SOURCE: “Richard Steele, Journalist—and Journalism,” in Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod, The School of Journalism, West Virginia University, 1977, pp. 21-31.

[In this essay, first presented at a 1976 symposium, Winton examines Steele's editorial direction of the Tatlerand the Spectator. The critic maintains that Steele introduced a number of innovations into print journalism, most notably the letters-to-the-editor feature, which permitted an unprecedented interaction between writer and audience.]

A few years ago the death of the novel was confidently predicted in literary-critical circles: all vital signs were down and mourners were to be observed, somewhat unbecomingly cheerful perhaps considering the occasion, dusting off their black serge suits against the moment when the venerable old genre would at last utter its death rattle. The stubborn patient refused to pass away, however; indeed, there are some who contend it has found a new life, but at any rate if the novel should depart this coil tonight, we have been warned! Nowadays Marshall McLuhan and followers are telling us that not only the novel but the very medium of print itself is passe in our non-linear age, one with the bustle and the mustache cup; non-linear media will speedily take over, we are told (we are told in print, incidentally, and at great length).¹

Be that as it may. Talk about the approaching demise of the printed word has had one positive result: serious scholars are looking carefully at the medium of print in its historical contexts, outlining some of the philosophical and sociological aspects of the printing process. Recent work by the literary and philosophical historian Father Walter J. Ong comes to mind; or that by the cultural historian Elizabeth Eisenstein.² If the printing press is destined to have a lifespan of fewer than six hundred years, to die with the waning years of the Twentieth Century, its impact on world culture will at least be well-documented.

What an extraordinarily flexible and powerful medium it has been. Paralleling a rising curve of literacy in the West—some would argue, producing that rising curve—the printing press has spread almost irresistibly, helping to bring about an age, from the Sixteenth Century to the present, of continuing revolutions of one sort or another: scientific, economic, industrial, and of course, political. One of the first individuals to understand and exploit some of its possibilities in English, this paper will argue, was Richard Steele.

A key era in the spread of printing technology through the English-speaking world, we now see in retrospect, was the last decade of the Seventeenth Century, which witnessed the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1694 and with it the practical end of widespread governmental control of the press. King Charles II, who was more alert to the revolutionary possibilities of the printing press than he is usually given credit for, had encouraged the enforcement of the Licensing Act with the result that there were no printers in the British Isles other than those of London, York, and the university presses in Oxford and Cambridge, and very few in the British overseas colonies. There were a handful of exceptions of course: Samuel Green and his family firm in Massachusetts, William Bradford in Philadelphia and William Nuthead in Maryland, but these exceptions were negligible in terms of mass influence.³ By and large the Licensing Act was enforced, and the attitude of many government officials may have been like that of King Charles's loyal servant, Governor Sir William Berkeley of Virginia who refused to let a printing press into the colony: “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience. …” William III, coming ashore in England at Exeter during the Revolution of 1698, could not find a press in that large provincial capital on which to print the proclamation of his accession.⁴

Thus, although there was a considerable pent-up demand for printing in London by 1694, in the provinces and colonies there was little demand and less supply, in the form of presses. It was outside of London, however, that the rate of growth during the following decades was largest, starting as it did from zero in most places; supply and demand grew up together, so to speak. As Prof. Richmond Bond has shown, the number of periodicals increased tenfold in London between 1700 and 1799. But in the first twenty-five years of the Eighteenth Century, each of twenty-five provincial towns acquired for the first time one or more journals as printing presses spread and the postal service improved.⁵ And so too in the colonies: South Carolina, for example, which had no presses at all in 1730, possessed three in 1733 and by the 1760's had three newspapers competing simultaneously⁶—all named the South-Carolina Gazette, by the way, to the confusion of students ever since.

