Public Prospects

Abstract

The turn to posterity in mid-century English periodical essays developed gradually between the 1750s and 1780s in response to what these essayists and their critics perceived as the final failure of the genre to create prominent and sustainable literary publics. Essay personae like Mr Town and Fitz-Adam, and a little later the Lounger and his forebear in the Mirror, address readers as potential members of what is essentially a counterpublic. Where the Tatler and Spectator aimed to reform the Town into a polite, intellectually engaged public, the mid-century essayists measured the quality and character of the publics they wanted to create against the shortcomings they perceived in the broader public — the one that the periodical essay, in most accounts of the genre, was largely responsible for creating. This expressly critical turn in serials like the World and Lounger assumes that the values and qualities that were conventionally associated with the public (rational common sense, critical self-reflection, etc.) have been dissolved into a welter of media overstimulation and a corresponding climate of general distraction.