An early coffee house periodical and its readers: The athenian mercury, 1691-1697

London Journal

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 28-33

  Berry, Helen ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; MEDIA INDUSTRY;

EID: 0033915914     PISSN: 03058034     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/ldn.2000.25.1.14     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. The use of the word 'Athenian' to mean a questioning disposition dates back to the decades after the Restoration. Richard Leigh's Censure oftJie Rota recorded the proceedings of the 'Athenian Virtuosi' in a 'Coffe-Academy instituted by Apollo for the advancement of Gazette Philosophy, Mercury's, Diurnals &c."
2. in 1673. See Harrison Ross Sleeves, 'The Athenian Virtuosi and the Athenian Society', Modern Language Review, VII (1912), 359. The following is adapted from my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 'Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late Seventeenth-Century England,
3. With Special Reference to the Athenian Mercury' (University of Cambridge, 1998). I am indebted to Keith Wrightson for his comments on earlier versions of this paper.
4. Charles Gildon, The History of the Athenian Society, for the Resolving all Nice and Curious Questions by a Gentleman who Got Secret Intelligence of the Whole Proceedings (1692), 6.
5. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in theEaiîy Periodical (1989), 82-6.
6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transi, by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Massachusetts, 1989), 57-67 and passim.
7. Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance. Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 16601770 (Oxford, 1989);
8. Stephen Pincus, 'Coffee Politicians Does Create': Coffee Houses and Restoration Politicial Culture', Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 807-34;
9. Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee Houses (1956); Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses (1963).
10. Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science. Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian
11. Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge, 1992), 143. 7 Ibid, 144-145.
12. Among his most infamous publications was the Second Spira, a popular pamphlet about an atheist who was struck dead for blasphemy. For details of Sault's life and career, see 'Richard Sault', Cambridge Antiquarian Society, xv (1865), 37.
13. Articles of agreement for writing the Athenian Mercury dated 'this Tenth of Aprill in the Year of our Lord 1691',
14. Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS. D72. A transcription of the Articles is in Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade. A Study of his Career with a Checklist of his Publications (New York, 1976), 74-108.
15. See Elkanah Settle, The New Athenian Comedy, containing the Politicks, Oeconomics, Tacticks, Crypticks, Apocalypticks, Stypticks, Scepticks, Pneumaticks, Theologicks... ofthat most Learned Society (1693).
16. A[thenian] Mercury], [Vol.] 1, [No.] 2 (24 March, 1691).
17. AM, 10, 8 (22 April, 1693).
18. See for example Walter Graham, The Beginnings of the English Literary Periodical. A Study of Periodical Literature, 1665-1715 (Oxford, 1926) ;
19. Miriam K Starkman, Swift 's Satire on Learning in A Tale of A Tub (New York, 1968);
20. Robin Kent, Agony: Problem Pages Through the Ages (1987), 1-7.
21. The publisher recalled the network of distributors by name in his autobiography: 'Mrs Baldwin, Mrs Nutt, Mrs Gurus, Mrs Mallett, Mrs Groom, Mrs Grover, Mrs Barnes, Mrs Winter, Mrs Taylor', and dedicated volume eleven of the Athenian Gazette to them (JulyOctober, 1693).
22. See also Margaret Hunt, 'Hawkers, Bawlers and Mercuries: Women and the London Press in the Early Enlightenment', in M. Hunt, M.Jacob, P. Mack and R. Perry (eds), Women and the Enlightenment, Women and History No. 9 (New York, 1984).
23. lan Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957), 36.
24. City Mercury, 16 (4 July, 1692). Unlike the Athenian Mercury, readers did not have to pay for this periodical, which may thus have had a wider circulation.
25. Ellis, Penny Universities, xiv.
26. Dunton, The Life and Errors of John D union, Late Citizen of London (1705), 236-7.
27. Margaret Hunt gives the example of the hawker Ann Dodd, who took in over a quarter of the 10,000 copies of the London Journal in 1721. In 'Hawkers, Bawlers and Mercuries', 50-1.
28. See also Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998), passim,
29. Athenian Gazette, preface to vol. 19 (October 1695-February 1696).
30. Parks, Dunton, 77.
31. Dunton, Life and Errors, 423.
32. Parks, Dunton, 113.
33. Dunton, Life and Errors, 189.
34. AM, 2, 19 undated [July, 1691].
35. Ibid, 10,4 (31 October, 1691). This name could of course have been fabricated, but the unusual inclusion of a precise date and place of origin, as well as a name, is suggestive of authenticity. For the intimate character of urban neighbourhoods at this time, see Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourlwod and Society: a London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987).
