The Coffee Houses of Queen Anne’s London

By David Fairer

By the turn of the eighteenth century the coffee houses of London had become the great meeting-places of the capital – for relaxation and for stimulation. Whether your drink of choice was coffee, chocolate, or expensive tea, it was here you met with your friends and encountered strangers; where you could exercise your wit, pick up the latest news, sound forth your political opinions, and hear the latest spicy gossip as it did the rounds. Some characters (like Medley in Etherege’s The Man of Mode) were news bulletins in themselves, circulating scandal as a currency – one that gained value in the telling – perhaps to crash by tomorrow.

Jacob Spon’s frontispiece to his tract on coffee, tea, and chocolate (Paris, 1685). The three contrasting figures reflect the far-flung origins of the drinks: Turkey (coffee), China (tea), and Spanish America (chocolate).

A French traveller found London’s coffee houses remarkable: “You have all manner of news there: you have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please; you have a dish of coffee; you meet your friends for the transaction of business – and all for a penny, if you don’t care to spend more.” (Henri Misson, 1717).

Coffee houses had their individual character, and this might change over the course of a day. Early in the morning the news-mongers circulated, spreading and exchanging the overnight intelligence; later, well-informed gentlemen might stroll in and put matters right; by afternoon the atmosphere was perhaps one of after-dinner reflection; then the place would ready itself for the arrival of the wits and the theatrical crowd primed for the adventures of the evening; and by nine the critics might reappear with their judgments on the new play at the Theatre Royal.

First established in London during the Commonwealth, after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the coffee houses seem to have gained a reputation for seditious conversation – places that might attract the disaffected. In December 1675 King Charles II issued a proclamation in the London Gazette to suppress all coffee houses as being the haunts of “Idle and disaffected persons” who were spreading “malicious and scandalous reports to the defamation of His Majesties Government . . . speaking evil of things they understand not.” From the following week it would be forbidden for anyone “to keep any publick Coffeehouse, or to utter or sell any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea, or they will answer the contrary at their utmost Perils.” It was a Draconian move against an institution that was becoming popular, and needless to say, this attempt to end what was proving to be a profitable trade for merchants and proprietors alike, was doomed. After a huge outcry the threat was withdrawn.* (*https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/100707).

By the reign of Charles’s niece, Queen Anne (1702-14), the coffee houses – and their slightly more upmarket cousins the chocolate houses – could be numbered in their hundreds, and they had established themselves as relatively respectable places of resort. Of course, seditious sentiments might still be uttered, and quarrels over politics were liable to break out at any time. The following picture suggests what a lively and disputatious place a London coffee house of the period might be, with the bewigged clientele coming to blows:

‘The Coffee-House Mob, or, Debates Pro, and Con, on the Times’. Frontispiece to Ned Ward, The Fourth Part of Vulgus Britannicus: or, The British Hudibras (1710).

But coffee houses were generally clubbable places, resorts of conversation, grumbling, rumour, wit, scandal, and intellectual and political debate. There was something to suit every taste:

The gentle Beau too, joins in wise debate,
Adjusts his cravat, and reforms the State.
[The Tripe Club. A Satyr (1706)]

One establishment might offer conversations in Latin, another attract projectors and men of science, another one be the resort of members of the clergy in town on church business. But you had to be careful – a confirmed Whig would no sooner think of frequenting the high Tory Cocoa-Tree in Pall Mall, than a Jacobitical Tory would settle himself at Will’s in Covent Garden at the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street.

Each establishment had its own character, and there was all the variety you could wish for. White’s Chocolate House on St James’s Street was a more aristocratic haunt notorious for the ‘deep play’ of hazard, a dicing game at which huge fortunes were made or lost in a single evening, and when the shirt on your back could be the final desperate stake.

The social mix was considerable, but in one important way they were exclusive. Unlike the many taverns and alehouses of the capital, London coffee houses were closed to women. A fair number of them, however, were run by widows. Lillywhite’s compendium lists nineteen of them, including those presided over by Widow Turnbull, Widow Nixon, Widow Lloyd, and Widow Vernon – who in 1713 carried on her business in Fleet Street after the death of her husband. This situation was probably quite common – and it made a widow well set up in business an attractive marriage prospect.

