Publicity and Privacy in The History of PDF

History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.
Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British

Coffeehouse
Brian Cowan*
McGill University
Abstract
The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise
of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This
article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse – the
presumption that there was a ‘golden age’ of British coffeehouse society in the later
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries which entered into a state of decline
during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and finds it wanting. The
article suggests that the history of the coffeehouse public sphere is better understood
in terms of a transformation from an early modern ‘performative publicity’ to a
Romantic style of public life which reflected changing notions of the relationship
between the self and society that have been identified by cultural historians of the
Romantic age. Rather than trying to identify the moment of its decline, historians
should try to explain the continuing vitality of the coffeehouse, and by extension
the coffeehouse public sphere, as they have evolved over the course of the last three
and a half centuries.
The history of the coffeehouse has a number of obviously captivating

characteristics. Coffee is today one of the most widely and habitually
consumed commodities in the world and the coffeehouse as a social space
has undergone a renaissance in recent years with the rise of the gourmet
coffee market around the world and perhaps epitomised by the Starbucks
coffee brand and retail empire.1 The coffeehouse seems relevant to
contemporary culture in a way that is unusual for most other aspects of the
early modern world. Whereas most of the institutional pillars of old regime
societies such as monarchy, aristocracy and the established church have now
withered away in their contemporary importance, the coffeehouse has not
only survived but flourishes in today’s world.
It is curious then that a common theme in most histories of the British
coffeehouse has been that of decline. The golden age of the coffeehouse is
taken to be synonymous with the early years of its emergence in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, the classical
coffeehouse is often thought to have entered into a social decline out of
which it would never emerge. The current coffee renaissance is seen to be
a pale imitation of the early coffeehouse society in its prime.2 This article
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse . 1181
takes the declensionist model of coffeehouse history as a point of departure

for understanding the broader significance of that history in the study of the
British experience of modernisation. It argues that stories of decline unduly
idealise early modern coffeehouse society and in doing so these narratives
also fail to properly historicise the coffeehouse experience. The three and a
half centuries of British coffeehouse history have been as variegated and
complicated as the history of modern British society itself.
There have been two major reasons for the popularity of declensionist
narratives in coffeehouse history. The first has been the predominance of a
Whig interpretation of English history in which the rise of the coffeehouse
has been understood as an indicator of the declining power of monarchical
pretensions to absolutism in the face of the rising influence of public opinion
and popular participation in the politics of the realm. To the extent that it
was taken seriously at all in British historical writing, the history of the
coffeehouse was wedded to a Whig narrative of the rise of English liberty.3
Tory and revisionist histories have tended to disparage or more commonly
to ignore the importance of the rise of the coffeehouse. The second has
been the remarkable popularity in recent years of Jürgen Habermas’s
argument for the development of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (bürgerliche
Öffentlichkeit) which he thought emerged between the later decades of the
seventeenth century and the age of the French Revolution.4 When coupled
with a renewed interest by historians in early modern print culture and its
role in fuelling the political debates of the era, this association between the
coffeehouse and the history of the ‘public sphere’ has invigorated attempts
by early modern historians to understand the emergence of public opinion
as a factor in political debate.5 Both the old-fashioned Whig narratives and
the new model (often ‘post-revisionist’) public sphere histories have identified
the historical significance of the coffeehouse with its role in the rise of public
opinion as a force to be reckoned with in British political culture.6 The
Abbé Prévost’s often quoted early eighteenth-century declaration that the
‘coffeehouses and other public spaces are the seats of English liberties’ has
had remarkable staying power.7
Incipient in both of these models for the history of the coffeehouse is an
assumption that the golden age of coffeehouse public opinion could not last
for long and that it would ultimately decline. This sort of nostalgia for a
‘golden age’ of coffeehouse culture now long past can be dated as early as
1723, when the journal Pasquin pined for the lost days of John Dryden’s
benevolent rule over the company at Will’s Coffeehouse.8 The argument
for a decline of the classical coffeehouse is explicit in the work of Habermas,
who in a moment of uncharacteristic chronological precision locates the
golden age of the British coffeehouse in the years between 1680 and 1730.9
One need only refer to the titles of works such as Richard Sennett’s
Fall of Public Man (1976) or Stephen Miller’s recently published essay on
Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (2006) to witness the enduring
appeal of this sense that the classic coffeehouse public sphere did not survive
© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x
1182 . Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse
its eighteenth-century heyday and was doomed to decline and wither away.10
Markman Ellis’s The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2004) and his valuable
four-volume edition of printed primary sources Eighteenth-Century Coffee
House Culture (2006) also invoke a ‘rise and fall’ narrative for British
coffeehouse history.11 Ellis is critical of the Whig and Habermasian
interpretations of the coffeehouse as romanticisations of the coffeehouse
past, yet he remains wedded to a notion that there was something unique
and important about the early modern coffeehouse that we have subsequently
lost. For Ellis, the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the decline
of the original British coffeehouse and that by the Victorian era,‘the age of
the coffeehouse had ended’ and ‘the idea of the coffeehouse as a collective
conversational experiment was finished’.12
An interpretation as popular and as enduring as this cannot be completely
wrong and there is indeed much to be said for the unique and socially
significant character of coffeehouse society in its putative golden age during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 One can retain a sense of the
unique nature of the ‘conversational experiment’ that characterised early
modern coffeehouse society without falling prey to the rather too simple
and perhaps overly romantic narrative of ‘decline and fall’ that has dominated
most histories of the British coffeehouse. Through a review of the
historiography of the British coffeehouse from its mid-seventeenth-century
inception to the present day, this essay will suggest that there are alternative
ways of understanding its long-term history. The modern history of the
coffeehouse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains substantially
under-researched in comparison to its early modern predecessor and this
article does not pretend to offer much by way of new research in these areas,
but it will suggest that the assumption that the classic coffeehouse must have
declined and dissipated in the high modern era is a thesis well worth
questioning.
Contrary to the declensionist narratives which have prevailed in most
accounts of the British coffeehouse, one could argue that the coffeehouse
has in fact become progressively more ‘public’, more democratic and more
accessible, albeit quite different in its social character and in its cultural
significance from its earlier inceptions, over time. The key variable in
question here is ‘publicity’. What was a public place at various points in the
past? What did it mean to ‘be in public’ and has this experience changed
over time? The coffeehouse is a useful means to gauge such changing notions
of this ‘public-ness’ over time because it has been understood to be both a
quintessentially public and private institution.
As a commercial space theoretically open to all comers, it was ‘public’ in
the sense that it was accessible to anyone who was willing and able to pay
for the coffee sold there. As a space for the consumption and discussion of
matters of general concern, the coffeehouse was also thought to be a centre
for the expression of public opinion. These are indeed the crucial elements
which made the coffeehouse such an important exemplar for Habermas’s
‘bourgeois public sphere’. More recent historical works have concurred: for
Tim Blanning, coffeehouses ‘can be said to have exemplified the public
sphere’.14
But the coffeehouse has played just as important a role in the new histories
of early modern private life that have been the concern of social historians.15
While the coffeehouse was a commercial space, it was also often located
within a larger domestic space in which people (most often the proprietor
and his or her family) lived.16 The coffeehouse could also be a ‘private’ place
for the clientele too: it was a place to relax, perhaps to read quietly, or to
engage in personal conversation with a select few friends and neighbours.
Although theoretically open to all, coffeehouses tended to be the havens for
select coteries of likeminded individuals. The public coffeehouse and the
private club emerged in tandem, and not in opposition to one another.17
The public and the private are variable concepts and the relationship
between the two has been conceived quite differently over time.18 By tracing
the history of the coffeehouse from its mid-seventeenth-century inception
to the modern era, we can look at one particularly useful and illuminating
case for understanding the changing relationship between understandings
of public and private life. I will suggest here that we can best understand
the changes in terms of a transformation of cultural expectations of what it
meant to go to a coffeehouse and participate in the public and private lives
enacted in these spaces. Rather than understanding this process in terms of
the decline and fall of a classical coffeehouse public sphere, it is better to see
it as a shift from a ‘performative’ form of publicity to a ‘Romantic’ style of
public life. The coffeehouse public sphere did not just fade away, but it was
experienced rather differently in modern Britain than it had been in the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Coffeehouse Origins
Much has been invested in the history of the origins of the coffeehouse. The
coffeehouse as a social institution was not invented in Britain, but in the
Ottoman Empire and the Turkish example provided an exotic model for
the development of the coffeehouse in Britain.19 In 1654, Samuel Hartlib
referred to the newly established English coffeehouse as ‘a Turkish alehouse’,
a phrase that elegantly captured the ambiguous place of the early English
coffeehouse as something both foreign and familiar.20 It is certain that the
earliest proprietors of coffeehouses in England were foreigners. The two
top contenders for the title of ‘first coffeehouse keeper’ in the British Isles
include a Jewish (probably Sephardic) immigrant known to us only as ‘Jacob’
and an ethnic Greek servant who had lived in Ottoman Izmir before moving
to England.
After the publication of a scholarly edition of the diaries of the late
seventeenth-century Oxford scholar Anthony Wood in the last decade of
the nineteenth century, it seemed that the first English coffeehouse had been
established in March 1651, when ‘Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the
Angel’ in east Oxford.21 This claim has recently been challenged by Markman
Ellis, who has pointed out that the date was conjecturally assigned by Wood’s
editor Andrew Clark based on an entry from a 1671 redrafting of Wood’s
original diary entry on the topic from sometime in late 1654 or early 1655.22
A much stronger claim for the title of the first coffeehouse in England exists
for the London coffeehouse established by a Greek servant named Pasqua
Rosee at some point between 1652 and 1654.23
While the precise dates of the establishment of the first London and
Oxford coffeehouses will probably remain somewhat obscure, it is clear that
the early 1650s saw the establishment of a number of coffeehouses in both
cities and that their original proprietors tended to be Levantine Jews or
Greeks who had made their way to England through their associations with
the English merchants and scholars who made journeys to the Ottoman
Empire in the early seventeenth century. Although Turkish and South Asian
Muslims also immigrated to England in the seventeenth century and were
often caricatured in satirical literature as coffeehouse proprietors, there is no
evidence that any of these immigrants were involved in the early coffeehouse
trade.24
It is significant that Oxford and London were the first cities in which the
English coffeehouse was invented. Both places were connected to the wider
world through scholarly and mercantile networks. Ultimately it took the
existence of both communities in order to legitimise the new coffee drink
and the new social institution called the coffeehouse.
Rosee made his way to London through the support of the Levant
merchant Daniel Edwards and he began his career as a coffeeman serving
coffee in Edwards’s home before he was encouraged by Edwards to make
his living selling coffee by retail. Of course there could have been no
coffeehouses without coffee to sell within them, and in the early years of
the trade, most of that coffee was obtained from Levant merchants. The
East India Company became increasingly important in the coffee trade in
the later seventeenth and especially the early eighteenth century.25
But it was equally important that a language could be found in which
coffee and coffeehouses could be made comprehensible and indeed desirable
to a broader consuming public than just the few Levant merchants and
Levantine immigrants who had acquired a taste for coffee abroad. This
legitimacy came from the enthusiastic response to coffee from the English
virtuosi, an intellectual community characterised by their almost insatiable
‘curiosity’ for understanding as much as possible about the worlds around
them. In the 1650s, many of these virtuosi gathered together in Oxford
clubs, drank coffee, shared medical information about the new drink and
began to frequent the newly established coffeehouses. By the later 1650s,
London virtuosi, such as those who frequented James Harrington’s Rota
club, had followed suit.26 It was this combination of mercantile business
savvy and virtuoso enthusiasm for the new coffee commodity that allowed
it to become one of the more successful new imports of the seventeenth

