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Updated: June 3, 2025
I would not be tedious in this discourse, but cannot but observe that our race suffered very much about three hundred years ago, by the marriage of one of our heiresses with an eminent courtier, who gave us spindle-shanks and cramps in our bones; insomuch, that we did not recover our health and legs till Sir Walter Bickerstaff married Maud the milkmaid, of whom the then Garter King-at-Arms, a facetious person, said pleasantly enough, "that she had spoiled our blood, but mended our constitutions."
The boys and girls strive who shall come first when they think it is I that am knocking at the door; and that child which loses the race to me runs back again to tell the father it is Mr. Bickerstaff. This day I was led in by a pretty girl, that we all thought must have forgot me, for the family has been out of town these two years.
Isaac Bickerstaff accordingly became silent on politics, and the article of news which had once formed about one-third of his paper, altogether disappeared. The Tatler had completely changed its character. It was now nothing but a series of essays on books, morals, and manners. Steele therefore resolved to bring it to a close, and to commence a new work on an improved plan.
There was in the city at that time a certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting future events. Swift, who hated all shams, wrote, with a great show of learning, his famous Bickerstaff Almanac, containing "Predictions for the Year 1708, as Determined by the Unerring Stars."
"Phoebus," says he, "was the god of Poetry. These little instances, Mr. Bickerstaff, show a gentleman's reading. Then to take off from the air of learning, which Phoebus and the Muses had given to this first stanza, you may observe, how it falls all of a sudden into the familiar; 'in petticoats! "'Or Phoebus' self in petticoats."
Wherein the Month and Day of the Month are set down, the Persons named, and the great Actions and Events of next Year particularly related, as they will come to pass. Written to prevent the People of England from being further imposed on by vulgar Almanack Makers. By ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, Esq. PREDICTIONS for the Year 1708, &c.
The name of Isaac Bickerstaff Steele borrowed from his friend Swift, who, just before the establishment of the "Tatler," had borrowed it from a shoemaker's shop-board, and used it as the name of an imagined astrologer, who should be an astrologer indeed, and should attack John Partridge, the chief of the astrological almanack makers, with a definite prediction of the day and hour of his death.
Bickerstaff, we remember, though I fear that in these days the pleasant and profitable pages of "The Father" are hardly more known to the generality of readers than the lost books of Livy or the missing cantos of the "Faërie Queene," possibly we may remember, I say, that the wise, witty, learned, eloquent, delightful Mr.
Bickerstaff, for whom I am not ashamed to declare I have a very great passion and tenderness. It is not for your face, for that I never saw; your shape and height I am equally a stranger to; but your understanding charms me, and I am lost if you do not dissemble a little love for me. I am not without hopes; because I am not like the tawdry gay things that are fit only to make bone-lace.
Steele flung up his 'Tatler', and instead of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, subscribed himself Richard Steele to the last of those papers, after a handsome compliment to the Town for their kind acceptance of his endeavours to divert them.
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