Richard Steele

English writer

• Born: March 12, 1672 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: September 1, 1729
• Place of death: Carmarthen, Wales

In collaboration with Joseph Addison, Steele was one of the eighteenth century’s leading essayists. Steele and Addison’s two journals, The Tatler and The Spectator, were highly influential in literary and political circles. Steele also was a successful playwright, and his last play is still considered the consummate sentimental comedy.

Early Life

Richard Steele was born into a poor but noble Protestant Dublin family. His father, also named Richard, died early in his son’s childhood, leaving only œ300 to his widow and three children. Consequently, five-year-old Richard was sent to live with his uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary to the duke of Ormond, and his aunt, Lady Katherine Mildmay. Uncle Henry, who became Steele’s legal guardian, supervised his education until Richard was twelve years old, then enrolled him in London’s prestigious Charterhouse School in 1684. Two years later, Joseph Addison entered the school, and the two became instant friends, prefiguring their famous collaboration.

In 1689, Steele matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford. In the late seventeenth century, Oxford was one of two common paths to success for a poor young man from a good family. Yet, instead of taking a degree, Steele took a second path: military service. In 1692, Steele joined the duke of Ormonde’s Second Troop of Life Guards. Advancement in the English army at this time depended as much on blood lines as on military acumen, so Steele hoped to parlay an officer’s title into a government position. However, it did not happen.

Instead, Steele made a name for himself with his pen while still serving as a soldier. In 1695, his poetic eulogy for the late Queen Mary was published, with a fawning dedication to Baron Cutts, who happened to command a regiment. At this time, writers rarely supported themselves by patronage rather than direct payments for their writings, dedicating their works to nobles who rewarded them with money or a position. In the baron’s case, the reward for Steele’s poem was a commission in his regiment. Steele was pulling himself up by his pen.

Life’s Work

Richard Steele’s next published work was a tribute to his school friend Addison, who by 1700 was establishing himself in the London literary scene, both as a dramatist and as a pamphlet writer. The first decade of the eighteenth century is often considered the beginning of English journalism, but before 1704, most of what later would be called news reporting was done through pamphlet writing, with a separate publication for each topic. In 1700, Addison was one of the major writers for the Whigs, a faction with middle-class mercantile interests, gaining power in Parliament. Consequently, Addison was being vilified in pamphlets from the Whigs’ opponents, the Tories, and Steele came to his defense.

Disappointed by the lack of opportunities arising from his military service, Steele attempted one last volume under the patronage system. Again dedicated to Lord Cutt, this treatise on the moral reform of the soldier, The Christian Hero (1701), became Steele’s first bestseller, going through eight editions in Steele’s lifetime. Also in 1701 he had his first success at Drury Lane, the leading theater of eighteenth century London, with a comedy under the unlikely title and subject The Funeral. A satire on undertakers and lawyers, the play was immediately popular, and it was performed in London through the entire century.

Steele’s next play was not so successful. The Lying Lover (1703) played only ten nights and was never revived. Nevertheless, Steele was now established in the London stage, and since his army career did not seem to be succeeding, he resigned in 1705. In April of that year his third comedy, The Tender Husband, opened to enthusiastic London audiences and became a standard part of the London repertory for two generations. This success gave Steele the security to marry in the spring of 1705, though his wife, Margaret, would die in December of 1706.

Having established himself as a major literary power, Steele offered his services to the Whig Party as a political writer. The Whigs’ opponents, the Tories, associated with Queen Anne and the landed nobles of England, had Steele’s friend Jonathan Swift on their side, satirizing the Whigs with virtual impunity. Steele defended the Whigs and in the process not only lost Swift’s friendship but also subjected himself to vicious ad hominem attacks in the Tory press—mostly written by Swift. Steele’s political prose for the Whigs was contained exclusively in pamphlets, until April, 1707, when he was offered the editorship of the Whigs’ London Gazette. Secure again, he married Mary Scurlock on September 7.

The London Gazette did not lend itself to Steele’s style of political writing. It was literally a news sheet, posting ads and notices of events. Few items ran more than one hundred words. The experience, however, gave Steele valuable editorial skills, and he became accustomed to the three-issues-per-week schedule of the London newspapers. Parlaying this experience into his own paper, Steele launched The Tatler on April 12, 1709. The Tatler offered a greater range to Steele’s satiric genius. Borrowing his former friend Swift’s character, Isaac Bickerstaff, Steele enlarged the fictitious Londoner into the “tatler” of the journal’s title, a jovial busybody who shares the gossip of London with his readers, gently satirizing the city’s vices with good-natured ridicule. In the course of 271 issues, Steele’s longtime friend Joseph Addison joined him in the writing chores, and when The Tatler’s final issue appeared on January 2, 1711, Addison and Steele prepared for a more evenly balanced collaboration, which became the most famous literary pairing of the century.

On March 1, 1711, Addison and Steele inaugurated The Spectator, producing six issues per week through December 6, 1712, for a total of 555 issues. For The Spectator, Steele created not only the title character, Mr. Spectator, but also a whole host of London characters whose exploits were described in the various essays. Although Steele edited numerous periodicals until his death in 1729, his lively writing for The Spectator sealed his reputation. Late in life he attempted one final comedy, The Conscious Lovers (1722), an immediate and lasting success that still is widely anthologized and occasionally performed.

Significance

Although his plays are now rarely read, aside from the model comedy of sentiment, The Conscious Lovers, Richard Steele’s periodical essays are some of the most frequently reprinted writings of the eighteenth century. In a great age of satire, Steele’s prose is as satiric as Swift’s without being as harsh. Where Swift skewered his opponents (including Steele) with personal attacks, Steele held up the general foibles of average Londoners to friendly jest, without using real names or thinly veiled caricatures. Although Swift ridiculed Steele’s convoluted sentence structure, his prose style was consciously imitated for several generations, and his essays appeared as models in elementary composition textbooks for nearly two hundred years after his death.

While Steele’s devotion to the Whig Party lost him the political favor of the Crown throughout the reign of Queen Anne, his patience was rewarded in 1714 with the accession of King George I. George’s greater sympathy with the Whigs led to Steele’s knighting in 1715.

Bibliography

Dammers, Richard H. Richard Steele. Boston: Twayne, 1982. This volume in a standard series on English authors is the ideal starting point for a study of Steele, evaluating all his major works and digesting the relevant criticism.

Goldgar, Bertrand A. The Curse of Party. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Provides background on the Whig versus Tory political issues of the era of The Spectator, with particular focus on the political reasons for Steele’s break with Jonathan Swift.

Kenny, Shirley Strumm, ed. The Plays of Richard Steele. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Complete text of Steele’s four comedies, with an introduction that offers the best brief overview of Steele’s stage career.

Loftis, John. Steele at Drury Lane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Focusing on Steele’s dramatic writing, this literary study is nevertheless a readable and comprehensive portrait of Steele and his life between 1701 and 1722.

Mackie, Erin. Commerce à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in “The Tatler” and “The Spectator.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. An exploration into how Steele’s two most popular periodicals shaped and were shaped by the material and social culture of eighteenth century England.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator.” Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Representative selections of Addison and Steele’s periodical essays, with a generous introduction and head notes, as well as select related contemporary works.

Winton, Calhoun. Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964. A detailed biography covering Steele’s life through 1705.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sir Richard Steele, M.P. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. A continuation of Winton’s earlier work, covering Steele’s life from 1705 to his death in 1729.