Addison, Joseph

Addison, Joseph (b Milston, nr. Amesbury, Wiltshire, 1 May 1672; d London, 17 June 1719). English writer and statesman. Addison was a Whig MP from 1708 until his death, a classical scholar, a poet, a playwright, and one of the leading journalists of his age. His journalism appeared mainly in the Tatler and its successor the Spectator, both of which had a large middle-class readership, and he said, ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses.’ In terms of aesthetics, his most important writings are a series of essays ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ published in the Spectator in 1712. They show a pragmatic outlook and a belief that the arts should ‘deduce their laws and rules from the general sense and taste of mankind, and not from the principles of those arts themselves’. In these writings he helped lay the basis for the notion of ‘sensibility’ and for that of an ‘inner sense’ of beauty later taken up by Hutcheson and the philosopher David Hume (1711–76). As a member of the Kit-Cat Club, Addison was painted by Kneller.