The essence of the printing press' advantage was its simplicity of operation and its responsiveness. The design and operating procedures of the common press were highly conservative—Shakespeare's printers and those who printed the Kilmarnock edition of Robert Burns's poems could have exchanged places without the least difficulty—conservative but basically simple. A literate person—man or woman, by the way—with a copy of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1683) in his hand could teach himself or herself the trade, from beginning to end. Simplicity of operation was not a factor of prime importance in London when Richard Steele began The Tatler in 1709, although unprecedented demand for the paper brought about a kind of farming-out operation among the printers, as Prof. William Todd has shown.⁷ But it was crucially important in the provinces and colonies, where printing-houses were small and pressmen few. There, if necessary, one man who knew his business could mix his own ink, compose his folio halfsheet page at the type cases, operate the press himself, dry the pages and even take the papers in his own hands to the neighboring taverns and coffee houses for sale and distribution, if he did not have a printer's devil and could not find a boy who would do it for him for a penny. The process was a natural school for the autodidact and the way was open for the development of authors who could complete the process by actually composing their work, in both senses of the word, with the composing stick. Two who did so were those autodidact printers Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. Franklin has recorded his debt to The Spectator in a memorable passage of the Autobiography. Alone at his brother James' printing house at night or on Sundays, the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Franklin was, as he put it, endeavoring “at Improvement.”

About this time I met with an odd Volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I though the Writing excellent, and wish'd if possible to imitate it. With that View, I took some of the Papers, and making short Hints of the Sentiment in each Sentence, laid them by a few Days, and then without looking a the Book, try'd to compleat the Papers again, by expressing each hinted Sentiment at length and as fully as it had been express'd before, in any suitable Words, that should come to hand. Then I compar'd my Spectator with the Original, discover'd some of my Faults and corrected them.⁸

And so on. This testimonial from America's great printer/philosopher will serve as an introduction to a second aspect of printing press journalism as Richard Steele developed it in 1709: its responsiveness, responsiveness to the needs of both the reader and the author/editor. There was, or could be, an interaction between the writer and the reader impossible with the printed book. Distribution, as we have seen, was simple in an era of taverns. A mass audience could be reached beyond the dreams of even the most popular preacher. Steele gave away the first four numbers of Tatler; after that anyone with a penny could buy a copy, or if without a penny could read someone else's copy at the coffeehouse. Early in the life of the Tatler, in the seventh number, Steele began soliciting letters to the editor, calling on his readers to send him the “occurrences you meet with relating to your amours, or any other subject within the rules by which I have proposed to walk.”⁹ Letters flooded in, and this became a staple department of Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, as well as of the numberless descendants of these papers. Although Steele and later his partner Addison were writing their papers at home or in a coffeehouse, careful provision was always made for receiving these letters: in the case of The Guardian, a lion's head was set up in Button's Coffee House into which letters could be dropped.

The letters-to-the-editor feature offers a good illustration of the quality of responsiveness which Steele discovered and exploited in his papers. The germ of the notion was to be found in the question-and-answer papers such as John Dunton's Athenian Mercury, designed according to its founder to answer “all the Nice and Curious Questions Propos'd by the Ingenious.”¹⁰ Defoe had also earlier used some letters in his Review. In Tatler and Spectator, however, the true possibilities of the feature were explored. As Steele indicated when he called for “occurrences you meet with relating to your amours,” the letters could and did provide the basis for an advice-to-the-lovelorn column, Dear Abby's ancestor. Or the department could serve as a forum for serious political debate, with letters supporting various sides of a question. If readers would not respond on a subject of topical interest, the editors could respond for them, writing letters to themselves over assumed names. Bernarr Macfadden was still using this stratagem two centuries later when he was getting Physical Culture magazine underway. And when all else failed, when the well of editorial inspiration dried up, one could use letters to fill the empty columns: in August 1711 Steele fleshed out a Spectator with some letters he had written his wife two months earlier, omitting names and addresses of course.

