Scholarship on Richard Steele continues to be dominated by his collaboration with Joseph Addison on The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712; 1714). Surprisingly little has been said about his other journalistic enterprises, including The Guardian (1713), The Englishman (1713–1715), The Theatre (1720), and lesser-known but scarcely less ephemeral papers like The Lover and The Reader (both 1714). Steele’s contributions (1707–1710) to The London Gazette, the official government newspaper, probably deserve the neglect they have had; no editorialising was tolerated in that paper, and Steele himself found the enterprise ‘very innocent and very insipid’. Though Charles Knight and Nicola Parsons have published good work on Steele's politics, in common critical imagination he remains a cultural ally of Addison, the producer of literary periodicals offering ethical instruction and promoting good sense and benevolence.

Some of the best recent discussions of Steele (and Addison) have been devoted to the role of The Tatler and The Spectator in either fostering or challenging the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere. Brian Cowan has contended Addison and Steele ‘were not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics’, at least in ‘the Spectator project’, and in general scholars have assumed that both men wished to distance themselves from their contemporary news-writers. The presence of news in The Tatler is often marginalised by modern commentators; most critics conclude that Addison and Steele rely primarily on indirection, implicitly advocating a Whig culture without engaging directly in specific civic controversy. When Steele appears in accounts of early eighteenth-century journalism, he is kept well distant from his more argumentative, deep-in-the-muck counterparts like Defoe and Swift. Scholars see him more as a champion of Whig culture, in other words, than a participant in partisan Whig politics.

The questions addressed in this chapter are simple ones. What sort of political work does Steele do as a journalist, and what change if any do we find across his periodical oeuvre? What happens if we read him not only as Addison's ally but also as a party player crossing swords with the likes of Defoe and Swift? Knight's Political Biography is the only study produced in the last generation that pays significant attention to any Steele paper other than The Tatler and The Spectator.