We can see from the following illustration what an imposing figure the chatelaine of a coffee house would cut with her tall tiara and ample gown:

A London coffee house c. 1705

The coffee boy, dressed in his smart livery, was proud of his ability to pour out the coffee in an elegant way – like the young man in the above plate. The few pictures of coffee-boys all show them lifting the pot as high as they can manage and delivering an elegant stream of liquid into the earthenware bowl (china cups with handles had not yet established themselves).

On entering, the customer deposited his penny at the bar, and was expected to seat himself with the other gentlemen. You didn’t go into a coffee house to sit alone and keep your own company. And at these so-called ‘penny universities’, newspapers, books and pamphlets were available, and some of them had their own libraries. They could be venues for auctions, lottery ticket sales, with projectors making their pitch. Business could be transacted, especially in the flourishing coffee houses in Exchange Alley, off Cheapside in the City. The most famous of these were Jonathan‘s, Garraway’s, and Lloyds – which specialised in the latest shipping news. Entering Jonathan’s you would be met with a crowd of stock-jobbers crying their wares, and could hear the price of stocks rise and fall as the deals were made all round you. When the Royal Exchange was closed to share-dealing, the trade simply moved into the warren of streets on the other side of the road, packed with brokers, bankers, and the new trade of insurance.

In contrast to the busy financial dealings in Exchange Alley, at Will’s in Covent Garden the brightest and best in the literary world gathered. In this place where the great Dryden had once held court, aspiring writers formed a coterie in the company of Addison, Swift, Wycherley, Ambrose Philips, John Dennis, and John Gay. Here, as in other coffee houses which aspired to a literary character, a young man’s reputation could be made with a witty epigram or a finely turned pastoral. It was at Will’s that the teenage Alexander Pope made friends with Swift, and brought himself to the notice of influential patrons.

Such coffee-houses had libraries that lent out books, and on the tables, beside the newspapers, would be scattered controversial pamphlets, tedious sermons, or satirical squibs. An aspiring poet might tour the coffee houses and leave behind manuscript copies of his latest inspiration, hoping they would be noticed by the cultural influencers of the day. If he was especially lucky, his piece might find its way into The Tatler, the influential periodical begun by Richard Steele in 1709. This thrice-weekly paper offered regular reports from four carefully chosen coffee houses. As Steele explained in the first number, “All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, shall be under the article of White’s Chocolate House; Poetry, under that of Will’s Coffee House; Learning under the title of the Grecian; and Foreign and Domestick News you will have from St James’s Coffee House.” From those four appropriate outposts, the magazine’s persona, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’, was able to cover the cultural field – much like the Sunday supplements do today.

Part of the joy of a coffee house was its clientele, and a newcomer might encounter a wide range of characters. In Ned Ward’s series, The Weekly Comedy: Or, the Humours of a Coffee-House (1707), his readers were offered a succession of comic scenes that featured a miscellany of characters, including Hazard (a gamester), Blunt (a plain dealer), Bite (a sharper), Nice (a beau), Whim (a projector), Trick (a Lawyer), Froth (a punster), Bays (a poet), Harlem (a news-writer), and Guzzle (a hard drinker) – a group described by Ward a “Knaves of all Trades, and Fools in Ev’ry Art.” In Ward’s typically dyspeptic words, the coffee houses were full of “a buzzing breed, / That o’er their Coffee tattle, smoke, and read.”

But these places were not just for drinking and talking. Wagers would be taken on the news – men would talk about their trades, their latest reading, pass judgment on new play, speculate on the news from Europe – the triumphs and reverses when Britain was involved in a long continental war. The coffee houses of Queen Anne’s London fed the capital’s insatiable desire for news and sociability. At a time when ‘the World’ was merely five miles across and could be walked in a couple of hours, people sensed that everything was within reach. So much was happening around you that you really ought to know about it, and the coffee houses acted as a busy exchange. Here is Lewis Theobald writing about his daily routine in The Censor, no. 61 (12 March 1717):

