Nathan Drake keened in 1805 that Joseph Addison for all his literary achievement and "moral dominion" frustrated biographers, who stood helpless before his reticence and distrust of self-revelation. Time and scholarship have not made the private individual more accessible. The Letters of Joseph Addison, for example, scrupulously gathered and edited by Walter Graham for publication in 1941, exposed a cinematic "Thin Man," a largely nonexistent personality clothed and bewigged. Almost as if his personal papers had been censored, not a single piece of correspondence between him and his family has been preserved. Peter Smithers's second edition of a fullscale biography (1968) unearthed few significant clues to Addisonian uniqueness. Only surface details about the public figure, who apparently forfeited depth for appearance and impact, have been perpetuated.

A mélange of paradoxes, he made his artistic life fuel his political career so that a rapid symbiotic association developed between artistry and...