This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.