A toast to the first Spectator (and to CoffeeHousers)

It’s The Spectator’s summer party today, and in a rather important year. It was exactly 300 years ago that Joseph Addison & Richard Steele first published the earliest incarnation The Spectator. This blog is named for the coffee houses that had sprung up all over London at that time — the original destinations for The Spectator. It had gossip, opinion, character assassinations, literary review (it hyped up Paradise Lost), theatre and the arts. It was a huge success, without about one in ten Londoners reading it at the time. Were Addison alive now, there are a few characteristics he’d recognise in this virtual coffee house. He wrote using a pseudonym, just as most CoffeeHousers use a nom-de-blog. Addison said what he liked about coffee houses is that you can listen, without taking part. Only a minority of our readers leave comments, but I like to think that all of us enjoy the rough-and-tumble.