War and the culture of politeness: the case of The Tatler and The Spectator
Andrew Lincoln, QMUL, March 2010
During the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the
eighteenth, transformations in the financing and organization of the military allowed
England, and then Britain, to wage war abroad on an unprecedented scale. At the
same time some writers were trying to imagine and promote an idea of civil society
governed by norms of a benevolent “politeness.” One function of the new culture of
politeness was to reconcile readers to the massive increase in military activity. This
paper will explore the process of reconciliation in the two most influential periodicals
of the early eighteenth century, The Tatler and The Spectator, which are sometimes
credited with a key role in the development of polite standards of taste in eighteenthcentury Britain.1
The Tatler (1709-10) and the first run of The Spectator (1711-12) both
appeared during the War of the Spanish Succession. They were produced in years of
war weariness, when peace was in prospect but tantalisingly out of reach, and when
successive Whig and Tory administrations needed to attune the public to the
continuation of an expensive campaign. These were years of deep crisis, in which
public discontent with the war was fuelled by high taxes, enforced recruitment, losses
sustained in battle, government concessions to the allies, and party propaganda.2 The
revived Spectator appeared from June to December 1714, when peace had arrived and
Britain was struggling to cope with the return of disbanded soldiers. The Tatler and
The Spectator both worked to counteract the effect upon public opinion of such
problems.
1
Before they began work on these periodicals, Addison and Steele had already
served the war effort on behalf of the Whig administration. When he launched The
Tatler, Captain Richard Steele, one-time member of the 34th Regiment of Foot, was
editor of the London Gazette, the official government newspaper and the primary
source of war news in England.3 Addison was at this time Secretary to the Earl of
Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1704, he had written what was to become the
most admired poetic celebration of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim, The
Campaign, and in 1707 had published an anonymous pamphlet urging a massive
increase in the levy of English soldiers to crush Louis XIV and protect British
commercial interests.4 The Spectator was launched at the beginning of 1711, some
months after a Tory election victory had removed these writers’ patrons from office.
But both Addison and Steele remained committed to promoting the war, and they
adapted the periodical essay to this end.
War news
The establishment of a regular army in the later seventeenth century had made war an
activity that most English gentlemen would only read about. And war generated an
ever-increasing volume of reading materials to satisfy a growing demand. The Tatler
and The Spectator show a keen awareness of this development, and seek to influence
it. Both publications satirize the contemporary appetite for war news, and the
willingness of newspapers to gratify it. It is no accident that the advent of the first
daily newspapers in England coincided with the beginning of the War of the Spanish
Succession, since the interest generated by war helped to make daily news a viable
proposition.5 But the criticisms of news in both The Tatler and The Spectator suggest
that war presented a special problem both to the writer and reader of news. In the
2
absence of professional foreign correspondents, papers translated reports of overseas
news verbatim from foreign newspapers, inserted under headings identifying the
source—which was often a newspaper representing the enemy’s point of view, such
as the Paris Gazette. Readers were expected to interpret news in relation to its source,
rather than to take it at face value. The dependence on uncertain and conflicting
sources, and the rapid change in events in war, led news writers to hedge their reports
with ambiguities. According to The Tatler, “The Tautology, the Contradictions, the
Doubts, and Wants of Confirmations, are what keep up imaginary Entertainments in
empty Heads.”6 Since the war was a focus of bitter party rivalry, war news was
particularly liable to be spun according to party views. In the new age of public
finance there was cause to be concerned about the economic impact of news. Public
credit rose and fell in direct reaction to reports of battles, which, as Addison
complained in the Spectator, were generally cried about the streets of London “with
the same Precipitation as Fire.”7 If the obsessive interest generated by war news was
seen as a special problem, it also came to be seen in The Spectator as offering a
special opportunity. Mr Spectator sees himself as attempting to capture a new
readership brought into being by the rage for news of war: “This general Curiosity has
been raised and inflamed by our late Wars, and, if rightly directed, might be of good
Use to a Person who has such a Thirst awakened in him.” He argues that the news
reader might be encouraged to “apply himself to History, Travels,” and other
improving writings.8 But if war has helped to provide the conditions for the
development of a polite culture, readers had to be given a view of war compatible
with such a culture.
