Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.

This essay explores some of the plethora of modes of censorship of British ‘imperial’ theatre through the long eighteenth century. Suppression ranged from the informal censorship of ‘Oriental’ performance practiced by Sir Richard Steele in managerial practice and periodical censure through cancellations of productions of Patriot drama attacking colonial slavery deemed offensive by Walpole’s Licenser. While productions set in distant lands increasingly offered an allegorical means of critiquing British imperial practices, in the decades of reaction following the French and Haiitian Revolutions, plays that explicitly denounced English participation in the slave trade, such as Oroonoko, were eventually expunged from the stage by nervous managers. Helping explain this managerial censorship. William Hazlitt’s amazed and anxious response to a rare performance of Oroonoko in 1815 reveals the terror inspired in White audiences by the belief that Black spectators might re-enact the slave revolts modelled on stage by heroic African protagonists. Censorship of imperial subjects thus ranged from the attempted control of dramatic subject matter through to the governmental or managerial erasure of texts and performances deemed subversive or revolutionary.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

Chapter 4 examines the early mediation of the events of 1715 Rising within the context of a mediascape for news consisting of both the older form of manuscript newsletters and an increasing number of printed newspapers and periodicals. It compares reports about the developing conflict found in the manuscript newsletters sent to the Newdigate family between May 30 and September 29, 1715 with those printed in five newspapers during the same time period, suggesting that the affordances of the newspaper form both amplified the sense of discontinuity in the news about the Rising as it was unfolding and made that information available to a larger and anonymous audience. It explores the subsequent treatment of the conflict in two periodical essays published in 1715 and 1716: Richard Steele’s The Town-Talk and Joseph Addison’s The Free-Holder. It concludes by considering popular histories written in the immediate aftermath of the 1715 which reprinted information originally found in newsletters and newspapers. These histories both minimized what had been the threat of the 1715 Rising and helped to circulate Jacobite counter-memories.

Built around two visits to Westminster Abbey, this short coda compares early eighteenth-century attitudes to theatrical transitions to William Hazlitt's and Charles Lamb's writing about actors. Both Lamb and Hazlitt emerge as hostile to what I have called the art of transition, as they each denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution.

This chapter takes a careful corpus-based look at the politeness vocabulary of the eighteenth century. It starts with a wide-angle perspective of the terms politeness, civility and courtesy in general-purpose corpora before moving on to a more detailed analysis of a larger selection of politeness- and impoliteness-related lexical items in a dedicated corpus of eighteenth-century epistolary novels by Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney. In the second part of this chapter, two case studies are devoted to the sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele and the domestic tragedy The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell by George Lillo. Both plays have a strong and explicit educational intent. They want to instruct and entertain and help their audiences to become better human beings who rise above the mere observance of rules of etiquette.