Let’s begin with a proposition. The Cambridge History of the British Essay, in forty-seven substantive and original chapters, provides the first major history of the essay form in English. It deploys both wide-angle and telescopic lenses to survey that history, from the deep roots of the essay in classical tradition through its proliferation in today’s digital media.Footnote ¹ While there are forms of Anglo-American essayism relevant to that prolonged history, it is worth noting that a separate volume in the Cambridge History series, published contemporaneously with this one, is dedicated to the essay in an American context.Footnote ² Of course, since we are living in an era of global connectivity (if not connection), such distinctions may seem irrelevant. Yet over the past six centuries, a tradition of the British essay has evolved in reviewing, travel writing, history, biography, political theory, spiritual autobiography, and many other modalities inherent to the essay that extended its reach as a flexible and multivalent form long before the emergence of the Internet.

That tradition includes colonial and postcolonial manifestations of the essay that deserve attention, both as extensions of the British imperial enterprise and as internal forms of subversion and resistance to it.Footnote ³ The familiar voices of Francis Bacon, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and other canonical staples are resituated here in the context of other voices that have long gone missing. Such voices emerge in the angry rhetoric of pamphlets by women essayists in the early modern period, in the resolves and sermons of seventeenth-century divines, in the school themes that have been all too quickly crumpled up and buried in time, in the newspaper columns of Chartists and radicals striving for political reform, in the publications of the New Woman, in the periodical networks of African Gold Coast intellectuals, in the creative non-fiction of postcolonial subjects, in the memoirs of Irish Traveller people, and in essayistic responses to geopolitical crises and the spectre of ecological apocalypse.Footnote ⁴ Our purpose in this preface is to give a few pointers, not a detailed map of what is, after all, quite a hefty volume. A map of sorts is provided in the two appendices of essayists mentioned in this volume, the first alphabetical and the second chronological. But if its name is any indication, the essay lives and breathes through exploration.

While not exactly a ‘preface essay’ as Mario Aquilina defines it in Chapter 29 of this volume, our preface does have essayistic aspirations to remain brief and conversable, despite the larger arsenal of rhetorical, didactic, scholarly, analytical, polemical, and even propagandist strategies available to the essayist, as one finds elaborated in the chapters of this volume.Footnote ⁵ What we would like to stress above all is the associative nature of the essay. Such association may operate as an internal structuring mechanism, as in the form of the literary essay derived from Montaigne, but it is likewise a generic feature linking the essay to other literary forms. Among those elaborated in this volume are the associations the essay has with the novel, the commonplace book, the miscellany, the school theme, the preface, the review, the newspaper leader, the letter, the diary, the political tract, the conduct manual, the travel journal, the philosophical treatise, the reverie, the gastronomical effusion, the verse essay, the memoir, the blog, and the cine-essay.Footnote ⁶

The essay may present itself in the shape of verse under the title of an essay, or it may pass by other names in the form of a de facto essay. It may be plucked from a longer text and collected in a book of essays, or it may appear serially in the more ephemeral form of a periodical. It may adopt a tone that is vituperative and satiric, or comforting in avuncular wisdom. Its voice may be strident in the face of injustice, or soporific (at times) in high seriousness. It may appear light and portable to be read on a plane, or ponderous and unsociable like a tortoise tucked away under an old motley cover. Whatever totality one makes of it, the essay generically seems predisposed to expose its own contrary – to turn itself inside out like the rebellious child of literary history that it is and resist the very habits of classification that define its Enlightened parent. It may display inherited patterns of the species, but its vitality lies in its unpredictability: if the essay is anything, it is protean in its attempt to be.Footnote ⁷

Given these conditions, any effort to plug any gaps and assay, systematically, to introduce The Cambridge History of the British Essay as an airtight vessel of historical continuity would be worse than absurd: it would be an act of cowardice aimed to fend off criticism. Yet criticism, as this volume makes clear, is an important part of the essay tradition.Footnote ⁸ Rather than attempting to steer clear of it, let us take the first step here by saying that, had we chosen to replace the voice of Laura Marcus, Professor of English at New College, Oxford, whose untimely death took place during the composition of this volume, we might have had a chapter on the autobiographical essay, or the essay as life writing. Life sometimes writes itself in unexpected chapters, which, in this case, we have chosen to let stand as a speaking absence representing so many losses that took place during the Covid pandemic.

From the chasm of loss, however, life sometimes springs, and as Saikat Majumdar remarks: ‘The tradition of life writing is essential to the postcolonial essay in English, as becomes evident with some of its most exciting exponents from different parts of the former British Empire’, whose autobiographical essayism his chapter proceeds to explore.Footnote ⁹ In another context, Kevin Brazil shows how life writing is an important part of the art criticism of Virginia Woolf and Vernon Lee,Footnote ¹⁰ whose essays are treated elsewhere in this volume in different contexts: of the New Woman movement (Rebecca Rainof, Chapter 34); of politics and propaganda surrounding the First World War (Rachel Baldacchino, Chapter 35); and of modernism (Michael Wood, Chapter 36). Eve Tavor Bannet discusses the autobiographical performance of selfhood in early British essays and letters, and Paige Reynolds does the same for the contemporary Irish essay. Uttara Natarajan sounds the ‘familiar’ voices of autobiographical urban essayists of the Romantic era, while Eric Tippin treats the ironies of life writing in the short-form essay as it developed between 1870 and 1920, as in G.K. Chesterton’s ‘A Piece of Chalk’. In an exciting intervention, David Russell discusses the role of life writing in the early days of psychoanalysis.Footnote ¹¹

