14 - The Periodical Essay and the Rise of Literary Professionalism

Summary

The extraordinary popularity of essays amongst British readers in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of the idea of the professional author – an historical convergence that reflects both the popularity of the genre with writers of the age and the prominence of the essay as a discursive space in which the idea of literary professionalism could be imagined. Throughout the century, essay writers repeatedly emphasised not just the spirit of polite sociability evoked by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, but more self-ironically, the ways that their digressive and miscellaneous style and everyday focus resonated with the pressures of commercial modernity. In doing so, they articulated a version of literary professionalism that grounded its value in precisely the sorts of apparent limitations that authors were embracing as a basis of the essay genre.