Chapter 2 examines how the Mall in St James’s Park – the prime location for promenading in eighteenth-century London – became a key site for writers and artists who turned a humorous eye on the social ambitions of London’s middling sorts. Here, men and women congregated “to see and be seen, to censure and be censured”, as one account put it, and comic accounts of the promenade frequently describe the Mall as a battleground in which new, commercial wealth clashes with forms of inherited status. The literary and visual satires examined here respond to concerns about the blurring of distinctions by suggesting, albeit wishfully, that attempts by the middling sorts to imitate those higher up the social scale are always transparent, and true rank and status always reveals itself.

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.

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.