century.27 It also allowed for the initial flourishing of the coffeehouse as a
social institution.
Coffeehouse Controversies
Despite its remarkable success, the British coffeehouse was also controversial
from the moment of its invention. As the numbers of coffeehouses in the
Stuart kingdoms grew, particularly in the metropolis of London, and as the
coffeehouses began to develop a particular culture of news dissemination
and open discussion of current events, they began to look suspiciously like
centres for the ‘spreading of false news, and licentious talking of matters of
state and government’ and Charles II’s Restoration regime began to consider
various means for either suppressing the coffeehouses or at least regulating
the discussion of political matters within them.28 This debate over the
regulation of late seventeenth-century coffeehouses has often been interpreted
as a debate about the extent to which the political culture of the time had
come to terms with an accepted existence of a ‘public sphere’ of open and
critical debate.29
A point which has often been missed in these debates is that there
was a wide gap between the norms and practices of public politics in
seventeenth-century Britain. The practice of appealing to a sort of ‘public
opinion’ as a means of influencing political action had been a longstanding
option in British state affairs and it gained particular force over the course
of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation debates about the
relationship between religious and state policy in both religious and domestic
affairs.30 Perhaps the best example, albeit an extreme one, of this can be seen
in the ways in which John Pym and his Junto fellows relied on the crowd,
rumours and public petitioning (politics ‘out of doors’) to bolster their
bargaining position vis-à-vis Charles I in the early moments of the Long
Parliament.31 The practice of ‘public’ politics had been well established in
early modern Britain by the time that the coffeehouse began to develop as
a unique social institution for the dissemination and discussion of news in
the later seventeenth century. Hence perhaps the persistent efforts by Tudor
and Stuart historians of late to insist that there were many other precursors
to Habermas’s classical coffeehouse public sphere, not least in the vibrant
and vicious print culture of post-Reformation and civil war era Britain.32
The sense that this sort of appeal to public opinion as a source for political
legitimacy was itself a legitimate move, rather than the political equivalent
of ‘foul play’ or a much lamented last resort, developed much more slowly.33
Charles II recognised the practical benefits to his regime that could result
from appealing to public opinion and making full use of all of the means for
manipulating that opinion that crown patronage could provide. But this did
not mean that the king or his chief ministers thought that this should be a
normal state of affairs, and they certainly did not approve of attempts by
opposition politicians such as the Earl of Shaftesbury to use public opinion

