Mr Spectator, Sir Roger, and Good Humour

ALBERT FURTWANGLER Mr Spectator, Sir Roger, and Good Humour Everyone knows Sir Roger de Coverley as a figure of old-fashioned country manners and of gentle Addisonian satire upon the Tories. But a close inspection of his appearances in the Spectator reveals that he is these things mainly in the haze of a reader's memory. More immediately he is a figure born of journalistic convention and bred to journalistic convenience, like Mr Spectator, the mock editor or eidolon of this periodical . In fact, his origins and development provide a handy and revealing pattern against which Mr Spectator can be measured. Both figures are set out at the beginning of the periodical; both are set aside at its close. Sir Roger appears much more briefly in the Spectator; but he appears at length, early and late in its run, in sets of papers penned by Addison. He appears in order to answer emergent problems facing the editors, and he appears almost always as a companion and foil for this eidolon. Furthermore, the development of Sir Roger represents the creation of an amiable humorist - an eccentric figure who calls forth good-natured, affectionate laughter rather than the superior scorn of the satirist. Considering their origins, we might expect such an old, rustic Tory to have been cut down by Mr Spectator's urbane and learned assertions of his own excellence. Instead, a fast friendship between them served to enlarge both these characters. As well as reflecting Addison's particular deftness at character, Sir Roger became a major example of good humour in a century that exalted this new pattern of comedy. Mr Spectator, meanwhile, absorbed from his companion an uncanny range of agreeable authority. These developments deserve attentive study. For in them we can see Addison working up striking subtleties from some very unlikely raw materials of journalism, and creating a spirit of generous, encouraging comedy to support Mr Spectator's teaching. I Sir Roger de Coverley inherited his place in the Spectator, and even his name, from conventions of earlier periodicals. He may have developed into a character, but he was conceived first as a device. Like the eidolon, he was to be a figure useful for editorial manoeuvres and perhaps aUractive to readers as the embodiment of a knowledgeable joke. UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number I , Fall 1976 32 ALBERT FURTWANGLER He was introduced, in the first place, as a member of Mr Spectator's club, and clubs, even palpably fictitious ones, had already proved immensely attractive to periodical readers and had lent an easy, immediate suggestion of authority to many an opening paper. The origins of this device surely lay in the publications of actual learned societies, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which had been appearing monthly since 1665. But as early as the 'Athenian Society' of Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1691) a more general kind of club device had become popular in print. This question-and-answer periodical survived for several years, and was revived under similar titles in later redactions l Dunton's idea was also copied widely and it remained popular long after its seeming authority had worn out.2 Defoe~ for example, had such a feature in his early Reviews - 'Mercure Scandale: or, Advice from the Scandalous Club' - but he came to treat it frankly as a burden imposed upon him by reader demand: 'Receiving or Answering Letters of Doubts, Difficulties, Cases, and Questions, as it is a Work I think my self very meanly qualifi'd for, so it was the remotest thing from my first Design of any thing in the World; and I could be heartily Glad, if the Readers of this Paper would excuse me from it yet. '3 Perhaps the atmosphere of a club seemed familiar or ennobling to readers as they pored over their periodicals in the coffeehouses. Such decorum, anyhow, seems to have been the point of a notice in the second of Dunton's issues: " Tis true, we have already received some questions that are very fit to be answered, but are not so proper for Coffee-houses.' But the great appeal of this device is that it opened a way for ordinary...