The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers

On the morning of the 12th of April, 1709, there was laid upon all the coffee-house tables of London the first number of a double-column sheet in small folio, entitled The Tatler, or the Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff. The Tatler was to be issued thrice a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and could be bought for the moderate price of one penny. The pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff had been made familiar all over London, some months before, by an admirable jest played by Dr. Swift upon a notorious almanac maker and quack astrologer, one Partridge. Swift, writing over the signature of Bickerstaff, had gravely predicted that Partridge would infallibly die at a certain day and hour, and in another pamphlet had given a circumstantial account of his decease; while poor Partridge convulsed the town with frantic protestations that he was still alive. But the editor of The Tatler who now assumed this name of Bickerstaff was not Swift, but Richard Steele. It seems to have been Steele's intention to keep, for a time, his editorship a secret; but his disguise was soon penetrated by at least one of his friends. Joseph Addison, who was in Ireland when The Tatler appeared, detected the hand of his friend in the sixth number. He furnished Steele, it is said, with many hints and suggestions for the early numbers of the paper, and after his return from Ireland in 1710 became himself a regular contributor. In January, 1711, The Tatler came suddenly to an end, with the 271st number. Steele, however, had no thought of abandoning this form of literary effort, and on the first of the following March he started that now more famous journal, The Spectator. The Spectator was similar in form and purpose to The Tatler, but it was to be issued daily. It is usually spoken of as Addison's Spectator; but it was no more Addison's than Steele's. The two men were associated in the conduct of it from the start, and their contributions were about equal in number-Addison writing 274 papers, and Steele 236. The second number of The Spectator, written by Steele, contains the account of that club, of which Sir Roger de Coverley was the most famous member; and the Coverley papers followed at intervals through the next year and a half.