This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

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.

What is it to forget a concept, confuse one, or lose one? These are familiar terms of criticism for Kierkegaard, but they can seem strangely otiose or themselves confused. In his essay, Cavell elucidates these terms, their critical purport in Kierkegaard’s practice, and he seeks to offer an assessment of that practice – in particular, to assess whether the practice is itself philosophical. Cavell’s assessment leads him to discuss (early in the essay) the connection between the religious and the psychological and (late) the connection between the aesthetic and the psychological. Jolley reassesses Cavell’s assessment: he refocuses on the forgetting, confusing, or losing of concepts, and on the use of such terms of criticism – in Kierkegaard’s specifically, but also more generally in many philosophical practices that understand themselves as at once logical and dialectical. E.g., What is the difference, for Kierkegaard, between qualitative dialectic and quantitative? Is the making of such a distinction an application, a moment, of one or the other dialectic, and if so, what are the consequences of such self-application? Along the way, Jolley revisits Cavell’s understanding of the connection between the religious and the psychological, and the aesthetic and the psychological.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

Eighteenth-century British culture witnessed the ascendance of the ideology of proper human form, a belief system interlinking concepts of the beautiful, the natural, and the good with proper bodily configuration. The relatively new discourses of physics, biology, and aesthetics, and the re-emergence of the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy, contributed to the formation of this ideology. Many of the period’s literary texts endorsed and/or critiqued social expectations of the beautiful and the natural, as these established the popular assumption that a well-shaped and good-looking body instantiated the proper human form. This assumption in turn associated proper form with high moral standards, the possession of which determined an individual’s social respectability and acceptance. Such physiognomic thinking also equated deformity with depravity. However, authors such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Sarah Scott, each in their own way, exposed the complexities and contradictions inherent in such reasoning. Moreover, the novel – emerging as a genre during this century – assumed an important role by becoming a vehicle by which the culture of sensibility softened and appropriated certain aspects of the ideology of form by recasting defective and deformed characters as objects of pity and charity.

Notes that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the rights to Shakespeare had been consolidated into the hands of the Tonson publishing firm. The Tonsons – oftentimes in concert with a cartel of other London publishers – served as the primary publishers of Shakespeare for the greater part of the eighteenth century. The chapter registers a number of innovations introduced by the Tonson group: the recruitment of well-known writers to serve as editors and the prominent advertising of this fact on edition title pages; the publication of the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare; experimentation with different multivolume formats, breaking with the tradition of single-volume folio publication. The textual strategies of the different editors employed by the Tonsons are explored, with the 'aesthetic' approach of an editor such as Alexander Pope being contrasted with the more scholarly approach of Lewis Theobald. The appearance of the first extended sketch of Shakespeare's life in Nicholas Rowe's edition is also noted.

This chapter begins by demonstrating that an attention to transition was a key element in some prominent literary critical writing of the later eighteenth century. I then argue that, within such writing, the understanding of transition evolves from that explored in my earlier chapters. Borrowing a term that Elizabeth Montagu, William Richardson, and their contemporaries make frequent use of, one might call this evolution a shift from dramatic transition to ‘dramatic character’. Montagu does this as she argues for the moral impact of Shakespeare’s incessantly enthralling dramatic characters, and Richardson when he claims that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters are such perfect imitations of life that their passions and transitions might serve as the subjects of philosophical enquiry into human nature. I use Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1740) to illuminate the tensions inherent in such a critical standpoint, as efforts to explain moments of spectacular dramatic transition in terms of a character's stable identity risk minimising the spectacle that invited such explanation in the first place.

This chapter is devoted to several brief sections and sets the stage for what follows by dealing with some of the key elements of context and background for the remainder of the book. These include: ancient politics and political thought in Greece and especially Rome; the distinction (and non-distinction) between party and faction; Jacobitism; Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the nature of the eighteenth-century British fiscal-military state; and sociability and partisanship. It concludes by highlighting that the most common way to discuss and write about political parties in the eighteenth century was in political, historical, and constitutional terms.

In early modern Europe, international communication in Latin was increasingly counterbalanced by the growth of language contact and exchange among Europeans who favoured the vernacular languages over the classical ones. Not surprisingly, this resulted in the production of dictionaries, initially bilingual and polyglot, and later monolingual, of a large number of languages. Given this context, this chapter studies how the English language and English lexicography were slowly involved in the development of the European tradition of dictionary-making. A number of polyglot, bilingual, and trilingual dictionaries are surveyed in order to show their reciprocal influences and the Continental impact on English dictionaries: in fact, polyglot dictionaries grew out of bilingual ones, bilingual dictionaries were made into trilingual ones, the wordlists of monolingual dictionaries were sometimes taken from bilingual ones, etc. It will also be shown how a few monolingual English dictionaries were related, directly or otherwise, to Continental sources. The chapter will finally focus on Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in order to highlight how it was influenced by Continental models and how, in turn, it exerted its influence on European lexicography.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Joseph Addison’s alignment of fugitive print with the idea of ‘accidental reading’ in The Spectator, as an important context for Samuel Johnson’s later theorisation of fugitive literature and ephemerae in the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter explores the importance of the new medium of the handbill and in particular its role in paper wars of the 1790s.

Chapter 6 deals with the visiting card as a new form of social media that anticipates the text messaging of today, exploring how its novelty caught the attention of Horace Walpole and Samuel Johnson. As a genre that was particularly invested in the representation of social life, the novel is one of the most important sources for understanding the complexities of visiting in eighteenth-century social life and textual media that facilitated and recorded it. With reference to the novels of Jane Austen and, in particular, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), I discuss how prose fiction adapted the capacity of visiting card and other kinds of ephemeral texts in order to realise the affective power of the intimate social encounter entailed in handing over one’s card. I argue that The Absentee is exceptional as a fiction that not only utilises the visiting card but also emulates ephemerology as the Enlightenment’s other science.