{"id":257,"date":"2019-12-17T22:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T22:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-westernciv-humandevelopment\/chapter\/m5-discourse-2-at-the-coffee-house\/"},"modified":"2020-01-14T18:26:55","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T18:26:55","slug":"m5-discourse-2-at-the-coffee-house","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-westernciv-humandevelopment\/chapter\/m5-discourse-2-at-the-coffee-house\/","title":{"raw":"M5 \u2013 Discussion 2: At the Coffee House","rendered":"M5 \u2013 Discussion 2: At the Coffee House"},"content":{"raw":"
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A center of communication and discourse in the 17th and 18th centuries was the coffee house. In the article below, Matthew Green (2013) describes the world of the London coffee house. To what would you liken the coffee house in today\u2019s society? Provide three reasons how these two environments are similar and three in which they are very different. Defend your arguments with evidence and examples.<\/p>\r\n


The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

By\u00a0Matthew Green<\/span><\/a><\/p>\r\n

In contrast to today\u2019s rather mundane spawn of coffeehouse chains, the London of the 17th and 18th century was home to an eclectic and thriving coffee drinking scene. Dr Matthew Green explores the halcyon days of the London coffeehouse, a haven for caffeine-fueled debate and innovation which helped to shape the modern world.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

A disagreement about the Cartesian Dream Argument (or similar) turns sour. Note the man throwing coffee in his opponent\u2019s face. From the frontispiece of Ned Ward\u2019s satirical poem\u00a0Vulgus Brittanicus<\/em>\u00a0(1710) and probably more of a flight of fancy than a faithful depiction of coffeehouse practices \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

From the tar-caked wharves of Wapping to the gorgeous lamp-lit squares of St James\u2019s and Mayfair, visitors to eighteenth-century London were amazed by an efflorescence of coffeehouses. \u201cIn London, there are a great number of coffeehouses,\u201d wrote the Swiss noble C\u00e9sar de Saussure in 1726, .\u201d..workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news.\u201d Nothing was funnier, he smirked, than seeing shoeblacks and other riffraff poring over papers and discussing the latest political affairs. Scottish spy turned travel writer John Macky was similarly captivated in 1714. Sauntering into some of London\u2019s most prestigious establishments in St James\u2019s, Covent Garden and Cornhill, he marvelled at how strangers, whatever their social background or political allegiances, were always welcomed into lively convivial company. They were right to be amazed: early eighteenth-century London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, save Constantinople.<\/p>\r\n

London\u2019s coffee craze began in 1652 when Pasqua Ros\u00e9e, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant merchant, opened London\u2019s first coffeehouse (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael\u2019s churchyard in a labyrinth of alleys off Cornhill. Coffee was a smash hit; within a couple of years, Pasqua was selling over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local tavern keepers. For anyone who\u2019s ever tried seventeenth-century style coffee, this can come as something of a shock\u2014unless, that is, you like your brew \u201cblack as hell, strong as death, sweet as love,\u201d as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and shot through with grit.<\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s not just that our tastebuds have grown more discerning accustomed as we are to silky-smooth Flat Whites; contemporaries found it disgusting too. One early sampler likened it to a \u201csyrup of soot and the essence of old shoes\u201d while others were reminded of oil, ink, soot, mud, damp and shit. Nonetheless, people loved how the \u201cbitter Mohammedan gruel,\u201d as\u00a0The London Spy<\/em>\u00a0described it in 1701, kindled conversations, fired debates, sparked ideas and, as Pasqua himself pointed out in his handbill\u00a0The Virtue of the Coffee Drink<\/em>\u00a0(1652), made one \u201cfit for business\u201d\u2014his stall was a stone\u2019s throw from that great entrep\u00f4t of international commerce, the Royal Exchange.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

A handbill published in 1652 to promote the launch of Pasqua Ros\u00e9e\u2019s coffeehouse telling people how to drink coffee and hailing it as the miracle cure for just about every ailment under the sun including dropsy, scurvy, gout, scrofula and even \u201cmis-carryings in childbearing women\u201d \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Remember\u2014until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly\u2014or very\u2014drunk all of the time. Drink London\u2019s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (\u201csmall beer\u201d). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses\u2014in Jonathan\u2019s, Lloyd\u2019s, and Garraway\u2019s\u2014spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain\u2019s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.<\/p>\r\n