as a means of forcing undesired policy options such as passing an exclusion
bill against the Duke of York in the late 1670s or early 1680s.34 It is this
disconnect between the pragmatic benefits that could be reaped from appeals
to public opinion and the widespread sense that this sort of politics was
distinctly downmarket and not to be encouraged, above all amongst one’s
political opponents, that has led Mark Knights to observe that ‘the emergence
of the “first public sphere” [in later Stuart Britain] was marked by
contemporary fears of a highly irrational, abusive and manipulative form of
public discourse’.35 In my own work on the coffeehouse public sphere, I
have articulated a difference between what one can call a ‘practical public
sphere’ – defined by the actions people actually performed in public and as
a means of influencing others – and a ‘normative public sphere’ which
comprised the attitudes and assumptions which governed thoughts about
the ways in which one was supposed to behave in public.36
What is achieved by distinguishing between a normative and a practical
public sphere? One could argue that the distinction helps one make sense
of the different kinds of discussions about public opinion and political action
that were held in early modern Britain. Fears of the ‘irrational, abusive and
manipulative’ discourse found in political pamphlets, newspapers and in
coffeehouse debate that were part and parcel of the practical public sphere
routinely gave rise to the disparagement of that discourse and those practices
in the expressions of public norms. Unsurprisingly then, the vast majority
of the satirical literature focusing on later seventeenth-century coffeehouse
discourse was highly critical, if not outright dismissive about the possibilities
for anything like a civil coffeehouse public sphere.37 Hence Lawrence Klein
concluded that ‘it is hard to find kind words for the coffeehouse during the
Restoration period’.38
The practical public sphere which functioned in the late seventeenth-
century coffeehouses was quite different from the ways in which it is
portrayed in Habermas’s famous discussion of the ‘bourgeois public
sphere’. At the risk of adding yet another qualification upon an existing
qualification, I would like to suggest here that this practice of coffeehouse
publicity is best characterised as ‘performative’. There was a theatrical nature
to coffeehouse sociability in its formative century and this accounts for much
of the intense interest in the new social institution. Hence perhaps the
popularity of the coffeehouse as a setting for dramatic productions in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.39 Especially at the major London
coffeehouses such as Will’s, Garraway’s, the Amsterdam or Sam’s coffee-
houses, there was an assumption that the debates, discussions and activities
that took place there would be observed and commented upon by an
audience that was greater than the coterie of habitués who happened to be
on site at the time. Understanding this sense of coffeehouse theatricality
helps explain why Richard Steele would attempt to organise the reports in
his Tatler journal according to the famous coffeehouses of London:
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article
of White’s Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will’s Coffee-house; learning,
under the title of Graecian; foreign and domestick news, you will have from St.
James’s Coffee-house.40
These coffeehouses became stages for public (and often very politicised)
performances on an everyday basis.
This performative nature of the practical coffeehouse public sphere may
help us understand events such as the all too frequent brawls and bravado
declamations which characterised coffeehouse society in the late seventeenth
century, particularly in moments of intense national crisis.41 Without such
a sense of performative publicity, it is hard to make sense of cases such as
the arrival of a sea captain in the notoriously Whig-friendly Amsterdam
Coffeehouse in order to seize up a copy of a petition for the parliament
being circulated there in January 1680 and to announce that the petition
was promoted by ‘none but fanaticall persons’ in front of such obviously
hostile company. The captain was subsequently seized by the company and
forced to appear before the Lord Mayor in order to swear his oaths of
allegiance to the crown and established Protestant church before he was
discharged.42 This case is not atypical, but simply one amongst many incidents
in which one can find the coffeehouses of late seventeenth-century London
used as virtual stages upon which political pronouncements, acts of defiance
and even provocations to violent confrontation were made.
Of course coffeehouses were not necessarily unique in this respect. Robert
Shoemaker’s recent studies on the decline of public insult, violence and
duelling in eighteenth-century London, particularly in its open air spaces
‘out of doors’ and on its streets, have demonstrated that there was a substantial
transformation in metropolitan attitudes to public life during this period. The
coffeehouse was born in an age when it was still common and socially
accepted for Londoners to denounce one another in public for perceived
misbehaviour, criminal conduct or supposedly subversive beliefs.43 Shoemaker
has noted that
in early modern society, life was often conducted as a public performance, in
which individual identity was shaped by a public audience and individuals
manipulated that identity through a process of ‘self-fashioning’.44
By the later eighteenth century, this performative sense of public life had
been replaced by a more interiorised sense of self-identity and coffeehouse
sociability too would change to reflect these new attitudes.45 But in the first
century of its emergence, the coffeehouse would be a common stage upon
which public insults, brawls, duels and other forms of highly contrived
activities such as compelled health-drinking were commonly performed.46
The coffeehouse quickly became a crucial site for public behaviour and
social interactions of various sorts, but the kinds of ‘publicity’ found therein
were more suited to the conventions of early modern performative sociability
than to the rather more self-reflective (and tamer) norms that would prevail
in later centuries.
A Golden Age?
As a venue for this sort of performative publicity, coffeehouse behaviour
was highly scrutinised by anyone with an interest in public life. This intense
concern for proper coffeehouse sociability may indeed account for the
persistent appearance of the coffeehouse in the urban satirical literature of
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.47 And it is in this satiric
literature where we find the coffeehouse as the basis for another set of debates
about the norms and values that should guide coffeehouse sociability. A
certain code of coffeehouse civility had been established by the earliest
virtuoso patrons of the coffeehouse in the Interregnum and early Restoration
era, but it was as honoured in the breach as much as it was actually observed,
particularly as the coffeehouse became more deeply imbedded in the patterns
of urban daily life.48 By the end of the seventeenth century, the virtuoso
origins of coffeehouse civility had been almost entirely forgotten and the
coffeehouse was now just as likely to provide the imaginative setting for
urban satires such as Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698 –1700) as it was to be
considered the locus for the reformation of public manners in works such
as John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691–96), a periodical which tried rather
unsuccessfully in its second issue to restrict proper coffeehouse discourse to
‘only what is a fitting entertainment for the ingenious, or what does consist
with faith and good manners’.49
The era which Habermas identified as the ‘golden age’ of British
coffeehouse society between 1680 and 1730 perhaps appears as such because
it is in these years that the coffeehouse emerges in contemporary discourse
as a key site for the civilisation of public manners. Rather than as simple
evidence for the inherent civility of coffeehouse sociability, these continuing
attempts to civilise the coffeehouse should be understood as an indicator of
the continuing cultural anxieties provoked by the existence of the
coffeehouse as a centre for public socializing, news reading and wide-ranging
political discussion.
Coffeehouses continued to be watched with great care by both local
authorities as well as agents of the crown, and attempts to regulate
coffeehouse politics by the state continued well into the eighteenth century.50
Charles II’s famous 1675 proclamation suppressing the coffeehouses of
England in one fell swoop was never attempted again after its rather hasty
repeal in early 1676, but this was due more to pragmatic concerns than to
a generalised acceptance of the coffeehouse as a legitimate venue for public
debate. Very similar attempts at suppression were vetted at moments of
severe political crisis such as December 1679 and October 1688. As late as
October 1718, proposals to search coffeehouses ‘where disaffected persons
resort’ and to prosecute coffeehouse-keepers who continued to subscribe
to seditious papers were still being contemplated in the secretary of state’s
office.51 The coffeehouse did not escape political scrutiny in its supposed
‘golden age’.

It is nevertheless true that the decades after the glorious revolution saw
the deeper elaboration of a different strategy for regulating coffeehouse
sociability, a strategy that relied less upon outright suppression and legal
prosecution than it did on imagining the coffeehouse as a space safe for the
cultivation of a more ‘civil’ society. In this way, the coffeehouse emerged
as one of the key sites for the imagining of a ‘normative public sphere’, and
it was indeed this normative discourse that formed the basis for Habermas’s
original concept of a bourgeois public sphere. Without a doubt, the most
important writings to adumbrate this normative vision of a coffeehouse
public sphere were the periodical prose essays of Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele published as the Tatler (1709 –11) and the Spectator (1711 –12; 1714)
papers.52
The detailed and colourful descriptions of coffeehouse society presented
in the Tatler and Spectator papers are extremely compelling and have figured
prominently in nearly every subsequent history of the early English
coffeehouse. This was particularly true for the Habermasian account of the
coffeehouse as the primary locus for the English public sphere. Habermas
claimed that the Spectator papers were ‘so intimately interwoven with the
life of the coffee houses that the individual issues were indeed sufficient basis
for its reconstruction’.53 But the coffeehouse public sphere described in the
Spectator essays was an imagined construct: it was an expression of the desire
by ‘polite’ Whigs such as Addison and Steele to reform early eighteenth-
century coffeehouse society.54 In an age characterised by cut throat partisan
politics and at a particular moment when the political fortunes of their own
party, the Whigs, were at an ebb tide, the authors of the Spectator papers
desired to make the coffeehouse a less contentious and less overtly politicised
space.
How else should one understand suggestions for the reformation of
coffeehouse manners such as those published in Tatler no. 268? In this rather
facetious essay, we find a letter from Lloyd’s Coffeehouse (the precursor to
the modern insurance firm, Lloyd’s of London) which proposes
that there be a pulpit erected within every coffee-house of this city and the
adjacent parts; that one of the waiters of the coffee-house be nominated as reader
to the said pulpit; that after the news of the day has been published by the said
lecturer, some politician of good note do ascend into the said pulpit; and after
having chosen for his text any article of the said news, that he do establish the
authority of such article, clear the doubts that may arise thereupon, compare it
with parallel texts in other papers, advance upon it wholesome points of doctrine,
and draw from it salutary conclusions for the benefit and edification of all that
hear them.
The essay also suggests that this coffeehouse homily may be followed by
another speaker who would be allowed to ‘confirm or impugn [the previous
lecturer’s] reasons, strengthen or invalidate his conjectures, enlarge upon his
schemes, or erect new ones of his own’. Any cause for further debate must
be referred to the pulpit for elaboration,‘there to make good any thing that
he has suggested upon the floor’. The point of this proposal is not so much
to promote reasoned and civilised debate on current events in the coffee-
houses, but rather to purge it of its frivolous excesses. The establishment of
coffeehouse pulpits, the essay suggests, should
put a stop to those superficial statesmen who would not dare to stand up in this
manner before a whole congregation of politicians, notwithstanding the long
and tedious harangues and dissertations which they daily utter in private circles.55
The ‘coffeehouse pulpit’ conceit was not chosen unconscientiously. Just
months before the essay was published, the rabid high-church Tory Dr
Henry Sacheverell had been convicted of high crimes and misdemeanours
for his intemperate sermon delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Gunpowder
Day in 1709. Sacheverell’s sermon was ritually burnt by a common hangman
after his conviction, but one common Tory response had been to respond
in kind by burning the sermons of Whig churchmen such as Richard West
and Benjamin Hoadley.56 Sermons were highly contentious vehicles for
conveying political messages in early eighteenth-century England and it was
just as important for the Spectator project to reclaim the sermon for polite
discourse as it was to tame the partisan nature of coffeehouse society.57 In
an earlier dispute between Whigs and Tories in the town of Colchester, a
local coffeehouse had been used as a venue for a high-church parody of a
sermon preached by the low-church rector of St. Michael, Colchester,
William Smithies. Smithies was appalled that coffeehouse banter and
homiletic discourse had been so scandalously miscegenated; this was, he
claimed,‘to mob the pulpit, to set the gown and buffoon together, like the
dog and the bear, [it] was to make a jest of themselves, a church of the
coffeehouse, and a stage of the pulpit’.58
The Tatler’s proposal for a coffeehouse pulpit was not serious, but it was
designed to accentuate the unreliability and the superficiality of coffeehouse
discourse. The essay reminded its readers that the coffeehouse was not a
church and that coffeehouse chatter about the news of the day was nothing
like a well reasoned sermon based on scripture. The end result was to
trivialise most coffeehouse discourse and to make it appear anodyne by
inviting their readers to laugh at the pretensions of ‘coffeehouse politicians’
who took themselves far too seriously.59
The ‘normative public sphere’ envisioned by moralists such as Addison
and Steele was no less powerful for being an ideological construct. One did
not have to build actual pulpits in the coffeehouses of London to get the
point that most of the news talk that took place there was superficial and
best taken with a grain of salt. As Kate Retford has observed in another
context,
the normative and the actual were not, and are not, hermetically sealed entities.
Ideals have to have some relationship with common experience to have any
degree of purchase and always exert a level of pressure, even if that pressure does
not prohibit alternative modes of existence.60
The attempted Spectatorial reformation of the English coffeehouses may

