Sugared with wit: How ‘Mr Spectator’ came to life

The Spectator is a child of the 19th century, and damned proud of it. First published in 1828, the link provided by its 10,000 issues to a long-vanished age of Regency waistlines and Romantic poets is one of the great wonders of journalism. Its success was built upon Victorian foundations, yet it is a peculiarity of the current media landscape that The Spectator, the only current affairs magazine actually to have been published in the 19th century, should in many ways seem the least Victorian of the lot.

The New Statesman, Prospect, Standpoint: all have a certain quality of moral earnestness that one could imagine Gladstone admiring. The Spectator, by contrast, seems to breathe the coffee-perfumed air of an earlier age. Right from its first edition, it has been shaded by the spectre of a vanished sensibility. In its morals, its values, its style, there is little of the wing-collar about it. Dress The Spectator up in period costume, and it would have to sport a powdered wig.

The magazine has always cast a certain wistful gaze back at the 18th century. This is evident enough from its title. To launch a new publication back in 1828 was no less a leap of faith than it would be today — but to call it The Spectator was a gesture of self-confidence so lavish that it might have seemed to verge on the conceited. The original Spectator, founded in 1711, was a daily publication which, despite folding after a year, had come to be enshrined over the course of the 18th century as a supreme model of English prose.

As David Butterfield describes in his history of the magazine, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the men who had written the essays which constituted The Spectator’s daily offering, were admired by even the most exacting critics.