A short life of the author
Sir Richard Steele (12 March 1672 – 1 September 1729) was an Irish-born British essayist, playwright, and politician who, together with his school friend Joseph Addison, created the two most important periodical publications in English literary history — The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712, revived 1714) — and in doing so invented a new literary form: the periodical essay, the short, accessible, morally instructive prose piece addressed to the educated but non-scholarly reader. If Addison was the more polished prose stylist, Steele was the more inventive, the more personal, and the more human of the two — and it was Steele’s impulse to create, to experiment, and to address the reader as a friend that gave the periodical essay its distinctive character.
Early Life
Steele was born in Dublin to an English father and an Irish mother, both of whom died when he was young. He was educated at the Charterhouse School in London, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Joseph Addison, and at Merton College, Oxford. He left Oxford without a degree to join the army, serving as a cavalry officer and eventually rising to the rank of captain.
His military career produced his first publication, The Christian Hero (1701), a moral treatise arguing that Christian virtue was superior to pagan heroism and that men of the world should aspire to be good as well as brave. The book was earnest, sincere, and widely mocked by Steele’s fellow soldiers, who found its moralising incompatible with the author’s well-known fondness for taverns, gambling, and women.
The Plays
Steele’s early comedies — The Funeral, or Grief a-la-Mode (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705) — were modest successes that marked a deliberate departure from the cynical, sexually explicit comedies of the Restoration. Steele wanted to reform the English stage by writing plays that were funny without being immoral — a project that his contemporaries regarded with the same scepticism they had directed at The Christian Hero.
His most successful play, The Conscious Lovers (1722), is a sentimental comedy that largely replaces wit with moral sentiment as the source of dramatic interest. It was enormously popular and influential, establishing the “sentimental comedy” that would dominate the English stage for half a century.
The Tatler (1709–1711)
Steele launched The Tatler on 12 April 1709 under the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff” — a name borrowed from Jonathan Swift, who had used it in a satirical hoax. The paper appeared three times a week and covered news, gossip, literary criticism, and moral essays distributed across fictional departments: news from St. James’s Coffee House, entertainment from Will’s, learning from the Grecian.
Steele wrote the majority of the early issues himself, drawing Addison in as a contributor after about fifty numbers. The paper’s innovation was its tone: conversational, urbane, morally serious without being preachy, and addressed to a readership that included women as well as men. It defined the coffee-house culture of early eighteenth-century London and created a literary marketplace for the short prose essay.
The Spectator (1711–1712)
The Spectator, which Steele and Addison launched after The Tatler ended, was an even greater achievement. Published daily, each issue consisted of a single essay on manners, morals, taste, or social behaviour, attributed to “Mr. Spectator,” a fictional observer of London life, and his club of representative social types — Sir Roger de Coverley (the country gentleman), Sir Andrew Freeport (the merchant), Captain Sentry (the soldier), Will Honeycomb (the man of fashion).
The 555 numbers of The Spectator constitute a comprehensive portrait of early Georgian society and a sustained argument for the civilising power of polite conversation, moderate religion, literary taste, and social courtesy. Addison wrote the more famous individual essays — including the celebrated Saturday papers on Milton and the series on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” — but Steele wrote more issues overall and was responsible for the paper’s general conception and tone.
Legacy
Steele and Addison’s periodicals shaped the English essay for two centuries. Samuel Johnson, whose own periodical The Rambler was directly modelled on The Spectator, called Addison’s prose “the model of the middle style.” The familiar essay — personal, conversational, mildly didactic — descends directly from their work. The concept of the periodical as a vehicle for forming public taste and moral opinion was their invention.
Steele’s personal reputation was less elevated than Addison’s. He was perpetually in debt, frequently drunk, and his political career (he served in Parliament and was knighted in 1715) was marked by controversy. But his warmth, his generosity, and his genuine if inconsistent moral seriousness give his writing a humanity that Addison’s more polished prose sometimes lacks.
Collecting Steele
Original issues of The Tatler and The Spectator are collectible — individual numbers in good condition bring $20–$100. The collected editions (the first book edition of The Spectator appeared in 1712–1715) are available in various eighteenth-century printings. Steele’s plays are found in collected editions of Restoration and early Georgian drama. His works are primarily of scholarly and historical interest to collectors.