not have made them any more ‘polite’ in an absolute sense, but Addison
and Steele were remarkably successful nevertheless in establishing a sort of
mental framework in which the coffeehouse might be imagined as a
potentially more polite social space. Coffeehouse politeness always remained
more of an aspiration than a reality in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.61
While Habermas’s notion of a bourgeois public sphere tends to conflate
the normative and the practical elements of coffeehouse sociability, more
recent critics and historians of the early eighteenth-century coffeehouse
milieu have been attentive to the specifically ideological purposes built into
the ways in which ventures such as the Tatler and Spectator essays and their
many imitators in the coffeehouse periodical market discussed the
coffeehouse.62 It is perhaps a testament to the success and the long-term
cultural importance of the Spectator project that so much attention has been
paid to the normative vision of the coffeehouse adumbrated in the essays of
Addison and Steele.
The Spectatorial desideratum of a reformation of coffeehouse manners
had an effect on the ways in which coffeehouses were imagined throughout
the eighteenth century. The essays themselves were often imitated, and their
satires on coffeehouse society were reiterated again and again. In 1732, The
Grub Street Journal (1730–37) returned to the comparison between preaching
and coffeehouse conversation. ‘What method can have so just a claim for
approbation’, the Journal asked disingenuously,
as the constant reading of those weekly compositions which treat of matters of
policy, morality, and religion, with such admirable brevity and perspicuity?
Especially if they are read in a place where there is an opportunity of consulting
ingenious and learned persons, immediately, upon any difficulty which may
arise. This is a circumstance, which gives a coffeehouse the advantage of a church,
or of a conventicle, where all persons are obliged to hear in silence whatever
absurdity happens to be dictated from the pulpit.63
The assumption that eighteenth-century coffeehouses were paragons of
politeness has become so deeply ingrained that the irony in this passage
might easily be missed at first glance. But when one recognises that the
principal author and editor of the Grub Street Journal, Richard Russel, was
a non-juror and a sardonic critic of contemporary society, it can hardly be
overlooked. By parodying the rhetoric of Whig anti-clericalism, Russel
compares the unstructured, uninstructed discourse of the coffeehouse which
takes the weekly newspapers as its foundation and finds this wanting when
compared to the carefully considered, authoritative and scripturally based
sermon.
Historians and critics of the eighteenth century have not yet fully explored
or indeed satisfactorily explained the irony that some of the most enthusiastic
emulators of the Spectatorial essay format were Tories such as Mary
Delarivier Manley and Samuel Johnson, non-jurors such as Russel, and
Jacobites such as Nathaniel Mist.64 To be sure, Whiggish journals such as

The Lay Monk (1713–14), The Censor (1717) and Pasquin (1722 –24) also
carried on the tradition of Spectatorial Whiggery with their apparent pose
of non-partisanship and their continued jibes against the impolite pretensions
of the high church clergy, but it is remarkable that the Spectatorial torch
found its most prominent bearers amongst Tory writers in the age of Whig
oligarchy.
By the latter part of the eighteenth century, many English commentators
could not help but think of London coffeehouses with the Spectator in mind.65
Not long after arriving in London, the young Scotsman James Boswell made
his way to Will’s Coffeehouse,‘so often mentioned in the Spectator’, in order
to relive the experiences he had read about in the famous essays.66 The
notion that the ‘golden age’ of the coffeehouse had more or less come and
gone during the lifetimes of Addison and Steele had already crept into the
minds of some as early as the 1760s, when coffeehouses were still a vibrant
part of London’s political, social and economic life.
The Romantic Coffeehouse

The myth of the early eighteenth-century ‘Augustan’ coffeehouse has been
so strong that very little historical attention has been devoted to the history
of the British coffeehouse in the rest of the eighteenth century. Although
the coffeehouses of mid-eighteenth-century Britain figure in the arguments
for an expansive popular politics that compromised the hegemony of the
parliamentary Whig oligarchy, they are invoked merely to bolster the
arguments for a broader political culture than the Namierite model would
allow.67 The coffeehouses of mid-Hanoverian Britain await their proper
historian.68 Just as neglected has been the history of the coffeehouse in the
age of the French Revolution and its aftermath, even though it is well-
known that coffeehouses continued to flourish as urban institutions well
into the nineteenth century.69 While the coffeehouses themselves were
well-entrenched, coffeehouse sociability and especially coffeehouse politics
remained controversial, particularly during the contentiously revolutionary
1790s and afterwards. More than a century after its inception, the
potentials for coffeehouse sociability to provoke political controversy were
demonstrated once again in the fervid debates surrounding the French
Revolutionary crisis of the 1790s.
Two high profile trials of the radicals John Frost and William Hodgson,
both for the seditious words each man uttered at London coffeehouses have
garnered particular attention from historians of late.70 Frost was convicted
in May 1793 of uttering seditious words, particularly for openly declaring
that he was ‘for liberty and equality and no king in England’ at the Percy
Coffeehouse and served six months in Newgate prison for the offence.71
The case of Hodgson arose from a similar incident. Hodgson, a member of
the radical London Corresponding Society, and his friend the Reverend
William Pigott had become involved in a fracas with the other customers
at the New London coffeehouse in September 1793 in the course of which
Hodgson proposed toasts to equality and to the French Republic, adding
‘may it triumph over all the governments in Europe’ for good measure.72
While convictions for demonstrations of these sorts of overt republican
beliefs are hardly remarkable, what has been of great interest is that both
Frost and Hodgson were convicted for words uttered in a coffeehouse, that
supposed bastion of free and reasoned political debate. Frost’s lawyer Thomas
Erskine tried to defend him on the grounds that unguarded words uttered
in a coffeehouse were a private matter and as such could not be grounds for
a conviction for sedition, which was a public offense. By the end of the
eighteenth century, coffeehouse sociability could be construed as private
and not normally subject to public scrutiny. A defense on these grounds
would have been hardly imaginable a century earlier, when public
exclamation and indeed denunciation was part and parcel of the performative
nature of coffeehouse society. Frost’s trial thus became, according to John
Barrell, ‘a debate . . . on exactly what kind of a space a coffee house was’.73
Hodgson’s trial too raised the question of whether one should consider
words spoken in a coffeehouse to be a public or a private matter. In a
pamphlet written in defense of Hodgson, Pigott declared his outrage at the
invasion of privacy implied by the prosecution of his friend: ‘Till now, it
had been supposed, that the table or box in a coffee room, was as sacred
and inviolable as a private room, nay, even as our own house’.74 Au fin, these
protestations were unpersuasive and both Frost and Hodgson were found
guilty, but it is nevertheless remarkable that a credible defense could be
mounted for both men on the grounds that the state had no right to interfere
with, and indeed prosecute, the private conversations of men in a
coffeehouse.
The debates over these trials illuminate the continuing juxtaposition of
public and private life in the experience of coffeehouse society, but they
also mark the emergence of new ways of thinking about the coffeehouse.
In some respects, not much had changed from the early coffeehouses.
Newspapers and pamphlets were still read, and heated political debate could
ensue among customers. The heated challenges to drink loyal healths to the
king countered by radical healths to equality and the French Republic that
occasioned Hodgson’s conviction for sedition would not have been
unfamiliar to the coffeehouse debates that took place a century earlier during
the Exclusion Crisis or in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. But
the defenses mounted in both trials marks the emergence of a new notion
what constituted proper coffeehouse society. The coffeehouse could now
be conceived of as a place for quiet contemplation and unguarded relaxation
by individuals rather than a venue for the collective argumentation and
demonstration of professed belief. At some point in the later eighteenth
century, it seems that there arose, as John Barrell puts it, ‘the notion that
coffee houses were among the places where the privacy of public men was
Fig. 1. Anon., ‘Interior of a Coffeehouse’ (c.1700), inscribed in brown ink: ‘A.S 1668’ (believed
to be false), (147 × 220 cm); The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (Anon.
English, dated c.1705), body color, [1931-6-13-2], British Roy PIIIa. © Copyright the Trustees of
the British Museum.
lived out; places were they could unbend, could be ‘themselves’, as we put
it, or could be other than themselves, and could enjoy, however guardedly,
what Habermas calls ‘the parity of “common humanity” without that
reflecting on their public reputation’.75 The performative public sphere was
giving way to a new ‘romantic’ style.
The best evidence for this transformation is found in the changes in the
spatial layout of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse. While early eighteenth-
century coffeehouses still consisted of an open room with large tables around
which customers gathered to read and talk as a common group, the later
eighteenth-century coffeehouse often had separate booths where customers
gathered together in relative privacy to read or chat amongst themselves,
presumably without the expectation that other customers would take an
interest in, or still less spy upon and report to the authorities, what was said
there (cf. Figs. 1 and 2). In the Romantic age, the coffeehouse could be
construed as a haven for the ‘private life’ of individuals and the unguarded
expression of the self rather than as a constantly public stage for open and
communal performances for which one might be constantly judged. This
surely is yet another indicator that the later decades of the eighteenth century
did indeed see a sort of ‘cultural revolution’ in terms of the ways in which
the individual self related to the rest of society.76
Another telling difference between Romantic coffeehouse society and its
Augustan predecessor is the striking prominence of silence in depictions of
Fig. 2. C. Lamb after G. M. Woodward, ‘A Sudden Thought’, (London: S. W. Fores, 1 Jan. 1804),
etching and stipple, (25 × 35.5 cm), British Museum [BM] Department of Prints and Drawings,
Catalogue of English Cartoons and Satirical Prints, 1320–1832, [BM Sat.] 10325.1; Lewis Walpole
Library, [LWL] 804.1.1.7. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
the later eighteenth-century coffeehouse.77 Whereas the coffeehouses of the

