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 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, 
Stimulants, and Intoxicants (trans. David Jacobson, New York: Pantheon, 1992 
[1980]), Ch. 2, "Coffee and the Protestant Ethic," pp. 15-95 ...

   "Until the seventeenth century, coffee remained a curiosity for Europeans 
....
   "The situation changed around the middle of the seventtenth century.  
Suddenly a whole set of hitherto unknown exotic substances became 
fashionable.  Together with chocolate, tea, and tobacco, coffee made its 
entrance upon the stage of European luxury culture." (p. 17)

   "Court aristocracy added coffee drinking as one more flourish to its cult 
of luxury....  Essentially, it was not the drink itself that mattered to 
court society but how it could be consumed, the opportunities it afforded 
for display of elegance, grace, and high refinement....
   "Bourgeois society of the same period regarded coffee in a different, 
quite contrary light.  Not form, but substance--the drink--was the focus of 
interest.  The thging itself, in this case, consisted in the catual 
physiological properties and effects ascribed to coffee.... an amazingly 
motley catalogue of often mutually contradictory virtues....  It cools 'hot' 
temperaments, but on the other hand it warms up 'cold' ones, etc.  Coffee, 
in other words, wa viewed as a panacea.  There wasn't a positive effect it 
wasn't credited with.  If we wade through the jumble of properties most 
commonly attributed to it, however, we come up with two that are actually 
one in the same: sobriety and the power to sober up a person.... in contrast 
to previously known drinks, all of which were alcoholic.  The coffee 
drinker's good sense and business efficiency were contrasted with the 
alcohol drinker's inebriation, incompetence, and laziness ...." (pp. 19-22)

Cf. Lieutenant Uncleigh's "rattle-headedness" vs. the Revd. Wicks 
Cherrycoke's Bible-readin' piety (M&D, Ch. 6, p. 48)?  But to continue from 
Schivelbusch ...

   "There was another series of attributes which the seventeenth century 
ascribed to coffee, none of them borne out by modern scientific findings....
   "If we examine these supposed properties, the motivation behind the 
projections becomes clearer.  Michelet speaks ... of 'antierotic coffee, 
which at last replaces exual arousal with stimulation of the inetellect.'  
What he had in mind here was the coffeehouse culture of the Enlightenment, 
the coffeehouse as the gathering place of intellectuals and center for 
discussion....  It was regarded as a substance that reduced sexual energies, 
even to the point of impotence.  It was recommended to clerics who lived in 
celibacy.  In 1764 a broadside caused a great sensation in London.  Its 
title: "The Women's Petition against Coffee, Representing to Publick 
Consideration the Grand Inconveniences accruing to their SEX from the 
Excessive Use of that Drying, Enfeebling LIQUOR.  Presented to the Right 
Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of VENUS." ... It is easy to identify 
the sociopolitical impulse behind this complaint: the English coffee-houses 
of this period excluded women, and in their pamphlet the women were 
rebelling against the increasing patriarchalization of society....
   "Coffee as the beverage of sobriety and coffee as the means of curbing 
the sexual urges--it is not hard recognzie the ideological forces behind 
this reorientation.  Sobriety and abstinence have always been the battle cry 
of puritanical, ascetic movements.  English Puritanism, and more generally, 
the Protestant ethic, defined coffee in this way and then wholeheartedly 
declared it their favorite drink.
   "There is no doubt that coffee is to a large degree an ideologically 
freighted drink.  Yet it would be wrong to see only this aspect of it.  For 
coffeee undeniably has other properties that made it so well-suited to 
European civilization as it evolved from the seventeenth century on.... The 
seventeenth century was the century of rationalism, not only in philosophy, 
but in all the important areas of material life....  Rationaliy and 
accountability characterize the bourgeois spirit that was behind it all.
   "The seventeenth-century bourgeois was distinguished from people of past 
ecnturies by his menatl as well as his physical lifestyle....  The 
middle-class man worked increasingly with his head, his workplace in the 
office, his working position was sedentary....  In this connection coffee 
functioned as a historically significant drug.  It spread through the body 
and achieved chemically and pharamcologically what rationalism and the 
Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically.  With 
coffee, the principle of rationality enetred human physiology, transforming 
it to conform with its own requirements.  The result was a body which 
functioned in accord with the demands--a rationalistic, middle-class, 
forward-looking body." (pp. 37-9)

   "In 1687 or 1688--the exact date is not recorded--Edward Lloyd opened a 
coffeehouse on London's Tower Street.  He anmed it after himself: Lloyd's 
Coffeehouse....
   "Lloyd's Coffeehouse soon evolved into a meeting place for people in the 
maritime occupations ....  One sector of Lloyd's clientele in particular 
continued to expand--the insurance brokers...." (p. 49)

Again, see M&D, Ch. 3, p. 26.  But to finish off in Schivelbsuch ...

   "The coffeehouse as a public space was as novel as coffee was a drink.... 
  Sobriety and moderation were the order of the day for the coffeehouse: 
proper manners were required, talk was to be held to a subdued and 
considerate level--it was, in short, everything that taverns were not....
   "On the basis of these rules the coffeehouse of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries fulfilled its most important role: as a center for 
communication....  Yet the coffeehouse fulfilled this function not only for 
commerce.  It was equally important fot two other middle-class activities: 
journalism and literature.... people frequented coffeehouses not only to 
conduct business but also to discuss literary and political topics--and to 
read the newspapers that were available there....
   "In the early eighteenth century the editors of London's weeklies used 
cofeehouses quite literally as their editorial offices....
   "The most important direct effect coffeehouses had on literature was 
probably in helping to create a culture of dialogue, of conversation, which 
originated in coffeehouses and only then made its way into written 
literature.  The prose of a Laurence Sterne or a Diderot, for instance, is a 
conversational prose, a prose of dialogue, modeled, quite clearly, on 
coffeehouse discussion and 'argumentation.'  ... osmosis between reality and 
literature ...." (pp. 52-9)

And on this point, see, according to Schivelbusch, Harold Routh, "Steele and 
Addison," The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, UK: 
Cambridge UP, 1907-21), Vol. 9: From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift, 
conveniently online at, e.g., ...

http://www.bartleby.com/219/0204.html

And might I also recommend, on the pre-European circulation of coffee ...

Hattox, Ralph S.  Coffee and Coffeehouses:
   The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval
   Near East.  Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990.

Okay, that ought about to do it ...




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