The meteoric success of Pasqua\u2019s shack triggered a coffeehouse boom. By 1656, there was a second coffeehouse at the sign of the rainbow on Fleet Street; by 1663, 82 had sprung up within the crumbling Roman walls, and a cluster further west like Will\u2019s in Covent Garden, a fashionable literary resort where Samuel Pepys found his old college chum John Dryden presiding over \u201cvery pleasant and witty discourse\u201d in 1664 and wished he could stay longer\u2014but he had to pick up his wife, who most certainly would not have been welcome.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

The earliest known image of a coffeehouse dated to 1674, showing the kind of coffeehouse familiar to Samuel Pepys \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

No respectable women would have been seen dead in a coffeehouse. It wasn\u2019t long before wives became frustrated at the amount of time their husbands were idling away \u201cdeposing princes, settling the bounds of kingdoms, and balancing the power of Europe with great justice and impartiality,\u201d as Richard Steele put it in the\u00a0Tatler<\/em>, all from the comfort of a fireside bench. In 1674, years of simmering resentment erupted into the volcano of fury that was the\u00a0Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petition Against Coffee<\/em>. The fair sex lambasted the \u201cExcessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE\u201d which, as they saw it, had reduced their virile industrious men into effeminate, babbling, French layabouts. Retaliation was swift and acerbic in the form of the vulgar\u00a0Men<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Answer to the Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petition Against Coffee<\/em>, which claimed it was \u201cbase adulterate wine\u201d and \u201cmuddy ale\u201d that made men impotent. Coffee, in fact, was the Viagra of the day, making \u201cthe erection more vigorous, the ejaculation more full, add[ing] a spiritual ascendency to the sperm.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

There were no more\u00a0Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petitions<\/em>\u00a0after that but the coffeehouses found themselves in more dangerous waters when Charles II, a longtime critic, tried to torpedo them by royal proclamation in 1675. Traditionally, informed political debate had been the preserve of the social elite. But in the coffeehouse it was anyone\u2019s business\u2014that is, anyone who could afford the measly one-penny entrance fee. For the poor and those living on subsistence wages, they were out of reach. But they were affordable for anyone with surplus wealth\u2014the 35 to 40 per cent of London\u2019s 287,500-strong male population who qualified as \u2018middle class\u2019 in 1700\u2014and sometimes reckless or extravagant spenders further down the social pyramid. Charles suspected the coffeehouses were hotbeds of sedition and scandal but in the face of widespread opposition\u2014articulated most forcefully in the coffeehouses themselves\u2014the King was forced to cave in and recognise that as much as he disliked them, coffeehouses were now an intrinsic feature of urban life.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

A map of Exchange Alley after it was razed to the ground in 1748, showing the sites of some of London\u2019s most famous coffeehouses including Garraway\u2019s and Jonathan\u2019s \u2013 Source.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\r\n

By the dawn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were counting between 1,000 and 8,000 coffeehouses in the capital even if a street survey conducted in 1734 (which excluded unlicensed premises) counted only 551. Even so, Europe had never seen anything like it. Protestant Amsterdam, a rival hub of international trade, could only muster 32 coffeehouses by 1700 and the cluster of coffeehouses in St Mark\u2019s Square in Venice were forbidden from seating more than five customers (presumably to stifle the coalescence of public opinion) whereas North\u2019s, in Cheapside, could happily seat 90 people.<\/p>\r\n

The character of a coffeehouse was influenced by its location within the hotchpotch of villages, cities, squares, and suburbs that comprised eighteenth-century London, which in turn determined the type of person you\u2019d meet inside. \u201cSome coffee-houses are a resort for learned scholars and for wits,\u201d wrote C\u00e9sar de Saussure, \u201cothers are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.\u201d Flick through any of the old coffeehouse histories in the public domain and you\u2019ll soon get a flavour of the kaleidoscopic diversity of London\u2019s early coffeehouses.<\/p>\r\n