36. AM, 18, 13 (27 August, 1695). 27.Ibid, 9, 15 (31 January, 1693).
37. 28. Ibid.
38. Poor Robin's Intelligence, No. 2 (17 July, 1691).
39. Ibid, No. 1 (8 July, 1691).
40. AM, 3, 18 (26 September, 1691).
41. Original letters to the Tatler and Spectator are in the British Library, Add. MS. 61,687, Blenheim Papers, Vol. DLXXXVII.
42. John Hough ton, Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, No. 16 (1 June, 1692). My thanks to Natasha Glaysier for this reference.
43. Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory (eds) An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: SamuelJeake of Rye, 1652-1699 (Oxford, 1988), 221. Jeake's interest in the Athenian Mercury belies its authors' skepticism about astrology. They dismissed almanacs as worthless, 'the best of which more often miss than hitt, and those who have had the greatest Fame, not having been so kind to tell us any thing of the great Snows, and Cold that we have had this Winter'. AM, 16, 24 (9 March, 1695).
44. Jeake's questions about the nature of the earth's motion were answered in AM, 10, 10 (29 April, 1693), not 10, 11 (2 May, 1693) as claimed by Hunter and Gregory.
45. AM, 7, 29 (July 5,1692). The subject of political and religious bias is complex and beyond the scope of this particular paper, although it is notable that the Athenian Society usually avoided politically sensitive issues, preferring learned or casuistical subjects. It would in any case be problematic to infer the political sympathies of readers from the periodical's broadly Williamite tone.
46. Parks, Dunton, 88-90.
47. Jonathan Swift to the Athenian Society, letter dated 'Moor-Park, Feb. 14,1691/2'. The letter and Odevfere published in the Athenian Gazette, supplement to vol. 5 (October 1691 January 1692).
48. AM, 13, 21 (April 17,1694). British Library, Burney Collection of Early English Newspapers.
49. 40. Ibid.
50. Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS., D72. For a complete quotation and analysis of the 'Anonymia' letters, see my article "Nice and Curious Questions": Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury', TJie Seventeenth Century, XII, No. 2 (Autumn 1997), 257-276.
51. Public Record Office, Prob. 11/657 ff. 82, mentions 'Mrs Maria Jones (alias Orinda)', whom Dunton describes as 'my very generous friend lately living at the White Ball in German Street and my Executrix'. See also John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997), 141, on Elizabeth Singer Rowe.
52. Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago, 1986), 'A catalogue of plain bound books belonging to the Rt. Honourable the Lady Ann, Countess of Coventry, 1704', 346-7.
53. See for example Roger Chartier, 'Texts, Printing, Readings' in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, 1974), xii-xiii and passim,
54. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Grossman (eds), The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, 1980);
55. John Brewer, 'Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptives, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent's Reading', inj. Raven, H. Small and N. Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), 226-45.
56. Hannah Barker cautions against this assumption when using early modern newspapers as historical sources in Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 33.
57. For a more detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the periodical's content, see Berry, 'Gender, Society and Print Culture', passim.
58. The literature on the emergence of the middling sort in the long eighteenth century is extensive. See for example Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort. Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley, 1996);
59. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (1989);
60. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 3-55 and passim; Vivien Brodsky Elliott, 'Mobility and Marriage in Pre-Industrial England' (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1979);
61. Peter Earle, 'The Middling Sort in London' in Christopher Brooks and Jonathan Barry (eds), The Middling Sort of People (1994), 141-58;
62. Michael Mascuch, 'Social Mobility and Middling Self Identity: the Ethos of British Autobiographers, 1600-1750',
63. Social History 20, No. 1 (January, 1995), 45-61. The relational aspect of middling status is brought particularly into focus in a nonmetropolitan context. See
64. Henry Richards French, 'Chief Inhabitants and their Areas of Influence: Local Ruling Groups in Essex and Suffolk Parishes, 1630-1720' (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993). See also Lawrence Stone, 'Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700', Past and Present, 33 (1966), 16-55;
65. David Cressy, 'Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England', Literature and History, 3 (1976), 29-44.
66. Earle, 'Middling Sort', 150-2.
67. Ibid, 134.
68. AM, 18, 15 (3 September, 1695).
69. Brodsky Elliott, 'Mobility and Marriage', 67-8.
70. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), 107-150 and passim.
71. AM, 14, 12 (30June,1694).
72. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), 461-518.
73. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998), 148-172 and passim;
74. Earle, English Middle Class, 106-30;
75. Hunt, Middling Sort, 29-34.
76. See also Daniel A. Rabuzzi, 'Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected in Business Handbooks', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, No. 2 (1995-6), 169-189.
