Characters of the Age

Abstract

It is impossible to overstate the influence of La Bruyère’s Characters on British Enlightenment views of Theophrastan character writing, and on the development of the periodical essay. Though rarely cited in studies of eighteenth-century English literature, this French collection of portraits, maxims and satiric reflections defined for British critics across the century the character sketch as a literary genre. Samuel Johnson, as noted earlier, saw a clear line running from the courtly conduct books of Casa and Castiglione, through La Bruyère’s Characters, and into the Tatler and Spectator. Though he drew this connection roughly 70 years after the Tatler began publishing, Johnson had good reason to see it: Eustace Budgell, who contributed more essays to the Spectator than any of Addison’s and Steele’s other collaborators, had produced a successful English translation of the Characters in 1699, as well as a 1715 translation of Theophrastus, whose Characters La Bruyère had originally included (in French translation) with his own book. Johnson saw more to the connection than Budgell’s involvement, however. He notes how the first English essay serials keep the future in mind even as they write for present readers, something they share with the French author’s work. ‘The Tatler and Spectator adjusted, like Casa, the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness,’ Johnson declares; ‘and, like La Bruyère, exhibited the “Characters and Manners of the Age”.’¹