MDMD4: Those Damnable Whig Coffee-Houses

[Dave Monroe]

"'Damme, Sir,-- a Book?  Close it up immediately.'
   "''Tis the Holy Bible, Sir.'
   "'No matter, 'tis Print,-- Print causes Civil Unrest,-- Civil Unrest in 
any Ship at Sea is intolerable.  Coffee as well.  Where are newspapers 
found?  In those damnable Whig Coffee-Houses.  Eh?  A Potion stimulating 
rebellion and immoderate desires.'"  (M&D, Ch. 6, p. 48)

"freshly infus'd Coffee flows ev'ryplace, borne about thro' Rooms front and 
back" (M&D, Ch. 1, p. 6)

>From Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 
1992 [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974]), Ch. 4, "Public Roles," pp. 64-88 
...

   "The coffeehouse was a meeting-place common to both London and Paris in 
the late 17th and the early 18th Century, though, due to England's greater 
control of the coffee market, the coffeehouses were more numerous in London. 
  The coffeehouse is a romanticized and overidealized institution: merry, 
civilized talk, bonhomie, and close friendship all over a cup of coffee, the 
alcoholic silence of the gin shop as yet unknown.  Moreover, the 
coffeehouses performed a function which makes it easy to romanticize them in 
retrospect: they were the prime information centers in both cities at this 
time.  Here paper were read, and at the beginning of the 18th Century the 
owners of London coffeehouses began to edit and print newspapers themselves, 
applying in 1929 for a monopoly in the trade.  Such business activities as 
insurance, which relied on information about the likelihood of success in a 
particular venture, grew up in coffeehouses: Lloyd's of London began as a 
coffeehouse, for instance." (p. 81)

John Bailey mentioned earlier Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Tastes of Paradise 
(NY: Pantheon, 1992) on this last point, but I'll get to Scivelbusch shortly 
(I hope).  But recall also ...

"'... there's not an insurancer in the Kingdom, from Lloyd's on down, who'll 
touch your case for less than  sum you can never, as Astronomers, possibly 
afford.'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 26)

Ironically, then, an astronomical sum?  And also ...

"'She is Lloyd's of Portsmouth.  Believe her.'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 29)

But to continue from Sennett ...

   "As information centers, the coffeehouses naturally were places in which 
speech flourished.  When a man entered the door, he went first to the bar, 
paid a penny, was told, if he had not been to the place before, what the 
rules of the house were (e.g., no spitting on such and such a wall, no 
fighting near the window, etc.), and then sat down to enjoy himself.  That 
in turn was a matter of talking to other people, and the talk was governed 
by a cardinal rul: in order for information to be as full as possible, 
distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the 
coffeehouse had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any 
conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden 
to speak or not.  It was bad form to even touch on the social origins of 
other persons when talking to them in the coffeehouse, because the free flow 
of talk might then be impeded." (p. 81)

There was a great article in The Onion some five or so years ago about a 
fight breaking out in a coffee shop (e.g., guy gets thrown through window 
[!], rushes back in to make a point), but, unfortunately, it apparently 
predates The Onion's online archive ...

http://www.theonion.com/archive/archive_comptech.html

But, again, to continue from Sennett ...

   "The turn of the 18th Century was an era in which outside the 
coffeehouse, social rank was of paramount importance.  In order to gain 
knowledge and information through talk, the men of the time therefore 
created what was for them a fiction, the fiction that social distinctions 
did not exist.  Inside the coffeehouse, if the gentleman had decided to sit 
down, he was subject to the free, unbidden talk of his social inferior.  The 
situation produced its own speech pattern.
   "The generality of Addison and Steele's reports on coffeehouse talk is 
not only a product of their minds, but an accurate report on the kinds of 
speech that permitted people to participate on a common ground.... the long 
periodic sentences flow on, the familiar descriptive phrases which everyone 
has heard a hundred times before are invoked again, and a frown goes around 
the table if someone makes an allusion that may be applied to the 'person of 
any one of the hearers.'  Coffeehouse speech is the extreme case of an 
expression with a sign system divorced from--indeed, in defiance of--symbols 
of meaning like rank, origins, taste, all visibly at hand.
   "People thus experienced sociability in these coffeehouses without 
revealing much about their own feelings, personal history, or station.  Tone 
of voice, elocution, and clothes might be noticeable, but the whole point 
was not to notice.... permitted strangers to act without having to probe 
into personal circumstances.
   "By the 1750's the coffeehouses were on the decline in London and Paris.  
The coffeehouse declined in part for purely economic reasons.  In the early 
18th Century, the British East India Company became involved in tea imports, 
on a vastly more profitable scale than the older coffee import arrangements; 
trade with China and India expanded around tea, and tea became 
fashionable...." (pp. 81-2)

Okay, have a pile of stuff here, so ...



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