Coffeehouse civility, 1660-1714: An aspect of post-courtly culture in England

Huntington Library Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 31-51

  Klein, Lawrence E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649452328     PISSN: 00187895     EISSN: 1544399X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3817904     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. see The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672-1680, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (1935; reprint, London, 1986), 464-70
2. Edward F. Robinson, The Early History of Coffee-Houses in England(London, 1893)
3. and Ulla Heise, Coffee and Coffeehouses, trans. Paul Roper (West Chester, Pa., 1987)
4. For example, early writers on coffeehouses often alluded, mostly unfavorably, to the Near Eastern origins of coffee and of the coffeehouse. This element dropped from view after 1688
5. See the excellent assessments and revisions of Elias by Dilwyn Knox, "Disciplina: The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility," in John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto, eds., Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice Jr. (New York, 1991), 107-35
6. "A Character of London-Village" (1684), in Gwendolen Murphy, A Cabinet of Characters (London and Oxford, 1925), 324-25. For seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materials, the city of publication is London, unless otherwise indicated
7. The Character of a Coffee-House (1665), 3-4. Dates are retained in titles below because of the similarity of titles
8. The Character of a Coffee House (1673), 1
9. A Broadside against Coffee (1672)
10. But the notion that the coffeehouse was a modern university of sorts pleased others, such as John Houghton; see A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, vol. 15, no. 461, 23 May 1701
11. News from the Coffe-House (1667)
12. A Coffee-House Dialogue (1679), 1-2
13. R. T., "The Art of Good Husbandry" (1675), in Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), 97-100
14. Thomas P. Slaughter, ed., Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle's Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, 1984), 21
15. See R. A. Beddard, "The Restoration Church," in J. R. Jones, ed., The Restored Monarchy, 1660-1688 (London, 1979), 155-75
16. See Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), 28-29
17. and H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers, 2 vols. (1887; reprint, New York, 1966), 1:27-53
18. On the politics of the Royal Society, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 129-39, 283-331
19. James Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism, and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983)
20. and Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), 36-38
21. Earlier, Secretary Williamson had considered similar actions; see Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1:381 n
22. For further discussion of these efforts, see Pincus, "'Coffee Politicians Does Create,'" 822-30
23. A Brief Description of the Excellent Vertues of that Sober and Wholesome Drink, Coffee (1674)
24. See, for example, William Rumsey, Organon Salutis (1657), sigs. b2v-b3r
25. The Vertue of the Coffee Drink (1670?)
26. and Robert Morton, The Nature, Quality and Most Excellent Vertues of Coffee (1670?)
27. Sir Henry Blount (1602-82) championed coffee and the coffeehouse in the 1650s and 1660s as the sober alternative to debauchery, which he associated with the universities; see Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (1949; reprint, Harmondsworth, England, 1972), 132
28. The juxtaposed effect of coffee and alcohol was a commonplace used by later writers, too; see Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia (1687), 1:40
29. and Guy Miège, The New State of England (1691), 37-38
30. For a good summary of such stereotypes, see T. W. Corns, W. A. Speck, and J. A. Downie, "Archetypal Mystification: Polemic and Reality in English Political Literature 1640-1750," Eighteenth Century Life 7 (1982)
31. "The Gallant's Worthy Commendation of the Mug" (1682)
32. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, 27-29, 101-2
33. Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts (London and New York, 1993), 84-85
34. and Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge, 1994), passim
35. There is, of course, plenty of evidence that Tories were as reliant as Whigs on coffeehouses for purposes of publicity and organization. Roger L'Estrange lambasted coffeehouses but, according to Thomas Shadwell, he organized the "Crepe-gown-men" in one. See Ebsworth, Roxburghe Ballads, 5(i):177
36. see also Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 2:367, 369, 369n
37. Heraclitus Ridens, no. 12, 19 April 1681
38. The Humours of the Coffee-House (1707), 1-4, 9-11, 18-19, 23
39. "The Publick Spirit of the Whigs" (1714), Prose Works, 8:4l-42
40. Miège, The Present State of Great Britain (1707), 137-38
41. and John Houghton, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, vol. 15, nos. 457-61 (25 April-23 May 1701)
42. See Robert Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, Calif., 1993), esp. 12-35, 249-51
43. Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983)
44. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987)
45. Howard Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in "Augustan" England (Princeton, N.J., 1978)
46. See H. T. Dickinson, "Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century," in John Cannon, ed., The Whig Ascendancy (New York, 1981), 41, 46-47
47. Michael Heyd, "The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 258-80
48. Frank Manuel, The Changing of the Gods (Providence, 1983), 34-51
49. and John Marshall, "The Ecclesiology of the Latitude-men, 1660-1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and 'Hobbism,'" Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 407-27
50. and Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-Industrial Britain, 1500-1700 (London, 1970), 23-25, 143-44, 157-58
51. For the best summary of this development, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989)
52. See H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), 13-118
53. On the Whigs' ideological dilemma, see J. G. A. Pocock, "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform," in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), 215-18
54. and J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (Cambridge, 1977), 35-60
55. John Dunton, The Night-Walker, vol. 1, no. 1, September 1696, sigs. A3v-A4r
56. See D. W. R. Bahlmann, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, Conn., 1957)
57. David Hayton, "Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late-Seventeenth-Century House of Commons," Past and Present, no. 128 (1990): 48-89
58. W. A. Speck, "William - and Mary?" in Lois G. Schwoerer, The Revolution of 1688-89 (Cambridge, 1992), 131-46
59. and Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996)
60. John Dennis, "The Usefulness of the Stage," in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1939), 1:153-55
61. John Dennis, "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry," in Hooker, Critical Works, 1:336
62. See Lawrence E. Klein, "The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness," Eighteenth Century Studies 18 (1984-85): 186-214
63. On this argument, see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994), esp. chaps. 8 and 9
64. Shaftesbury, "Sensus Communis," in Characteristicks, 1:64-65
65. Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1987), 2:46-47 (No. 86, 27 October 1709)
66. John Calhoun Stephens, ed., The Guardian (Lexington, Ky., 1982), 404-6 (No. 95, 30 June 1713)
67. Bond, Tatler, 1:326-28 (No. 46, 26 July 1709)
68. Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 5:208-11 (No. 49, 26 April 1711)
69. See Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens, Ga., 1985), 122-23
70. Bond, Tatler, 2:361 (No. 153, 1 April 1710)
71. Bond, Tatler, 2:439-442 (No. 171, 13 May 1710)
72. Another good example of coffeehouse conversation that spins out of control, "with little Edification," is Spectator No. 481, 11 September 1712 (Bond, Spectator, 4:205-8)