YEAR ONE - EARLY JOURNALISM - ADDISON AND STEELE

Seb from year one writes: I found a record of Addison and Steele's 'The Spectator' magazine, which is here on this site, with a biography on the men themselves and then volumes 1-3, although I've only touched on volume 1.

Whether these texts are reliable or not is up for the reader to decide, but I believe the provision of these records to be intriguing enough to warrant eager reading nonetheless. Here's the link to the site: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=18311&pageno=1 - I've set the link to the first page of volume 1 of The Spectator.

You may well have already discovered this website, but I thought I'd spread the word all the same.

PS: I'm sure you can find almost anything text-related on this site, just use the author and title word search bars on the side. I've just located Thomas Hobbes' 'The Leviathan' (http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1319137&pageno=7), and it's fascinating. However, the phrase 'take from this what you will' is very apt when reading such voluminous works, as is a nice cold pint.

CHRIS HORRIE ADDS: Excellent work Seb. For the seminar stick to working mainly with the text. You need an entire year to do all the contextual stuff. The contrast of (English and French) decadence and conservatism versus (American) puritanism and liberalism is one theme we could profitably explore - but this material is so rich that there are a 100 themes that could be examined - all of them valid, and all good for giving the grey matter a good work out which is the whole and only point of HCJ.

I remembered Peter Greenaway's film The Draftsman's Contract which is based on some of the essays of Addison and Steele. It was made in the 1980s and it contains all sorts of connections with the neoconservatism of the 1980s - eg in some clips the characters use cordless telephones when they are setting up all manner of financial scams (such as the famous Tulip investment bubble) which has all these parallels with the asset inflation, stock market boom of the 1980s (and again recently). Some thing never changes. In fact - in human affairs - nothing ever changes (discuss!).


ALSO - Hogarth's puritanism and moralising...



HENRY FIELDING'S LONDON:


JOHN GAY - THE BEGGAR'S OPERA



PURITANS IN AMERICA:

As I say we could spend all year profitably studying this fascinating period, but for our purposes we are taking it as the context from which the specific identifiable activity of journalism arose. Naturally as journalists we want a bit of a picture of the world we are living in and where it sort of came from.