Two Aspirins and a Comedy > Narrative fiction page > The Spectator
The Spectator
Were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele the first bloggers? The Spectator, published every weekday from March 1711 to December 1712 -- with a final run of 80 issues between June and December 1714 -- is an enduring mirror on the literary and intellectual life of London between the Glorious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They were both conservative and rebellious times, a tension elegantly expressed in this groundbreaking magazine.
You can read the pages either by navigating the calendar (left), blog-style, or by using the previous page / next page links at the foot of each page. If your browser does not support inline frames, you can navigate the separate issues in your full browser window starting here.
[Source notes: these pages were produced from the three-volume Spectator on Project Gutenberg. A very simple PHP script produces the individual issues from a single flat-text database. Notes from the 1891 edition are kept intact, but internal hyperlinks have been removed.]