This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-nineteenth century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focused on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).

This chapter identifies a subgenre of the essay form – the dream-essay – and charts its trajectory from early modern philosophy, through the Romantic interest in vision and reverie. Arguing that that the dream-essay both arises from and extends the sceptical ethos of Cartesian philosophy, it discusses Montaigne’s position on dreams, René Descartes’s vocational dream, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dream reveries. With this background established, it turns to the Romantic dreamers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey, emphasising how, for these writers, dreaming – and writing about dreaming – elaborates a paradoxical form of consciousness which is also a form of expression. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of the contemporary writers Adam Phillips and W.G. Sebald.

This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

This chapter examines the origins and style of the early English essay, in order to consider the peculiarities of the form. The first section discusses the vexed origins of the English essay, which arrived on the literary scene both as an innovation, and as a continuation of older forms of moral discourse. It argues that essays were characterised by a paradoxical relationship to temporality, affecting both how the form began, and its style, in representing thought and thinking. Examining the style of essays by Francis Bacon, William Cornwallis, Nicholas Breton, Owen Felltham, and John Hall, the chapter uncovers a tension between flow and stasis, evident in punctuation and the structure of sentences. Rather than taking this to signal two distinct styles of the early English essay, associated respectively with Montaigne and Bacon, the chapter argues that it is the tension that is characteristic, oscillating between the representation of deliberation and decision.

Pater acquired a copy of William Carew Hazlitt’s new edition of Montaigne’s Essays published in 1877. This chapter begins by drawing out similarities in the reception of Pater and Montaigne, both of whose writings were assailed for their egotism, scepticism, and sensuality. Such parallels laid the foundations for Pater’s adoption of Montaigne as a proxy for defending his own critical enterprise. Pater’s highly revisionist account of Montaigne hails him not only as a far subtler thinker and moralist than had hitherto been acknowledged in his English reception, but also as a model of aesthetic finesse, demonstrated above all in his engagement with literature. Rather than contesting the charge of self-centredness, Pater defends Montaigne’s incisive interest in his own various and volatile responsiveness as the essential precondition for any criticism worth having. Curious and sociable, the Selfish Reader as represented by Montaigne cherishes the opportunity to view things from different angles and to probe new possibilities for the self, which is never simply given but always at stake in its encounters.

This chapter focuses on eclecticism as a face of political moderation. Starting from the definition of eclecticism given by Michel de Montaigne in his Essays, it shows that eclecticism has important implications for the ways in whicb we conceive of our political attachments. It then considers the justification of eclecticism given by Daniel Bell in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and compares it to the eclecticism at the heart of the fusionist movement initiated by Frank Meyer in the 1960s. Finally, it presents eclecticism as a way to avoid any form of “blueprint thinking.”

This chapter explores the relationship between political moderation and realism and shows that moderation properly understood and practiced is compatible with pragmatic partisanship. It shows that at the core of moderation lies a certain propensity to self-subversion (the term borrowed from A. O. Hirschman).

This chapter offers a historical introduction to the origins of the essay in sixteenth-century France. It examines the role of memory in the early-modern essay and attempts to identify the mnemonic affordances of the essay form. The author compares the essays of Michel de Montaigne to those of his English successors, Francis Bacon and William Cornwallis.

This chapter explores the moral and psychological dimensions of the neo-Roman concept of freedom, dimensions that have often been overlooked in favour of a political (and, still more narrowly, republican) analysis of non-domination. Through the example of Montaigne, the late sixteenth-century moral essayist, I argue that neo-Roman freedom is neither exclusively nor intrinsically republican in orientation, that it is best understood as a claim about the status of persons, and that this approach provides a firmer basis for establishing its distinctiveness and value than those accounts, including Quentin Skinner’s, which cast it as a robust variant of non-interference.

Eric Langley examines how early modern writers revisit the classically derived emblematic scenario of the shipwreck as they assess the nature of compassionate contact. In this chapter, he shows how the recurring image of the shipwreck provides insight into the extent to which vulnerability, affectivity, embeddedness or interdependence are integrated into the substructure of the subject at various historical moments. He argues that the emblem of the shipwreck is used in early modern texts, and particularly in the works of Shakespeare, to account for both the importance and cost of emotional interaction.