommend virtue by making it attractive. His essays often distilled classical precepts into practical counsel on conversation, reading, friendship, and the uses of leisure. He wrote with a lucid, balanced cadence that avoided pedantry, allowing learned references to serve rather than overshadow the matter at hand. Politically a moderate Whig, he tilted the paper’s judgments toward civil liberty, religious tolerance, and national honor, while shunning the harshness of party pamphleteering.

Themes and Subjects

The Tatler treated London as a theatre of manners. It mocked the fop, the duelist, the gossipmonger, the fortune-hunter, and the literary pretender, not to humiliate individuals but to expose types of vanity that corrode sociability. It counseled sincerity in courtship, fairness in commerce, and good sense in dress and entertainment. The stage and the coffeehouse were examined as schools of taste, with judgments about actors, poets, and critics presented as opportunities to refine standards of wit and judgment. The paper addressed women as an important part of its readership, urging education, decorum, and mutual respect in domestic life. Throughout, it balanced curiosity about the day’s talk with suspicion of rumor, proposing civility and self-command as the antidotes to faction, credulity, and noise.

Reception and Legacy

The Tatler achieved immediate popularity, shaping the expectations of a broad, literate audience for whom periodic essays could be a guide to living well in a complex city and a contested polity. It ended in early 1711, having prepared the way for The Spectator, where Addison and Steele expanded the project with a more elaborate cast and larger ambitions. Yet The Tatler established the template: a personable narrator, a rhythm of timely topics and timeless concerns, and a commitment to delighting while instructing. Its blend of news, criticism, and moral reflection became a model for eighteenth-century journalism and for the English essay tradition, and Addison’s contributions fixed the ideal of polite prose, measured, humane, and quietly persuasive, that would influence critics and periodical writers on both sides of the Atlantic.