War and Polite Society
3
The Tatler and The Spectator encourage politeness in an attempt to imagine a cultural
middle ground between the landed and commercial interests, and to modify the
acceptable norms of gentlemanly behavior “from a primarily courtly and aristocratic
code, given to the display of power and wealth, to a more bourgeois, commercial and
feminised code, given to the display of benevolence, and sensibility.”9 In practice,
Addison and Steele’s cultural program is carefully distinguished from the Whig
political program it advances, and this is particularly apparent in their treatment of
war. In these periodicals, war is detached from specific political or economic
objectives, such as the aggressive pursuit of commercial advantage that Addison had
recommended in his pamphlet of 1707. It is discussed in terms of manners and
morals, in terms of principles that can be regarded as “natural” and “universal.” When
the causes of war are discussed, they are assigned to the personal ambition of Louis
XIV, and described in terms of a corrupted taste and judgment.10 In accord with this
cultural project, the periodicals have to suggest that modern war does not negate the
values of polite society, but reinforces them; that a modern urban world, in which the
better-off have more leisure to spend in “Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in
Coffee-Houses,” can resist the corruptions of luxury and sustain the moral fortitude
necessary to meet the increasing demands of war; and that a modern professional
army can operate without brutalizing its soldiers.
The periodical had to encourage an appropriate response to the fate of those
killed in battle, those widowed or orphaned, maimed, or displaced. Strategically
positioned references show how such effects of war, which might lower morale or stir
discontent, can instead strengthen public spirit by giving private individuals at home
scope for acts of benevolence. After noting the successful launch of a new lottery to
4
support the war effort, the fictional author of The Tatler, Isaac Bickerstaff, announces
that he has settled an annual pension on a family of Palatine war-refugees (whose
presence in London was decried in Tory publications).11 When then public is absorbed
with the Sacheverell case, he cites the case of two war-orphans whose education is to
be maintained through act of charity.12 Sometimes the losses of war are addressed in
overtly fictional narratives written in a sentimental or gently comic mode. Their
uncomplicated outlines and clear moral focus represent the antithesis of the
bewildering war report. One paper presents the contrasting letters of two love rivals
(Jack Careless and Colonel Constant) written before they were killed at the battle of
Almanzar.13 Another describes the deaths of a Corporal and a Private at the Siege of
Namur, and shows how their animosity is overcome as the extremities of the
battlefield call out a selfless comradeship.14 This kind of fiction not only personalized
the losses of warfare, but also allowed some account to be given of those who were
normally below the horizon of public attention, since only high ranking officers were
likely to be mentioned in dispatches or listed as casualties.
The Tatler praises the singular heroism of Marlborough, but supplements this
praise with tales of ordinary heroism. One paper imagines the unsung virtue of the
lower ranks: it includes a letter supposedly from a sergeant of the foot guards, serving
at Mons, to a sergeant in the Coldstream Regiment “at the Red-Lettice in the Butcher
Row.” The writer reports his own head wound and the death of common friends,
including one for whose widow he has gathered money. Bickerstaff considers it an
“honest Representation” of the typical poor soldier’s “chearful heart,” and of the
Gallantry of those in the “Heap” of an army—who have the same regard to fame as
those above them, if their fame exists in the eyes of a different, smaller public. The
paper ends with an imaginary scheme for proportioning the glory of a battle among a
5
whole army, dividing it into shares after the method of the million lottery.15 This
fantasy ignores the brutal treatment soldiers actually experienced in the army. It is no
surprise that Steele did not approve of the portrait of Sergeant Kite in Farquhar’s The
Recruiting Officer, which made audiences laugh at the horrifying realties of army
recruitment.16 It is not that Steele cannot acknowledge harsh realities—but those that
are acknowledged must be reconciled with the attempt to improve manners and
promote public spirit. That is, they must be seen as issues of personal conduct, rather
than of systemic brutality.
