Compare and contrast addison and steele as writers
Answers
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) lived rich lives on their own, but here we will briefly talk about them together as a way of introducing the collaborative journalism for which they are now best remembered, the essay series The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712). Born just a few weeks apart, Addison and Steele knew each from the age of thirteen, and they also overlapped at Oxford (though they attended different colleges, Addison going to Queen’s and Magdelen and Steele to Christ Church and Merton). They crossed paths again in London in the early part of the eighteenth century; both of them had political and literary ambitions. By all accounts, Addison and Steele had very different personalities. Addison had many friends and seems to have been brilliant at getting influential people to support and help him. But his personal demeanor was serious and he wrote ambitious poems and the century’s most significant verse tragedy, Cato (1713), a play that is rarely staged now but was a staple of the repertory for decades. Steele was more a journalist at heart, and his plays are all comedies (to be sure, Addison wrote a comedy, too, but it was not very successful, whereas Steele had several hits). And a lot of people seemed to be unable to take Steele very seriously; he was notorious for running up big debts, and was often mocked in the public press of the period.
Surely part of the difference between the two men and the way that they were received by others had to do with issues of class and ethnicity. Steele was Irish, and although he was from a respectable family in Dublin (his father was an attorney) he did not have much of a family network in England to help him make his way in the world. He almost certainly faced his share of the prejudice against Irish people that many English people harbored for centuries. After his time at Oxford (which he left without completing a degree), Steele went into the army, and did well, rising to become a captain. He started writing poetry and drama as a side project while he was still in the military. At some point, though, his military career stalled, and he came to London to work in the government; he got a position at court, and took on the job of editing the official newspaper, the London Gazette. Addison was not from a particularly wealthy or noble family, either, but the Addisons were well-placed in the power structure of the Church of England, the official state church. Addison’s father Lancelot w