Addison, Joseph 1672-1719
English essayist and politician

Born in Milston, Wiltshire, he was educated at Charterhouse and Queen's College and Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he became a Fellow. A distinguished classical scholar, he began his literary career in 1693 with a poetical address to John Dryden and an Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694). In 1699 he obtained a pension to train for the diplomatic service and spent four years in France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Holland. The Campaign, a poem commissioned by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax to celebrate the victory of Blenheim (1704), brought him a commissionership of Excise. Elected MP for Malmesbury in 1708, he kept the seat for life. A prominent member of the Kit-Kat Club, and a friend of Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele, he contributed to Steele's periodical The Tatler, and in March 1711 he and Steele founded the Spectator, 274 numbers of which were the work of Addison. His essay 'On the Pleasures of the Imagination' explored new ground in aesthetics, and laid the basis for the idea of 'sensibility' that became so influential later in the century. He also wrote an opera, Rosamond (1706), and the blank-verse tragedy Cato (1713) as well as other articles and a prose comedy, The Drummer (1715). After the accession of George I (1714), he became secretary to the Earl of Sunderland as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and in 1716 he was appointed a lord commissioner of trade. In the Hanoverian cause, he issued (1715-16) a political newspaper, the Freeholder, which cost him many of his old friends, and he was satirized by Pope as 'Atticus'. He became Secretary of State under Sunderland in 1717, but resigned his post a year later, owing to failing health. Almost his last literary undertaking was a paper war on the Peerage Bill of 1719.

Bibliography: P Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (1954); N Ogle, The Life of Addison (1826).