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Unit 12: Steele-On The Death of Friend: Introduction

The famous literary pair were born in the same year. Steele, the senior by less than two months, Notes
was baptized on the 12th of March 1672 in Dublin. His father, also Richard Steele, was an attorney.
He died before his son had reached his sixth year, but the boy found a protector in his maternal
uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary and confidential agent to two successive dukes of Ormond.
Through his influence he was nominated to the Charterhouse in 1684, and there first met with
Addison. Five years afterwards he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and was a postmaster at
Merton when Addison was a demy at Magdalen. Their schoolboy friendship was continued at the
university, and probably helped to give a more serious turn to Steele’s mind than his natural
temperament would have taken under different companionship. Addison’s father also took an
interest in the warm-hearted young Irishman; but their combined influence did not steady him
sufficiently to keep his impulses within the lines of a regular career; without waiting for a degree
he volunteered into the army, and served for some time as a cadet “under the command of the
unfortunate duke of Ormond” (the first duke’s grandson, who was attained in 1715). This escapade
was made without his uncle’s consent, and cost him, according to his own account, “the succession
to a very good estate in the county of Wexford in Ireland.” Still, he did not lack advancement in
the profession he had chosen. A poem on the funeral of Queen Mary I (1695), dedicated to Lord
Cutts, colonel of the Coldstream Guards, brought him under the notice of that nobleman, who
took the gentleman trooper into his household as a secretary, made him an officer in his own
regiment, and ultimately procured for him a captaincy in Lord Lucas’s regiment of foot. His name
was noted for promotion by King William, but the king’s death took place before anything had
been done for Captain Steele. A duel which he fought with Captain Kelly in Hyde Park in 1700,
and in which he wounded his antagonist dangerously, inspired him with the dislike of the practice
that he showed to the end of his life.
Steele probably owed the king’s favor to a timely reference to his majesty in The Christian Hero, his
first prose treatise, published in April 1701. The “reformation of manners” was a cherished purpose
with King William and his consort, which they tried to effect by proclamation and act of parliament;
and a sensible well-written treatise, deploring the irregularity of the military character, and seeking
to prove by examples — the king himself among the number — “that no principles but those of
religion are sufficient to make a great man”, was sure of attention. Steele complained that the
reception of The Christian Hero by his comrades was not so respectful; they persisted in trying him
by his own standard, and would not pass “the least levity in his words and actions” without
protest. His uneasiness under the ridicule of his irreverent comrades had a curious result: it
moved him to write a comedy. “It was now incumbent upon him”, he says, “to enliven his
character, for which reason he writ the comedy called The Funeral.” Although, however, it was
Steele’s express purpose to free his character from the reproach of solemn dullness, and prove that
he could write as smartly as another, he showed greater respect for decency than had for some
time been the fashion on the stage. The purpose, afterwards more fully effected in his famous
periodicals, of reconciling wit, good humor and good breeding with virtuous conduct was already
deliberately in Steele’s mind when he wrote his first comedy. The Funeral was produced and
published in 1701, and received on the stage with favor. In his next comedy, The Lying Lover; or, the
Ladies’ Friendship, based on Pierre Corneille’s Menteur, produced two years afterwards, in December
1703, Steele’s moral purpose was directly avowed, and the play, according to his own statement,
was “damned for its piety.” The Tender Husband, an imitation of Molière’s Sicilien, produced
eighteen months later (in April 1705), though not less pure in tone, was more successful; in this
play he gave unmistakable evidence of his happy genius for conceiving and embodying humorous
types of character, putting on the stage the parents or grandparents of Squire Western, Tony
Lumpkin and Lydia Languish. It was seventeen years before Steele again tried his fortune on the
stage with The Conscious Lovers, the best and most successful of his comedies, produced in December
1722.

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