Essays, autobiographical and otherwise, often incorporate idiosyncratic aspects of life and, had we the eidolon of an eighteenth-century essayist, we might here say a word about cats. More specifically, about one cat named Christabel whom we might – unfairly but truthfully – blame for the loss of a chapter on the character-essay. She did not eat it. Nor can we (strictly speaking) hold her accountable for the fact that it never materialised. But it is worth noting that Sir Thomas Overbury, author of a series of ‘characters’ from 1614, did not like cats. And that, while Nicholas Breton considered dedicating his Characters vpon Essaies, Morall and Diuine (1615) to his cat, he instead chose Francis Bacon for a muse: ‘Worthy knight, I have read of many essays, and a kind of charactering of them, by such, as when I looked unto the form, or nature of their writing, I have been of the conceit that they were but imitators of your breaking the ice to their inventions.’Footnote ¹² Whether Breton would have placed John Earle, author of Essays and Characters (1628), among the imitators of Bacon, we, who have not studied the matter, cannot say. We must leave the character essayists swimming in cold waters beneath the ‘broken ice’ until someone, perhaps you, dear reader, decides to go fish.Footnote ¹³ In the meantime, let us leave the last word on this subject to Leigh Hunt, who opens one essay in a deviously noncommittal manner: ‘A blazing fire, a warm rug, candles lit and curtains drawn, the kettle on for tea … and finally, the cat before you, attracting your attention, – it is a scene which everybody likes, unless he has a morbid aversion to cats; which is not common.’Footnote ¹⁴ But those words, from ‘The Cat by the Fire’ (1834), do not contain the last word. For that, we turn instead to an earlier essay by Hunt, ‘A Day by the Fire’ (1811), which opens: ‘I am one of those that delight in a fireside, and can enjoy it without even the help of a cat or a tea-kettle. To cats, indeed, I have an aversion.’Footnote ¹⁵

A chapter on animals (it occurs to us now) would indeed have sat nicely in this history of the essay. Alas, we cannot offer that, though the interested reader may discover the fate of animals in the ecocritical essay. For the last chapter of this volume, Richard Kerridge’s ‘The Essay, Ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene’, contains some animal remains: a beached whale with one eye plucked out, a rotting lamb disembowelled by buzzards, the skull of a gannet, and some rabbit bones. More appetising, although less searing, we can also offer Amy L. Tigner’s chapter, ‘Food and the Essay’ (Chapter 17). What not to eat, on the other hand, we learn from John Strachan’s chapter ‘Satire and the Essay’ (Chapter 16), which discusses Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ as a model for later British essayists, who ravenously gobbled it up and spat it out in similar, bite-sized chunks of satire. Thanks to our cat, we have digressed, through animals, from essays to food, but at least we have Natalie M. Phillips and Sydney Logsdon to remind us that distraction has always been a key feature of the essay.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, to the point: thematic chapters like the ones named above challenge the ostensibly chronological order of this volume. Consider, as yet another example, Barbara Schaff’s chapter ‘A Brief History of Travel and the Essay’ (Chapter 30), which begins with Bacon’s 1594 essay ‘Of Travel’ addressed to young Englishmen on the Grand Tour and winds up in 2021, with Taran N. Khan, listening to ‘other’ voices in the capital of war-torn Afghanistan. Let us simply conclude that while a historiographical spine structures this volume, its organisational vagaries may be as interesting – indeed as necessary to life – as variants in nature.

Overall, the five sections of The Cambridge History of the British Essay are intended to retain a forward movement through time while highlighting patterns that emerge in the essay’s long march toward futurity. In brief, these five sections address: (1) the formation of the British essay tradition in the early modern period; (2) its development through essay periodicals, clubs, coffeehouses, and other aspects of eighteenth-century culture;Footnote ¹⁷ (3) the morphing of the essay in the nineteenth century to serve the purposes of education,Footnote ¹⁸ cultural identity, and moral and political reform; (4) the fragmentation of identities, individual as well as communal, through such phenomena as decolonialisation, the traumas of World War, the articulation of feminism by the New Woman, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and the increasingly frenetic pace of life in modernity; and (5) contemporary engagements with the essay form through film and photography, literary theory,Footnote ¹⁹ public intellectualism, postcolonial subjectivity, performative identity, ecological consciousness, and digital media, from blogs to Substack newsletters. And now, we might add ChatGPT, a platform deploying artificial intelligence to enable computers to write essays in response to prompts – a new twist in the history of the essay that has some wondering: ‘Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay?’Footnote ²⁰

More than 600 years of changing media and historical circumstance, however, have proven the resilience and adaptability of the essay. We hear its diverse sounds and styles ranging from plain to polemical, from didactic to dreamlike, and from contrarian to sublime. We can almost smell its purposes – its subtleties and subversions – whether political or moral, utilitarian, evangelical or aestheticist. Often, we get a taste of an argumentative structure building, only to find it circling back, teasing us out of teleology into more recursive patterns of thought. Essays touch us too, often with that quality Hazlitt called gusto, an intense form of aesthetic experience involving more than one mode of sensation.Footnote ²¹ The essay, in short, is a dynamic form in which some of the brightest minds of our generation – and others – have attempted to speak of what seems most essential. One thinks of George Orwell and the New Orwellians – generations apart yet determined to say something meaningful as the condition for speaking at all.Footnote ²² At the same time, the essay, to borrow the etymology of the term from Montaigne as ‘an attempt’ or ‘trial’, belies the profound human stakes involved in any such attempt. The chapters of this book together are themselves an attempt – the first, perhaps, but likely not the last – to glimpse the future through the past of the essay in English.