Literary and dramatic criticism were important features in The Tatler from the beginning, and in its successors. As with letters-to-the-editor, the idea was not entirely new: John Oldmixon had included notices of recent plays in his Muses Mercury (1707-08), and journals such as History of the Works of the Learned had for decades carried reviews which were mainly mere abstracts of the works examined. Steele came to dramatic criticism from a career as a successful playwright and could draw not only on his personal knowledge of the actors and theater companies but on wide reading in dramatic literature. His approach was to treat the living theater seriously and as a totality. In a Tatler he writes of the experience of going to a performance, hearing the orchestra, seeing the expectant audience:

Thus far we gain only by coming into an audience; but if we find added to this, the beauties of proper action, the force of eloquence, and the gaiety of well-placed lights and scenes, it is being happy, and seeing others happy for two hours; a duration of bliss not at all to be slighted by so short-lived a creature as man.¹¹

Formal literary criticism entered The Tatler as early as No. 6, with the quoted remarks of a critic at Will's Coffeehouse applauding Vergil's judgment in the selection of heroic epithets. Examination of different aspects of Paradise Lost in The Tatler was a sort of prelude to Addison's famous series of Spectators on the poem. These ran in the Saturday issues of the paper for almost four months in 1712 and constituted the most important criticism of Milton's work published to that time.

Although extended commentary of this nature has been attempted from time to time in periodicals since those of Steele and Addison, it must be admitted that the book is a more suitable vehicle for criticism than the periodical. The periodical excels, however, in the parody, the spoof, the brief adverse review, the criticism of criticism. The “humourous character,” for example—humorous in both the Eighteenth and Twentieth Century senses of the term: the individual with some extreme mannerism; these sketches introduced by Steele and Addison were imitated literally hundreds of times in the century following. Steele's Dick Reptile, the cliche-monger, brings his eighteen-year-old nephew to meetings of the club “to show him good company, and give him a taste of the world. This young fellow sits generally silent; but whenever he opens his mouth or laughs at anything that passes, he is constantly told by his uncle, after a jocular manner, ‘Ay, ay, Jack, you young men think us fools; but we old men know you are.’”¹² Swift borrowed this for his “Genteel and Ingenious Conversations.” Tom Folio, Addison's bibliographical pedant in No. 158, has had many descendants, some still alive. Dr. Samuel Johnson's dimwitted critic Dick Minim of the Idler series is of this ilk. Benjamin Franklin's creation, the widow Silence Dogood, writing in The New-England Courant (1722), provides an interesting variant in that she is the author rather than the victim of satire. In her recipe for composing a New England funeral elegy the joke is of course on Franklin's pious fellow townspeople (many of them, significantly, graduates of Harvard), who were writing and publishing the poetic effusions:

Having chose the Person, take all his Virtues, Excellencies, &c. and if he have not enough, you may borrow some to make up a sufficient Quantity: To these add his last Words, dying Expressions, &c. [Franklin is a dangerous man with an etcetera] if they are to be had; mix all these together, and be sure you strain them well. Then season all with a Handful or two of Melancholy Expressions, such as Dreadful, Deadly, cruel cold Death, unhappy Fate, weeping Eyes, &c. Have mixed all these Ingredients well, put them into the empty Scull of some young Harvard … there let them Ferment for the Space of a Fortnight, and by that Time they will be incorporated into a Body, which take out; and having prepared a sufficient Quantity of double Rhimes, such as Power, Flower; Quiver, Shiver; Grieve us, Leave us; tell you, excel you; Expeditions, Physicians; Fatigue him, Intrigue him, &c. you must spread all upon Paper, and if you can procure a Scrap of Latin to put at the End, it will garnish it mightily. …¹³

This is the stuff of genius: Franklin was sixteen years old when he wrote this. Certainly he had learned his lessons well from reading the Spectator. It is, as noted earlier, the sort of brief literary enterprise which accords preeminently well with periodical journalism. It requires, it should be recognized, its own sort of limited brilliance: Art Buchwald in our time is a great practitioner of the art which originated with the Tatler's Tom Folio and the Spectator's Political Upholsterer.