In both The Tatler and The Spectator, idealized views of the soldier coexist
with an unsatisfactory reality in need of reform.17 But in The Tatler Isaac Bickerstaff
(himself an old soldier) is the antithesis of the ill-mannered, loud-mouthed soldier of
popular concern. He refers to others soldiers who exemplify his belief that “Good
Sense is the great Requisite in a Soldier,” such as the lieutenant of marines at his
sister’s wedding feast, who discomforts an “ill-bred coxcomb.”18 The Spectator takes
the idealization of the soldier further. The Spectator club includes among its members
the gentlemanly Captain Sentry—courageous, modest, thoughtful, sensitive, and
apparently well read.19 Through this figure, the conventional idea that the experience
of war renders soldiers unfit for civilian life is inverted: war emerges as the field in
which manners and morals receive their most rigorous test, and their most effective
improvement. Indeed, in The Spectator, as in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics
(published in 1711), war begins to emerge as an activity in which characteristics
associated with disinterested sociability—such as good manners, good conversation,
an open disposition, and a sympathetic concern for others—are most clearly
revealed.20
6
The Tatler and The Spectator both seek to accommodate what Pocock has
described as “a civic morality of investment and exchange,” and to suggest that, in a
world increasingly shaped by commerce, the arts can defeat luxury and promote
virtue.21 But they suggest that the culture must be approached through appropriately
critical attitudes in order to regulate its savage aspect. They condemn unreservedly the
aristocratic commitment to dueling, as well as the violent popular entertainments of
the bear-garden. But cultural manifestations of violence, both popular and aristocratic,
that relate to war, are subject to careful critical appraisal. Drawing on and helping to
popularize neo-classical and newer forms of criticism, they work to secure the moral
usefulness of the bellicose content of the arts, distancing it from aristocratic codes of
honor and from sensational barbarism.
The problem of the violence of Homeric epic is addressed directly in a
Spectator which argues that Alexander the Great’s capacity for barbarous actions
arose not from his “Passion for Homer,” but from his faulty education, which failed to
encourage critical reflection upon heroic models.22 The Tatler suggests that very
young children can derive salutary lessons in good conduct from violent stories:
Bickerstaff admires the accomplishments of his little Godson, who studies “the Lives
and Adventures of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions.”
The boy is not corrupted by chapbooks that delight in violence: by reading critically,
he is preparing himself for a life of patriotic duty. “He would tell you of the
Mismanagements of John Hickathrift, find Fault with the passionate temper in Bevis
of Southampton, and loved Saint George for being the Champion of England; and by
this Means, had his Thoughts insensibly molded into the Notions of Discretion, Virtue
and Honour”.23
7
In practice, the assumption that “There is a Propriety in all things” allows both
periodicals to suggest an equivalence between the experience of war and other kinds
of experience.24 Spectator 350, which features Captain Sentry, exemplifies the
tendency to move between, and align, different frames of reference—military, social,
moral and aesthetic—in order to suggest that ideas of manliness, courage, social
decorum and artistic expression can all be judged in the same terms. A letter to
Captain Sentry contains the story of a little English corn vessel attacked by a French
privateer. The singular bravery of the English captain inspires an “unmanly” desire
for vengeance in the French Commander who takes him prisoner. The English
prisoner is beaten, bound and starved—against the humanitarian inclinations of the
French crew and to the disgust of the governor of Calais. Humanity is seen as a
natural sign of manliness, and so as transcending barriers of nation and rank, while
inhumanity is localised in the corrupt French Commander. As Captain Sentry moves
to consider the manners of the “Town,” the situation is reversed, since here the man of
true gallantry is likely to be despised, while the impudence of youths is admired in the
eyes of little people. While moral vision assumes clarity in the extremities of war, it
becomes clouded in the social life of the Town and its assemblies. At this point
Captain Sentry suggests that judicious literary criticism will help to counteract the
malign influence of urban life. Just as criticism can help us to distinguish between the
true from the false sublime, so it can help us to distinguish between true and false
courage., as the French Critic Le Bossu shows in his comparison between the
ostentation of Virgil’s Turnus, and the quieter, defensive courage of Aeneas. In this
paper, then, the violence of war is accommodated within a system of equivalences: a
proper appreciation of martial courage is equivalent to a proper discrimination of the
sublime and to a proper estimation of manners. War is judged as if brutality arises
8
from the moral disposition of the mean individual, and one can choose to oblige one’s
enemies.25
The discussions of heroic poetry in The Tatler and The Spectator tend to play
down the specifically military aspects of the poems in order to consider other features.
