Studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1646 -1723 Portrait of Joseph Addison 1672 – 1719, English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, and Politician joseph Addison

Studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1646 -1723

Portrait of Joseph Addison 1672 – 1719, English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician

Joseph Addison

oil on copper

31 x 24.5 cm. (12.1/4 x 9.3/4 in.)

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.

Life and writing

Background

Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), writer and politician, was born on 1 May 1672 at the rectory, Milston, a hamlet north of Amesbury in Wiltshire, the son of Lancelot Addison (1632–1703) and his wife, Jane, née Gulston (c.1635?–1684). His father was at that time vicar of Milston, and Joseph is said to have been baptized on the same day, indicating that there were doubts about the baby's survival. His mother came like his father from a clerical and royalist background; her brother William Gulston had held the living at Milston prior to Lancelot, and became bishop of Bristol in 1679. Joseph was the oldest child in the family to survive infancy. His sister Dorothy, born in 1674, was twice married, while his two brothers achieved minor note in the world. Gulston (1673–1709) entered the service of the East India Company and was briefly governor of Fort St George (Madras) prior to his sudden death, and Lancelot (1680–1710), a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, followed him to India in 1710.

The young Addison spent his first eleven years at Milston, although he may have received some private schooling at Amesbury and Salisbury. In June 1683 his father was elected dean of Lichfield, and the family moved to a substantial deanery in the cathedral close there. Joseph attended the ancient Lichfield grammar school, where Samuel Johnson studied a generation later. Although Addison's father soon received preferment as archdeacon of Coventry and gained increasing renown as an author of theological books, he was evidently a poor financial manager and the family enjoyed no great prosperity.

Despite the loss of Jane Addison, the Addisons seem to have been a close-knit and harmonious group according to Richard Steele, who made holiday visits to them at the deanery. The celebrated friendship of Addison and Steele began when Joseph was sent to the Charterhouse School in London at thirteen. From 1685 the boys were under the direction of a new master of the Charterhouse, the speculative and unorthodox Thomas Burnet. Steele was the older of the two by just seven weeks. Both young men were bound for Oxford at the end of their schooldays.

At The Queen's College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being specially noted for his Latin verse, and became a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work, a book of the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. His translation of Virgil's Georgics was published in the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers and Charles Montague, 1st Earl of Halifax, took an interest in Addison's work and obtained for him a pension of £300 a year to enable him to travel to Europe with a view to diplomatic employment, all the time writing and studying politics. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III, an event which lost him his pension, as his influential contacts, Halifax and Somers, had lost their employment with the Crown.

On 18 May 1687 Addison matriculated at Queen's College, his father's alma mater. Two years later, as Steele was entering Christ Church, Addison moved to Magdalen College, having been elected to a demyship on 30 July 1689 thanks to the efforts of one of the tutors at Queen's, William Lancaster. This mark of recognition came because of the young man's attainments in classical learning, and above all