Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was a British writer and politician whose name is usually remembered with that of his long-standing friend Richard Steele. Together they founded The Spectator, one of the best-known periodicals of the early eighteenth century. Addison wrote in a clear, simple prose style that marked a break from the mannerisms and conventional classical images of the seventeenth century. He also held public office, served in Parliament, and became famous for his tragedy Cato.

Addison was born in Milston, Wiltshire, the eldest son of Lancelot Addison, a scholarly English clergyman. Soon after Joseph’s birth, his father was appointed Dean of Lichfield, and the family moved into the cathedral close. Addison was educated at Charterhouse School in London, where he first met Richard Steele, and then at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, was specially noted for his Neo-Latin verse, and became a fellow of Magdalen College.

His early career joined literature, patronage, and politics. In 1693 he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and in 1694 his first major work, a book on the lives of English poets, was published. His translation of Virgil’s Georgics appeared the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers, and Charles Montague, 1st Earl of Halifax, took an interest in his work and helped secure him a pension of £300 a year so he could travel in Europe while studying politics and preparing for diplomatic employment. In Switzerland in 1702, he learned of the death of William III, after which he lost that pension because his influential contacts had lost their Crown employment.

After returning to England at the end of 1703, Addison found a new opening after the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Lord Treasurer Godolphin commissioned him to write a commemorative poem, and The Campaign was received so well that Addison was appointed Commissioner of Appeals. In 1705 he published Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c., in the years 1701, 1702, 1703. That same year, with the Whigs in power, he became Under-Secretary of State and accompanied Lord Halifax on a diplomatic mission to Hannover. He later served as Member of Parliament for Lostwithiel in 1708 and 1709, for Cavan Borough in the Irish House of Commons from 1709 to 1713, and for Malmesbury from 1710 until his death in 1719.

Addison’s public life ran beside a steady literary one. In 1709 Steele began publishing The Tatler, and Addison became a regular contributor. In 1711 they began The Spectator, whose first issue appeared on 1 March 1711; it was originally a daily paper and continued until 20 December 1714, with an interruption during the publication of The Guardian in 1713. Addison’s last publication was the political paper The Freeholder, issued in 1715–16.

On the stage, Addison wrote the libretto for Thomas Clayton’s opera Rosamond, which had a disastrous London premiere in 1707. His most famous dramatic work was Cato, a Tragedy, written in 1712 and produced in 1713 to acclaim from both Whigs and Tories. Based on the last days of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, it treats conflicts between individual liberty and government tyranny, republicanism and monarchism, logic and emotion, and belief in the face of death. Popular across the British Empire and especially in America for several generations, Cato was known to many of the Founding Fathers, and George Washington sponsored a performance for the Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–78. Addison’s words still speak because they join public action with moral pressure, asking how a person should think, write, and stand when history is pressing close.