Less easy to define and discern is the early periodicals' influence on fiction. One of the great cliches of literary criticism is to the effect that the novel began with Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson in the 1740's. It is usual to tip one's hat to Daniel Defoe by way of thanks for his contribution—some maintain that he started it all—but no one has dealt successfully with short fiction in the periodicals, considered as a whole. It is a daunting problem: there are few or no bibliographical guides. Beyond Richmond Bond's book on The Tatler and Donald Kay's recent Short Fiction in the Spectator¹⁴—both very welcome, let me say—there is almost nothing. If you want to find fiction in, say, an early American newspaper, you go and look, issue by issue. This being so, it is easier to treat the novel as having been born in the context of book publication, to look to books as influences on books. Easier to do so but misleading. In all probability, for every one reader who first encountered fiction in book form, twenty read fiction first in periodicals.

In this, as in other aspects of early periodical journalism there is the consideration of responsiveness. Journalism as Steele found it was a provisional medium: topics could be changed, extended, contracted, repeated. It was especially well-adapted for experimentation in fiction and a great deal of such experimentation took place. Hundreds and thousands of examples of short fiction—what I call in my classes “nugget fiction” for want of a better term—appeared in newspapers and magazines in the course of the Eighteenth Century. The way was prepared in the very first number of The Tatler which, after the introductory material about the new paper presents the story, dated from White's Chocolate-house, of a

gentleman, who walks here at the hours when men of quality first appear. … His history is, that on the 9th of September, 1705, being in his one and twentieth year, he was washing his teeth at a tavern window in Pall-Mall, when a fine equipage passed by, and in it a young lady who looked up at him; away goes the coach, and the young gentleman pulled off his nightcap, and instead of rubbing his gums, as he ought to do, … he sits him down, and spoke not a word till twelve at night; after which, he began to enquire, if anybody knew the lady. The company asked, ‘What lady?’ But he said no more until they broke up at six in the morning. All the ensuing winter he went from church to church every Sunday, and from play-house to play-house all the week, but could never find the original of the picture which dwelt in his bosom.

And so on. Steele is here presenting what television viewers today would recognize as a pilot program. He could continue his story in a later number if he chose or he could leave it where it was. Or correspondents could write the editor with different stories of their own, or offer continuations of the original story. More than a century later two writers who probably understood the possibilities of fiction in journalism as well as anyone has before or since were involved in an amusing incident which may serve as a symbolic footnote here. Charles Dickens was publishing his Barnaby Rudge serially in the weekly Clock when a review appeared by a young American informing him how the mystery of the plot would be unraveled and identifying, correctly, who dun it.¹⁵ His correspondent was Edgar Allan Poe. Between them, Poe and Dickens, both journalists, may be said to have brought short fiction and the English novel to maturity.

The point of the story for present purposes is that periodical journalism in the Eighteenth Century was a transatlantic enterprise. More will be said on this later, but it may be noticed that the single most popular Spectator of them all is a piece of nugget fiction set in the English-speaking colonies of America. This is Steele's story of Inkle and Yarico, enormously popular in the Eighteenth Century, translated, adapted, and reprinted again and again.¹⁶ Inkle, a young English merchant, is left ashore in America while searching for provisions. The beautiful Indian maid Yarico rescues him and hides him in a cave, where she provides for his every need.

In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn'd a Language of their own, in which the Voyager communicated to his Mistress, how happy he should be to have her in his Country, where she should be Cloathed in such Silks as his Wastecoat was made of, and be carried in Houses drawn by Horses. …

When an English ship picks them up and takes the happy couple to Barbados, however, Inkle “began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Money he had lost during his stay with Yarico.” He also began thinking how this caper would be received back at the home office in London.

Upon which Considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian Merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child by him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.