The walls of Don Saltero\u2019s Chelsea coffeehouse were festooned with taxidermy monsters including crocodiles, turtles and rattlesnakes, which local gentlemen scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane liked to discuss over coffee; at White\u2019s on St James\u2019s Street, famously depicted by Hogarth, rakes would gamble away entire estates and place bets on how long customers had to live, a practice that would eventually grow into the life insurance industry; at Lunt\u2019s in Clerkenwell Green, patrons could sip coffee, have a haircut and enjoy a fiery lecture on the abolition of slavery given by its barber-proprietor John Gale Jones; at John Hogarth\u2019s Latin Coffeehouse, also in Clerkenwell, patrons were encouraged to converse in the Latin tongue at all times (it didn\u2019t last long); at Moll King\u2019s brothel-coffeehouse, depicted by Hogarth, libertines could sober up and peruse a directory of harlots, before being led to the requisite brothel nearby. There was even a floating coffeehouse, the Folly of the Thames, moored outside Somerset House where fops and rakes danced the night away on her rain-spattered deck.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

Hogarth\u2019s depiction of Moll and Tom King\u2019s coffee-shack from\u00a0The Four Times of Day<\/em>\u00a0(1736). Though it is early morning, the night has only just begun for the drunken rakes and prostitutes spilling out of the coffeehouse \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Despite this colourful diversity, early coffeehouses all followed the same blueprint, maximising the interaction between customers and forging a creative, convivial environment. They emerged as smoky candlelit forums for commercial transactions, spirited debate, and the exchange of information, ideas, and lies. This small body-colour drawing shows an anonymous (and so, it\u2019s safe to assume, fairly typical) coffeehouse from around 1700.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

A small body-colour drawing of the interior of a London coffeehouse from c. 1705. Everything about this oozes warmth and welcome from the bubbling coffee cauldron right down to the flickering candles and kind eyes of the coffee drinkers \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Looking at the cartoonish image, decorated in the same innocent style as contemporary decorated fans, it\u2019s hard to reconcile it with Voltaire\u2019s rebuke of a City coffeehouse in the 1720s as \u201cdirty, ill-furnished, ill-served, and ill-lighted\u201d nor particularly\u00a0London Spy<\/em>\u00a0author Ned Ward\u2019s (admittedly scurrilous) evocation of a soot-coated den of iniquity with jagged floorboards and papered-over windows populated by \u201ca parcel of muddling muck-worms...some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco.\u201d But, the establishments in the West End and Exchange Alley excepted, coffeehouses were generally spartan, wooden and no-nonsense.<\/p>\r\n

As the image shows, customers sat around long communal tables strewn with every type of media imaginable listening in to each other\u2019s conversations, interjecting whenever they pleased, and reflecting upon the newspapers. Talking to strangers, an alien concept in most coffee shops today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and shameless social climber, kept a diary in 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffeehouse, sitting down next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private boxes and booths did begin to appear from the late 1740s but before that it was nigh-on impossible to hold a genuinely private conversation in a coffeehouse (and still pretty tricky afterwards, as attested to by the later coffeehouse print below). To the left, we see a little Cupid-like boy in a flowing periwig pouring a dish of coffee\u00a0\u00e0 la mode<\/em>\u2014that is, from a great height\u2014which would fuel some coffeehouse discussion or other.<\/p>\r\n

Much of the conversation centred upon news:<\/p>\r\n

There<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s nothing done in all the world<\/em>
From Monarch to the Mouse,<\/em>
But every day or night <\/em>\u2018<\/em>tis hurled<\/em>
Into the Coffee-House<\/em><\/p>\r\n

chirped a pamphlet from 1672. As each new customer went in, they\u2019d be assailed by cries of \u201cWhat news have you?\u201d or more formally, \u201cYour servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?\u201d or, if you were in the Latin Coffeehouse, \u201cQuid Novi!\u201d That coffeehouses functioned as post-boxes for many customers reinforced this news-gathering function. Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions could be twined from a single conversational thread as when, at John\u2019s coffeehouse in 1715, news about the execution of a rebel Jacobite Lord (as recorded by Dudley Ryder) transmogrified into a discourse on \u201cthe ease of death by beheading\u201d with one participant telling of an experiment he\u2019d conducted slicing a viper in two and watching in amazement as both ends slithered off in different directions. Was this, as some of the company conjectured, proof of the existence of two consciousnesses?<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

A Mad Dog in a Coffeehouse<\/em>\u00a0by the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1800. Note the reference to Cerberus on the notice on the wall and the absence of long communal tables by the later 18th century \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

