Aids to Reflection is permeated by the literary tendencies of an age which encouraged a conversational tone on the part of the author. In the ‘Age of Sensibility’ friendship was a particularly common literary motif. Biographical confessions of a seemingly private nature were, prior to Romanticism, both rare and thought undesirable: Rousseau's Confessions (1782) and Gibbon's Memoirs of my Life (1796) were published posthumously. However their publication constitutes instances of a developing European trend towards autobiography culminating in Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–33). Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) was published long before Wordsworth's Prelude (1850) and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater (1822) is a good instance of the novel and rather scandalous resonance of autobiographical confessions in this period.

The eighteenth century was a period in which letters or aphorisms assumed a particular importance in the wake of the salon culture, and in which biographical elements, travel news, and intellectual gossip were often integrated into a book form. An obvious example is Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr Mendelssohn (Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, in Briefen an den Herrn Mendelssohn) in which Jacobi reports on his visit to Lessing and his conversation with him.