previous century were more often than not noted for their gregarious
company, the habitués of late Georgian coffeehouses were remarkable for
their taciturnity. In his 1714 account of a journey through England, the
Scotsman John Macky remarked that one might join the ‘best company’ at
Tom’s and Will’s coffeehouses, where gentlemen may be found ‘sitting
familiarly, and talking with the same freedom, as if they had left their quality
and degrees of distance at home; and a stranger tastes with pleasure the
universal liberty of speech of the English nation’.78 The Russian visitor
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin encountered a rather different social scene
during his 1790 visit to England’s coffeehouses. He remarked that
I have dropped into a number of coffeehouses only to find twenty or thirty men
sitting around in deep silence, reading newspapers, and drinking port. You are
lucky if, in the course of ten minutes, you hear three words. And what are they?
‘Your health, gentlemen!’79
Contemporary prints also remarked upon the relative tranquillity of
coffeehouse sociability.80 In Isaac Cruickshank’s print The Silent Meeting
(1794), the men assembled in this coffeehouse are reading independently or
minding their own business (Fig. 3). The practice of communal reading of
papers or the reciting them aloud to an audience, both of which can often
Fig. 3. I. Cruickshank, ‘The Silent Meeting’, etching and engraving with hand colouring, (16.5 ×
23.1 cm), (London: Laurie & Whittle, 12 May 1794); LWL, 794.5.12.53. Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale University.
be found in earlier representations of the coffeehouse, appear to have passed

out of fashion by the end of the eighteenth century.81
It would be just as unwise to take these Romantic-era reports of
coffeehouse taciturnity as exact representations of coffeehouse society as it
would be to read the earlier Augustan reports of coffeehouse conviviality
as precise descriptions of everyday coffeehouse practice. Both exaggerate in
order to make a broader point about English culture, but it is striking that
coffeehouse society could be used in such patently different ways over the
course of the eighteenth century. It is easy to assume that the supposed rise
of coffeehouse privacy in the later eighteenth century marked the beginning
of the end of the golden age of the coffeehouse public sphere. The silent
meetings at Cruickshank’s coffeehouse appear drab and dull in comparison
with the colourful anecdotes of Dryden’s manner of holding forth at Will’s
Coffeehouse or of Addison’s coterie of wits who gathered together at
Button’s Coffeehouse. The power of this contrast grew along with a nostalgia
for a now lost ‘golden age’ of English letters in the early nineteenth
century.
It should not be surprising then to find pronouncements about the decline
of the coffeehouse as early as the Regency era. In 1817, Isaac d’Israeli claimed
that ‘the frequenting of coffee-houses is a custom which has declined within

our recollection, since institutions of a higher character, and society itself,
has so much improved within late years’.82 D’Israeli did not elaborate on
which institutions and which improvements of his age had made coffeehouse
society obsolete in his opinion, but it is clear that his obituary for British
coffeehouse society was somewhat premature. The coffeehouse remained
an important part of early nineteenth-century urban society and new
coffeehouses continued to be established in this period.83
An 1840 Parliamentary select committee report on import duties provides
an important survey of early nineteenth-century British coffeehouses and it
demonstrates the continued vibrancy of the institution. The report claims
that while there were no more than a dozen coffeehouses in London in 1815
(perhaps thus occasioning d’Israeli’s comment) by 1840 the number had
surged to somewhere between 1600 and 1800 and that perhaps one hundred
new shops were opening per year. The keeper of the Crown Coffeehouse
in Haymarket estimated that he served between 1600 and 1800 customers
daily. His coffeehouse was provisioned with forty-three copies of the daily
newspapers as well as ‘seven provincial and six foreign papers, twenty-four
magazines, four quarterly reviews and eleven weekly periodicals’. He also
claimed that his coffeehouse was frequently by ‘all classes of people . . . but
the majority were artisans’.84 This is hardly evidence for the decline of the
coffeehouse public sphere; if anything, the evidence seems to point to something
of a coffeehouse renaissance beginning in the Regency era, particularly with
regard to access to coffeehouses for the labouring and artisanal classes.85
Indeed Bryant Lillywhite’s enormously valuable catalogue of references
to London coffeehouses records several well-known coffeehouses which
survived well into the later nineteenth century, perhaps the most famous
and venerable of which was Garraway’s Coffeehouse which survived until
1873 (Fig. 4).86 Lloyd’s Coffeehouse also survived into the nineteenth century
and indeed successfully transformed itself into the modern insurance firm,
Lloyd’s of London (Fig. 5).87 A thorough survey of the London trade
directories, which were printed regularly and with substantial detail after
1768, would no doubt provide a wealth of information about the later
Hanoverian- and Victorian-era coffeehouses.88
Continental European historians have certainly not neglected the
nineteenth-century coffeehouse. W. Scott Haine’s monograph, The World
of the Paris Café (1996) demonstrates the centrality of Parisian cafés to the
social life of the French working class in the nineteenth century.89 The
modernisation of the French café is another topic which awaits further
study. The subject of Haine’s book is clearly quite different from the early
modern French cafés, but in the meantime one must still rely on Alfred
Franklin’s Le Café, le Thé, et le Chocolat (1893), a volume in his remarkable
antiquarian collection La vie privée d’autrefois.90 The coffeehouse culture of
fin de siècle Vienna is also well-known and is the subject of a useful anthology
by Harold Segel in which one can find Anton Kuh’s 1916 lament for the
Fig. 4. W. H. Prior, Garraway’s Coffeehouse (from a sketch taken shortly before its demolition),
(London, 1878 or later), hand-coloured wood engraving from a sketch by W. H. Prior and originally
produced for the part-work Old and New London (London, 1873 – 1878), (10.5 × 14.5 cm).
Courtesy of the author.
Fig. 5. T. Rowlandson, ‘Lloyd’s Subscription Room’ (1 Jan. 1809), in R. Ackerman, Microcosm of

London: Or, London in Miniature ([London]: R. Ackermann, [1808–10]), Beinecke Library shelfmark
ByzL 080. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

imminent demise of the Austrian ‘literary café’ (Literatur-Café), a once fertile

cultural space which he thought had lost its ‘philosopher’s mien and . . .
self composure’ and had thus become ‘bourgeois and harmless’.91 The romantic
ideals of coffeehouse society have been so powerful that the coffeehouse
has appeared to be in a constant state of decline. But given the current state
of research on European coffeehouses, it would be rash to assume that the
coffeehouses of Britain passed the torch of cultural ferment and social
significance to their continental cousins, the cafés in the nineteenth century.92
From a Performative to a Romantic Public Sphere?

