[In this essay, Maurer explores how early periodicals depicted and defined gender roles, family dynamics, and other social and domestic values.]

The revolution in which the slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité” was proclaimed began in 1789, but the alliance between the three elements was forged much earlier. Modern patriarchy is fraternal in form and the original contract is a fraternal pact.

—Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

From Rae Blanchard in 1929 to Kathryn Shevelow in 1989,¹ critics have examined the ways in which Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's periodical publications, in particular the Tatler (1709-11) and the Spectator (1711-12), acted to influence and define their female audience in the process of constructing a new ideology of domestic femininity: “Through the work of their authoritative yet benign personae, these early periodicals established a definition of feminine nature, rewarded the behavior that adhered to this definition, and punished behaviors that did not.” In particular, these texts “created a situation in which female readers were cast into these roles of daughters and wives in the act of reading the periodical ‘properly.’”² In addition, such critics as Terry Eagleton and Michael Ketcham have attempted to analyze the ways in which the Spectator in particular generated an inclusive discursive realm, serving a variety of social and political uses.³ In The Function of Criticism, Eagleton, following Jürgen Habermas,⁴ argues for the early eighteenth-century periodicals' central place in bringing about a bourgeois “public sphere,” a site of discourse that, by cutting across class and party lines, served to unify an English ruling bloc through culture.⁵ Ketcham argues that in contrast to the dominant seventeenth-century model of society, which saw public and private, city and country, land and money as conflicting polarities, the newer eighteenth-century model, expressed within the Spectator, attempted to represent a unified and cohesive social order embodied within an intimate group—both the Spectator Club itself and the affective family—as secure against the self-interest and disorder of the outside world.

Although Ketcham's analysis does include some discussion of the family as an important part of the Spectator's redefinition of social groups,⁶ it is nevertheless notable that in the emphasis on inclusion and social definition, neither Eagleton nor Ketcham adequately addresses the part played by gender. In this article, I look at the intersection and interrelation of these two constructions—of a new domestic femininity, as well as of a nonpartisan, noncompetitive and familial masculinity—as they are manifested within the shift in narrative structure and situation from the Tatler to the Spectator. As a literary endeavor, the Tatler is defined fictionally as the production of one man—the “Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff”—and is aimed in particular toward women. Bickerstaff announces in the Tatler's first number: “I resolve also to have something which may be of Entertainment to the Fair Sex, in Honour of whom, I have invented the Title of this Paper.” In contrast, the later periodical eidolon is an unnamed, anonymous “Spectator,” whose voice sounds only within the confines of his (all-male) club. I argue that this shift creates a different model of intratextual relations, which is then manifested in the relations between text and reader. Just as Bickerstaff reconstitutes gossip and “tattle” into materials for the reformation of “manners and morals,” so too does Mr. Spectator exploit the possibilities inherent within “spectatorship,” as a theme, a process, and a rhetorical position. These shifts in narrative, as well as in authorial relations—the Tatler is primarily Steele's production, whereas Addison shared equal responsibility for the Spectator's original 555 numbers⁷—allowed for the fuller development of a discourse about male homosocial relations.

Yet the ideology of male consolidation that is, I think, accurately described by Eagleton and Ketcham, depends in large part upon the creation and then effacement of a female “other”—a construct itself dependent upon a rigid separation between male and female qualities and appropriate behaviors. Unlike the earlier periodical productions of John Dunton, which often described male and female attributes, as well as sexual appetites, as relatively comparable, different in degree rather than in kind,⁸ the Tatler promulgated an incommensurability of both bodies and spirits, declaring that “there is a sort of Sex in Souls” and that “the Soul of a Man and that of a Woman are made very unlike, according to the Employments for which they are designed,” so that even “the Virtues have respectively a Masculine and a Feminine Cast.”⁹ As Shevelow has written, “Conflating souls, minds and virtues in order to assign gender opposition, Steele here was less concerned with situating gender within the framework of Christian doctrine than he was with reifying, by recourse to an essentialist argument, a notion of intrinsic gender opposition.”¹⁰ For a woman, reading the Tatler meant educating herself into that essentialist position, becoming a desirable object and thus desirable woman to the extent to which she internalized the periodical's pronouncements and narrative examples.

In concentrating on women's education, however, critics have overlooked the ideological construction of the male reader. For him, reading the Tatler meant identifying with Isaac Bickerstaff, as a character older, of the world, opinionated, and benevolently paternalistic in his dictates. Through Bickerstaff's functions as “a correspondent, a persona, [and a] figure of wise male behavior,” Steele asserted his eidolon's “authority to articulate the periodical's moral standards and reformist sentiments.”¹¹ The familial model for this interaction, best exemplified in the papers detailing the relationship between Bickerstaff—who is sixty-four—and his young half-sister Jenny Distaff, is that of a father to a daughter. As Shevelow has persuasively argued, this relationship takes its model and moral authority from the genre of father-daughter conduct literature, which, in the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth centuries, provided norms for female behavior and feminine gender identity. Jenny Distaff's “education,” from a flighty, feisty, pleasure-loving young woman into the dedicated, loving, and obedient wife of “Tranquillus”—a trader whom Bickerstaff has chosen for her—serves as a model for the Tatler's female readers, just as Bickerstaff's paternal, indeed patriarchal, attitudes and actions provide a paradigm for correct male behavior.¹²

