The original Tatler is founded in 1709 by Richard Steele, who uses the nom de plume "Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire", the first such consistently adopted journalistic persona, which adapts to the first person, as it were, the seventeenth-century genre of "characters", as first established in English by Sir Thomas Overbury and soon to be expanded by Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711).

Steele's idea is to publish the news and gossip heard in London coffeehouses, hence the title, and seemingly, from the opening paragraph, to leave the subject of politics to the newspapers, while presenting Whiggish views and correcting middle-class manners, while instructing "these Gentlemen, for the most part being Persons of strong Zeal, and weak Intellects...what to think."

To assure complete coverage of local gossip, a reporter is placed in each of the city's popular coffeehouses, or at least such are the datelines: accounts of manners and mores are datelined from White's; literary notes from Will's; notes of antiquarian interest are dated from the Grecian Coffee House; and news items from St. James’s Coffee House.

In this first incarnation (there will be several others, continuing to the present day), it is published three times a week.

Wren's later life is not without criticisms and attacks on his competence and his taste.

The Letter Concerning Design of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, circulates in 1712 in manuscript.

Shaftesbury, proposing a new British style of architecture, censures Wren’s cathedral, his taste, and his long-standing control of royal works.

Wren had been appointed to the Fifty New Churches Commission in 1711, but when the surveyorship starts in 1715 will be left only with nominal charge of a board of works.