Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

This chapter examines the ways in which Grand Tour narratives developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the conception of Europe in that period. It includes Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy &c (1705), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and argues that in the later eighteenth century the description of Europe via a part (classical Italy) gives way to an emphasis on the particular. Recent critical attention to slowness, microspection and proximate ethnography in travel writing studies is applied to Grand Tour sentimentalism and satire in order to propose the value of reading such texts as examples of vertical travel. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s contributions to Grand Tour writing and discourse rearticulated some of the motifs of stillness and intimacy popularised by earlier writers such as Sterne but introduce new frameworks for thinking about Europe which include its possibilities as a site for shared, familial experience.

The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

The small size of old coins and medals attracted the attention of collectors as well as antiquaries throughout the long eighteenth century. Whereas the metallic substance of numismatic objects often provoked narratives of moral decline and decay, the objects’ smallness proved to be a means of reinvigorating the influence they may have exerted on the Enlightenment’s historical imagination. This chapter pays particular attention to the emphasis John Evelyn placed on the smallness of old coins and medals in his influential treatise, Numismata (1697). For Evelyn, the smallness of numismatic objects ensured their historical preservation and enhanced their collectability as well as their usefulness as metaphors of mind, aides-mémoires, and didactic devices. Accordingly, coins’ and medals’ smallness also corresponded to the power they had to circulate and accumulate. The kinds of scale produced by the vast quantities of small numismatic objects that had amassed throughout history stands as a refrain throughout Evelyn’s Numismata, which transforms numismatic objects’ smallness and innumerability into long and far-reaching logics of association.

Chapter 4 examines the early mediation of the events of 1715 Rising within the context of a mediascape for news consisting of both the older form of manuscript newsletters and an increasing number of printed newspapers and periodicals. It compares reports about the developing conflict found in the manuscript newsletters sent to the Newdigate family between May 30 and September 29, 1715 with those printed in five newspapers during the same time period, suggesting that the affordances of the newspaper form both amplified the sense of discontinuity in the news about the Rising as it was unfolding and made that information available to a larger and anonymous audience. It explores the subsequent treatment of the conflict in two periodical essays published in 1715 and 1716: Richard Steele’s The Town-Talk and Joseph Addison’s The Free-Holder. It concludes by considering popular histories written in the immediate aftermath of the 1715 which reprinted information originally found in newsletters and newspapers. These histories both minimized what had been the threat of the 1715 Rising and helped to circulate Jacobite counter-memories.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Joseph Addison’s alignment of fugitive print with the idea of ‘accidental reading’ in The Spectator, as an important context for Samuel Johnson’s later theorisation of fugitive literature and ephemerae in the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter explores the importance of the new medium of the handbill and in particular its role in paper wars of the 1790s.

This chapter investigates the grounds upon which we might address the question of Gothic literature before the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in late 1764. In line with much criticism, it begins by identifying traces of the Gothic in a selection of earlier texts, including Shakespearean drama and the Graveyard poetry of the 1740s. Proposing that this question is best thought of in historical terms, however, it considers how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century critics themselves conceptualised the nation’s ‘Gothick’ literary inheritance, surveying, as it does so, such Whig writers as William Temple, John Dennis, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Joseph Addison and Mark Akenside, as well as works by the Tory John Dryden. Having situated Walpole’s fiction alongside contemporary works by Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson, it argues that a self-conscious spirit of ‘Revival’ is crucial to what would later become known as ‘Gothic fiction’. By way of conclusion, the chapter turns to the case of Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), assessing the extent to which it might be described as an example of pre-Walpolean Gothic.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.