For whether by direct example, as with Jenny Distaff, or through stories, often presented as responses to readers' queries, men are being taught to control women, to educate them into proper daughters, wives, and mothers. In the second number, a Bickerstaff-type figure mends the marriage of his beautiful but ill-natured niece by prescribing a “Cordial” that she must hold in her mouth when with her husband; that is, he makes her “good” by keeping her silent. Another man, by seeing through his wife's “little Arts”—her faking “Fits” and “Convulsions” to get her own way—turns her into a dutiful wife (No. 23). In a reworking of The Taming of the Shrew, still another man cures his wife's bad temper by dissimulating one of his own (No. 231). In all of these examples, as with Jenny Distaff, women are seen as both more open to, as well as more in need of, reform. Yet this contrast is also formulated as a result of inherent gender difference. In Tatler No. 139, Bickerstaff ruminates upon “the many Nights I have sat up for some Months past in the greatest Anxiety for the Good of my Neighbors and Contemporaries,” noting that “it is no small Discouragement to me, to see how slow a Progress I make in the Reformation of the World.” Although his tone is satirical by virtue of its exaggeration, the analysis that follows is wholly serious, when, to give women credit, he notes that they have indeed been better subjects than men, for women's “tender Hearts are much more susceptible of good Impressions, than the Minds of the other Sex.” Women respond emotionally, men intellectually: although this perspective is hardly new to us, the sentimentalized configuration of that difference is worth noting, as is its explanation with reference to separate spheres: “Business and Ambition take up Men's Thoughts too much to leave Room for Philosophy: but if you speak to Women in a Style and Manner proper to approach them, they never fail to improve by your Counsel.” Of course the “you” refers here exclusively to men: although men may be too busy to pay much attention to their own reformation, an integral part of their “Business” must be their attention to reforming women. In deference, therefore, to this greater receptivity in women, Bickerstaff writes that “I shall therefore for the future turn my Thoughts more particularly to their Service, and study the best Methods to adorn their Persons, and inform their Minds with the justest Methods to make them what Nature designed them, the most beauteous Objects of our Eyes, and the most agreeable Companions of our Lives.”

A separation of spheres—women to the domestic realm, men to the realm of economics and politics—is fundamental to the Tatler's reforming process. Necessary as well is the narrative authority invested in Bickerstaff, an authority Richard Steele, in the periodical's last number, claims has been lost or certainly compromised by his eidolon's loss of anonymity.¹³ It seems no coincidence, therefore, that the next periodical persona—Mr. Spectator—is narratively distinguished by his public silence, as well as by his position as an observer rather than a worldly participant. Mr. Spectator's description of his own “neutrality” encompasses both a personal and a party political level. His spectatorial position not only enables him to know far more than he could ever have practical experience of—he has been “a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artisan,” and is, moreover, “well-versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father”—but it also gives him the moral detachment to “discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game.”¹⁴ In addition, his statement of political disinterest—“I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories” (No. 1)—becomes a model for civic interaction in general. In Spectator No. 125, written by Addison, Mr. Spectator comments that “there cannot a greater Judgment befal a Country than such a dreadful Spirit of Division as rends a Government into two distinct People, and makes them greater Strangers and more adverse to one another, than if they were actually two different Nations.” These divisions are as dangerous personally as they are civilly: the “private Evils which they produce in the Heart of almost every particular Person … is very fatal both to men's Morals and their Understandings; It sinks the Vertue of a Nation, and not only so, but destroys even Common Sense.”

The allegedly neutral and therefore emulatable position of Mr. Spectator is also enacted by the Spectator Club itself, particularly in the characters of two of its members, the Tory squire Sir Roger de Coverly and the Whig merchant Sir Andrew Freeport. In No. 126, Mr. Spectator uses the example of his two companions, who, although “of different Principles,” one “inclined to the landed and the other to the moneyed Interest,” nevertheless become a model for the kind of neutral association he had argued for in the previous number, an association of detached merit rather than partisan interest. In both Sir Roger and Sir Andrew, political “Humour” is “so moderate … that it proceeds no farther than to an agreeable Raillery, which very often diverts the rest of the Club.” In the supposedly disinterested discourse of the public sphere, dissent becomes diversion; enemies are friends.

Yet as a model for human interaction, the Spectator Club is clearly a model for male interaction. Although in No. 34 the Spectator claims that “my Readers too have the Satisfaction to find, that there is no Rank or Degree among them who have not their Representative in this Club, and that there is always some Body present who will take Care of their respective Interests,” it is notable that the “interests” of women are supposedly taken up by Will Honeycomb, an over-the-hill “ladies man,” itself a stereotypical masculine “type” that had been thoroughly satirized in the Tatler and was to come in for its share of attack in the Spectator as well. So much for women's interests. In the Spectator Club, women's “interest” turns out to be sexual interest in women.¹⁵

The supposedly nonpartisan, apolitical stance of both the Spectator Club and the periodical itself—a stance that, as Eagleton and others¹⁶ have pointed out, represents a definite political position—depends upon women's exclusion both from the club and from the realm of politics. Women can serve as the “common enemy,” the “other,” against whom, and in the name of whom, men of conflicting interests can unite. The articulation of an essentialist gender identity is a crucial part of this process, and in the pages of the Spectator, two things are represented as especially odious: the crossing of gender boundaries, in the form of women who dress as men, or men who act like women, and the involvement of women in party politics. Sempronia, who mingles her toilet with political talk (No. 45), is an example of the dangerous “Fopperies” that will be a consequence of the peace with France; in a slightly later number, Mr. Spectator's attack on women's use of patches to signify party affiliation unites the two elements when he writes that women should distinguish themselves as “tender Mothers and faithful Wives” rather than as “furious Partizans,” for “Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country” (No. 81).

If the Tatler's guiding textual dynamic is enacted familially as that between fathers and daughters, developing into that between husbands and wives, I would argue that the Spectator, while still retaining elements of that dynamic, is more strongly dominated by a different relationship—the one between fathers and sons. This homosocial bond parallels, indeed epitomizes, the masculine consolidation, toleration, and nonpartisan spirit exemplified by and within the Spectator Club. The essentiality of gender difference discussed in relation to the Tatler and maintained throughout the Spectator constitutes the father-daughter, husband-wife relationship as one of permanent inequality, because it is based upon the fixed characteristic of sex. In the relationship between father and son, however, the inequality is only temporary, structured by disparities in age and experience. In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman argues that both Locke and Rousseau “agreed that the natural duty of parents to care for their children gave them rightful authority, but, they argued against Filmer, parental power was temporary.” As Pateman notes, however, for Locke, “children” become “sons,” for she continues: “Once out of their nonage, at the age of maturity, sons become as free as their fathers and, like them, must agree to be governed.” Pateman cites Locke's Second Treatise for emphasis: “Thus we are born Free, as we are born Rational; … Age that brings one, brings with it the other too. And thus we see how natural Freedom and Subjection to Parents may consist together, and are both founded on the same principle. A Child is Free by his Father's Title, by his Father's Understanding, which is to govern him, till he hath it of his own.”¹⁷

