3 - The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles

Summary

Introduction: The Title of ‘Essay’

Titles are a problem for the essay; in fact, it is only late in its history that ‘the essay’ becomes the title of a genre. This book might have been called The Edinburgh Companion to Periodical Writing or to the Paper, two terms under which the essay, as we now understand it, was often known until well into the nineteenth century. The word ‘essay’ was frequently applied to books which may not to us seem very essayistic, such as John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), while many works we now call essays preferred to go by some other label: papers, periodical writings, occasional writings, lucubrations, discourses, meditations, gossips, sketches or notes, among other alternatives. In Charles Lamb, for instance, we find a ‘Chapter’ (‘on Ears’), a ‘Dissertation’ (‘upon Roast Pig’), a ‘Complaint’ (by ‘A Bachelor … of the Behaviour of Married People)’, ‘Detached Thoughts’ (‘on Books and Reading’) and ‘Confessions’ (‘of a Drunkard’), as well as many essays free of any generic tag (‘A Quakers’ Meeting’, ‘Grace before Meat’, ‘The Old Margate Hoy’).

Montaigne did not mean to found a genre by titling his work Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne: the essai is a description of various acts of living and writing assembled in his chapters, not of any chapter of the book, so that the word ‘essay’ in its contemporary meaning has become a mistranslation of Montaigne’s word essai (‘soundings’, ‘trials’ and ‘assays’ have been proposed instead).The first English translator, John Florio, expressed his doubts about ‘essay’ by adding a subtitle: The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses (1603). A similar hesitation marks Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays, subtitled Religious Meditations. Places of Per-swasion and Disswasion, and the 1626 text, the Essays or Counsels Civil or Moral. In the unpublished introduction to the 1612 edition of his Essays, Bacon wrote that ‘the word is late, but the thing is ancient, for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations’. By 1625, he retreated from the word ‘essay’, writing that for the Latin translation he intended ‘a weightier name, entitling it “Faithful Discourses – or the Inwards of things” (Sermones Fideles, sive Interiora rerum)’.