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Europe: Oxford English Dictionary

While Montaigne's essays were not initially emulated in France, they were read and influential in England. Francis Bacon published the first works in English described as essays in 1597, only five years after Montaigne's death. During the Age of Enlightenment, essays were used by polemicists in England to convince readers of particular positions and featured heavily in periodical literature through the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson. In the 18th and 19th centuries, essayists like Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas de Quincey wrote essays for the general public on diverse subjects in England.

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69 views1 page

Europe: Oxford English Dictionary

While Montaigne's essays were not initially emulated in France, they were read and influential in England. Francis Bacon published the first works in English described as essays in 1597, only five years after Montaigne's death. During the Age of Enlightenment, essays were used by polemicists in England to convince readers of particular positions and featured heavily in periodical literature through the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson. In the 18th and 19th centuries, essayists like Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas de Quincey wrote essays for the general public on diverse subjects in England.

Uploaded by

Kimberly Mae Menor
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Europe

While Montaigne's philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his most immediate
disciples tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that his family (the Eyquem line)
was of English extraction, had spoken of the English people as his "cousins", and he was early read
in England, notably by Francis Bacon.[6]
Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597 (only five years after the death of Montaigne,
containing the first ten of his essays),[6] 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described
themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in 1609, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary. Other English essayists included Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in
1600 and 1617 that were popular at the time, [6] Robert Burton (1577–1641) and Sir Thomas
Browne (1605–1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il
Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote about the theme of
wisdom.[7]
In England, during the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favored tool of polemicists who aimed
at convincing readers of their position; they also featured heavily in the rise of periodical literature, as
seen in the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele
used the journal Tatler (founded in 1709 by Steele) and its successors as storehouses of their work,
and they became the most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in England. Johnson's essays
appear during the 1750s in various similar publications. [6] As a result of the focus on journals, the
term also acquired a meaning synonymous with "article", although the content may not the strict
definition. On the other hand, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is not an essay
at all, or cluster of essays, in the technical sense, but still it refers to the experimental and tentative
nature of the inquiry which the philosopher was undertaking. [6]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the
general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a proliferation of great essayists in English
—William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey all penned numerous essays
on diverse subjects, reviving the earlier graceful style. Later in the century, Robert Louis
Stevenson also raised the form's literary level.[8] In the 20th century, a number of essayists, such
as T.S. Eliot, tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays. Virginia
Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos wrote literary criticism essays.[7]
In France, several writers produced longer works with the title of essai that were not true examples
of the form. However, by the mid-19th century, the Causeries du lundi, newspaper columns by the
critic Sainte-Beuve, are literary essays in the original sense. Other French writers followed suit,
including Théophile Gautier, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître and Émile Faguet.[8]

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