Introduction

Abstract

The periodical essay has suffered a strange fate in literary history. Along with the novel, it is the form of writing with the deepest ties to eighteenth-century Britain. Unlike the novel, however, periodical essays in their classical form more or less disappeared — conveniently enough for an eighteenth-century genre — by 1800. These essays were ubiquitous while they lasted, with close to two hundred series having been published in half as many years. Yet now the genre is mainly represented by the handful of numbers from the Tatler and Spectator included in most eighteenth-century literature anthologies.¹ The at best minor status of the periodical essay in our standard literary histories might be enough to account for the deficiency that this book aims to correct: the lack of a sustained, focused history of the genre. But the recent turn to periodical studies among scholars of Enlightenment would suggest that the time is especially ripe for such a history to appear.