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chapter one American Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians Transatlantic Periodical Culture in the Eighteenth Century I In its April issue for 1776, the Pennsylvania Magazine, which had been founded the previous year by Scottish-born printer Robert Aitken, published “A Reverie.” Aitken’s anonymous correspondent, after declaring himself a “great admirer of the Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians,” goes on to describe the effect of a recent encounter with issue no. 35 of Richard Steele’s Guardian from 1713: “After having read the paper, I closed the book; and reflecting on the oddity of the thought, fell into one of those deep reveries, whereby the mind is entirely absorbed, and rendered, for a while, totally inattentive to the objects of sense; forming, as it were, a kind of waking dream.”1 The “reverie” had been a staple of the periodical essay ever since Joseph Addison first deployed it in Spectator no. 3 in 1711, describing a “Methodical Dream” of Lady Credit. Of the many innovations Addison and Steele brought to the periodical form in its infant years, the “Vision or Allegory” was to be one of the most lasting and most imitated throughout the next century. For Addison and Steele, the reverie or vision often emerges from deep contemplation of the busy world around them—in the case of Spectator no. 3, for example, from a visit to the fledgling Bank of England where Mr. Spectator is delighted “to see the Directors, Secretaries , and Clerks, with all the other Members of that wealthy Corporation, ranged in their several Stations, according to the Parts they act in that just and regular Oeconomy.”2 In the case of Aitken’s American correspondent, there are no such banks to visit, no busy city streets to stalk or smoky coffee-shops to observe. In the Pennsylvania Magazine, the vision results instead from reading an installment of the London-based Guardian from sixty years earlier, in which a “correspondent” wrote in to tell of how, “having determined the pineal gland to be the chief place of the soul’s residence, he had procured from a great philosopher a box of snuff, having this remarkable property, that a pinch of it duly administered, so affected his pineal gland, as to enable his soul to leave her residence for a while, and enter that of any other person .”3 The Guardian’s correspondent, one “Ulysses Cosmopolita” (George Berkeley) had gone on to describe remarkable cosmopolitan voyages from pineal gland to pineal gland through the vehicle of this remarkable snuff. And so inspired was the Guardian’s editorial persona, Nestor Ironside, that he declared his own acquisition of the “Philosophical Snuff” “and gives Notice that he will make use of it, in order to distinguish the real from the professed Sentiments of all Persons of Eminence in Court, City, Town and Country.”4 Two generations later and an ocean away, in the pages of the Pennsylvania Magazine there is no “Philosophical Snuff” to be had; but imported copies of the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian themselves serve to produce similar hallucinogenic effects. As Mr. Cosmopolita wrote,“You may imagine it was no small Improvement and Diversion, to pass the time in the Pineal Glands of Philosophers, Poets, Beaux, Mathematicians, Ladies and Statesmen.”5 This was the guiding fantasy of the magazine form as it emerged in England over the course of the eighteenth century, expanding on the periodical sheets popularized by Addison and Steele and coming into its own with the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, the first successful English-language miscellaneous periodical. In the opening issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775, Aitken’s editor, Thomas Paine, celebrated the ideal of the magazine as a place where, even though “we are not all Philosophers, all Artists, nor all Poets,” we can store and share the “sweets” in a common “bee-hive.”6 As Paine argued here, on the brink of the American Revolution, the new magazine could serve as the engine of genius and a necessary prophylactic against imported vice: “It has always been the opinion of the learned and curious that a magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”7 But it is not only the collections of the magazine (the Pennsylvania Magazine was subtitled “The American Monthly Museum”) but its serial nature that made it so powerful a tool. Unlike the book or the newspaper, the periodical returns serially...

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