Joseph Addison and His Time

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Joseph Addison emerges as a writer of rare moral grace, but his greatness is revealed most vividly through his friendship with the restless, debt-ridden, irresistibly charming Richard Steele. Steele's persuasive apologies, his dependence on Addison's generosity, and the famous scene in which Addison finds a supposed house of hardship overflowing with food, wine, music, and revelry, all expose a bond of loyalty, forgiveness, and amused human understanding. Out of that friendship came The Spectator, a journal that sought to lift journalism above vulgar sensationalism and make wit, philosophy, and morality part of everyday life. The essays introduced a brilliant observing narrator and the unforgettable Sir Roger de Coverly, whose warmth and eccentricity helped turn ordinary society into rich literary material. Addison's finest work, "The Vision of Mirza," carries that moral vision into allegory, tracing humanity's fragile passage through misery, vanity, and passion toward a radiant afterlife for the virtuous. Against this backdrop, the book paints early eighteenth-century London as noisy, disorderly, and often brutal, condemning duelling and savage entertainments like bull-baiting and bear-baiting while showing Addison and Steele as reformers determined to make readers better without sacrificing pleasure.