… gentility as the son of the Dean of Litchfield, Lancelot Addison (1632-1703), Addison was educated first at Charterhouse School, where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator, Richard Steele , and later at Oxford University. After … circle during the last years of Anne’s reign, Alexander Pope recalled that Addison regularly met ‘his party’ at Button’s Coffeehouse, and he ‘stayed five or six hours – and sometimes far into the night’. Before he married Lady Warwick, he … Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee houses.‘ ( The Spectator, n° 10, 12 March 1711 ) He imagined a society in which learning and moral improvement …