Our motley paper seizes for its theme.
The original sheet appeared on Tuesday, April 12, 1709,[13] and the days of its publication were fixed to be Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. 'In the selection of a name for the work, Steele affords an early instance of delicate raillery, by informing us that the name "Tatler" was invented in honour of the fair sex; and that in such a character he might indulge with impunity the desultory plan he first laid down, with a becoming imitation of the tattle and gossip of the day.' The first four numbers were given gratis, the price was then fixed at a penny, which was afterwards doubled.
Steele, whose humour was most happily adapted to his task, assumed as censor of manners the alias of Isaac Bickerstaff. 'Throughout the whole work,' writes Beattie, 'the conjuror, the politician, the man of humour, the critic; the seriousness of the moralist, and the mock dignity of the astrologer; the vivacities and infirmities peculiar to old age, are all so blended and contrasted in the censor of Great Britain as to form a character equally complex and natural, equally laughable and respectable,' and as the editor declares, in his proper person, 'the attacks upon prevailing and fashionable vices had been carried forward by Mr. Bickerstaff with a freedom of spirit that would have lost its attraction and efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.'
A scarce pamphlet, attributed to Gay, draws attention to the high moral and philosophic purpose which was entertained originally. 'There was this difference between Steele and all the rest of the polite and gallant authors of the time: the latter endeavoured to please the age by falling in with them, and encouraging them in their fashionable vices and false notions of things. It would have been a jest some time since for a man to have asserted that anything witty could have been said in praise of a married state; or that devotion and virtue were any way necessary to the character of a fine gentleman. Bickerstaff ventured to tell the town that they were a parcel of fops, fools, and vain coquettes; but in such a manner as even pleased them, and made them more than half inclined to believe that he spoke truth.'
The humorists of the Augustan era were, as the world knows, peculiar objects of regard to the great writer of 'Roundabout Essays' in the age of Queen Victoria. Novels, lectures, and reviews alike prove the industry and affection with which Thackeray conducted his researches amidst the veins of singular richness and congenial material opened to him by the lives and writings of these famous essayists, in such profusion that selection became a point of real art.
It is not difficult to trace the results of Thackeray's reading among his favourite writers, or to watch its influence on his own compositions. Nor did his regard for these sources of inspiration pass the bounds of reasonable admiration; he argues convincingly of the authentic importance of his chosen authorities.
From his minute and intelligent studies of the works of these genial humorists Thackeray acquired a remarkable facility of thinking, spontaneously acknowledged by all his contemporaries, with the felicitous aptitude of the originals, and learned to express his conceptions in language simple, lucid, and sparkling as the outpourings from those pure fonts for which his eagerness may be said to have been unquenched to the end of his career.
That artist-like local colouring which gives such scholarly value to 'Henry Esmond,' to the 'Virginians,' to the 'Humorists of the Eighteenth Century,' and which was no less manifest in the work which engaged his thoughts when Death lightly touched the novelist's hand, furnishes the evidence of Thackeray's familiarity with, and command of, the quaintest, wittiest, wisest, and pleasantest writings in our language.
It will be felt by readers who realise Thackeray in his familiar association with the kindred early humorists, that the merry passages his pencil has italicised by droll marginal sketches are, with all their suggestive slightness, in no degree unworthy of the conceits to which they give a new interest; while in some cases, with playful whimsicality, they present a reading entirely novel. The fidelity of costume and appointments, even in this miniature state, confirms the diligence and thought with which the author of 'Henry Esmond' pursued every detail which illustrated his cherished period, and which might serve as a basis for its consistent reconstruction, to carry his reader far back up the stream of time.
The necessity of compressing within the limits of this volume our selections from the comparatively exhaustless field of the humorous essayists, necessarily renders the paragraphs elucidated by Thackeray's quaint etchings somewhat fragmentary and abrupt, while the miscellaneous nature of the topics thus indiscriminately touched on may be best set forth according to the advertisement with which Swift ushered in his memorable 'Number One':