I wish to argue that the potential to see the father-son relation as only temporarily unequal is a phenomenon that gains increasing importance in the early eighteenth century, as England's shift from a rural, landed economy toward a commercial, trade-based system allowed for representations of new, noncompetitive relations between fathers and sons, as well as often between the oldest son and his brother or brothers. In Tatler No. 189, Bickerstaff contrasts desirably empathetic parent-child relations, in which parents “repeat their Lives in their Offspring; and their Concern for them is so near, that they feel all their Sufferings and Enjoyments as much as if they regarded their own proper Persons,” with the brutishly competitive situation of “the common Race of 'Squires in this Kingdom [who] use their Sons as Persons that are waiting only for their Funerals, and Spies upon their Health and Happiness; as indeed they are by their own making them such.”¹⁸

Under a mercantile system, however, all can, in theory, work and prosper simultaneously. Unlike the Tatler, where Bickerstaff's trading nephew is eclipsed in a woman's favor by his scholar and courtier brothers (No. 207), the Spectator is extremely explicit in its celebration of business and trade. Although Mr. Spectator expresses an extremely warm, almost filial fondness for the kindly but doddering Sir Roger de Coverly, it is clearly Sir Andrew Freeport who exemplifies desirable masculine and civic characteristics: he is a man of “indefatigable Industry, strong Reason, and great Experience”; he has a “natural unaffected Eloquence”; he is “richer than other Men” (No. 2). In Spectator No. 69, Addison writes that “there are not more useful Members in a Commonwealth than Merchants. They knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Works for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great.” Indeed, he sets up trading interests as comparable with, if not superior to, landed ones: “Trade, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire: it has multiplied the Number of the Rich, made our Landed Estates infinitely more Valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an Accession of other Estates as Valuable as the Lands themselves.”¹⁹

The Tatler's, and more explicitly the Spectator's representations of “commercial man” can thus become a way to rethink the very separation of gender and class. I agree with the historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, when in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, they argue that gender and class always operate together, that consciousness of class always takes a gendered form.²⁰ Their study attempts to dismantle traditional separations of public and private, to demonstrate how “middle-class men who sought to be ‘someone,’ to count as individuals because of their wealth, their power to command or their capacity to influence people, were, in fact, embedded in networks of familial and female support which underpinned their rise to public prominence.”²¹ Beginning in the late seventeenth century, England's mercantile expansion, the development of London as a center of international commerce, and the concomitant “birth of a consumer society”²² contributed toward constituting trade, traders, and trading as essential components of contemporary discourse and debate. While the development of a coherent and solidified middle-class identity may have been a later eighteenth-century phenomenon, writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were certainly concerned with describing, as well as often promoting, behaviors and values—for both men and women—later to be termed “middle-class.”

The process of tracing these shifts in notions of value and virtue is extremely problematic, for these changes were simultaneous rather than sequential, the categories themselves not unified and discrete but contradictory and fluid. What needs to be emphasized are the tensions and interactions among two different embodiments of exemplary masculinity: the gentleman of landed property, who could “claim the public virtue of disinterestedness,”²³ and the “gentleman trader,” who acts to reconfigure aristocratic benevolence and generosity in a new form. As texts written by men who span both worlds, the Tatler and particularly the Spectator can be read as barometers of the dialectical process of class consolidation. In the Spectator, the triumph of Whig economic and political interests is made possible by the denial of those interests within a social position construed as neutral and thus universally benevolent. The period's crucial issue—how to make commercial man virtuous man²⁴—is enacted within the pages of the Spectator by developing a new ideology of commercial relations articulated in family terms, and a new ideology of familial relations described in economic terms. The process of “multiplying affinities” described by Samuel Clarke in his “Discourse of Natural Religion,” first printed in 1706, expands the familial language of “natural affection” to encompass “the agreeing community of all mankind”:

Next to that natural self-love, or care of his own preservation, which every one necessarily has in the first place for himself; there is in all men a certain natural affection for their children and posterity, who have a dependence upon them; and for their near relations and friends, who have an intimacy with them. And because the nature of man is such, that they cannot live comfortably in independent families, without still further society and commerce with each other; therefore they naturally desire to increase their dependencies, by multiplying affinities, and to enlarge their friendships, by mutual good offices, and to establish societies, by a communication of arts and labour: till by degrees the affection of single persons, becomes a friendship of families; and this enlarges itself to society of towns and cities and nations; and terminates in the agreeing community of all mankind.²⁵

The conflation of economic and homosocial benevolence is best exemplified in the Spectator's “Cornelii,” a family of “eminent Traders” in which the personal relationships among father, sons and brothers are depicted as entirely compatible with—indeed, a reason for the success of—their business interests: “their good Correspondence with each other is useful to all that know them as well as to themselves: And their Friendship, Good-will, and kind Offices, are disposed of joyntly as well as their Fortune; so that no one ever obliged one of them, who had not the Obligation multiplied in Returns from them all” (No. 192). This Edenic portrait of masculine familial relations is celebrated by Addison as a “sublime Pleasure, … as sacred as Friendship, as pleasurable as Love, and as joyful as Religion.” Although throughout these periodicals, women are most commonly the focus of spectatorial approbation, here Addison tellingly writes that “it is the most beautiful Object the Eyes of Man can behold, to see a Man of Worth and his Son live in an entire unreserved Correspondence. The mutual Kindness and Affection between them give an inexpressible Satisfaction to all who know them” (No. 192).

As a way further to explicate this intersection of economics and family, I want to modify the position taken by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph.²⁶ Hirschman argues for a shift from the Augustinian perception of three comparable passions—the desire for money and possessions, the desire for power, and sexual desire—to a belief in the late seventeenth century that economic activity could emerge as a benign form of “interest,” rather than a destructive passion, which could itself serve to counteract the tyrannical abuse of power. Although Hirschman's analysis is particularly helpful in understanding the early eighteenth-century view of economic activity as personally benevolent and socially useful, his emphasis on the relation between economics and politics ignores or even erases the third “passion”—sexual lust. I believe that the ideology of a domestic, benevolent, even “companionate” masculinity becomes a way not of sublimating passions to interests but of integrating the two within the context of the sentimental nuclear family.

