Daniel Defoe

Political Journalism: Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele

The gathering reputation and impact of journalism came through the literary and
political journals of the reign of Queen Anne. These flourished in the years
between the lapsing of the licensing Act and the imposition of Stamp Duties
(1712).
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are generally regarded as the most significant
figures in the development of the 18 TH century periodical essay. Together they
produced three publications: the Tattler (1709-11), the Spectator (1711-12), and
the Guardian (1713).
Although the novelist Daniel Defoe made some contributions to its evolution,
Addison and Steele are credited with bringing the periodical essay to maturity.
Appealing to an educated audience, the periodical essay was not scholarly, but
casual in tone, concise, and adaptable to a number of subjects, including daily
life, ethics, religion, science, economics, and social and political issues.
Another innovation brought about by the periodical was the publication of letters
to the editor, which permitted an unprecedented degree of interaction between
author and audience. In fact, Addison and Steele and other editors of the 18 th
Century viewed themselves as moral instructors and arbiters of taste.
The impact of periodicals was both immediate and ongoing. Throughout the
eighteenth century and beyond there were many imitators of Addison and
Steele's publications who modelled their style, content, and editorial policies on
those of the Tattler, the Spectator, and the Guardian.

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

It is in this period when the novel fully developed.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

He is considered the inventor of the epistolary novel and the father of the novel
of sentimental analysis by introducing psychological studies of the characters,
especially women.

Richardson started his career as a novelist quite late in his life when he was
asked to help the uneducated through a sequence of letters

dealing with

everyday subjects.
He decided to make a novel from the letters, and wrote Pamela, or virtue
Rewarded, the story of virtuous 15-year-old maidservant, who worked in a rich
household and resists her masters advances.
Pamela, regarded as the first best-seller in English literature, is a novel that
celebrates the middle-class value of chastity before marriage in opposition to the
lasciviousness of the aristocracy.

Clarissa Harlowe, his second epistolary novel, is considered Richardsons

masterpiece and it

Richardsons success in his own age is mostly due to the subject matter of his
novels, and to the technique of narration he used. As far as the former, that is
the theme of women who defend their virtues from the advances of a powerful
man, it appealed to a vast audience, above all women who constituted the
larger part of the reading public. The other element was the suspense created
by

the technique that Richardson used. He himself defined it as writing to

the moment. This technique is a bit similar to the one used in modern soap
operas: each letter dealing with the present has got elements whose
consequences will happen in the next letter thus letting the reader wait.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

He was the first English novelist to introduce the burlesque element in the novel
by treating trivial things as if they had great importance.

Fielding was different from De Foe and Richardson. He belonged to the

aristocracy and, unlike them, he did not believe in sexual chastity above all
other virtues and, instead, he defended qualities such as courage, generosity or
loyalty. His first novel, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews is to be
considered as a reaction against the hypocrisy of the time as well as a reaction
to Richardsons Pamela. Fielding wanted to ridicule the Puritan view of morality.
The Shamela in the title is a pun on the words of shame and Pamela.
In his second novel, Joseph Andrews, he wrote a story based on the life and
adventures of Joseph, Pamelas brother. The situation is reversed and we have a
young man who works at a ladys that wants to seduce him after her husbands
death. Joseph, who is chaste and virtuous, refuses her advances.
Besides, he wrote Tom Jones (1749), regarded as his best novel, is a picture of
the life of the lower and upper classes of the 18TH century society. Both a
Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel.
Fieldings novels are considered picaresque in style, written in imitation of
Cervantes: they are usually humorous, full of action and excitement).

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)

Irish-born English novelist and humourist, Sterne was considered an anti-novelist

because he did not follow the canons of realistic novel and he was actually closer
to modern one. His novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(1759-1767), recalls the streams of consciousness technique of Joyce and Wold:
it has no plot, no time scheme and it is full of the authors digressions, inventions
and comments. Besides, the temporal dimension is non-existent and clock time
is abandoned for psychological time. It may be supposed that Sterne was
influenced by John Lockes theory of the Association of Ideas.