Life in a 17th Century Coffee Shop by David Brandon

Author:David Brandon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Life in a 17th-Century Coffee Shop
ISBN: 9780752470474
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

A Coffee House for Every Cause and Interest

All nations use coffee as an aid to conversation.

P.G. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life

One of the most obvious characteristics of the coffee houses was how each tended to attract a specialised clientele. They became the acknowledged meeting place for members of a particular profession or occupation, for those with shared aims – perhaps what would now be called an interest group – or sometimes simply for those who wanted the company of the like-minded.

Often the kind of clientele who used a particular coffee house reflected the activities that were carried on in that part of London. Lloyd’s and Garraway’s, for example, attracted the businessmen in the financial quarter around the Royal Exchange in the City of London. In Westminster St James’s and the Cocoa-Tree were much used by politicians, the former associated with the Tories, the latter with the Whigs. Many coffee houses were sited close to St Paul’s Cathedral and frequented by clergymen and intellectuals eager to debate theological and philosophical issues.

Will’s Coffee House in Covent Garden, once a seedy drinking den called the Red Cow, was famed as the resort of London’s literati. The self-appointed guru of Will’s was the poet and playwright John Dryden (1631–1700). Here he held forth to a rapt audience with his views on the most recently published or performed poems and plays, and his reputation was such that many highly distinguished men of letters such as Samuel Pepys and Alexander Pope became habitués of Will’s, eager to absorb his latest pronouncements. This probably gave Dryden undue power as a literary critic and an arbiter of literary taste. Unimpressed by Will’s was the acerbic Irish clergyman and wit Jonathan Swift, who in ‘Hints to an Essay on Conversation’ disparagingly wrote of the company he observed there:

The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Will’s Coffeehouse, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble; that is to say, five or six men who had writ plays . . . entertained one another with their trifling composures in so important an air, as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them.

On Dryden’s death, Will’s rapidly changed its character and became devoted to the gambling craze of the time. Its mantle was later assumed, among others, by Button’s Coffee House, also in Covent Garden. Here the guiding light was Joseph Addison (1672–1719), essayist and politician. Addison contributed to the Tatler magazine started by his close friend Richard Steele in 1709 and to its more significant successor, the Spectator. The Tatler mainly concerned itself with literature, manners and morals, and advocated moderation and toleration in politics and religion. The Spectator had a wide and prestigious readership and Will’s, Addison and Steele between them were unquestionably highly influential in spreading the idea of a liberal ‘polite’ culture among the educated middle classes of the time. As Dr Johnson said in his

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