And yet, the idealized view of the family implicit within its sentimental construction acts to mask areas of discomfiture and anxiety about the family's proper roles and functions, in particular with regard to the kinds of “expenditure” necessary to a developing consumer society. When configured as detached from the spheres of business and especially politics, the family can vindicate production, consumption, and expenditure as integral to masculinity. Sexual desire, when channeled into marriage, produces the legitimate heirs who will both prosper from and participate in the father's material enterprise. Power, the most dangerous of passions according to Hirschman's conception, is achieved not by the aristocratic means of status or wealth, but through the benevolent and educative relation to one's (male) offspring: “It is not in the Power of all Men to leave illustrious Names or great Fortunes to their Posterity, but they can very much conduce to their having Industry, Probity, Valour, and Justice. It is in every Man's Power to leave his Son the Honour of descending from a virtuous Man, and add the Blessing of Heaven to whatever he leaves him” (Spectator No. 192). Thus the status of the “New Man” becomes increasingly defined by his ability to provide for his family, in material, social, and spiritual terms. He, in turn, becomes dependent upon that family unit to provide his raison d'être. This situation, however, comprises another site of anxiety, for to be dependent—even upon one's dependents—can prove psychologically threatening.

It becomes, then, part of emerging domesticity to define femininity in a way that distinguishes women's attributes, behaviors, even bodily responses from those of men. Women's enforced absence from the public realm becomes reinscribed as their necessary presence within the domestic sphere. And yet, it is a presence riddled with ambivalence. While the periodical's approbative attitude toward the marital relationship is epitomized by Mr. Spectator's claim to “make the Word Wife the most agreeable and delightful Name in Nature” (No. 490), in this text the ideal form of human relationship is represented not by husbands and wives but by fathers and sons.²⁷ The original but temporary inequality of the father and son is transformed in the interests of trade into a “partnership” between brothers, thus exemplifying the move, described by Pateman, from paternal or traditional patriarchy to fraternal patriarchy. To recast Freud's anthropological narrative, the brothers no longer need to kill the father, they just go into business with him.

The Spectator provides a compelling instance of such male bonding. We witness relationships of collaboration rather than competition on both structural and narrative levels. Structural examples range from the extra-fictional authorial collaboration of Addison and Steele to the fictional joint authorship of the Spectator Club; textual examples include numerous stories of cooperation among family members. Although both social historians and literary critics usually focus on bonds between husbands and wives, or on the general relations of parents to children, I believe that a consideration of male relations is equally important to an understanding of the ideology of the family. Begun in the Tatler and realized more fully in the Spectator, the discourse of masculinity best exemplified in the relation between fathers and sons served to educate male readers into their familial roles, which became simultaneously the expression of a class position.

The paternal characteristics that I am terming “sentimental” are not, of course, exclusive to the middle classes. Such attributes, however, become represented in a way that serves to mark them as fundamentally middle class, a form of “partnership” impossible within families in which inheritance was determined by “the need to keep together the estate upon which the standing of gentry families depended.”²⁸ In contrast, partible inheritance, as well as the opportunity for sons to join their father in the family business,²⁹ permitted a form of economic affiliation that could also carry moral and emotional weight. The most extreme form of this father-son “partnership” is manifested in the type I shall call the “fraternal father.” He, like the father in the Cornelii family, “lives with his Sons like their eldest Brother” (Spectator No. 192). It is therefore no accident that the exemplary Cornelii are a family of “eminent Traders,” so that their benevolent familial relations have public implications, and can produce “Returns” that are both pecuniary and societal.

All of the “moral” characteristics associated with the exemplary sentimental father are made possible by changes in economic structures. A father's lack of filial partiality (Tatler No. 235)—emulating Noah rather than Jacob—is manifested materially in partible inheritance or business partnership rather than primogeniture; financial liberality (Tatler No. 60) can result from the fact that the son's learning to manage the family fortune is also in his father's interest; sympathy, empathy, and understanding (Spectator No. 263) are possible in part because father and son are functioning together within the same or a similar system. The “transplanted self-love” of Spectator No. 192 is in part transplanted self-interest. The idealized image of the “sentimental father,” who protects, supports, advises, and understands his son or sons is thus a composite portrait. Formed, on the one hand, in light of the middle-class fraternal ideal, he is also developed in contrast to the traditionally authoritative “patriarchal father”: the king who decrees rather than discusses, has complete control over familial resources, and competes for those resources with his heir or heirs. Such a type is associated, as we shall see, primarily with the aristocracy and landed gentry. As in Tatler No. 189 cited above, the patriarchal father serves mainly to personify the negative aspects of aristocratic paternity: selfishness, profligacy, competitiveness, and insensitivity. Taking its motto from Terence—“My son should enjoy these things equally with me, or even more, because youth is more appropriate for these things”—Spectator No. 496 describes those fathers who unbecomingly pursue their own pleasures at the expense of their sons. Not only do these men provide a negative role model by failing to teach their sons “to resist the Impetuosity of growing Desires,” but they also deplete the stock that should allow their offspring to live honorable lives: “Narrowness in their Circumstances has made many Youths to supply themselves as Debauchees, commence Cheats and Rascals.”³⁰

And yet, the Spectator's portraits of such men are complemented, and conquered, by the presence of their opposite, the “fraternal father.” Although the supposed egalitarianism implicit in this latter form of father-son relations is manifested less frequently than is, for example, the father's role of benevolent guardian to his son,³¹ the fraternal ideal is both omnipresent and extremely important. In addition to promoting a critique of patriarchal attitudes, such an ideal can also buttress a belief in liberal individualism. In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman contends that by obscuring the part of the social contract that depends upon men's subordination of women, contract theory, far from being opposed to patriarchal right, reinscribes that right in a new configuration: “modern patriarchy is fraternal in form and the original contract is a fraternal pact.”³² Thus while the concept of a cooperative “fraternal fatherhood” might seem seductive in its promise of male relations apparently stripped of hierarchy and dominance, Pateman's analysis reminds us of such a concept's dark underside. In spite of Defoe's analogy between a trading partnership and a marriage, since both are “engaged in for better for worse, till the years expire,”³³ in this period the only “true” contract, and therefore partnership, can exist between men.³⁴ And what makes possible that partnership, and the model of egalitarianism upon which it is based, is the subordination of women. In these new, increasingly middle-class representations of masculine virtue, modeled upon the relations between the sentimental father and his “towardly” son (Spectator No. 263), oppressive relations are reinscribed, albeit in new forms. Such “fraternal patriarchy” serves as both a basis for the capitalist endeavor, and as a means of perpetuating women's subordination and exploitation.

