Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison invented, with Richard Steele, the English periodical essay, and wrote a play about Cato that both sides of the American Revolution quoted at each other. He was a clergyman's son, educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, where he met Steele, and he entered public life by writing a poem about the victory at Blenheim that pleased the Whig ministry enough to make his career. He served as a Member of Parliament and eventually as Secretary of State. The work that mattered was the Spectator, which he and Steele produced daily in 1711 and 1712 through the invention of a fictional club whose members - Sir Roger de Coverley above all - let them write about manners, marriage, taste and religion without lecturing. Addison said he wanted to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries to dwell in clubs and coffee-houses, and the periodical essay as a form comes from that sentence. Cato: A Tragedy, staged in 1713, dramatises the younger Cato's suicide at Utica rather than submit to Caesar, and it became the supreme emblem of republican virtue in the eighteenth century. Washington had it performed for the army at Valley Forge. Nathan Hale's line about regretting he had but one life to lose, and Patrick Henry's about liberty or death, are both close to lines in it. He married a countess, quarrelled with Steele over politics, and died at forty-seven. His prose style was held up as a model for two centuries. Johnson, who disagreed with him about most things, advised anyone who wished to write well to give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison. The Spectator ran to 555 numbers in under two years.

• Lived: 1672 CE – 1719 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: writer, politician