Given this evidence, one cannot assume that the British coffeehouse had
begun to decline in its social or cultural importance by the early nineteenth
century. But if the coffeehouse managed to survive and indeed flourish in
the years approaching its mid-nineteenth-century bicentenary, it seems that
the nature and experience of coffeehouse social life had changed as well.
Coffee was still consumed, of course, as were newspapers, magazines and
other sorts of cheap print. An easily recognizable ‘public sphere’ still existed
in the Romantic-era coffeehouse. But the codes and conventions that governed
coffeehouse conduct and the expectations of the kinds of social interactions
that one might find in an early nineteenth-century coffeehouse seem to
have changed since the supposed Augustan golden age of Mr Spectator.
With the late eighteenth-century decline of ‘performative publicity’ and
its replacement by a more inward-looking, self-reflective sense of self, a
cultural ideal valorised by the cult of sensibility and exemplified by Henry
Mackenzie’s famous ‘man of feeling’, the sometimes boisterous and perhaps
flamboyant culture of early modern coffeehouse culture began to give way
to a new style of public life.93 There is no need to equate this change with
a decline of the public sphere – many of the central elements associated
with the Habermasian public sphere concept remained central to the post-
Romantic coffeehouse, such as public access, the availability of newspapers
and periodicals, and the open discussion of current events – but it did mark
a change in the way in which the coffeehouse public sphere was experienced
by its participants.
By the nineteenth century, it seems that one could go into a coffeehouse
with the expectation that one would not be obliged to join in the company
already gathered there, but rather one could go in order to read, relax or
carry on a conversation with one’s existing company, and one could do this
without the expectation of interruption from one’s fellow coffeehouse
companions. The public coffeehouse could be experienced as an extension
of one’s private life, and as the arguments made in defence of the radicals
Frost and Hodgson claimed, one’s coffeehouse behaviour could reasonably
be expected to be ‘off the record’ and not subject to constant public scrutiny.
It may seem paradoxical that the continued growth of the coffeehouse public
sphere, in the sense that there were probably more of them and they may
have been more accessible to a wider variety of customers in the early

nineteenth century, was also accompanied by the intensification of a sense
of coffeehouse privacy as well. But this process has been demonstrated with
some detail by historians of the eighteenth-century ‘cultural revolution’.
Referring to the French case, Roger Chartier has argued that ‘it was the
constitution of the private as a form of experience and a set of values that
made possible the emergence of a space both autonomous of state authority
and critical of it’.94 Thus the intense cultural politics of the French Revolutionary
era were enabled by, rather than in opposition to, the cultivation of a private
sense of self distinct from the public sphere. In Britain too, the ‘invasions of
privacy’ that John Barrell has so carefully documented were only made possible
by the (relatively recent) development of a sense that there was a private life
that could be invaded by revolutionary or counter-revolutionary politics.95
It is ironic that the post-Romantic coffeehouse with its greater emphasis
on peacefulness, privacy and quiet contemplation should more closely
resemble the ‘normative public sphere’ so strenuously advocated by Addison
and Steele in their Tatler and Spectator papers. The ‘loquacious bores, boasters,
projectors, pedants, sardonic laughers, over-zealous gesticulators, and even
singers and whistlers’, of the Augustan coffeehouses that garnered the ire of
Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator would have been compelled even more
so to keep to themselves in the coffeehouse society of late Hanoverian
Britain.96 Further research on the social history of the coffeehouse in late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain will be necessary to determine
whether the practical experience of coffeehouse life changed as much in
this period as did the normative expectations for coffeehouse society. But
whatever the results of these studies may be, it is unlikely that the history
of the modern coffeehouse will continue to fit the ‘decline and fall’
model. The experience of public coffee drinking has changed dramatically
since its mid-seventeenth-century inception, but anyone who has witnessed
the proliferation of Starbucks, Costa Coffee or any of the numerous other
coffee shops in Britain today can attest, the coffeehouse has survived and is
alive and well in the early twenty-first century.
One could also argue that the early eighteenth-century public sphere of
coffeehouse society, in which print publication and public responses to it
were closely linked has found a parallel of sorts in the recent rise of the
Internet’s ‘blogosphere’. One prominent blogger, who also happens to be
a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, was inspired to blog in conscious
imitation of the early eighteenth-century periodicals such as Addison’s and
Steele’s Tatler and Spectator.97 Perhaps the coffeehouse public sphere has not
died at all; it has simply moved into cyberspace.98
Acknowledgement
Research support for this article has been provided by the Canada Research
Chair in Early Modern British History; a Standard Research Grant from the
Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); and

the SSHRC-supported collaborative research programme ‘Making Publics:
Media, Markets and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700’. The
author is grateful to the editors and referees at History Compass, his McGill
colleague Prof. Thomas Mole and the audiences at lectures sponsored by
the Dept. of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Early
Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara for providing
helpful comments on, and corrections to, earlier drafts of this article.
Acknowledgement is made to the following for the images contained in this
work and for permission to reproduce illustrations: The Trustees of the
British Museum, London for Fig. 1: Anon.,‘Interior of a Coffeehouse’. We
also acknowledge the following sources for the remaining illustrations: The
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University for Fig. 2: C. Lamb after G.
M. Woodward, ‘A Sudden Thought’; the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale
University for Fig. 3: I. Cruickshank, ‘The Silent Meeting’; the author for
Fig. 4: W. H. Prior, Garraway’s Coffeehouse; and the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University for Fig. 5: T. Rowlandson,‘Lloyd’s
Subscription Room’.
Short Biography
Brian Cowan holds the Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British
History at McGill University, where he is an Associate Professor in the
Department of History. His first book, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence
of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven/London, 2005) was awarded the
Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association in
2006. He is currently researching a monograph entitled Dr. Sacheverell’s False
Brethren: Media Politics and the State Trials of Early Modern Britain and he is a
co-investigator with the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council’s Major Collaborative Research Initiative on ‘Making Publics:
Media, Markets and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500 – 1700’,
http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca/.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, Associate
Professor of History, McGill University, 855 rue Sherbrooke ouest, Montréal H3A 2T7, Québec,
Canada. Email: Brian.cowan2@mcgill.ca.
1 According to M. Ellis,The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson,
2004), xi; A. Wild, Coffee: A Dark History (New York, NY: Norton, 2005), 3; M. Pendergrast,
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York, NY: Basic,
1999), xv, coffee is second only to oil in value on the international commodity markets. In 1998,
the Rogers International Commodities Index gave coffee an initial weighting well below second
place (fourteenth and behind other agricultural products such as wheat, maize, cotton and soybeans),
http://www.rogersrawmaterials.com/, accessed on 26 Dec. 2006. For an insider’s view of the
Starbucks Corporation, see H. Schultz and D. J. Yang, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built
a Company One Cup at a Time (New York, NY: Hyperion, 1997).
2 The best and most recent work to develop this declensionist narrative is Ellis, Coffee House, a
work which takes particular exception to the predominance of milk and sugar sold by contemporary
coffee merchants.
3 B. Cowan, ‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 47/1 (2004): 21–46;
Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (London: Yale University
Press, 2005), esp. 147–51; M. Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, 4 vols. (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2006), esp. 1:xvii.
4 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). On Habermas’s
reception history, see B. Cowan, ‘What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the
Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (February 2001):
127–57; D. Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current
Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory, 31 (1992): 1 –20; H. Mah,
‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History,
72/1 (March 2000): 153–82; M. Ellis,‘Coffee-women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the
Early Eighteenth Century’, in E. Eger, C. Grant, C. O’Gallchoir and P. Warburton (eds.), Women
and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation 1700 –1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 27–52.
5 Recent articles in History Compass and Literature Compass have been particularly concerned with
reviewing the debate on the politics of the emergence of a public sphere: J. Peacey, ‘Print and
Public Politics in Seventeenth Century England’, History Compass, 5/1 (2007): 72–98,
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00369.x; M. Knights,
‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass, 3/1 (2005):
1–20, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x; J. A.
Downie, ‘How Useful to Eighteenth-Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the “Bourgeois
Public Sphere”?’ Literature Compass, 1/1 (2003): 1–19, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/
10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00022.x. See also Downie,‘The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’,
in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 58 –
79; P. Lake and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of
British Studies, 45/2 (2006): 270–92.
6 Perhaps the most explicit attempt to merge Whig history with Habermasian public sphere theory
can be found in S. Pincus, ‘ “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration
Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (December 1995): 807–34. An attempt to
differentiate a revised public sphere concept from the older Whig historiography can be found in
Lake and Pincus,‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 286–92.
7 Prévost, Oeuvres de Prévost, ed. J. Sgard, 8 vols. (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble,
1977–1986), 1:247; my translation. On Prévost’s experience with London coffeehouses and English
sociability more generally, see J. Sgard, [La] Vie De Prévost (1697–1763) (Québec: Presses
Universitaires de Laval, 2006), 92 –3. For one amongst many approving citations of Prévost, see
M. D. George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London: Penguin, 1967), 16.
8 Pasquin, no. 87 (29 Nov. 1723); Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 254–5.
9 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 32. Habermas may be the source for the incorrect and
undocumented assertion that most English coffeehouses had turned into private clubs or ‘chop
houses’ by 1730 in Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 14. See also C. J. Sommerville, The News
Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 83–4.
10 R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1976); S. Miller, Conversation: A History
of a Declining Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The particular causes identified for
the decline of the classic coffeehouse differ in each case, but the nineteenth century is almost
always identified as the moment of its demise.
11 See also the concurring remarks in H. Berry’s review of Ellis in English Historical Review, 120/489
(December, 2005): 1447–8;A. Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee Houses (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1956), 223–39.
12 Ellis, Coffee-House, 215. This view has filtered into the popular press as well, see T. Geoghegan,
‘Tales from the Coffee Shop’, BBC News Magazine (16 May 2005), http://news.bbc.co.uk/
2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4550669.stm, accessed on 29 Dec. 2006.

