Many of the great innovations in history have come about when a pair of friends, meeting in high school or college, had a paradigm-shifting idea together and then decided to bring that idea to the marketplace. In recent decades, one of the most well-known examples was the creation of Apple, a computer company that began in a garage, as a collaboration between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and has revolutionized the cell phone, music listening and tablet computing industries. However, these sorts of partnerships are nothing new, as The Spectator shows. Founded in 1711 by Charterhouse School chums Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, this paper was a series of “papers,” each of which was about 2,500 words in length. The original papers numbered 555, and they were gathered into a collection of seven volumes (Cowan, 2004, p. 350). According to Paper No. 10, the purpose of The Spectator was “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with moralityto bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses” (Addison and Steele). The papers contained tips about conversational and social etiquette, as well as a series of talking points about various topics of the day. As with Starbucks and other coffeehouses now, it was the businesses that subscribed to the paper, not the individual reader; original estimates had readership at about 60,000 for each paper, which would have been about 10 percent of the population of London (Cowan, 2004, p. 346). While people from all socioeconomic backgrounds perused The Spectator, its intended audience was the growing class of traders and merchants that formed the economic middle in Great Britain at that time. Even after it ceased publication, in 1712, it was bound into sets and sold, long into the nineteenth century, because of the enduring life span of its advice on morality, the humor in its entertainment, and the outstanding level of prose.
The early eighteenth century saw the birth of many institutions, not the least of which was the coffeehouse. The opportunity to spend leisure time in this sort of place was still a new phenomenon at this point in time; in the years before urbanization and industrialization, when the vast majority of people occupied themselves in agricultural pursuits, no one had the time to go and sit in coffeeshops and discuss issues. The nobility had the leisure time, but they occupied themselves in their own dwellings, instead of entering the public sphere to associate with others.
The coffeehouse, then, became a place in which private people could meet to discuss private topics (Cowan, 2004, p. 345). In addition to coffeehouses, the public sphere in which these conversations took place included social clubs and newspapers; The Spectator contributed significantly to the growth of this public sphere of discussion. According to Juergen Habermas, it was the development of this sphere that set the stage for intelligent discussions of public issues, allowing for the public awareness necessary for a democracy to prosper (Habermas, 1989, p. 29). When customers came into these coffeehouses, they read The Spectator – which led to the formation of public opinions.
The entire format of The Spectator was a new phenomenon when it appeared in the early 1700’s. During this time period, periodicals did not do well commercially; most of them had political parties sponsoring them to provide the funding to keep them in business (Downie, 1993, p. 57). In the case of The Spectator, though, each run of 3,000 received extremely wide circulation, both within London and to the friends of those who mailed them copies outside the city. Indeed, a “Gentleman’s Society” was established in November, 1711, where fans of the paper would meet at Younger’s Coffeehouse to talk about the most recent issue; other clubs sprang up in Scotland for the same purpose (Cowan, 2004, p. 346).
One of the driving ironies of modern advertising is the exploitation of people’s desires to be unique to get them to purchase a product. Red Dog beer, which was offered for sale in the United States in the 1990’s and 2000’s, had as its slogan “Be Your Own Dog.” Of course, to express your independence, you had to buy the same beer as everyone else who wanted to express their independence as well. Currently, Dr. Pepper, an American soft drink bottler, is running a set of television spots in which people take off whatever shirt they are wearing, to reveal a maroon T-shirt that says, “Be A” followed by a word like “Trendsetter” or “Success.” While the words are different, the color of the shirts, and the font, are the same, making the desire to strike out on one’s own contingent on wearing a shirt that looks virtually identical to everyone else – and drinking the same soft drink.