If the vast corpus of 17th-century pamphlet literature is anything to go by then early coffeehouses were socially inclusive spaces where lords sat cheek-by-jowl with fishmongers and where butchers trumped baronets in philosophical debates. \u201cPre-eminence of place none here should mind,\u201d proclaimed the\u00a0Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House<\/em>\u00a0(1674), \u201cbut take the next fit seat he can find\u201d\u2014which would seem to chime with John Macky\u2019s description of noblemen and \u201cprivate gentlemen\u201d mingling together in the Covent Garden coffeehouses \u201cand talking with the same Freedom, as if they had left their Quality and Degrees of Distance at Home.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Perhaps. But propagandist apologias and wondrous claims of travel-writers aside, more compelling evidence suggests that far from co-existing in perfect harmony on the fireside bench, people in coffeehouses sat in relentless judgement of one another. At the Bedford Coffeehouse in Covent Garden hung a \u201ctheatrical thermometer\u201d with temperatures ranging from \u201cexcellent\u201d to \u201cexecrable,\u201d registering the company\u2019s verdicts on the latest plays and performances, tormenting playwrights and actors on a weekly basis; at Waghorn\u2019s and the Parliament Coffee House in Westminster, politicians were shamed for making tedious or ineffectual speeches and at the Grecian, scientists were judged for the experiments they performed (including, on one occasion, dissecting a dolphin). If some of these verdicts were grounded in rational judgement, others were forged in naked class prejudice. Visiting Young Slaughter\u2019s coffeehouse in 1767, rake William Hickey was horrified by the presence of \u201chalf a dozen respectable old men,\u201d pronouncing them \u201ca set of stupid, formal, ancient prigs, horrid periwig bores, every way unfit to herd with such bloods as us.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

But the coffeehouse\u2019s formula of maximised sociability, critical judgement, and relative sobriety proved a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Coffeehouses encouraged political debate, which paved the way for the expansion of the electorate in the 19th century. The City coffeehouses spawned capitalist innovations that shaped the modern world. Other coffeehouses sparked journalistic innovation. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Button\u2019s coffeehouse, a stone\u2019s throw from Covent Garden piazza on Russell Street.<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

The figure in the cloak is Count Viviani; of the figures facing the reader the draughts player is Dr Arbuthnot, and the figure standing is assumed to be Pope \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

It was opened in 1712 by the essayist and playwright Joseph Addison, partly as a refuge from his quarrelsome marriage, but it soon grew into a forum for literary debate where the stars of literary London\u2014Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot and others\u2014would assemble each evening, casting their superb literary judgements on new plays, poems, novels, and manuscripts, making and breaking literary reputations in the process. Planted on the western side of the coffeehouse was a marble lion\u2019s head with a gaping mouth, razor-sharp jaws, and \u201cwhiskers admired by all that see them.\u201d Probably the world\u2019s most surreal medium of literary communication, he was a playful British slant on a chilling Venetian tradition.<\/p>\r\n

As Addison explained in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, several marble lions \u201cwith mouths gaping in a most enormous manner\u201d defended the doge\u2019s palace in Venice. But whereas those lions swallowed accusations of treason that \u201ccut off heads, hang, draw, and quarter, or end in the ruin of the person who becomes his prey,\u201d Mr Addison\u2019s was as harmless as a pussycat and a servant of the public. The public was invited to feed him with letters, limericks, and stories. The very best of the lion\u2019s digest was published in a special weekly edition of the original\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, then a single-sheet journal costing one-and-a-half pence, edited inside the coffeehouse by Addison. When the lion \u201croared so loud as to be heard all over the British nation\u201d via the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, writing by unknown authors was beamed far beyond the confines of Button\u2019s making the public\u2014rather than a narrow clique of wits\u2014the ultimate arbiters of literary merit. Public responses were sometimes posted back to the lion in a loop of feedback and amplification, mimicking the function of blogs and newspaper websites today (but much more civil).<\/p>\r\n

\"image\"<\/p>\r\n

\u201cAn excellent piece of workmanship, designed by a great hand in imitation of the antique Egyptian lion, the face of it being compounded out of a lion and a wizard.\u201d\u2014Joseph Addison, the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, 9 July 1713 \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

