In 1709, the year in which Samuel Johnson was born, London saw its first daily evening newspaper, the Evening Post, and Richard Steele began writing the Tatler. In these two periodicals from the same year, we have two different forms or genres – the newspaper and the literary essay. Although Johnson was born in Staffordshire, far from London, he would of course move to London and write for periodicals, and these two publications highlight one particularly important aspect of the impact of print on Johnson, while also pointing to tensions that animate Johnson’s contributions to journalism.

By the early eighteenth century, periodicals such as the Evening Post had begun to compile a variety of different stories in the same publication, paving the way for the format that would become so prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: newspapers providing daily updates on current events, across a wide range of fields, creating in the process, among other things, a narrative played out on what has come to be called the twenty-four-hour news cycle. On the other hand, with publications such as the Tatler, the eighteenth century began to see the development of the single-essay literary periodical. Typically published a couple of times a week, these journals might sustain a topic or a theme across a few issues. Usually, though, each prose essay offered anecdotal observations; what was sustained across them, instead of the narrative of the news, was the character created by the typically anonymous author of the journals’ reflections.