The Social Life of Coffee by Cowan Brian William

Author:Cowan, Brian William
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

8 Civilizing Society

Consider these two images of the coffeehouse (Figures 36 and 37). One is sober and serene, the other chaotic and conflict-ridden. In the first image, the coffeehouse is portrayed as a site for polite conversation, the cultivation of connoisseurship in the arts—note the pictures on the walls and the conversation that they seem to provoke among the coffeehouse patrons — as well as the quiet contemplation of the daily news or the latest political pamphlet. In the second print, we find a mob scene. This “coffeehouse mob” is situated in a very similar setting—note the recurrence of the pictures, the prints and newspapers, as well as the coffee-boy and the matron at the bar—but the patrons are engaged in anything but civil conversation. The first scene presents the coffeehouse as it was imagined it should be, with everything in its proper order, while the second presents a vision of a world in disarray. It might be imagined that the first image champions the coffeehouse as a venue for polite sociability and civil society while the second ridicules the coffeehouse as little better than an alehouse or a boisterous outdoor gathering of the “mobile.”1

On closer inspection, however, the differences between the two images are not as great as they might seem. The positive force of the first portrayal of coffeehouse society is called into question by the presence on the walls of a paper declaring “Here is right lyes” along with others which bear the names of Grub Street writers, one of whom can be identified as Thomas D’Urfey (1653–1723), the author of numerous popular songs and poems in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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