Sociability and Polite Improvement in Addison’s Periodicals

Addison argued in his periodical essays that the distinctive sociability of the coffee house was especially, if not uniquely, polite, rational, and civic, and as such, an important metaphor and location for Addison’s social reform. Addison developed his conception of coffee-house sociability in dialogue with Richard Steele, but while Steele argued that emulation of virtuous behaviour in neighbourly communities was sufficient guarantor of the polite and rational reformation of public culture, Addison repeatedly toyed with a more regulated model in which an arbiter or censor moderated coffee-house behaviour. In The Spectator, Addison had identified women readers as an important commercial and ideological opportunity. While women of the polite and middling classes bore the weight of Addison’s reformist expectations, such women were excluded from the public sociability of the coffee house. In recognition of this impasse, Addison and Steele addressed a series of essays to the tea table, a form of sociability in which women and female manners were dominant. These essays develop an innovative construction of tea-table sociability located in a fluid zone between public sociability and private domesticity, centred around tea consumption, polite conversation, and reading essays from The Spectator. The tea table was, accordingly, a significant extension and revision of their theory of public sociability.