As Cowan argues, this use of media to control the public sphere is nothing new, and in fact dates back to the writing of The Spectator. Without the paper, had people gathered together at coffeehouses, their discussion might have gone off in any number of directions, and their social behavior might not have followed any norms at all. One purpose of The Spectator was to give the people a set of issues to discuss – and to provide a set of rules that the people would follow while having those discussions. In other words, the newspaper served to institutionalize public discourse – indeed, “[t]he object of this reformation was not the perpetuation of a rational public sphere. The goal was rather to construct a social world that was amenable to the survival of Whig politics during a time in which the future of Whiggery was unclear” (Cowan, 2004, p. 347). And if you think that periodicals no longer push the agenda of any particular political wing, then take a close look at the editorial pages of such publications as The New York Times, which has a decidedly liberal perspective, and U.S. News and World Report, which tilts in the conservative direction. The Spectator, though, was one of the very first publications that sought to cast public discourse in the ideological pattern of the party that it supported. While these ideas masqueraded under the banner of manners, many of them were designed to push the reader in a definite political direction.
One might wonder why Addison and Steele selected the coffeehouse as their setting for this political education of the public in London. At that point, the only other public space for discourse was the “public house,” or the pub, and alcohol did not mix genially with discussion about even the most innocuous political manners. Also, the point of many of the tips in The Spectator was to provide edification, a goal that does not mix well with stouts and ales. Also, the coffeehouse was already in use for distribution by other publishers of papers, such as the Tory humorist Edward Ward, who put out three different periodicals between 1698 and 1700, as well as a series of poems published in pamphlets. One of the first British satirists, Ward focused on pointing out excesses in society, but only in general terms, not referring to specific individuals (Cowan, 2004, p. 349). A sympathizer with the Tory party, Ward was on the other side of the political debates from Addison and Steele; Ward saw the coffeehouse as a gathering place for scoundrels and swindlers. As Whig sympathizers (or, as opponents of Ward’s political point of view), Addison and Steele tried to capitalize on his negative views and build readership by showing a basic optimism about the people who gathered in coffeehouses – and by suggesting particular points of conversation and of behavior. The particular vices that Addison and Steele wanted to temper were a desire for novelty and an excessive attention to matters of fashion. While the desire for the new is, in our own time, one of the driving forces in economic growth, back then, the “pursuit of new things simply for the sake of their being new was considered to be an irrational vice that must be tamed” (Cowan, 2004, p. 349). Modern readers might consider this to be a highly unusual viewpoint, given our thirst for news that is just slaked by the 24-hour information cycle provided by the World Wide Web, but “attacks on the inordinate appetite of the English public for news were a commonplace of seventeenth-century satire, and they were deployed most readily by servants of the crown who had an interest in controlling the flow of information to the public outside the confines of the court” (Cowan, 2004, p. 349). As Roger L’Estrange, the chief licenser of the press in 1663, put it, “even supposing the pressand the people in their right wits[the press] makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiours, too pragmiticall and censorious, and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right, and licence, to be meddling with the government” (Fraser, 1956, p. 121). As Scott Black puts it, “the infrastructure of the press was a condition of articulating a civil model of personhood defined by one’s participation in a network of social relations” (Black, 1999, p. 32). The tensions involved in a greater involvement by the public in their own affairs brought scorn and control from the government, but they proved to be the tensions that would uproot monarchy after monarchy in 1830 and 1848 in Europe, and would topple the colonial empires in the years between 1880 and 1940.
The idea of public discourse is one that is quite new in the timeline of human history. It did appear in antiquity, in the Roman Republic and the early democracies in Greece, only to disappear until the rumblings of the Enlightenment. The monarchies and fledgling political parties were shrewd enough to want to keep that discourse in check, and such papers as The Spectator were early attempts to guide public dialogue in desired directions. Given the fact that we still have national news networks that promise to be “fair and balanced,” despite a predominance of commentators from one particular side of the ideological spectrum, those attempts are alive and well today – and still successful.
Works Cited
Black, Scott. “Social and Literary Form in the Spectator.” Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33
(1): 21-42.
Cowan, Brian. “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere.” Eighteenth Century Studies
Vol. 37 (3): 345-366. Web. Retrieved 10 April 2012 from
http://cerisia.cerosia.org/articles/cowan.coffeehouses.pdf
Downie, J.A. “Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne,” in Robin Myers and
Michael Harris, eds., Serials and their Readers 1620-1914. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll
Press, 1993.
Fraser, Peter. The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Licensed News
1660-1688. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.
Habermas, Juergen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989.
