Richard Steele was recognized, was indeed famous, in his own time as an innovative essayist, editor, and pamphleteer. No doubt the principal reasons for his being remembered today have to do with his activities as a writer of prose. His entry into the world of writing and publishing coincided exactly with the great explosion of printing after the Licensing Act expired in 1695, when government control over printing in the English-speaking world came to an abrupt end.

Steele was one of the first, it might be argued the first, to appreciate fully the consequences of this explosion, to understand the positive possibilities of the coming of print culture, when some of his most perceptive contemporaries saw only the dangers. Mass audiences for the first time in human history became theoretically available, and Richard Steele set about devising means of communicating with those audiences.

He was also a dramatist; he...