… readers (in one case, Steele used his own love letters to his wife), 8 and therefore contributed significantly to the fashion for epistolary narratives as a vehicle for polite discussion. And the paper’s audience was explicitly the … to be sociable with. It is in part for that reason – though also, allegedly, because Addison and Steele represented an unfashionable literary engagement with the wider public rather than with arcane texts increasingly dear to academics, and …