Richard Steele [ Art and Literature / Politics ]
… in the Coldstream regiment, in which he captained a troop. Steele later observed that ‘There is no sort of People whose Conversation is so pleasant as that of military Men’. 2 The military had its own codes of sociability, including … polite society. Steele made a significant contribution to the genre of the polite periodical that became key to sociable conversation both in the 1710s and throughout the eighteenth century because of the number of times his papers were … the title was in their honour and reflected the easy chatter that the paper emulated. Indeed, the periodical genre used conversation between its invented characters as a format (it sought to have the ‘air of common speech’); 5 reported …
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