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160 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
upon indifferent Subjects, hear their Duties explained to them,
and join together in Adoration of the supreme Being. . . .
My Friend Sir Roger, being a good Churchman, has beautified the
inside of his Church with several texts of his own choosing. He has
likewise given a handsome Pulpit-Cloth, and railed in the Communion-
Table at his own Expense. He has often told me that at his coming to
his Estate he found his Parishioners very irregular; and that in order
to make them kneel and join in the Responses, he gave every one of
them a Hassock and a Common-prayer Book: and at the same time
employed an itinerant Singing-Master, who goes about the Country
for that Purpose, to instruct them rightly in the Tunes of the Psalms;
upon which they now very much value themselves, and indeed outdo
most of the Country Churches that I have ever heard.
As Sir Roger is Landlord to the whole Congregation, he keeps
them in very good Order, and will suffer no Body to sleep in it
besides himself; for if by Chance he has been surprised into a
short Nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and
looks about him, and if he sees any Body else nodding, either
wakes them himself, or sends his Servant to them.
(Joseph Addison, ‘A Country Sunday’, The Spectator, 1711)
This sense of class and social identity is significant in the papers’
consideration of market appeal. The coffee-houses of London, or a
gentleman’s club, thus became the respected centres of ‘middle-brow’ ideas
on society, culture, manners and morals, literature and life. The Spectator’s
declared objective was ‘to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit
with morality’. This well-balanced attitude established a tradition of safe,
witty, reassuring observation of and comment on the life and times of
eighteenth-century London and England. Addison wrote: ‘I live in the world
rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.’ What emerges
as important is, therefore, a point of view, an attitude, rather than a committed
engagement with issues and debates – a well-informed distance which is
both tolerant and self-protective. In effect, it sets down and perpetuates
class values which would remain strong for more than two centuries: the
published word begins to become a powerful instrument in society.
The Gentleman’s Journal, which was published from 1692 to 1694,
was the first magazine of this kind; the similarly named Gentleman’s
Magazine was one of the longest lasting, from 1731 until 1914. The