Biography | Sir Richard Steele

Sir Richard Steele

Portrait by Sir Godfrey Keller, 1711; engraved: Barf Pinxf I Faber fecit 1733

1672 – September 1, 1729
Sir Richard Steele, the Dublin born dramatist and politician, was knighted in 1717. He is best known for co-authoring the periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator. The Tatler—published from Tuesday April 12, 1709 to Volume No. 271, Tuesday January 2, 1711—is noteworthy to freemasons for its several references to Freemasonry.
His named portrait is centrally placed on the Engraved List of Lodges in the print entitled Les Free-Masons published in the 1735 edition of Bernard Picart’s Cerérémonies et costumes religieuses de tous les peuple du monde. There is no viable explanation as to why Sir Richard Steele appears on the print, especially as there is no evidence of his ever having become a freemason. *
Non-mason

Source: AQC 111 (1998) p. 23. Illustration from PICART, B. Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde … Paris, 1736. V. IV. Engraving. After a drawing by Louise Fabrice Du Bourg.
* Cf. Rae Blanchard, “Was Sir Richard Steele a Freemason?” PMLA, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Sep., 1948), pp. 903-917. Published by Cambridge University Press, PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.