In the Spectator, the sentimental father is exemplary in large part because he combines patriarchal and fraternal roles. Such mentoring can cross both party lines³⁵ and class positions. Spectator No. 330 includes a letter from the eighteen-year-old “Son of a Merchant of the City of London,” who, after his father's death, is rescued from both aristocratic profligacy and professional oblivion by a country “Gentleman.” The son, whose mother has already died, inherits a modest estate, but “without Friend or Guardian to instruct me in the Management or Enjoyment of it,” soon encounters bad company and worse debt. Later, in an attempt at self-reformation, he begins to “study the Law,” but, equally bereft of advice, fails to progress: “I trifled away a whole year in looking over a thousand intricacies without Friend to apply to in case of doubt.” Good-hearted but ill-guided, our correspondent is delivered by a “relation,” who, observing in him “a good inclination,” carries him to his country seat. Under the “Favour and Patronage” of this virtuous man, the youth blossoms: his mentor has provided him with books, horses, and good conversation; inspired him with confidence, so that he feels “acceptable” wherever he goes; and most important, inclined him toward virtue. The youth writes that his patron has achieved such influence by blending superior knowledge, experience, and position with sympathetic understanding: “he has an Authority of a Father over me, founded upon the Love of a Brother.” Indeed his letter is meant as both a tribute to his mentor, and an exhortation to other men in similar positions to follow such an example: “If a Gentleman of Figure in a County would make his Family a Pattern of Sobriety, good Sense, and Breeding, and would kindly endeavour to influence the Education and growing Prospects of the younger Gentry about him, I am apt to believe it would save him a great deal of stale Beer on a publick Occasion, and render him the Leader of his Country from their Gratitude to him, instead of being a Slave to their Riots and Tumults in order to be made their Representative.”³⁶ Such commendable behavior, he writes, is desirable for all men who have achieved some kind of success, because it costs nothing and returns much: “others may gain Preferments and Fortunes from their Patrons, but I have, I hope, received from mine good Habits and Virtues.”

While these representations of idealized paternal benevolence emphasize the father or guardian's concern for “the Virtue and Disposition of his Children, [rather] than their Advancement or Wealth” (Spectator No. 192), the commercial man is, nevertheless, a better father precisely because of his superior ability to be “liberal without the least expense of [his] own Fortune” (Spectator No. 348), to share his mobile resources with his sons rather than compete with them for limited ones. Similar to the process through which potentially dangerous masculine sexual desire is purified when directed toward a chaste spouse,³⁷ so too is wealth rendered virtuous only when attached to virtuous behavior, thus serving to moralize worldly success: “Good Habits are what will certainly improve a Man's Fortune and Reputation; but on the other Side, Affluence of Fortune will not as probably produce good Affections of the Mind” (Spectator No. 192).

In Spectator No. 240, the benevolent qualities of these relations are exemplified in a letter that tells the story of a trader saved from “criminal Pleasures, some Excesses, and a general loose Conduct” by “the handsome Behaviour of a learned, generous, and wealthy Man,” of no relation, who takes the correspondent under his wing. Described, indeed, as a “good Angel,” this man puts his “Friendship,” “Advice,” and money at the youth's disposal, giving him “the Use of any Part of his Fortune, to apply the Measures he should propose to me, for the Improvement of my own.” A veritable sentimental son, the narrator reflects that “I assure you I cannot recollect the Goodness and Confusion of the good Man when he spoke to this Purpose to me without melting into Tears”; he is, however, able to put his gratitude into practice, not through direct returns to his mentor, who is far from needing them, but “by being ready to serve others to my utmost Ability, as far as is consistent with the Prudence” his mentor prescribes. Perhaps the correspondent's greatest gift from his mentor is not the “present Ease and Plenty of my Circumstances” made possible by the use of his money, but his having learned from him “the Government of my Passions, and the Regulation of my Desires.”³⁸ It is this last quality that the young trader distinguishes with the title of “Heroick Virtue in common Life,” and he asks the Spectator to furnish more such examples.

Spectator No. 248 extends the attributes of benevolent paternity to encompass possibilities for all men by comparing the worthy and public actions performed by those in “conspicuous Stations of Life” with the good works of the more common folk. Mr. Spectator points out that the former are in fact obliged by their “great Talents and high Birth” to “exert some noble Inclinations for the Service of the World” as part of their inheritance, for, if ignored, “such Advantages become Misfortunes, and Shade and Privacy are a more eligible Portion.” Romanticizing noble behavior can thus obscure the “heroick” possibilities available to men “in lower Scenes of Life”: “It is in every Man's Power in the World who is above meer Poverty, not only to do things worthy but heroick.”³⁹ By practicing the “Self-Denial” that is the “great Foundation of civil Virtue,” all men can be in a position to help others. Actions by those who “in the domestick Way of Life deny themselves many Advantages, to satisfy a generous Benevolence which they bear to their Friends oppressed with Distresses and Calamities,” are thus juxtaposed with those “great and exalted Spirits [who] undertake the Pursuit of hazardous Actions for the Good of others, at the same time gratifying their Passion for Glory.” It is not that the gentleman has less interest in helping other men, but that the commercial man has more resources with which to do so.