13 Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, articulates the distinctiveness of the early British coffeehouse while
challenging both triumphalist and declensionist narratives of its history.
14 T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 161; see also J. van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 240–51.
15 For example, M. Aymard, ‘Friends and Neighbors’, in P. Ariès and G. Duby (eds.), A History
of Private Life, 5 vols.; Vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. R. Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), esp. 475–7.
16 Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 79–80, 253–4.
17 This is a point emphasised in H. Love, ‘How Music Created a Public’, Criticism: A Quarterly
for Literature and the Arts, 46/2, (Spring 2004): 257–8; Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 255–6.
18 M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); compare also the interesting observations for
the Tudor and Stuart period in P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen
in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 195–213.
19 On Ottoman coffeehouses, see R. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage
in the Medieval Near East (Seattle,WA: University of Washington Press, 1985); J. Grehan,‘Smoking
and “Early Modern” Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East
(Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, American Historical Review, 111/5 (December 2006),
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.5/grehan.html, esp. pars. 14, 21, 39–40.
On the exoticism of the early English coffeehouse, see Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 113–32.
20 Hartlib,‘Ephemerides’ 1654, part 3, (4 Aug.–31 Dec. 1654), 29/4/29A-B, in The Hartlib Papers,
2nd edn. (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2002).

21 A. Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clark, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1891–1900), 1:168–9.
22 Ellis, Coffee-House, 30.
23 Ibid., 25–41; M. Ellis,‘Pasqua Rosee’s Coffee-House, 1652–1666’, London Journal, 29/1 (2004):
1 –24; B. Cowan, ‘Pasqua Rosee, fl. 1640–1670’, in Lawrence Goldman (ed.), Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography Supplement [ODNB] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 2006),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/92862, accessed on 13 Jan. 2007. Cowan, Social Life
of Coffee, was already in press when Ellis’s important new research on Rosee was published.
24 N. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558 –1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); M.
Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600 –1857 (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004).
25 Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 55–77.
26 Ibid., 89–101. Many important virtuoso writings on coffee are now reproduced under the
rubric of ‘science writing’ in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture, vol. 4.

27 One of the more controversial claims of Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, has been that the role of
the virtuosi was as necessary as that of the merchant community in successfully introducing coffee
to seventeenth-century English culture. See the reviews by K. Sharpe, Times Literary Supplement,
5369 (24 February 2006): 26; M. Ellis, American Historical Review, 111/5 (December 2006):
1594.
28 R. Steele (ed.), A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns . . . , 1485–
1714, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), no. 2359, (12 June 1672), also reproduced
in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture, 4:95–6; Cowan, ‘Rise of the Coffeehouse
Reconsidered’, surveys these attempts at coffeehouse regulation in detail. See also Cowan, Social
Life of Coffee, 193–209.
29 Pincus,‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’ argues strongly in favour of a full-fledged Restoration
public sphere; Downie,‘Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’ argues equally vehemently against
the proposition. These arguments have been recently been restated by their respective proponents
in Lake and Pincus,‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, esp. 281–6; Downie,
‘How Useful to Eighteenth-Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the “Bourgeois Public
Sphere”?’. An attempt to balance these positions can be found in A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and
Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 171–94.
30 See the notion of a ‘post-Reformation public sphere’ introduced in Lake and Pincus,‘Rethinking
the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, 273 –9 and the many works cited therein. For a
suggestion that early Tudor modes of ‘political communication’ had medieval precedents, see E.
H. Shagan,‘Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent affair’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 52/1 (2001): 21–33, and at greater length, Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
31 Compare D. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006) with C. S. R. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637 –1642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991) in which politics out of doors is routinely ignored, a point made in P.
Lake,‘Review Article’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 57/2 (1994): 167–97.
32 This literature is surveyed by Peacey,‘Print and Public Politics’, but see also the works reviewed
by J. Raymond, ‘Describing Popularity in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly,

67/1 (2004): 101–29. The essays in P. Lake and S. Pincus (eds.), The Public Sphere in Early Modern
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming) represent the culmination of
more than a decade of ‘post-revisionist’ work which has sought to explore the practice of public
politics largely in the period preceding Habermas’s classical moment for the bourgeois public
sphere.
33 Cowan,‘Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, 44–6; Social Life of Coffee, 221–4.
34 T. Harris, ‘ “Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker”: The King’s Friends and the Battle for the
Allegiance of the Common People in Restoration England’, in T. Harris (ed.), Politics of the
Excluded, c.1500 –1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 195 –232; Harris, ‘Understanding Popular
Politics in Restoration England’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed:
England After the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125–53; Harris,
Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 1660–1685 (London: Allen Lane, 2005); see also J. Miller,
‘Public Opinion in Charles II’s England’, History, 80 (1995): 359–81; J. Spurr, England in the 1670s:
‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 165–78; M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in
Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153–347, offers a detailed study
of the impact of public opinion during the ‘exclusion crisis’ while the essays in J. McElligott (ed.),
Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
illuminate the significance of public opinion for both loyalist and opposition politics in the
1680s.
35 M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 249; see also Knights, ‘History and Literature
in the Age of Defoe and Swift’.
36 Cowan, ‘What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?’, 127–57; ‘Rise of the Coffeehouse
Reconsidered’, 44–6; ‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 37/3 (2004): 360–1; Social Life of Coffee, 147–263.
37 Many of these sources are now conveniently available in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House
Culture, vol. 1.
38 L. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early
Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12; see also Klein,
‘Coffeehouse Civility, 1660 –1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 59/1 (1997): 30–51.
39 A selection of these plays have been edited in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture,
vol. 3.
40 Tatler, no. 1 (12 April 1709), in R. Bond (ed.), The Tatler, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), 1:16.
42 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.c 882 (3 Jan. 1680).
43 See L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003) for studies of feminine and masculine forms of this sort of public denunciation.
44 R. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London:
Hambledon, 2004), 297. See also Shoemaker, ‘Public Spaces, Private Disputes? Fights and Insults
on London’s Streets, 1660–1800’, in T. Hitchcock and H. Shore (eds.), The Streets of London: From
the Great Fire to the Great Stink (London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 54 –68; Shoemaker, ‘The Taming
of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in London, 1660 –1800’, Historical Journal,
45/3 (2002): 525–45; Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in
Eighteenth-Century London’, Social History, 26/2 (2001): 190–208; Shoemaker,‘The Decline of
Public Insult in London 1660–1800’, Past and Present, 169 (2000): 97–131.
45 The key role played by the eighteenth century in the making of an interiorized, fixed and
perhaps more modern, sense of self is explored in D. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self:
Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004);
M. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). See also C. Muldrew, ‘From a “Light Cloak” to
an “Iron Cage”: Historical Changes in the Relation between Community and Individualism’, in
A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 156–77.
46 For just two amongst many potential examples of compelled healths leading to coffeehouse
violence, see: The True Protestant Mercury: or, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 31 (9–13 Apr. 1681);
The Observator in Dialgoue, 419 (11 Oct. 1683). On the politics of health drinking, see M. Powell,
‘Political Toasting in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, History, 91/304 (2006): 508 –29; Powell, The
Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 17–27.
47 See the works collected in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, vols. 1 and 2; and the
commentary in Ellis, Coffee-House, 56–74; Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 225–6.

48 Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 79–145, 152–84; see also Klein, ‘Coffeehouse Civility, 1660–
1714’.
49 On Ward’s writings, a subject which deserves further scholarly attention, see H. Troyer, Ned
Ward of Grub Street: A Study of Sub-Literary London in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1946). On Dunton, who also still wants a satisfactory study, see H.
Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian
Mercury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); S. Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of
His Career with a Checklist of His Publications (New York, NY: Garland, 1976); G. McEwan, Oracle
of the Coffee-House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972).
Quotation from: Athenian Mercury, 1/22 (24 March 1690/91).
51 Ibid., 201–2, 210–11, 220–1. On the 1675 proclamation, see Pincus,‘Coffee Politicians Does
Create’ and compare Cowan, ‘Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’. Quote from the UK
National Archives, Public Record Office, SP 35/13/31.
52 Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’; ‘What Was Masculine About the
Public Sphere?’. See also Ellis, ‘Coffee-women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the Early
Eighteenth Century’.
53 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 42.
54 L. Klein,‘Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists: The Case
of the Spectator’, in J. Brewer and S. Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London:
Routledge, 1995), 221–33; Klein, ‘The Polite Town: Shifting Possibilities of Urbanness, 1660 –
1715’, in Hitchcock and Shore, Streets of London, 27 –39; S. Copley, ‘Commerce, Conversation
and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 18/1 (1995): 63–77.
55 Tatler, 268 (26 Dec. 1710), 3:351–2.
56 G. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Methuen, 1973); British Library, Additional
MS 70421, unfoliated (28 March 1710; 30 March 1710; 1 April 1710).

57 T. Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-
Century England’, in L. A. Ferrell and P. McCullough (eds.), The English Sermon Revised: Religion,
Literature and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 208–34.
58 W. Smithies, The Coffee-House Preachers: or, High Church Divinity Corrected (London: 1706), sig.
B1r; see also D. Defoe, Defoe’s Review, ed. John McVeagh, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2003–2011), no. 101 (22 Aug. 1706), 3:515–19.
59 See also the discussion of the Spectator’s treatment of ‘newsmongers’ in Cowan, Social Life of
Coffee, 237–46.
60 K. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 37.

