The Dust of Accidents: Rethinking the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay

This paper asks how the particular forms of self-irony that characterised mid-eighteenth-century periodicals such as The World and The Connoisseur reflect a dialectical relation to the contested idea of the public sphere.

Theodor Adorno’s suggestion that the essay genre is the “critical form par excellence” because “the essay’s truth gains its force from its untruth” may be especially true of these periodicals’ self-ironic flair, but his insight begs the important question of the different kinds of cultural work these essays’ paradoxical authority enabled.

If, as Jürgen Habermas famously argued, the Spectator’s dialogic form had helped to mediate the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, these later periodicals’ mixture of self-ironic humour and rational engagement was a double gesture: an endorsement of the democratic impulse of this new vision of open rational debate and a comical recognition of its limits. If critics today lament the evisceration of anything resembling a public sphere, even in its most imperfect form, this dialectical alignment may be more important than ever.