Adopting and popularising neoclassical criteria, they consider Homer’s and Virgil’s
“common sense,” their moral precepts, their use of epithets, dreams, allegories and
mythical fables, while the “lack of delicacy” in Homer’s sentiments is attributed to his
times. But elsewhere the periodicals work to validate representations of the violence
of war. The newly psychologized sublime, as theorized by John Dennis, proved useful
here as it allowed equivalences to be found between emotional responses to art and to
war itself. Dennis argued that enthusiastic passion could be moved by “Ideas
occurring in Contemplation” and that terror, the most transporting experience, and
could be transformed into “Joy” through reflection.26 This transferring of terror from
the realm of libidinous sensation to the realm of reason, allowed the violence of war
—whether represented or actual—to give rise to an elevating experience that
transcended its brutal origin. The principle of aesthetic reflection is invoked in the
most elaborate account of courage in The Spectator (no. 152). Here, Steele contradicts
his earlier attempt in The Tatler to attribute heroic virtue to the “Heap” of an army,
since he wants to emphasize the link between virtue and politeness. What looks like
courage in the mass of soldiers is downgraded to a mere “mechanical” habit. True
courage in war—the kind that commanders have—is said to be derived from thought
and reflection, and appears when “The Force of Reason gives a certain Beauty, mixed
with the Conscience of Well-doing, to all which was before terrible and ghastly to the
Imagination.” 27 Courage is itself aestheticised, so that the experience of military man
9
who has learned to accept the possibility of dying resembles the sublime experience
of the sensitive reader who knows how to appreciate terror in works of art.
This understanding of aesthetic experience informs Addison’s famous
Spectator papers on the popular ballad of “Chevy Chase.” The ballad is introduced
through a discussion that validates popular tradition as both national and universal,
since “Human nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures.”28 The tale of slaughter
that follows might be seen as reveling in sensational bloodshed, as Percy, Douglas
and their respective followers engage in deadly combat motivated by an ancient feud.
But on the one hand Addison shows how Le Bossu’s criteria for epic can be used to
read the poem for lessons in political unity, patriotism, and generosity to enemies.29
And on the other, he shows how the poem’s language, in capturing the violence and
pity of war, can be read as offering an elevating experience, in its “majestick
Simplicity,” its “Force and Spirit,” its “Beauty.”30 Addison’s approach implies that the
poem’s beauty reconciles the reader to the terrible sacrifices exacted by war. The
polite reader’s acceptance is identified as “common,” natural, in line with English
tradition, and shared with those who have no access to polite education. The reading
implicitly endows art with a dual potential: it can offer an imaginative preparation for
the hardships generated by war, and at the same time it can help to cultivate an
emotional and aesthetic sensitivity that will work against the enjoyment of violence of
cruelty to others. The sympathetic stories about the recent victims of war in these
periodicals serve a comparable function.
In various ways, then, the periodicals work to represent war as an activity that
does not conflict with benevolent principles of polite society but promotes those
principles. In The Spectator, the Club allowed different value systems to coexist as if
10
on easy terms. Here the commercial interests of modern Britain, represented by the
idealized figure of the Whig merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport, can be shown to exist in
relative harmony with the alternative values of the Tory landowner, Sir Roger De
Coverley. Commerce is carefully divorced from the violence of empire and seen as
essentially peaceful, promoting a “mutual Intercourse” among mankind.31 And while
the professional army was often criticized by landowners whose taxes helped to
sustain it, Captain Sentry is the heir of Sir Roger, whose estate he inherits. This
symbolic reconciliation between a traditional virtue grounded in landownership, and
the tried and tested virtue of the professional soldier indicates the place of war within
the periodical’s system of values. The soldier is not aligned with the enlightened selfinterest of the merchant, but represents an alternative to it.
As Donald Bonds notes that many of those who subscribed to the collected
volumes of The Spectator came from the financial and mercantile world of London:
the subscription lists includes directors of the bank of England, goldsmiths, private
bankers, speculators, East India company directors. Many of these “had made money
supplying stores of clothing and food to the armed forcers, both in the time of William
III and during the War of the Spanish Succession.”32 The largest group are
secretaries, commissioner, clerks and agents, many in the military branches of
government, responsible for managing the war effort, including paymasters of the
marine regiments. Many, in other words, were people who in one sense profited from
war.
The Spectator’s reforming message was carefully directed to such readers.
