ADDISON, JOSEPH. - English man of letters and essayist, b. at Milston (Wiltshire) in 1672, d. at Kensington in 1719. He came from classical studies and in his youth made a journey as a humanist scholar in Italy, which he recounted in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), which were placed on the Index (18 July 1729), including the French translation Remarques sur divers endroits d'Italie pour servir au voyage de monsieur Misson, vol. IV (17 Jan. 1729), on account of the pessimistic, false or exaggerated judgments that he set forth there against the Catholic clergy. He pursued a brilliant political career in the Whig party and in the last years of his life enjoyed a substantial pension granted him by the government in office.
His fame is linked to the creation of the Spectator, the leading newspaper of the time, which he founded in collaboration with Richard Steele in 1711. A moderate Protestant, a typical representative of the middle class, A. gave his articles a predominantly moralistic and popularizing character, with the invention of conventional characters but often artistically vivid. His prose foreshadows, even in its most simply informative aspects and in its moralistic aims, the rich essayistic and narrative production of the English eighteenth century. A. influenced our eighteenth-century moralists, among them first and foremost Gaspare Gozzi, who imitated him and was lavish in his praise of him.