This little story of the damsel in distress is interesting for a number of reasons in addition to the obvious one, that is, that it anticipates the long parade of novels about seduced or raped heroines. The villain of the piece, it will be noted, is the white man. Also, although the Inkle-Yarico romance is a fiction, Steele represents it as literally true. This looks forward to the important question of the nature of fictional “truth”, a subject much too large to deal with here and one, incidentally, that is still being vigorously debated today. Two years later Steele published in his periodical The Englishman an account of his interview with another English traveller to America, Alexander Selkirk, who had lived alone on Juan Fernandez Island for four years, the island, as Steele put it, “abounding only with wild Goats, Cats and Rats.” Selkirk's story, which was ture, provided Daniel Defoe with the germ of that great fictional narrative, Robinson Crusoe. The relationship between periodical journalism and fiction, as I have tried to show, is very complex, the more so because many of the authors of the early novel in English were also journalists: Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett.

The simplicity and responsiveness of periodical journalism guaranteed Steele and Addison competition, immediately and in great numbers. In the second autumn of The Tatler's life Addison complained of “those numberless Vermin that feed upon this Paper. …”

To enumerate some of these my doughty antagonists, I was threatened to be answered weekly Tit for Tat: I was undermined by the Whisperer, haunted by Tom Brown's Ghost, scolded at by a Female Tatler, and slandered by another of the same character, under the title of Atalantis. I have been annotated, retattled, examined, and condoled; but it being my standing maxim never to speak ill of the dead, I shall let these authors rest in peace. …¹⁷

As we now see it, Tatler, Spectator and Guardian would not have survived and succeeded if it had not been for the editorial direction which they enjoyed and which their competitors never received, or received only briefly. This direction consisted not only of editorial action as such, that is, providing consistently interesting material, week after week, month after month, much written by Addison and Steele themselves, but also other material provided by friends and acquaintances such as John Hughes, Alexander Pope, George Berkeley and Jonathan Swift. Those who have acted in an editorial capacity themselves will appreciate the amount of ingenuity, diplomacy, and sheer sweat that must have been expended in getting the papers out on deadline and keeping them good. Most of this side of the editorial function was performed by Steele.

Another aspect of editorial direction was the stance which the papers projected. Cover for this stance was provided, as everyone knows, by the framing devices which the editors employed: Isaac Bickerstaff in the case of The Tatler, Mr. Spectator and his Club in the second paper, and Nestor Ironside and his relatives in The Guardian. Steele had borrowed the character Bickerstaff from Jonathan Swift, who had in 1708 used him to predict the imminent death of the quack astrologer and almanac-maker, John Partridge, and then to report the circumstances of Partridge's death, including his death-bed repentance—which Partridge was witless enough to deny in print.¹⁸ This was a delightful hoax which lent the new paper some publicity. But Swift's Bickerstaff has little personality of his own; the focus with Swift is, quite properly, on the fatuous Partridge. As the months unfolded, The Tatler's Bickerstaff assumed a benevolent, humanitarian personality, acquired relatives (a female cousin, D. Distaff, wrote an early letter to the editor for example), and so did many others including Ephraim Bedstaff, Humphrey Wagstaff (Jonathan Swift) and one Offspring Twig. Bickerstaff even had his portrait engraved in 1710, by which time he had assumed his title of Censor of Great Britain. When Addison and Steele began The Spectator the editorial persona Mr. Spectator and his associates in the Club were most carefully delineated. By this time the editors realized fully that the framing device was a source of popular appeal in its own right, a fiction with its own reality, and that the fiction could be used to advance those libertarian and humanitarian ideals in which they believed. Many of these editorial causes are of historical interest only, the battles long since having been won. No-one worries much about duelling any more. Others, such as Steele's advocating the humane treatment of children or the education of women, are perhaps not dead yet.

The papers struck resonant chords in their own time. They were enormously popular from their first appearance and in each case were brought to an end by decision of the editors rather than because sales were declining. An adequate bibliography of reprinted editions and translations into foreign languages during the century after they appeared has never been done, but the reprints and translations were very numerous.¹⁹ They were especially popular in the English-speaking colonies of North America; Louis B. Wright, discussing the colonial literary culture, has asserted that “The most influential writers in the Eighteenth Century were probably Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.”²⁰ A recent study by Walter Edgar of the contents of libraries probated in colonial South Carolina seems to confirm this judgment. Apart from Bibles and prayer books, the collected Spectator appeared more times than any other work. Second and third on the list were Nathan Bailey's Dictionary and William Burkitt's Expository Notes … on the New Testament; but The Guardian was in fourth place and Isaac Bickerstaff's Tatler came fifth. Pope, Shakespeare, and The Whole Duty of Man were well back.²¹

