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Unit 13: Steele- On the Death of Friend-Detailed Study and Critical Appreciation

after his first wife’s death, Steele married Mary Scurlock. At this time he was editor of the London Notes
Gazette, the official government periodical.
Steele’s fame rests on his founding of The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712),
forerunners of modern journalism, which he wrote anonymously with Joseph Addison with the
object of targeting the intellectual and political melting pots of London’s coffeehouses and
bookshops. The Tatler, a series of thrice-weekly papers in which Steele planned to educate “Politick
Persons,” was addressed predominantly to fashionable society, whereas The Spectator appealed to
a wider audience. Using the idea of a club of different personalities, politics, culture, and foreign
and domestic topics were explored in The Tatler. Steele used the figure of Isaac Bickerstaff, created
by Jonathan Swift, to satirize the annual almanacs. Steele’s fundamental purpose was moral
didacticism: he wished to inculcate a practical morality in an accessible style. Swift, however,
attacked Steele’s loose use of syntax and the use of juxtaposition in his writing.
Published daily, The Spectator developed from The Tatler and included essays on relationships
between the sexes, manners, London life, taste, and politics. The Spectator assembled a club of
narrators whose personalities, eccentricities, and political viewpoints were revealed in concrete
detail. Led by Mr. Spectator, the narrators included the Tory country squire Sir Roger de Coverly,
and Sir Andrew Freeport, a Whig mercantilist. Steele’s contribution to The Spectator is distinguished
for his use of the letter form and the dialogue between either fictional personae or a writer and a
reader (real or imagined). His essays on women such as “The Education of Girls” (no. 66, 16 May
1711) reveal both his sentimentalism and his open, sympathetic stance towards women’s social
and sexual status.
Steele’s desire to be more politically outspoken against the Tory ministry produced two anti-Tory
periodicals, The Guardian (with Addison’s help) in 1713, and The Englishman (1713–1714), as well
as several pamphlets and short-lived periodicals. Elected as M.P. for Stockbridge in 1713, his
position in the House of Commons was disputed, and a Tory majority expelled him. Steele was
granted a governorship of Drury Lane Theatre in 1714 to, as he expressed it in his pamphlet Town
Talk, “Chastise the Vices of the Stage, and promote the Interests of Virtue and Innocence.” In 1715,
he was knighted by George I, and made a surveyor of the royal stables. Steele argued publicly
with Addison in 1718 over the peerage bill, an incident that led to the revocation of the Drury Lane
patent. He then began a biweekly paper called The Theater and later issued pamphlets about the
South Sea Bubble. His last play, The Conscious Lovers (1722), was based on Terence’s Andria; in it
Steele portrayed ideals of male and female manners and began the tradition of the sentimental
comedy. The play’s success enabled him to settle his debts. Steele retired in ill health to his estate
in Wales and died in Carmarthenshire in 1729.

13.1 Critical Appreciation

There is a sort of Delight, which is alternately mixed with Terror and Sorrow, in the Contemplation
of Death. The Soul has its Curiosity more than ordinarily awakened, when it turns its Thoughts
upon the Conduct of such who have behaved themselves with an Equal, a Resigned, a Chearful,
a Generous or Heroick Temper in that Extremity. We are affected with these respective Manners
of Behaviour, as we secretly believe the Part of the Dying Person imitable by our selves, or such as
we imagine our selves more particularly capable of. Men of exalted Minds march before us like
Princes, and are, to the Ordinary Race of Mankind, rather Subjects for their Admiration than
Example. However, there are no Ideas strike more forcibly upon our Imaginations; than those
which are raised from Reflections upon the Exits of great and excellent Men. Innocent Men who
have suffered as Criminals, tho’ they were Benefactors to Human Society, seem to be Persons of
the highest Distinction, among the vastly greater Number of Human Race, the Dead. When the
Iniquity of the Times brought Socrates to his Execution, how great and wonderful is it to behold
him, unsupported by any thing but the Testimony of his own Conscience and Conjectures of

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