Commercial interests are shown to be compatible with the virtues of benevolence and
philanthropy in civil society; but the soldier, whose character has been developed and
tested in a field remote from the material comforts and economic pursuits of modern
11
society, and who has faced the ultimate test of public spirit—being prepared to die for
his country—is shown as best qualified to illustrate Mr Spectator’s belief that “the
Preservation of Life should be only a secondary Concern, and the Direction of it our
Principal.”33 In the periodicals’ idealisations of the soldier, we can glimpse a “military
dream of society” different from the one identified by Foucault (which emphasised
“permanent coercions,” rather than the shaping of polite identity).34 The army emerges
as a realm that fosters sociability in its noblest form, an alternative to the Clubs,
Assemblies, Tea-Tables and Coffee-Houses that most readers know. As such, it is a
seductive fiction, which like the other fictions of war the periodicals consider, is
offered as a focus for moral instruction and emulation, and as a reassuring alternative
to the unsettling realities of war represented in the newspapers.
12
1
Notes
See for example Lawrence E Klein, Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 1994), p. 2; Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984) 9-27. 2
2
The Tatler was launched in March 1709 when peace negotiations were beginning. Peace was finally
proclaimed in May 1713. For accounts of the effects of war in these years, see G.M. Trevellyan, The
Peace and the Protestant Succession (London: Longman, 1934), John B Hattendorf, England in the
War of the Spanish Succession (New York: Garland, 1987).
3
He worked under the Earl of Sutherland, Secretary of State for the Southern Department in the Whig
administration.
4
The state of the war and the necessity of an augmentation, consider’d (London, 1708).
5
The Daily Courant, the first regular daily newspaper published in England, was launched on March 11
1702 as the War of the Spanish Succession was beginning. The first issue was dominated by war
reports.
6
The Tatler 178 (30 May 1710), 2: 471.
7
An Essay towards the history of the last ministry and parliament (London, 1710), noted that credit
rose on news of the first Allied Victory in Spain, on confirmation of the victory at Saragossa, and again
with the expectation of Peace at Gertruydenberg, and fell when peace talks were broken off (70-71).
The Spectator 251 (18 December 1711), 2: 476.
8
The Spectator 452 (8 August 1712), 4: 90-94.
9
Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004),
188.
10
See Bickerstaff’s Letter to Louis XIV The Tatler 23 (2 June 1709), 1: 182-184.
11
The Tatler 124 (24 January 1710), 2: 231.
12
The Tatler 140 (2 March 1710), 2: 302-303.
13
The Tatler 30 (18 June 1709), 1: 227-8.
14
The Tatler 5 (21 April 1709), 1: 51-53.
15
The Tatler 87 (29 October 1709), 2: 49-50.
16
“There is not […] the Humour hit in Sergeant Kite.” The Tatler 20 (26 May 1709), 159.
17
The Tatler 183 (10 June 1710), 2: 492; The Spectator 37 (12 April 1711), 1: 153; 132 (1 August
1711, 2: 22-25; 298 (11 February 1712), 3: 65; (16 April 1712), 3: 322; 533 (11 November 1712), 4:
402-3; 544 (24 November 1712), 4: 447.
18
The Tatler 191 (29 June 1710), 3: 36: 79 (11 October 1709), 2: 7.
19
He is introduced in The Spectator 2 (2 March 1711), 1: 11.
20
According to Shaftesbury, “it is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn. It is in war that
mutual succour is most given, mutual danger run, and common affection most exerted and employed.
For heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the same”. Characteristics of Man, Manners,
Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1999), 52.
21
Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 440.
22
The Spectator 337 (27 March 1712), 3: 247.
23
The Tatler 95 (15-17 November 1709) 2: 92-3.
24
The Spectator 350 (11 April 1712), 3: 303 [by Steele],
25
The Spectator 350 (11 April 1712), 3: 303-4.
26
John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, London, 1704, pp. 19-20, 86.
27
The Spectator 152, (24 August 1711) 2: 97-8.
28
The Spectator 70 (21 may 1711) 1: 297-303.
29
Donald F. Bond notes that Addison is following Le Bossu’s Trait du poem epique (1675), I, vii,
which describes epic poetry as moral instruction disguised under the allegory of an action, 1: 298n.
30
31
The Spectator 74 (25 May 1711) 1: 315-321.
The Spectator 69 (19 May 1711), 1: 294.
32
The Spectator, 1: lxxxvi-xcii.
33
The Spectator 25 (29 March 1711) 1: 108.
34
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991), 169.