Helps scholars and students form an understanding of the contribution made by the coffee-house to British and even American history and culture. This book attempts to make an intervention in debates about the nature of the public sphere and the culture of politeness. It is intended for historians and scholars of literature, science, and medicine.

This is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Richard Steele is famous as an early writer of sentimental drama and as half of the writing team, Addison and Steele. He is notable both for the indirect propaganda he developed with Addison and for the open partisanship of his own periodicals. He wrote extensively about responsible economics but was famously irresponsible in his own affairs.

In 1713, soon after publication of the Spectator had come to an end, its place on breakfast tables of Queen Anne's London was taken by the Guardian. Richard Steele, continuing in the new paper the blend of learning, wit, and moral instruction that had proved so attractive in the Tatler and Spectator, was the editor and principal writer; in the 175 numbers of the Guardian he included 53 essays by Joseph Addison, as well as contributions by Alexander Pope, George Berkeley, and several others, some of whom doubtless transmitted their papers through the famous lion's head letterbox that Addison had erected in Button's coffeehouse. "These papers," as John C. Stephens writes in the introduction to his edition of the Guardian, "helped to form and to shape the morals and manners of countless generations in Britain and abroad." This first modern edition of the Guardian was prepared from the original printing of the papers, is fully annotated and indexed, and includes a comprehensive introduction discussing especially the authorship of the individual essays.