SOURCE: “Addison, Steele and the Periodical Essay,” in Sphere History of Literature in the English Language, Volume 4: Dryden to Johnson, edited by Roger Lonsdale, Sphere Books Limited, 1971, pp. 144-63.

In the essay that follows, Bateson credits Richard Steele with the invention of the periodical essay but argues that it was Joseph Addison's brilliant prose style that assured the success of the genre.

I

The crucial innovations in a literature occur when some sub-literary form—such as the folk-song, the popular sermon, the melodramatic romance, to give three familiar examples—ceases to be ‘trash’ and becomes the vehicle of aesthetic experience. The ultimate causes of such a metamorphosis are usually traceable to some cataclysm in the particular society where it occurs, or at any rate in some change in its ruling class or dominant groups. But between the social revolution and the emergence of the new literary form which...