Three hundred years ago this year, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele launched a daily periodical, which, despite its short-lived existence (1711 to 1712, with a six-month revival in 1714), changed the course of literary history. It was called The Spectator and its effect was to popularise a way of writing about serious subjects that would spread right across the eighteenth century, influencing such writers as Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson. With an estimated readership of around 60,000 (about ten percent of London’s population at the time), its reach, by eighteenth-century standards, was remarkable. Nor was its influence confined to the capital; according to contemporary evidence, it was read in places as far away, and as far apart, as Boston and Sumatra.
Each number consisted of a shortish essay written by either Addison or Steele under the guise of the eponymous Spectator, whose habit it is to wander around London, reporting on its inhabitants and on the ‘Spectator Club’ in particular. This fictional club includes Sir Roger de Coverley, Tory foxhunter and country squire; Will Honeycomb, rakish man-about-town; Sir Andrew Freeport, businessman; and Captain Sentry, retired soldier. Each character represents a social type, a device that allowed the paper’s authors to construct a sort of allegorical satire on contemporary manners, tastes and habits. The publication was thus a blend of diversion and didacticism, of the light-hearted and the serious. Its aim, as the Spectator puts it himself, was to ‘enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality’.
A revolution in both form and content, The Spectator was a response to changing conditions. In 1695, the English parliament had declined to renew the Licensing Act, which had greatly limited the freedom of publishers. Consequently, the early eighteenth century was alive with new opportunities for men of letters such as Addison and Steele. Moreover, a new and changing readership was emerging from England’s increasingly affluent, non-aristocratic middle class. The Spectator was aimed at precisely this readership. As Addison put it in an early edition: ‘It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in Coffee-Houses.’
This ambition was reflected in the style of The Spectator, whose writers favored clarity and simplicity. Eschewing pomposity and meaningless cant, they were, in their own words, ‘nearer in our styles to that of common talk than any other writers’. Needless to say, such efforts were dismissed by the more established writers of the day as pandering to the semi-educated masses. But in point of both their sympathy for the emerging mercantile middle class and their determination to express that sympathy in language that class could understand, Addison and Steele were on the side of history.
Three centuries on from the periodical’s heyday, we are witnessing another revolution in the progress of the written word. Indeed, the spread of internet technology and proliferation of online content, while not precisely analogous to the eighteenth-century publishing boom, has stimulated a widespread debate about the future of newspapers and magazines not entirely dissimilar to that which greeted the periodicals. Once again, the discussion is couched in terms of quantity versus quality; once again, the right to comment is set against a person’s qualification to do so; and once again, the vested interest and literary snobbery have their parts to play.
Take, for example, the reaction to the rumours that one of Australia’s most esteemed literary journals may cease to exist in printed form. Last year, the seventieth anniversary of Meanjin was rather overshadowed by the news that its editor, Sophie Cunningham, had resigned, citing as her reason for doing so an unsatisfactory working relationship with Melbourne University Press, which took over the running of the magazine from Melbourne University in 2008. A suspicion, or rumour, that MUP was planning to move Meanjin online also seems to have been a factor, and it was this which caught the imagination of many in the Republic of Letters. Here, for example, is Peter Craven, writing in The Age towards the end of last year:
If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist. Yes, there are very effective magazines of opinion, such as the ABC’s The Drum or Crikey, which thrive online, but Meanjin – the magazine that in its day published Patrick White and Ezra Pound, and which functioned as a who’s who of the Australian literary and intellectual worlds – will shrivel in the online desert for the very reason that the best of what it has published down the years has had claims to permanence.
This last is a curious point indeed, since permanence is the very thing the internet appears to guarantee, as shown by the fact that every number of the original Spectator can now be downloaded from a website linked to Montclair State University. But it is Craven’s assumption that the literary arts will fail to thrive in an online environment that really cries out for closer inspection. Later in his piece he writes: ‘They have to preserve Meanjin as a magazine a kid might pick up in a library or a punter might see in a bookshop. Anything else will be barbarism.’ Precisely why it would be ‘barbarism’ to move Meanjin out of the shops and onto the internet Craven does not say. But perhaps this strident non sequitur, with its implicit appeal to the constituency of the civilised, is revealing of something deeper than reason.
Clearly, Craven’s opinion on this issue has a lot to do with his love of books. This is a love many people share. I myself own thousands of books, many of which I couldn’t bear to part with. Nevertheless, we make a big mistake if we confuse the wisdom contained in books with the technology of the book itself. ‘Does poetry need paper?’ asked Don Delillo in a recent interview with American PEN, dilating on the relationship between language and internet technology. But poetry, traditionally understood, should not need paper or the internet. Poetry appeals to that part of the brain that is attracted to the patterning of sounds; it has its roots in pre-literate societies where information was passed on orally. Notwithstanding such modern poems as make a fetish of their own textuality, paper is no more fundamental to poetry than the proscenium arch theatre is to drama.
