Because of rising literacy rates and improved printing technology, the short periodical essay gained in prominence and ubiquity in Britain between 1870 and 1920. Essayists such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc presided over the essay’s shift away from its long, mid-Victorian magisterial form to something more entertaining, modest, immediate, and apparently trivial. However, this shorter essay accomplished serious thought by way of its lightness, and was uniquely suited to twentieth-century urban modernity, as each of these authors show in their most anthologised essays. While this short, entertaining form of the essay was most prominent, the essay thrived in an unprecedented number of contexts and forms during this period. Oscar Wilde demonstrates the essay’s range in his immediate, paradoxical, irreverent, and serious letter from prison, ‘De Profundis’, and in doing so, hints at the future of the essay.

The chapter shows the outsize influence of the British periodical essay tradition, represented in publications like Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711– 12), on eighteenth-century American periodical essays. The British series presented themselves as the musings of fictional personae who lived in cities. The persona (almost always male) wandered about town, reflecting on what he observed and overheard in coffeehouses, streets, theaters, and other places of business or leisure. He was often diverted and sometimes frustrated by his fellow citizens; he also strived to enlighten with casual criticism of the arts or musings on the relevance of religion and history to everyday life. A pervasive, low-level irony was common in these writings. American essayists such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Judith Sargent Murray borrowed from the British model, customizing it for an American readership. The most original early American essay series sketch in their personae a knowing independence of mind amid a distracted and unreflective urban crowd, a rhetorical standpoint that paradoxically would come to define a newly nationalistic body of literature in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 examines the early mediation of the events of 1715 Rising within the context of a mediascape for news consisting of both the older form of manuscript newsletters and an increasing number of printed newspapers and periodicals. It compares reports about the developing conflict found in the manuscript newsletters sent to the Newdigate family between May 30 and September 29, 1715 with those printed in five newspapers during the same time period, suggesting that the affordances of the newspaper form both amplified the sense of discontinuity in the news about the Rising as it was unfolding and made that information available to a larger and anonymous audience. It explores the subsequent treatment of the conflict in two periodical essays published in 1715 and 1716: Richard Steele’s The Town-Talk and Joseph Addison’s The Free-Holder. It concludes by considering popular histories written in the immediate aftermath of the 1715 which reprinted information originally found in newsletters and newspapers. These histories both minimized what had been the threat of the 1715 Rising and helped to circulate Jacobite counter-memories.