On 1 July 1712, in his magazine The Spectator – which, widely available in coffeehouses, was probably the closest thing eighteenth-century England had to what we would now think of as a popular blog – Joseph Addison introduced a topic of discussion that might sound familiar to modern readers of fantasy:

Addison, of course, wasn't thinking of anything like the fantasy novel in the modern sense – his main purview was poetry and drama – but his observations were pertinent enough that a contemporary scholar, David Sandner, has argued that Addison could be regarded as ‘the first critic of the fantastic’. Addison does not quite use the terms ‘fantastic’ or ‘fantasy’, however, speaking instead of ‘the reader's imagination’ and ‘the poet's fancy’ – both terms which would increasingly, over the next century or so, move to the foreground in discussions of the fantastic imagination.