This is not to say, of course, that the internet won’t change the way we read and write. It will; indeed, it already has. But the point is that writing is a technology too – one that in its early days attracted its share of criticism. Indeed, no less a figure than Socrates, whose example Addison wished to follow, worried that the spread of literacy would steer the young away from true wisdom and towards the mere appearance of it. No doubt he was partly right. And no doubt there is much to be said for the view that internet technology not only gives us a false sense of erudition but also serves to undermine the very capacity for deep learning upon which true erudition is founded. But just as only a fool or a dictator could think that the spread of literacy constituted a net loss for humankind, so only the most confirmed reactionary could fail to appreciate that the internet is a wonderful tool in the service of knowledge.
In any case, and when it comes to the internet, it isn’t so much how we read as what we read that excites the doomsayers. Because there is so much trash on the internet, the internet itself is presumed to be at fault, rather as if the blame for Dan Brown could be pinned on Johannes Gutenberg. Certainly this would help to explain the tone of casual elitism that sometimes surrounds debates on the issue, a tone that tends to put one in mind of a desiccated fifteenth-century abbot attempting to defend the scribal tradition. (The subtitle of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine – Being Human in an Age of the Electronic Mob – tells you all you need to know about its thesis.) In this, the critics of the internet really do resemble the critics of The Spectator. As the historian and biographer Jenny Uglow has said of the eighteenth-century publishing boom: ‘The danger, as some saw it, was that culture itself was going to be defined by the new, “vulgar” public.’ And yet The Spectator, which in 1711 would have been unceremoniously tossed back and forth in London’s bustling coffeehouses, is now so esteemed in literary circles that any collection of the best English essays would be incomplete without something from its pages. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that a website such as Arts and Letters Daily – which provides daily links to the best reviews, essays and articles from around the world (and which, I notice, is designed to resemble an eighteenth-century broadsheet) – may one day be seen as a comparable leap forward.
Of course, for those of us who write for a living the internet represents an enormous challenge. With so much material available online, the decline of so-called ‘dead tree journalism’ is as inexorable as it was inevitable. Nor is it clear what business model will come to replace the current one, or even if there is a model that will allow the fourth estate to flourish in a way that protects the professional writer. But the situation is what it is, and literary magazines such as Meanjin are probably in a better position than most to respond to the new environment, partly insulated as they are from the rigours of the marketplace by the fact that they draw a large part of their revenue from public bodies and institutions – a reality that Meanjin’s new editor, Sally Heath, recognises implicitly when she writes, ‘Meanjin cannot be a publicly funded exercise aimed at bringing private pleasure to a fortunate few’. Certainly it would be an opportunity missed if literary magazines were not to try to take advantage of their unique position.
It is here that Addison and Steele’s example may serve as a guide and inspiration. Two points of comparison suggest themselves. The first has to do with circulation. Cheap to produce and widely available, The Spectator and other periodicals had massive readerships by the standards of the day, the market for printed material having grown enormously in the last twenty years. Moreover, the majority of The Spectator’s readers were not themselves subscribers to it but patrons of one of the subscribing coffeehouses. It is easy to see the parallels with the situation in the twenty-first century, where everyone is his own publisher and the readership is (potentially) vast. If Addison and Steele were around today I imagine they’d be online like a shot.
The second point is less obvious and has to do with the content of The Spectator. Clearly, the rise of the periodicals went hand in hand with a change of attitude. In The Literary Critics, George Watson notes how Addison, in his Spectator essays, revolutionised the idea of literary criticism, turning it from an elitist exercise preoccupied with literary precepts to one in which taste was the guiding principle and the general reader the intended audience. The Spectator was thus not only widely available but also peculiarly accessible; without talking down, it managed to bring the man in the street (or the man in the coffeehouse) into the cultural conversation. Needless to say, the capacity of the internet to extend this involvement is almost limitless. But notwithstanding the inclusion of blogs and reader-comment facilities, most magazine and newspaper websites maintain a fairly traditional, we-talk-you-listen relationship with their readers. If literary magazines can find some way of enriching that relationship – by making contributors available for questions, say, or by convening their own online book groups – they may move the process of cultural enfranchisement beyond the merely tokenistic.