77. Daniel Defoe, Complete English Tradesman (2nd. edn., 1727), 187.
78. See for example AM, 18, 8 (10 August, 1695) and 13, 9 (6 March, 1694). There were exceptions: one former master vintner ran up debts of £1500 mostly in fees paid to physicians to treat his 'melancholy mad' wife. In AM, 18, 28 (19 October, 1695). Defoe's debts in 1692 reached the spectacular sum of £17,000.
79. Dunton refers in his will to Mrs Frances Brath, 'My Fleet landlady, PRO/Prob.ll/657/fol. 82. See also Arnold A. Dallimore, Susanna Wesley (Michigan, 1996), 68-70.
80. AM, 11, 6 (July 29, 1693).
81. Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour Sex and Marriage (1999), passim,
82. AM, 3, 19, undated [September, 1691].
83. Parks, Dunton, 88.
84. See Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500-1700 (1994), 317.
85. AM, 11, 23 (26 September, 1693).
86. See Donna Andrew, 'The Code of Honour and its Critics: the Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850', Social History, v (1980), 409-34.
87. AM, 3, 2 (1 August, 1691)
88. French, 'Chief Inhabitants', 262.
89. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (Huntingdon, 1972), 31.
90. Hunter and Gregory, SamuelJeake, 1-5. 70 AM, 6, 30, undated [March, 1692].
91. The supplement to the Athenian Gazette, vol. 2, contains an extract from the Journal de Scavans, Tome 18, 47,
92. 'History of the Emperors' together with miscellaneous other works - Summa Biblica, and the Bibliothèque Univers. Tome 19, 508, a 'history of the Templars, translated from the Latin'. Works advertised originated from the major continental European printing houses; Hanover, Leyden, Amsterdam and Paris. The English universities were also represented by a Collection of Ancient Inscriptions by William Fleetwood, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
93. Pincus, 'Coffee Politicians', 813.
94. Dunton, Life and Errors, 235-7.
95. See AM, 1, 18 (23 May, 1691). The Athenian Society recorded that they had received thirteen questions from Cambridge, and they promised to answer them 'as soon as maybe'.
96. This is a mis-transcription in Dunton's will of the name of Henry Eden, who matriculated at Trinity College in 1693, became a Fellow of Trinity in 1699, and was awarded his Master's degree in 1700. SeeJ. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, I (Cambridge, 1922), 84. The several mistakes by the Clerk when copying the will for the purposes of Probate is evident from his writing 'Mecues' instead of 'Mercuries' in the extract quoted.
97. AM, 15, 12 (13 October, 1694). '
98. Ibid, 15, 10 (6 October, 1694).
99. Lacedemonian Mercury, 1, 5 (22 February, 1692).
100. Ibid, 1, 1 (1 February, 1692).
101. See for example AM, 11, 12 (19 August, 1693) and 17, 10 (4 May, 1694).
102. Ibid, 13, 7 (27 February, 1694).
103. This figure is calculated from a sample of eighteen issues of one volume in each year, AM, 6, 1-18 (February-March, 1692) and 13, 1-18 (February-April, 1694).
104. Ibid, 7, 24 (18 June, 1692) and 7, 25 (21 June, 1692).
105. Ibid, vols. 7 and 13 (1692-4) and 13, 16 (31 March, 1694).
106. Ibid, 13, 3 (13 February, 1694). See also the Introduction to Stephen Parks, Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons: Vol. 5, Poets and Men of Letters (1972). For an outhne of the motivating factors behind book purchase, see
107. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (1988), 166-70,
108. 176-83. Also by the same author, 'Consumer behaviour and social status in England, 1660-1750', Continuity and Change, 1, No. 2 (1986), 191-216.
109. AM, 7, 15 (17 May, 1692). Sale 'by the Candle' denoted a common form of auctioning by which the goods were sold to the last person to bid before a candle burnt below a marked point
110. AM, 13, 25 (1 May, 1694).
111. Ibid, 13, 20 (14 April, 1694).
112. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, passim.
113. AM, 9, 3 (December 20, 1692).
114. See for example the advertisements placed by one 'Mr Switerda a tutor in English, Latin and French, who advertised regularly in the periodical over a number of years. See for example Ibid, 8, 17 (25 October, 1692) and 11, 26 (7 October, 1693).
115. John Brewer, "The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious". Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660-1800', in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800. Image, Object, Text (1995), 346.
116. See David Cressy, 'Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early Modern England", in Roy Porter and John Brewer (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (1993), 314; idem,
117. Literacy and the Sodal Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 72, 124 -5, 128-9, 147-9, 154.