Two letters exemplify the number's most “sentimental” moments. The first concerns two brothers, and is structured by relations of both blood and inheritance. Lapirus, a younger son, has inherited from his father a “great Estate … by reason of the dissolute Behaviour of the First-born.” “Shame and Contrition,” however, have reformed the profligate brother; he became, according to Mr. Spectator, “as remarkable for his good Qualities as formerly for his Errors.” Lapirus, now in the role of father, restores the succession in the following letter:

Honoured Brother,

I enclose to you the Deeds whereby my Father gave me this House and Land: Had he lived till now he would not have bestowed it in that Manner; he took it from the Man you were, and I restore it to the Man you are.

Witnessing Lapirus's mixture of fraternal and paternal generosity can, however, obscure the fact that his own position is diminished, if not outright destroyed, by his good deed, as it were. Thus while he might sign himself “Your affectionate Brother,” his action reinscribes patriarchal succession. The second letter, in contrast, presents an example of fraternal affection that may very well surpass any other portrait in the Tatler or Spectator series. Implicitly categorized as a “love letter” by Mr. Spectator's comment that “I think there is more Spirit and true Gallantry in it than in any Letter I have ever read from Strephon to Phillis,” this missive describes an encounter between two tradesmen, which Mr. Spectator inserts “even in the mercantile honest Stile in which it was sent”:

Sir,

I have heard of the Casualties which have involved you in extreme Distress at this Time; and knowing you to be a Man of great Good-nature, Industry, and Probity, have resolved to stand by you. Be of good Chear, the Bearer brings with him five thousand Pounds, and has my Order to answer your drawing as much more on my Account. I did this in Haste, for Fear I should come too late for your Relief; but you may value your self with me to the Sum of fifty thousand Pounds; for I can very chearfully run the Hazard of being so much less rich than I am now, to save an honest Man whom I love.

This narrative, described by Mr. Spectator as a “City Romance,” rewrites the Tatler's earlier example of “Heroic Love in the City” (No. 213), in which the trader “Tom Trueman” wins his bride by saving her father from ruin at the hands of a corrupt factor. Paradoxically, Trueman is exemplary both because he rescues the father and because he forgoes the economic benefits incurred by such deliverance.⁴⁰ In the Spectator story, no woman is necessary to inspire male bonding. The increasing consignment of women to an allegedly isolated domestic sphere positions them as the necessary centerpiece of the nuclear family in their roles of wife and mother and, ironically, as the least important members of that intimate unit. In this period, as the sentimental father is melded into the sentimental man, women's protective, nurturing, and even moral qualities are shadowed by the greater possession of those same characteristics by men.

In what is perhaps the Spectator's most damning portrait of paternal relations gone awry, illegitimacy is configured as paternal betrayal. In No. 203, women who give birth to illegitimate children are mentioned solely in their child-bearing role, for their sexual behavior is never noted; removed from judgment, they are neither condemned nor pitied. It is as if they exist only as repositories for the seed of those “young Patriarchs,” who, “like heedless Spendthrifts that squander away their Estates before they are Masters of them, have raised up their whole stock of Children before Marriage.” Not only do the men in this “Generation of Vermin” squander their resources, but they also misuse their time and energies. The consummate, as it were, bad businessmen, these men apply themselves with “indefatigable Diligence” to the wrong things. Extraordinarily inventive in pursuing their “vicious Amour[s],” they misapply their resources by channeling them improperly. As Mr. Spectator notes, they “might conquer their corrupt Inclinations with half the Pains they are at in gratifying them.” The potent libertine, as he is represented in this text, betrays not his mistress but his legal wife, should he have one, and, most important, his progeny. Society itself, according to Mr. Spectator, colludes in such libertine behavior by using terminology that condemns the victims rather than the perpetrators: “And here I cannot but take notice of those depraved Notions which prevail among us, and which must have taken Rise from our natural Inclination to favour a Vice to which we are so very prone, namely, that Bastardy and Cuckoldom should be looked upon as Reproaches, and that the Ignominy which is only due to Lewdness and Falsehood, should fall in so unreasonable a manner upon the Persons who are Innocent.”

Addison, through the persona of Mr. Spectator,⁴¹ uses the voice of another to make his most powerful argument against the fathering of illegitimate children. He prints a letter written, not by a repentant father, but by a wronged son. In this most pathetic of epistles, we find represented all that the sentimental father shuns. Plagued by “continual Uneasiness” and “continual Anxiety,” this far from prodigal son is both infantilized and feminized. Deprived of paternal “Tenderness … Love and Conversation,” he is kept at “so vast a Distance” and treated so haughtily that he cannot express his feelings or communicate his situation to his father, nor can he “render him the Duties of a Son.” Uneducated in any occupation or profession but that of “Gentleman,” he is wholly dependent upon his father's doubtful “Assistance.” In his own terms, he is “a Monster strangely sprung up in Nature, which every one is ashamed to own.”

In this representation, reforming attention is focused not upon the wife or mother, who must be virginal before and chaste within marriage to ensure the “legitimacy” of her husband's heirs, but upon the chastity of the man himself, who must restrict the fulfillment of his appetites to the sphere of lawful marriage; status as father should follow, not precede, position as husband. The letter ends with the correspondent asking for Mr. Spectator's advice about his unhappy situation, with particular regard to the “part, I being unlawfully born, may claim of the Man's Affection who begot me, and how far in your Opinion I am to be thought his Son, or he acknowledged my Father.” Although Mr. Spectator does not here respond directly, of course his implicit answer is that even if legal ties are absent, emotional, moral, and material obligations are very much present. By distinguishing the products of custom from supposedly natural “Affections,” this text can criticize cultural norms at the same time as it reaffirms them. Just as Mr. Spectator's desire “to make the word Wife the most agreeable and delightful Name in Nature” (No. 490) elides nature and culture, instinct and law, so too does the construction of the “sentimental father” represent as intrinsic to all virtuous men attributes specific to a distinctive group at a particular historical moment.

