The first of our society is a gentleman of Worcestershire, of an ancient descent, a baronet, his name Sir Roger de Coverley. His great-grandfather was inventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him. All who know that shire are very well acquainted with the parts and merits of Sir Roger. He is a gentleman that is very singular in his behavior, but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only as he thinks the world is in the wrong. However, this humor creates him no enemies, for he does nothing with sourness or obstinacy; and his being unconfined to modes and forms makes him but the readier and more capable to please and oblige all who know him. When he is in town he lives in Soho Square. It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a perverse beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before this disappointment, Sir Roger was what you call a fine gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etherege, fought a duel upon his first coming to town, and kicked bully Dawson in a public coffee-house for calling him youngster. ("The Spectator Club," March 1st, 1711)

Basic Set Up:

Richard Steele introduces the character Sir Roger de Coverley, a member of the Spectator Club.

Sir Roger de Coverley, a member of the Spectator Club, is a character made up by Richard Steele. Even though de Coverley's a fictional character, he represents a certain class of English gentleman.

Richard de Coverley is just one of a group of characters that make up the club, and Steele depicts them all in order to comment on English society as a whole—or at least its upper class. It's one example of how Augustan writers used fiction to make political and social statements about what was going on around them.

This excerpt was published in one of the most popular periodicals of the time, The Spectator, but what's interesting is that the Spectator Club, as Steele depicts it, is made up of fictional characters. That makes this straight up fiction, which means that even though The Spectator was a journalistic publication, a lot of the writing published in it was fictional.

During the Augustan age, the line between journalism and fiction was pretty thin. Novelists like Defoe and Swift routinely framed their novels as journalistic works, "true" stories that were being told, and here we see Steele upping the ante by publishing a fictional work in an actual journalistic periodical.

Have things changed since the Augustan era? Where is the line between fiction and journalism now?