61 For a reminder that coffeehouses could still be considered centres of impoliteness as well, see
H. Berry, ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffeehouse and

the Significance of “Flash Talk” ’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001):
65–81.

62 D. Griffin, ‘The Social World of Authorship 1660 –1714’, in J. Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge
History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 52–
5; P. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary
Marketplace, 1678 –1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); S. L. Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics
of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998); E. Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The
Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Mackie, ‘Being Too Positive About
the Public Sphere’, in D. J. Newman (ed.), The Spectator: Emerging Discourses (Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press, 2005), 81– 104; T. Osell, ‘Tattling Women in the Public Sphere:
Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38/2 (2005):
283–300; K. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical
(London: Routledge, 1989); I. Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth-Century: Anxious
Employment (London: Routledge, 2005).
63 B. Goldgar (ed.), The Grub Street Journal 1730–33, 4 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2002), vol. 3, unpaginated, no. 145:1, (12 Oct. 1732).

64 See however, Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth-Century, ch. 2; R. Herman, The
Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, 2003); L. Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 38 –44; J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics
from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75 –7; A. S.
Limouze, ‘A Study of Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly Journals’, Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University,
1947), ch. 4; J. Black,‘An Underrated Journalist: Nathaniel Mist and the Opposition Press during
the Whig Ascendancy’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1987): 27–41.
65 J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York,
NY: Farar Straus and Giroux, 1997), 38–9.

66 J. Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762 – 1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill, 1950), 286. On Boswell’s vexed relationship to the Addisonian ideal, see P. Carter,
Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2001), 183–97.
67 J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976); M. Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion
During the Seven Years War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The
Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities:
Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); K. Wilson, The Sense
of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
68 Georgian coffeehouse history tends to be written as a complement to the history of the press
or of club life, on which see H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-
Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Barker and S. Burrows, Press, Politics and the
Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760 –1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002); P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial
Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
69 I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1794 –
1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and D. Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the
Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) both allude to revolutionary era
coffeehouse politics, but do not explore it in depth. McCalman,‘Ultra-Radicalism and Convivial
Debating Clubs in London, 1795–1838’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987): 309–33 and
A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c.1780–1850 (London: Home & Van Thal, 1949) are more
detailed and should be the starting point for future studies of the Romantic coffeehouse. See also
McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776 –1832 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 459.
70 J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), ch. 4; Epstein, ‘ “Equality and No King”:
Sociability and Sedition: The Case of John Frost’, in G. Russell and C. Tuite (eds.), Romantic
Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770 – 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 43 –61; J. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 2, which offers the best analysis of late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century British coffeehouse society to date.
71 M. T. Davis,‘Frost, John (1750–1842)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2004), http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10197, accessed on 13 Jan. 2007.

72 Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, 88.
73 Ibid., 83.
74 Ibid., 92.
75 Ibid., 96–7, where the source of the quotation (Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, 36) is not provided.

76 Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self; C. Jones and D. Wahrman (eds.), The Age of Cultural
Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
77 ‘The discipline of silence’ in nineteenth-century English coffeehouses and Parisian cafes marks
the beginning of the end for Richard Sennett’s ‘public man’: Sennett, Fall of Public Man, ch. 9,
quote at 207. I am grateful to Tom Mole for discussing this with me.
78 J. Mackay, A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman here, to his Friend Abroad
(London: J. Roberts, 1714), 109, bis.

79 Quoted in P. Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 61, see also 179, 253–4.

80 Visual representations of Romantic-era coffeehouses in prints, paintings and drawings are
particularly plentiful and deserve detailed art historical study in their own right. Several of these
are reproduced in Cowan, Social Life of Coffee; Barrell, Spirit of Despotism.
81 The disparagement of communal reading in the late eighteenth century is a theme of
R. Wittmann,‘Was There a Reading Revolution?’, in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), A History

of Reading in the West (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 290 –1, but the
practice clearly survived as shown in W. St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 242, 395.
82 D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, quoted in Ellis, Coffee House, 207.
83 For an interesting discussion of the Indian immigrant Sake Deen Mahomet’s 1809 Hindostanee
Coffeehouse enterprise in London, which was effectively an Indian restaurant, see M. H. Fisher,
The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey Through India (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1997), 149–52; Fisher, ‘Mahomed, Deen (1759 – 1851)’, ODNB (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53351, accessed on
15 Jan. 2007.
84 Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 28; see also K. A. Manley, ‘Engines of Literature: Libraries in an
Era of Expansion and Transition’, in G. Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2, 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 514.
85 M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, NY: Capricorn, 1965 [1951]),
306–7.
86 B. Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 223 –4; Ellis, Coffee House,
215. Similar catalogues and compilations of London coffeehouse history exist in manuscript,
including Guildhall Library, [GL] MS 19501/1-6; GL MS 3110/1-4; and Westminster City
Archives, D. Foster collection, Inns, Taverns, Alehouses, Coffee Houses, etc. in and around London,
82 vols. (c.1900).
87 Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, 330 –6, 395 –402; S. Palmer, ‘Lloyd, Edward (c.1648 –1713)’,
ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16829,

accessed on 15 Jan. 2007.
88 See for example, The London Directory for the Year 1768 (London: J. Payne, [1768]); E. H. Hall,
Coffee Taverns, Cocoa Houses and Coffee Palaces . . . with a Directory (London: Partridge, 1878).
89 W. S. Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789 –1914
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

90 A. Franklin, Le Café, le Thé, et le Chocolat, La Vie Privée d’Autrefois, vol. 13 (Paris: Plon, 1893).
On the early modern French café, see also R. M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment
in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); J. Leclant, ‘Coffee and Cafés
in Paris, 1644–1693’, in R. Forster and O. Ranum (eds.), Food and Drink in History, trans. P.
Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
91 A. Kuh, ‘Spirit of the Age in the Literary Café’ (1916), in H. B. Segel (ed. and trans.), The
Vienna Coffeehouse Wits 1890–1938 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 305. The
fin de siècle Viennese coffeehouse is currently the subject of an interdisciplinary research project at
Birkbeck College, London and the Royal College of Art, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/
research/ViennaCafe.
92 Compare Ellis, Coffee House, 215–20.
93 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language
of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
94 R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. L. Cochrane (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 196.

95 Barrell, Spirit of Despotism.
96 Cowan,‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, 356.
97 T. Osell, ‘I’m Nobody Who Are You’, Modern Language Association 30 December 2006
presentation; published as ‘Academic Blogging Part II’ (28 January 2007), http://
bitchphd.blogspot.com/2007/01/academic-blogging-part-ii.html, accessed on 2 Feb. 2007.
98 I am particularly grateful to Tom Mole for discussing the affinities between early coffeehouse
public sphere and the contemporary ‘blogosphere’ with me.
Disclaimer
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History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.

Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British

The history of the coffeehouse has a number of obviously captivating

takes the declensionist model of coffeehouse history as a point of departure

it to become one of the more successful new imports of the seventeenth

opposition politicians such as the Earl of Shaftesbury to use public opinion

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

The attempted Spectatorial reformation of the English coffeehouses may

Jacobites such as Nathaniel Mist.64 To be sure, Whiggish journals such as

The Romantic Coffeehouse

the later eighteenth-century coffeehouse.77 Whereas the coffeehouses of the

be found in earlier representations of the coffeehouse, appear to have passed

that ‘the frequenting of coffee-houses is a custom which has declined within

Fig. 5. T. Rowlandson, ‘Lloyd’s Subscription Room’ (1 Jan. 1809), in R. Ackerman, Microcosm of

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

imminent demise of the Austrian ‘literary café’ (Literatur-Café), a once fertile

From a Performative to a Romantic Public Sphere?

have been more accessible to a wider variety of customers in the early

Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); and

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

2nd edn. (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2002).

rubric of ‘science writing’ in Ellis, Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture, vol. 4.

by J. Raymond, ‘Describing Popularity in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly,

commentary in Ellis, Coffee-House, 56–74; Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 225–6.

MS 70421, unfoliated (28 March 1710; 30 March 1710; 1 April 1710).

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 37.

H. Berry, ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffeehouse and

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

2002), vol. 3, unpaginated, no. 145:1, (12 Oct. 1732).

NY: Farar Straus and Giroux, 1997), 38–9.

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10197, accessed on 13 Jan. 2007.

Sphere, 36) is not provided.

(London: J. Roberts, 1714), 109, bis.

University Press, 2000), 61, see also 179, 253–4.

R. Wittmann,‘Was There a Reading Revolution?’, in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), A History

ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16829,

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Duke University Press, 1991), 196.

public sphere and the contemporary ‘blogosphere’ with me.

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

© 2007 The Author History Compass 5/4 (2007): 1180–1213, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x

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