The Tatler. By Isaac Bickerstaff Esq; Numb. 1 – 271. 1709 – 1711

Bound in contemporary full calf. Blind stamped boards, Cambridge style. The spine in seven gilt stamped compartments, six raised bands, with a red lettering piece in the second compartment from the top. The boards scuffed with corners soft. Well-done early linen repairs to the spine, probably covering cracked boards, but the binding strong, not separating and easily read. Front flyleaf coming loose. Browning to some issues, as usual. Issue numbers occasionally shaved.

Contained in a mid 20th C. cloth clam shell box. The box with some wear to the edges.

With the bookplate of Sir Charles Mordaunt  (1836 – 1897) of Walton Hall

Per Wikipedia: The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such British classics as Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Idler, and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published in the same volume as the collected Spectator.

Richard Steele

Tatler was founded in 1709 by Richard Steele, who used the nom de plume “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire”. This is the first known such consistently adopted journalistic persona,which adapted to the first person, as it were, the 17th-century genre of “characters”, as first established in English by Sir Thomas Overbury and then expanded by Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711). Steele’s conceit (embodied in the title “Tatler”) was to publish the news and gossip heard in various London coffeehouses (in reality he mixed real gossip with invented stories of his own), and, so he declared in the opening paragraph, to leave the subject of politics to the newspapers, while presenting Whiggish views and correcting middle-class manners, while instructing “these Gentlemen, for the most part being Persons of strong Zeal, and weak Intellects…what to think.” To assure complete coverage of local gossip, he pretended to place a reporter in each of the city’s four most popular coffeehouses, and the text of each issue was subdivided according to the names of these four: accounts of manners and mores were datelined from White’s; literary notes from Will’s; notes of antiquarian interest were dated from the Grecian Coffee House; and news items from St. James’s Coffee House.

The journal was originally published three times a week, and Steele eventually brought in contributions from his literary friends Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison, though both of them pretended to be writing as Isaac Bickerstaff and authorship was revealed only when the papers were collected in a bound volume. The original Tatler was published for only two years, from 12 April 1709 to 2 January 1711. In 1711, Steele and Addison decided to liquidate The Tatler, and co-founded The Spectator magazine, which used a different persona than Bickerstaff.