If you\u2019re thinking of visiting Button\u2019s today, brace yourself: it\u2019s a Starbucks, one of over 300 clones across the city. The lion has been replaced by the \u201cStarbucks community notice board\u201d and there is no trace of the literary, convivial atmosphere of Button\u2019s. Addison would be appalled.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

<\/h2>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
\n

A center of communication and discourse in the 17th and 18th centuries was the coffee house. In the article below, Matthew Green (2013) describes the world of the London coffee house. To what would you liken the coffee house in today\u2019s society? Provide three reasons how these two environments are similar and three in which they are very different. Defend your arguments with evidence and examples.<\/p>\n


The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse<\/strong><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Matthew Green<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast to today\u2019s rather mundane spawn of coffeehouse chains, the London of the 17th and 18th century was home to an eclectic and thriving coffee drinking scene. Dr Matthew Green explores the halcyon days of the London coffeehouse, a haven for caffeine-fueled debate and innovation which helped to shape the modern world.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

A disagreement about the Cartesian Dream Argument (or similar) turns sour. Note the man throwing coffee in his opponent\u2019s face. From the frontispiece of Ned Ward\u2019s satirical poem\u00a0Vulgus Brittanicus<\/em>\u00a0(1710) and probably more of a flight of fancy than a faithful depiction of coffeehouse practices \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

From the tar-caked wharves of Wapping to the gorgeous lamp-lit squares of St James\u2019s and Mayfair, visitors to eighteenth-century London were amazed by an efflorescence of coffeehouses. \u201cIn London, there are a great number of coffeehouses,\u201d wrote the Swiss noble C\u00e9sar de Saussure in 1726, .\u201d..workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news.\u201d Nothing was funnier, he smirked, than seeing shoeblacks and other riffraff poring over papers and discussing the latest political affairs. Scottish spy turned travel writer John Macky was similarly captivated in 1714. Sauntering into some of London\u2019s most prestigious establishments in St James\u2019s, Covent Garden and Cornhill, he marvelled at how strangers, whatever their social background or political allegiances, were always welcomed into lively convivial company. They were right to be amazed: early eighteenth-century London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, save Constantinople.<\/p>\n

London\u2019s coffee craze began in 1652 when Pasqua Ros\u00e9e, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant merchant, opened London\u2019s first coffeehouse (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael\u2019s churchyard in a labyrinth of alleys off Cornhill. Coffee was a smash hit; within a couple of years, Pasqua was selling over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local tavern keepers. For anyone who\u2019s ever tried seventeenth-century style coffee, this can come as something of a shock\u2014unless, that is, you like your brew \u201cblack as hell, strong as death, sweet as love,\u201d as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and shot through with grit.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just that our tastebuds have grown more discerning accustomed as we are to silky-smooth Flat Whites; contemporaries found it disgusting too. One early sampler likened it to a \u201csyrup of soot and the essence of old shoes\u201d while others were reminded of oil, ink, soot, mud, damp and shit. Nonetheless, people loved how the \u201cbitter Mohammedan gruel,\u201d as\u00a0The London Spy<\/em>\u00a0described it in 1701, kindled conversations, fired debates, sparked ideas and, as Pasqua himself pointed out in his handbill\u00a0The Virtue of the Coffee Drink<\/em>\u00a0(1652), made one \u201cfit for business\u201d\u2014his stall was a stone\u2019s throw from that great entrep\u00f4t of international commerce, the Royal Exchange.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

A handbill published in 1652 to promote the launch of Pasqua Ros\u00e9e\u2019s coffeehouse telling people how to drink coffee and hailing it as the miracle cure for just about every ailment under the sun including dropsy, scurvy, gout, scrofula and even \u201cmis-carryings in childbearing women\u201d \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Remember\u2014until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly\u2014or very\u2014drunk all of the time. Drink London\u2019s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (\u201csmall beer\u201d). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses\u2014in Jonathan\u2019s, Lloyd\u2019s, and Garraway\u2019s\u2014spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain\u2019s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.<\/p>\n