Sometimes, in order to see the way forward, one needs to take the long view back. To return to The Spectator and peruse its pages three hundred years after they first appeared is to be struck by the extent to which its editor-authors cherished the flux of eighteenth-century life. Instead of lamenting the spread of high culture, and the ways in which that culture was changing, Addison and Steele embraced the new reality, and, in so doing, helped to shape it. No mere spectators to history, they responded to rapidly changing conditions with vigour and originality. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book.
Each number consisted of a shortish essay written by either Addison or Steele under the guise of the eponymous Spectator, whose habit it is to wander around London, reporting on its inhabitants and on the ‘Spectator Club’ in particular. This fictional club includes Sir Roger de Coverley, Tory foxhunter and country squire; Will Honeycomb, rakish man-about-town; Sir Andrew Freeport, businessman; and Captain Sentry, retired soldier. Each character represents a social type, a device that allowed the paper’s authors to construct a sort of allegorical satire on contemporary manners, tastes and habits. The publication was thus a blend of diversion and didacticism, of the light-hearted and the serious. Its aim, as the Spectator puts it himself, was to ‘enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality’.
A revolution in both form and content, The Spectator was a response to changing conditions. In 1695, the English parliament had declined to renew the Licensing Act, which had greatly limited the freedom of publishers. Consequently, the early eighteenth century was alive with new opportunities for men of letters such as Addison and Steele. Moreover, a new and changing readership was emerging from England’s increasingly affluent, non-aristocratic middle class. The Spectator was aimed at precisely this readership. As Addison put it in an early edition: ‘It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in Coffee-Houses.’
This ambition was reflected in the style of The Spectator, whose writers favored clarity and simplicity. Eschewing pomposity and meaningless cant, they were, in their own words, ‘nearer in our styles to that of common talk than any other writers’. Needless to say, such efforts were dismissed by the more established writers of the day as pandering to the semi-educated masses. But in point of both their sympathy for the emerging mercantile middle class and their determination to express that sympathy in language that class could understand, Addison and Steele were on the side of history.
Three centuries on from the periodical’s heyday, we are witnessing another revolution in the progress of the written word. Indeed, the spread of internet technology and proliferation of online content, while not precisely analogous to the eighteenth-century publishing boom, has stimulated a widespread debate about the future of newspapers and magazines not entirely dissimilar to that which greeted the periodicals. Once again, the discussion is couched in terms of quantity versus quality; once again, the right to comment is set against a person’s qualification to do so; and once again, the vested interest and literary snobbery have their parts to play.
Take, for example, the reaction to the rumours that one of Australia’s most esteemed literary journals may cease to exist in printed form. Last year, the seventieth anniversary of Meanjin was rather overshadowed by the news that its editor, Sophie Cunningham, had resigned, citing as her reason for doing so an unsatisfactory working relationship with Melbourne University Press, which took over the running of the magazine from Melbourne University in 2008. A suspicion, or rumour, that MUP was planning to move Meanjin online also seems to have been a factor, and it was this which caught the imagination of many in the Republic of Letters. Here, for example, is Peter Craven, writing in The Age towards the end of last year:
If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist. Yes, there are very effective magazines of opinion, such as the ABC’s The Drum or Crikey, which thrive online, but Meanjin – the magazine that in its day published Patrick White and Ezra Pound, and which functioned as a who’s who of the Australian literary and intellectual worlds – will shrivel in the online desert for the very reason that the best of what it has published down the years has had claims to permanence.
This last is a curious point indeed, since permanence is the very thing the internet appears to guarantee, as shown by the fact that every number of the original Spectator can now be downloaded from a website linked to Montclair State University. But it is Craven’s assumption that the literary arts will fail to thrive in an online environment that really cries out for closer inspection. Later in his piece he writes: ‘They have to preserve Meanjin as a magazine a kid might pick up in a library or a punter might see in a bookshop. Anything else will be barbarism.’ Precisely why it would be ‘barbarism’ to move Meanjin out of the shops and onto the internet Craven does not say. But perhaps this strident non sequitur, with its implicit appeal to the constituency of the civilised, is revealing of something deeper than reason.
Clearly, Craven’s opinion on this issue has a lot to do with his love of books. This is a love many people share. I myself own thousands of books, many of which I couldn’t bear to part with. Nevertheless, we make a big mistake if we confuse the wisdom contained in books with the technology of the book itself. ‘Does poetry need paper?’ asked Don Delillo in a recent interview with American PEN, dilating on the relationship between language and internet technology. But poetry, traditionally understood, should not need paper or the internet. Poetry appeals to that part of the brain that is attracted to the patterning of sounds; it has its roots in pre-literate societies where information was passed on orally. Notwithstanding such modern poems as make a fetish of their own textuality, paper is no more fundamental to poetry than the proscenium arch theatre is to drama.
