This chapter shows how the two most influential periodicals of Queen Annes reign, The Tatler and The Spectator, reacted to the perceived threat posed by the sometimes chaotic representation of contemporary battles in the newspapers, by offering readers fictionalised and idealised alternatives. This strategy was compatible with the attempts of their authors (mostly Richard Steele and Joseph Addison) to encourage politeness. War is seen to encourage disinterested sociability while the career of soldiering is seen to promote good manners. In the face of growing criticism of the bellicose aspect of European cultural heritage, the periodicals attempt to distinguish morally useful representations of violence from aristocratic codes of honour and from sensational barbarism.

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.

The chapter discusses Mary Robinson’s use of the spectator as a controlling satiric device in The Sylphid – a series of satirical essays published in the pages of the Morning Post 29 October 29, 1799 and January 31, 1800 which aim to expose the artificiality of society and ridicule contemporary fashions and characters. Scholarship on Robinson’s persona in The Sylphid has emphasized its importance in promoting Robinson as a free-ranging flâneuse, thus offering an alternative to the male gaze by challenging its authority and asserting the power of the female gaze. However, Sylphid’s gaze is not necessarily divested of the properties of the male gaze. The essay argues that Robinson employed the chief attributes of the spectator to construct her satirical persona: that is, the claim to objectivity, the properties of invisibility and shape-shifting, as well as the surreptitious surveillance of society whose secrets and flaws the spectator makes public knowledge. Figuring the spectator as an invisible spy not only helped Robinson advance her social satire and blur the boundaries between private and public, but also positioned her within the literary tradition of other satirical spectators, which further cemented her authority as a satirist.

This short book review discusses the philosophical appropriation by Plato and Aristotle of the Greek institution, at once social, political, and religious, of theoria, ‘spectating’. Pythagoras was alleged to have classified those who travelled to the Olympic Games as competitors, traders, or spectators: symbolising the pursuit in human life of honour, economic gain, and wisdom. Plato and Aristotle are often taken accordingly to be committed to what is sometimes labelled ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’, with knowledge of ultimate principles construed as non-discursive intuition or ‘instant ocularity’. But the vision they have in mind is actually the ‘seeing’ constituted by grasp of an explanation of how a whole complex of things hangs together, achieved only after much preparatory, exploratory thought.