The meteoric success of Pasqua\u2019s shack triggered a coffeehouse boom. By 1656, there was a second coffeehouse at the sign of the rainbow on Fleet Street; by 1663, 82 had sprung up within the crumbling Roman walls, and a cluster further west like Will\u2019s in Covent Garden, a fashionable literary resort where Samuel Pepys found his old college chum John Dryden presiding over \u201cvery pleasant and witty discourse\u201d in 1664 and wished he could stay longer\u2014but he had to pick up his wife, who most certainly would not have been welcome.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

The earliest known image of a coffeehouse dated to 1674, showing the kind of coffeehouse familiar to Samuel Pepys \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

No respectable women would have been seen dead in a coffeehouse. It wasn\u2019t long before wives became frustrated at the amount of time their husbands were idling away \u201cdeposing princes, settling the bounds of kingdoms, and balancing the power of Europe with great justice and impartiality,\u201d as Richard Steele put it in the\u00a0Tatler<\/em>, all from the comfort of a fireside bench. In 1674, years of simmering resentment erupted into the volcano of fury that was the\u00a0Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petition Against Coffee<\/em>. The fair sex lambasted the \u201cExcessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE\u201d which, as they saw it, had reduced their virile industrious men into effeminate, babbling, French layabouts. Retaliation was swift and acerbic in the form of the vulgar\u00a0Men<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Answer to the Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petition Against Coffee<\/em>, which claimed it was \u201cbase adulterate wine\u201d and \u201cmuddy ale\u201d that made men impotent. Coffee, in fact, was the Viagra of the day, making \u201cthe erection more vigorous, the ejaculation more full, add[ing] a spiritual ascendency to the sperm.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were no more\u00a0Women<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Petitions<\/em>\u00a0after that but the coffeehouses found themselves in more dangerous waters when Charles II, a longtime critic, tried to torpedo them by royal proclamation in 1675. Traditionally, informed political debate had been the preserve of the social elite. But in the coffeehouse it was anyone\u2019s business\u2014that is, anyone who could afford the measly one-penny entrance fee. For the poor and those living on subsistence wages, they were out of reach. But they were affordable for anyone with surplus wealth\u2014the 35 to 40 per cent of London\u2019s 287,500-strong male population who qualified as \u2018middle class\u2019 in 1700\u2014and sometimes reckless or extravagant spenders further down the social pyramid. Charles suspected the coffeehouses were hotbeds of sedition and scandal but in the face of widespread opposition\u2014articulated most forcefully in the coffeehouses themselves\u2014the King was forced to cave in and recognise that as much as he disliked them, coffeehouses were now an intrinsic feature of urban life.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

A map of Exchange Alley after it was razed to the ground in 1748, showing the sites of some of London\u2019s most famous coffeehouses including Garraway\u2019s and Jonathan\u2019s \u2013 Source.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

By the dawn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were counting between 1,000 and 8,000 coffeehouses in the capital even if a street survey conducted in 1734 (which excluded unlicensed premises) counted only 551. Even so, Europe had never seen anything like it. Protestant Amsterdam, a rival hub of international trade, could only muster 32 coffeehouses by 1700 and the cluster of coffeehouses in St Mark\u2019s Square in Venice were forbidden from seating more than five customers (presumably to stifle the coalescence of public opinion) whereas North\u2019s, in Cheapside, could happily seat 90 people.<\/p>\n

The character of a coffeehouse was influenced by its location within the hotchpotch of villages, cities, squares, and suburbs that comprised eighteenth-century London, which in turn determined the type of person you\u2019d meet inside. \u201cSome coffee-houses are a resort for learned scholars and for wits,\u201d wrote C\u00e9sar de Saussure, \u201cothers are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.\u201d Flick through any of the old coffeehouse histories in the public domain and you\u2019ll soon get a flavour of the kaleidoscopic diversity of London\u2019s early coffeehouses.<\/p>\n

The walls of Don Saltero\u2019s Chelsea coffeehouse were festooned with taxidermy monsters including crocodiles, turtles and rattlesnakes, which local gentlemen scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane liked to discuss over coffee; at White\u2019s on St James\u2019s Street, famously depicted by Hogarth, rakes would gamble away entire estates and place bets on how long customers had to live, a practice that would eventually grow into the life insurance industry; at Lunt\u2019s in Clerkenwell Green, patrons could sip coffee, have a haircut and enjoy a fiery lecture on the abolition of slavery given by its barber-proprietor John Gale Jones; at John Hogarth\u2019s Latin Coffeehouse, also in Clerkenwell, patrons were encouraged to converse in the Latin tongue at all times (it didn\u2019t last long); at Moll King\u2019s brothel-coffeehouse, depicted by Hogarth, libertines could sober up and peruse a directory of harlots, before being led to the requisite brothel nearby. There was even a floating coffeehouse, the Folly of the Thames, moored outside Somerset House where fops and rakes danced the night away on her rain-spattered deck.<\/p>\n