By the time of the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765, periodicals, virtually unknown at the turn of the century, were well-established up and down the Atlantic Coast. Political debate, letters to the editor, short fiction, editorial personae—journalistic practices which had been innovations when Steele introduced them in his papers, had become commonplace. Journalism came of age with the birth of the new republic, indeed played a key role, as Philip Davidson, Edmund Morgan and others have shown, in that birth.²² Steele's reputation was probably at its highest point at about this period. Young James Boswell came to London on his great adventure in 1763, resolving in his diary to “Be like Sir Richard Steele.”²³

The Nineteenth Century coined the term we have been using, journalism, and also decided that it was a term of opprobrium. The earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for “journalism:” “The occupation or profession of a journalist,” is 1833 in the Westminster Review. By 1881 the novelist George Meredith was observing: “Journalism for money is Egyptian bondage”; and Leslie Stephen remembered Carlyle telling a young man, “Journalism is just ditchwater.”²⁴ The new word rather quickly became a term of abuse in literary circles, although it might be observed that a number of good writers, particularly American writers, at one time or another have engaged in Meredith's “Egyptian bondage,” journalism for money: Twain, Hemingway and Mencken of course, but also Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Allen Tate and even Henry James.

It was his identification with journalism, however, that cost Richard Steele his good name in literary history. The memory of his partner Joseph Addison survives because he was a “literary theorist” or an “essayist,” activities that are still acceptable in literary circles. Steele was a great creative journalist but he is almost totally forgotten. It is too bad. He deserved better.

Notes

1. A convenient paperback edition of one of McLuhan's works which has now been around long enough to bear judgment on both style and content is Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

2. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Eisenstein, “The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance,” Past and Present, 45 (1969), 19-89.

3. See Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer, 2nd ed. (1938; rpt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 12-58. No colonial newspapers were established until after 1700.

4. Berkeley as quoted in Lawrence Wroth, A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore: Typothetae of Baltimore, 1922), p. 1; King William: George N. Clark, The Later Stuarts. 1660-1714, rev. ed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), p. 27.

5. Studies in the Early English Periodical, ed. Richmond P. Bond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 5-6.

6. Douglas C. McMurtrie, “The First Decade of Printing in the Royal Province of South Carolina,” The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933), 425-52; Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 2nd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Joel Munsell, 1874), II, 173.

7. “Early Editions of The Tatler,” Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), 121-133.

8. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 61-62.

9. The Tatler, ed. George A. Aitken (London: Duckworth, 1899), I, 64. All subsequent references are to this edition.

10. As quoted in Bond (n.5 above), p. 39.

11. Tatler No. 182 for 8 June 1710. My discussion of The Tatler is everywhere indebted to the fine book by Richmond P. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

12. Tatler No. 132 for 11 February 1710.

13. No. 7 for 25 June 1722, reprinted in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 26.

14. Bond, see n. 11 above; Donald Kay, Short Fiction in The Spectator (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975).

15. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), I, 193.

16. Spectator No. 11 for 13 March 1711. All references are to the edition by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

17. Tatler No. 229 for 26 September 1710.

18. For a full account, see Richmond P. Bond, “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 103-24.

19. Richmond Bond has estimated that from the years of first publication “for the remainder of the century editions of [either The Tatler or The Spectator] were issued on the average of once a year. …” Studies in the Early English Periodical (n. 5 above), p. 19. This estimate does not of course include editions of The Guardian or of Steele's other periodicals.

20. Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 19.

21. Walter B. Edgar, “Some Popular Books in Colonial South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 72 (1971), 174-78.

22. Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution 1763-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1956).

23. Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1950), p. 113, n.5.

24. Meredith and Carlyle as quoted in OED, s.v. “journalism.”