I have argued that in the eighteenth century, the configuration of the family as the sphere of masculine virtue allows that family to justify men's pursuits of both passions and interests. Yet the shift into a “fraternal” representation of familial relations via a father and son “partnership”—an association seemingly cooperative, benevolent, and without hierarchies of power and dominance—erases the oppressive implications, for both men and women, of that new masculine role. As the sentimental father develops into the sentimental man, men (as sons) are being socialized to assume the role of the active producer as if their life depended on it, for indeed it does; and these sons are taught to sustain their position through the subordination and objectification of desirably “dependent” women. For despite the concept of a “doux commerce,”⁴² mercantile relations are neither benevolent nor cooperative. Thus while the emerging ideology of a moral sentimental fatherhood made possible by commercial relations seems to be about good connections among certain men, this investment in sentimental masculinity can also reveal both the guilt and the human cost of these relations.

Notes

1. Rae Blanchard, “Richard Steele and the Status of Women,” Studies in Philology 26 (1929): 325-55; Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989).

2. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, p. 140.

3. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984); Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance and Form in the “Spectator” Papers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

5. Recent feminist analyses of the “public sphere” as a site for the construction of bourgeois individuality have emphasized the gendered quality of that construction. Exposing the “liberal fiction” of discursive universality by stressing its necessary, rather than just contingent, exclusion of women, such critics as Joan Landes and Nancy Fraser have used gender as a lens through which to refract the gendered bias and basis of Habermas's analysis. See Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Introduction and 40-53; and Nancy Fraser, “What's Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” New German Critique, no. 35 (Spring/Summer 1985): 97-131, reprinted in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 113-33. Ironically, the analyses of both Habermas and Eagleton after him replicate the exclusionary practices present within the very texts they discuss.

6. See Ketcham, Transparent Designs, chapter 4, “The Family and Intimate Community.”

7. Although in the Tatler's last number (271) Steele credits Addison with “the finest strokes of wit and humour in all Mr. Bickerstaff's Lucubrations,” in addition to help with specific “noble discourses,” Joseph Otten states that Addison's actual share amounted to one-fifth: “He wrote 49 issues completely by himself and contributed a share in 22 other numbers” (Joseph Addison [Boston: Twayne, 1982], 69). Richmond Bond ascribes 47 complete papers to Addison (“The Tatler”: The Making of a Literary Journal [Harvard University Press, 1971], 20). Compare this with Donald Bond's assessment of Addison's share in the Spectator: Bond claims that of the original 555 numbers, Addison wrote 202 of the “independent essays” that contained no contributed letters, whereas Steele wrote 89; of papers made up wholly or in part of letters or contributed matter Addison wrote 49 and Steele 162 (Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 1:lix).

8. I am thinking here of John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1691-97) and Night-Walker (1696-97). For an analysis of the ways in which these texts' emphasis on marital chastity became the focus for a discussion of changing familial relations, see Shawn Lisa Maurer, “Chaste Heterosexuality in the Early English Periodical,” Restoration 16, 1 (Spring 1992): 38-55.

9. Tatler, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), No. 172. All further references will be cited by issue number and included in the text.

10. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 100.

11. Ibid., 102.

12. Note that in Nos. 10, 33, 36, and 247, in which Jenny Distaff takes over while Bickerstaff is “out of town,” she answers correspondence, as well as conducting discussions of love “in all its forms” (No. 36). Yet all of the numbers dealing with Jenny's marriage and marital situation—75, 79, 85, 104, and 143—are narrated by Bickerstaff.

13. Richmond Bond argues that there may have been additional motivations behind Steele's decision to end the Tatler. Although political compromise with the powerful Tory leader Sir Robert Harley, who had been a subject of Steele's satire some months earlier “cannot now be demonstrated to the point of full acceptance, … it seems plausible as a major factor in Steele's decision and perhaps as the strongest” (186). See also pages 59-69 for Bond's discussion of overt political issues within the Tatler.

14. Spectator, ed. Bond, No. 1. All further references will be cited by issue number and included in the text.

15. Also conspicuous, of course, is the absence of any representative of the poor or laboring classes—but such an omission is subject for another essay.

16. See also Edward Bloom and Lillian Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal: In the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971), and especially Andrew Lee Elioseff's “Review Essay: Joseph Addison's Political Animal: Middle-Class Idealism in Crisis,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1973): 372-81.

17. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 84; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), second treatise, section 60.

18. For an analysis of the gentry's greater employment of primogeniture in the seventeenth century, see Joan Thirsk, “Younger Brothers in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Rural Economy of England (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 335-57.

19. For additional, and comparably celebratory, representations of trade and traders, see Spectator Nos. 21, 108, 174, 232, 283, 348, and 549.

20. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.

21. Ibid.

22. See Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

23. John Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey: English Literature in History, 1730-1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 22.

24. This implies, of course, its inverse: how to make virtuous man commercial man.

25. British Moralists, 1650-1800, ed. D. D. Raphael, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1:210.

26. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). See part 1, “How the Interests Were Called Upon to Counteract the Passions.”

27. While the ostensible focus of this article is the workings of sentiment in relations between men, feminist critiques of sentimental family ideology that emphasize its detrimental effect upon women, and especially wives, both underlie and make possible my own approach. In “Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family,” Susan Moller Okin stresses the ironic fact that both doctrines of individual rights and ideologies of increased familial “affect” brought women only greater limitations. She contends that the “development—or idealizing—of the sentimental domestic family, much documented by historians in recent years,” provided “a new rationale for the subordination of women” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 11, 1 [1981]: 65). Okin's discussion of family history thus challenges “the alleged connection between the growing idealization of families as private sanctuaries of sentiment, on the one hand, and an improvement in prevalent conceptions of and attitudes toward women, on the other” (74). Rather than ameliorating the situation of women, the conception of the family as “sentimental and domesticated” served instead “as reinforcement for the patriarchal relations between men and women that had been temporarily threatened by seventeenth-century individualism” (74). In contradiction to the assertions of historian Lawrence Stone (The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977]) and Randolph Trumbach (The Rise of the Egalitarian Family [New York: Academic Press, 1978]), Okin cites three negative effects of sentimental family ideology: a stronger division than ever before between “women's spheres of dependence and domesticity” and the “outside world”; women's increasing characterization as “creatures of sentiment and love rather than of the rationality that was perceived as necessary for citizenship”; and, most important to this essay, “a greater intensifying of masculine authority and sentiment in both private and public spheres” (74). Moreover, Susan Staves's recent study, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), criticizes the very basis of sentimental familial relations as articulated by Stone and Trumbach. Staves writes that “both historians have succumbed to a bourgeois illusion that there can be a clear separation between, on the one hand, a public and economic sphere, and, on the other, a private domestic sphere of true feeling and personal authenticity. In this aspect of their work, they have accepted the very ideological formulation created by eighteenth-century advocates of domesticity” (223). While all parts of Staves's book are relevant to this topic, see in particular her concluding chapter, especially pages 221-28.

28. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 112.

29. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 205-6.

30. Tatler No. 189 ofers a very near example of such parental misrule in a branch of Bickerstaff's own family, where children's desires are sacrificed to those of their father rather than compatible with them. Unlike good fathers, who favorably “repeat their Lives in their Offspring,” bad ones just keep perpetuating the same sins: “When one of the Family has, in the Pursuit of Foxes, and in the Entertainment of Clowns, ran out the Third Part of the Value of his Estate, such a Spendthrift has dressed up his eldest Son, and married what they call a Good Fortune, who has supported the Father as a Tyrant over them, during his Life, in the same House or Neighborhood: The Son in Succession has just taken the same Method to keep up his Dignity, till the Mortgages he has eat and drank himself into, have reduced him to the Necessity of sacrificing his Son also, in Imitation of his Progenitor.”

    But not only do decent sons suffer the faults of unprincipled fathers; the exigencies of landed inheritance can also create situations like that of “Ruricola” (Spectator No. 192), in which an admirable father is harnessed to a reprobate son. Although Ruricola's own life “was one continued Series of worthy Actions and gentleman-like Inclinations,” he is to be succeeded by “the Booby his Heir,” who is his father's opposite in every way. As “the Companion of drunken Clowns,” this son “knows no Sense of Praise but in the Flattery he receives from his own Servants; his Pleasures are mean and inordinate, his Language base and filthy, his Behaviour rough and absurd.”

31. Just as the reformist position of the Spectator is in many ways defined and motivated by the particular qualities of “spectatorship,” so too does the rubric of “guardianship” inform the moral and political position of the Guardian, a periodical published by Steele, with help from Addison, from March 12 to October 1, 1713. The periodical's eidolon, Nestor Ironside, derives his epither and his authority from his actual experience as guardian first to Marmaduke Lizard, the son and heir of his college friend, Sir Ambrose Lizard, and then to Marmaduke's own children.

32. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 77.

33. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Tradesman (1728), in The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1841), vols. 17 and 18, ch. 33, p. 169.

34. Chapter 22 (213-27) of Defoe's Compleat English Tradesman deals in much detail with the relation of women to their husbands' business. In addition to criticizing those “gentlewomen” who marry traders but scorn their business, Defoe also commends those women who become knowledgeable, less for its own sake than for their ability to maintain that business for their children should they become widowed. Women's place in business thus becomes “natural”—in contrast to the “unnatural” widow who might “think herself above having children by a tradesman”—when it maintains the link between men: “I have known many a widow that would have thought it otherwise below her, has engaged herself in her husband's business, and carried it on, purely to bring her eldest son up to it, and has preserved it for him, and which has been an estate to him; whereas otherwise it must have been lost, and he would have had the world to seek for a new business” (218).

35. See the story of “Tom the Bounteous” in Spectator No. 346, who, although “so known a Tory,” supports others on a collegial rather than a paternal level by “lend[ing] at the ordinary Interest, to give Men of less Fortune Opportunities of making greater Advantages.”

36. Compare the dialogue between Sir Roger de Coverly and Sir Andrew Freeport in Spectator No. 174; in No. 330, however, wealth is to be found in guidance rather than in labor.

37. While this theme runs throughout these texts, see in particular Tatler No. 120, Addison's allegory of love and lust.

38. Compare the discussion of the “Rake” in Tatler No. 27: represented as “the most agreeable of all bad Characters,” a Rake's “Faults proceed not from Choice or Inclination, but from strong Powers and Appetites, which are in Youth too violent for the Curb of Reason, good Sense, good Manners and good Nature. … His Desires run away with him through the Strength and Force of a lively Imagination, which hurries him on to unlawful Pleasures, before Reason has Power to come to his Rescue.” One could argue that in this depiction, “Reason” personifies the benevolent older guardian figure, whose timely intervention turns a bad young man good, or keeps a good one that way. In this sense, the “Rake” is in many ways a fatherless son.

39. See also Tatler No. 202: “I would have a Thing to be esteemed as Heroick which is great and uncommon in the Circumstances in the Man who performs it. Thus there would be no Virtue in human Life which every one of the Species would not have a Pretence to arrive at, and an Ardency to exert.”

40. The story seems conventional enough at first: a young apprentice falls in love with his master's daughter; the love is reciprocated, but the family business is failing, due, the young man suspects, “to the ill Management of a Factor, in whom his Master had an entire Confidence.” To remedy the situation, our hero goes on a “quest,” absenting himself from his true love in order to spend the rest of his apprenticeship with the “Foreign Correspondent [and become] acquainted with all that concerned his Master.” He learns his lessons so well that he is able to save his master ten thousand pounds. Soon afterward, Trueman inherits “a considerable Estate” from an uncle; he then returns to England and “demands” his beloved of her father. Along with his daughter, the generous and grateful merchant offers Trueman “the 10000 l. he had saved him, with the farther Proposal of resigning to him all his Business,” but Trueman refuses both, and retires “into the Country withh his Bride, contented with his own Fortune, though perfectly skill'd in the Methods of Improving it.”

41. Steele had himself fathered an illegitimate child, but unlike the examples cited in this text, he did not disown her: “During his time in the Footguards [1694] Steele engaged in amorous adventures and received for his trouble a baby girl, born to Elizabeth Tonson, sister of Steele's future publisher. To his credit, he acknowledged the child and later brought her into his home” (Richard H. Dammers, Richard Steele [Boston: Twayne, 1982], 3).

42. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 56-63.

For their assistance with versions of this article, I am grateful to Julie Ellison, James Winn, Adela Pinch, Wendy Motooka, and Brittain Smith.