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Hogarth\u2019s depiction of Moll and Tom King\u2019s coffee-shack from\u00a0The Four Times of Day<\/em>\u00a0(1736). Though it is early morning, the night has only just begun for the drunken rakes and prostitutes spilling out of the coffeehouse \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite this colourful diversity, early coffeehouses all followed the same blueprint, maximising the interaction between customers and forging a creative, convivial environment. They emerged as smoky candlelit forums for commercial transactions, spirited debate, and the exchange of information, ideas, and lies. This small body-colour drawing shows an anonymous (and so, it\u2019s safe to assume, fairly typical) coffeehouse from around 1700.<\/p>\n

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A small body-colour drawing of the interior of a London coffeehouse from c. 1705. Everything about this oozes warmth and welcome from the bubbling coffee cauldron right down to the flickering candles and kind eyes of the coffee drinkers \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking at the cartoonish image, decorated in the same innocent style as contemporary decorated fans, it\u2019s hard to reconcile it with Voltaire\u2019s rebuke of a City coffeehouse in the 1720s as \u201cdirty, ill-furnished, ill-served, and ill-lighted\u201d nor particularly\u00a0London Spy<\/em>\u00a0author Ned Ward\u2019s (admittedly scurrilous) evocation of a soot-coated den of iniquity with jagged floorboards and papered-over windows populated by \u201ca parcel of muddling muck-worms…some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco.\u201d But, the establishments in the West End and Exchange Alley excepted, coffeehouses were generally spartan, wooden and no-nonsense.<\/p>\n

As the image shows, customers sat around long communal tables strewn with every type of media imaginable listening in to each other\u2019s conversations, interjecting whenever they pleased, and reflecting upon the newspapers. Talking to strangers, an alien concept in most coffee shops today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and shameless social climber, kept a diary in 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffeehouse, sitting down next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private boxes and booths did begin to appear from the late 1740s but before that it was nigh-on impossible to hold a genuinely private conversation in a coffeehouse (and still pretty tricky afterwards, as attested to by the later coffeehouse print below). To the left, we see a little Cupid-like boy in a flowing periwig pouring a dish of coffee\u00a0\u00e0 la mode<\/em>\u2014that is, from a great height\u2014which would fuel some coffeehouse discussion or other.<\/p>\n

Much of the conversation centred upon news:<\/p>\n

There<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s nothing done in all the world<\/em>
From Monarch to the Mouse,<\/em>
But every day or night <\/em>\u2018<\/em>tis hurled<\/em>
Into the Coffee-House<\/em><\/p>\n

chirped a pamphlet from 1672. As each new customer went in, they\u2019d be assailed by cries of \u201cWhat news have you?\u201d or more formally, \u201cYour servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?\u201d or, if you were in the Latin Coffeehouse, \u201cQuid Novi!\u201d That coffeehouses functioned as post-boxes for many customers reinforced this news-gathering function. Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions could be twined from a single conversational thread as when, at John\u2019s coffeehouse in 1715, news about the execution of a rebel Jacobite Lord (as recorded by Dudley Ryder) transmogrified into a discourse on \u201cthe ease of death by beheading\u201d with one participant telling of an experiment he\u2019d conducted slicing a viper in two and watching in amazement as both ends slithered off in different directions. Was this, as some of the company conjectured, proof of the existence of two consciousnesses?<\/p>\n

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A Mad Dog in a Coffeehouse<\/em>\u00a0by the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1800. Note the reference to Cerberus on the notice on the wall and the absence of long communal tables by the later 18th century \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