This is not to say, of course, that the internet won’t change the way we read and write. It will; indeed, it already has. But the point is that writing is a technology too – one that in its early days attracted its share of criticism. Indeed, no less a figure than Socrates, whose example Addison wished to follow, worried that the spread of literacy would steer the young away from true wisdom and towards the mere appearance of it. No doubt he was partly right. And no doubt there is much to be said for the view that internet technology not only gives us a false sense of erudition but also serves to undermine the very capacity for deep learning upon which true erudition is founded. But just as only a fool or a dictator could think that the spread of literacy constituted a net loss for humankind, so only the most confirmed reactionary could fail to appreciate that the internet is a wonderful tool in the service of knowledge.
In any case, and when it comes to the internet, it isn’t so much how we read as what we read that excites the doomsayers. Because there is so much trash on the internet, the internet itself is presumed to be at fault, rather as if the blame for Dan Brown could be pinned on Johannes Gutenberg. Certainly this would help to explain the tone of casual elitism that sometimes surrounds debates on the issue, a tone that tends to put one in mind of a desiccated fifteenth-century abbot attempting to defend the scribal tradition. (The subtitle of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine – Being Human in an Age of the Electronic Mob – tells you all you need to know about its thesis.) In this, the critics of the internet really do resemble the critics of The Spectator. As the historian and biographer Jenny Uglow has said of the eighteenth-century publishing boom: ‘The danger, as some saw it, was that culture itself was going to be defined by the new, “vulgar” public.’ And yet The Spectator, which in 1711 would have been unceremoniously tossed back and forth in London’s bustling coffeehouses, is now so esteemed in literary circles that any collection of the best English essays would be incomplete without something from its pages. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that a website such as Arts and Letters Daily – which provides daily links to the best reviews, essays and articles from around the world (and which, I notice, is designed to resemble an eighteenth-century broadsheet) – may one day be seen as a comparable leap forward.
Of course, for those of us who write for a living the internet represents an enormous challenge. With so much material available online, the decline of so-called ‘dead tree journalism’ is as inexorable as it was inevitable. Nor is it clear what business model will come to replace the current one, or even if there is a model that will allow the fourth estate to flourish in a way that protects the professional writer. But the situation is what it is, and literary magazines such as Meanjin are probably in a better position than most to respond to the new environment, partly insulated as they are from the rigours of the marketplace by the fact that they draw a large part of their revenue from public bodies and institutions – a reality that Meanjin’s new editor, Sally Heath, recognises implicitly when she writes, ‘Meanjin cannot be a publicly funded exercise aimed at bringing private pleasure to a fortunate few’. Certainly it would be an opportunity missed if literary magazines were not to try to take advantage of their unique position.
It is here that Addison and Steele’s example may serve as a guide and inspiration. Two points of comparison suggest themselves. The first has to do with circulation. Cheap to produce and widely available, The Spectator and other periodicals had massive readerships by the standards of the day, the market for printed material having grown enormously in the last twenty years. Moreover, the majority of The Spectator’s readers were not themselves subscribers to it but patrons of one of the subscribing coffeehouses. It is easy to see the parallels with the situation in the twenty-first century, where everyone is his own publisher and the readership is (potentially) vast. If Addison and Steele were around today I imagine they’d be online like a shot.
The second point is less obvious and has to do with the content of The Spectator. Clearly, the rise of the periodicals went hand in hand with a change of attitude. In The Literary Critics, George Watson notes how Addison, in his Spectator essays, revolutionised the idea of literary criticism, turning it from an elitist exercise preoccupied with literary precepts to one in which taste was the guiding principle and the general reader the intended audience. The Spectator was thus not only widely available but also peculiarly accessible; without talking down, it managed to bring the man in the street (or the man in the coffeehouse) into the cultural conversation. Needless to say, the capacity of the internet to extend this involvement is almost limitless. But notwithstanding the inclusion of blogs and reader-comment facilities, most magazine and newspaper websites maintain a fairly traditional, we-talk-you-listen relationship with their readers. If literary magazines can find some way of enriching that relationship – by making contributors available for questions, say, or by convening their own online book groups – they may move the process of cultural enfranchisement beyond the merely tokenistic.
Sometimes, in order to see the way forward, one needs to take the long view back. To return to The Spectator and peruse its pages three hundred years after they first appeared is to be struck by the extent to which its editor-authors cherished the flux of eighteenth-century life. Instead of lamenting the spread of high culture, and the ways in which that culture was changing, Addison and Steele embraced the new reality, and, in so doing, helped to shape it. No mere spectators to history, they responded to rapidly changing conditions with vigour and originality. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book.
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