If the vast corpus of 17th-century pamphlet literature is anything to go by then early coffeehouses were socially inclusive spaces where lords sat cheek-by-jowl with fishmongers and where butchers trumped baronets in philosophical debates. \u201cPre-eminence of place none here should mind,\u201d proclaimed the\u00a0Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House<\/em>\u00a0(1674), \u201cbut take the next fit seat he can find\u201d\u2014which would seem to chime with John Macky\u2019s description of noblemen and \u201cprivate gentlemen\u201d mingling together in the Covent Garden coffeehouses \u201cand talking with the same Freedom, as if they had left their Quality and Degrees of Distance at Home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps. But propagandist apologias and wondrous claims of travel-writers aside, more compelling evidence suggests that far from co-existing in perfect harmony on the fireside bench, people in coffeehouses sat in relentless judgement of one another. At the Bedford Coffeehouse in Covent Garden hung a \u201ctheatrical thermometer\u201d with temperatures ranging from \u201cexcellent\u201d to \u201cexecrable,\u201d registering the company\u2019s verdicts on the latest plays and performances, tormenting playwrights and actors on a weekly basis; at Waghorn\u2019s and the Parliament Coffee House in Westminster, politicians were shamed for making tedious or ineffectual speeches and at the Grecian, scientists were judged for the experiments they performed (including, on one occasion, dissecting a dolphin). If some of these verdicts were grounded in rational judgement, others were forged in naked class prejudice. Visiting Young Slaughter\u2019s coffeehouse in 1767, rake William Hickey was horrified by the presence of \u201chalf a dozen respectable old men,\u201d pronouncing them \u201ca set of stupid, formal, ancient prigs, horrid periwig bores, every way unfit to herd with such bloods as us.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the coffeehouse\u2019s formula of maximised sociability, critical judgement, and relative sobriety proved a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Coffeehouses encouraged political debate, which paved the way for the expansion of the electorate in the 19th century. The City coffeehouses spawned capitalist innovations that shaped the modern world. Other coffeehouses sparked journalistic innovation. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Button\u2019s coffeehouse, a stone\u2019s throw from Covent Garden piazza on Russell Street.<\/p>\n

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The figure in the cloak is Count Viviani; of the figures facing the reader the draughts player is Dr Arbuthnot, and the figure standing is assumed to be Pope \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was opened in 1712 by the essayist and playwright Joseph Addison, partly as a refuge from his quarrelsome marriage, but it soon grew into a forum for literary debate where the stars of literary London\u2014Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot and others\u2014would assemble each evening, casting their superb literary judgements on new plays, poems, novels, and manuscripts, making and breaking literary reputations in the process. Planted on the western side of the coffeehouse was a marble lion\u2019s head with a gaping mouth, razor-sharp jaws, and \u201cwhiskers admired by all that see them.\u201d Probably the world\u2019s most surreal medium of literary communication, he was a playful British slant on a chilling Venetian tradition.<\/p>\n

As Addison explained in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, several marble lions \u201cwith mouths gaping in a most enormous manner\u201d defended the doge\u2019s palace in Venice. But whereas those lions swallowed accusations of treason that \u201ccut off heads, hang, draw, and quarter, or end in the ruin of the person who becomes his prey,\u201d Mr Addison\u2019s was as harmless as a pussycat and a servant of the public. The public was invited to feed him with letters, limericks, and stories. The very best of the lion\u2019s digest was published in a special weekly edition of the original\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, then a single-sheet journal costing one-and-a-half pence, edited inside the coffeehouse by Addison. When the lion \u201croared so loud as to be heard all over the British nation\u201d via the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, writing by unknown authors was beamed far beyond the confines of Button\u2019s making the public\u2014rather than a narrow clique of wits\u2014the ultimate arbiters of literary merit. Public responses were sometimes posted back to the lion in a loop of feedback and amplification, mimicking the function of blogs and newspaper websites today (but much more civil).<\/p>\n

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\u201cAn excellent piece of workmanship, designed by a great hand in imitation of the antique Egyptian lion, the face of it being compounded out of a lion and a wizard.\u201d\u2014Joseph Addison, the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, 9 July 1713 \u2013 Source<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re thinking of visiting Button\u2019s today, brace yourself: it\u2019s a Starbucks, one of over 300 clones across the city. The lion has been replaced by the \u201cStarbucks community notice board\u201d and there is no trace of the literary, convivial atmosphere of Button\u2019s. Addison would be appalled.<\/p>\n

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