“As I am obliged, in order to see how the world runs, and gather observations on the humours of mankind . . . I constantly appear once a Day at the Coffee-houses in vogue, and where I expect to meet with the most matter for speculation. Were it not for these diurnal circulations, and the minutes which I take from what occurs there, I might find myself sometimes at a loss for subjects  . . . I [put] on an air of inadvertence, and glean up the scatter’d papers from every table . . . being seated, and like a profound politician, with my coffee half cold, seeming to nod o’er the respective interests of Europe . . . I have often sat with pleasure to hear the Nation settled, and the Wits arraign’d; and amuse myself with the variety of conversation, which is bandied by every distinct knot of talkers. I have heard a country Squire over his pipe at one corner, sputtering about the age and strength of his October [a strong beer] and recommending the house-wifery of his daughter Penelope. At another, a company of sparks praising the beauty of a bar-keeper. A third clan would be canvassing the sermons and conduct of their parson . . . These disjointed topicks of conversation [are] played off at one time and in the self-same place . . .”

In this world, variety was a stimulus. These sociable spaces offered an unpredictable mixture of entertainment and challenge, knowledge and opportunity, escape and refreshment. The world was surely a better place for these busy harbours of the mind.

Some reading:

[Anon.], The Character of a Coffee-House. Wherein is contained a Description of the Persons usually frequenting it, with their Discourse and Humors (1665)

Ned Ward, The Weekly Comedy, as it is Dayly Acted at most Coffee-Houses in London (1699; reworked and republished as The Humours of a Coffee-House, 1707)

Henri Misson, Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England (1719)

John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (1929)

Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (1956)

Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses (1963)

Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2004)

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David Fairer was born in Kingston-Upon-Hull, Yorkshire. After studying in Oxford for ten years, he took up a lectureship at the University of Leeds in 1976, and since 1999 has been Professor of 18th Century English Literature (Emeritus 2018). He has written widely on the period. Some of his books include Pope’s Imagination (1984), English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2004), and Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle (2009). Chocolate House Treason (2019) is his fictional début – “not before time!” he says.

Chocolate House Treason is the first in a projected series of whodunits set in the London of Queen Anne during the uneasy months following the Act of Union (1707) when the new nation of ‘Great Britain’ came into being. 

The book is published by Troubador Publishing Ltd:

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/historical/chocolate-house-treason/

For some more background information, see the Chocolate House Mysteries website: https://davidfairer.com/

Restoration Comedy - a Reflection of Society?

by Annie Whitehead

Perhaps I should begin by defining ‘comedy’ in the theatre. Tragedies invariably centre around the main character and his psychological struggles: Macbeth with his ambition, Coriolanus with his pride. In general, comedies take a light-hearted, sometimes cynical look at the central character and the situation in which he finds himself; in short, at the man in his society. So how far was Restoration comedy a reflection of restoration Society, and how far was it a product of that Society?*

Molière 

The Restoration of 1660 heralded a new era for the English theatre. Curtailed during the civil war and the years of the Commonwealth, entertainment of this kind was once again in demand. The general consensus of opinion is that if Restoration comedy owed anything at all, it was to France, in particular to Molière, rather than to pre-war comedies (with perhaps the exception of Shadwell.)

It is natural enough to expect the returning Cavaliers to have developed a taste for French theatre during their exile. In this respect then, Restoration comedy was a product of the age. Another distinction can be found in the composition of the theatre companies. The two which dominated London were Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company and Sir William Davenant’s Duke’s Company. For the first time, actresses played the female roles, and a great deal of the sex and sensuality to be found in Restoration comedies resulted from the introduction of women to the stage. [1]

Nell Gwyn

So who were the playwrights, and what were their aims?  This was a period when the court had a genuine influence on literature in general, and Charles II took an intelligent interest. Most of the playwrights were as well known to their audiences as the actors were, and would be on friendly terms with the like of the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Rochester and Sir Charles Sedley. These men wrote themselves, and would be in a position to give advice to the dramatists. Patronage played an important part in the world of the theatres and there is little doubt that the playwrights attempted to meet the demands of their patrons and their audience. Dryden was one who did not participate in the way of life he portrayed in his plays. He constantly played down to contemporary taste, and Sutherland [2] suggested that this was the reason for the startling indecency in some of his comedies. His The Kind-Keeper had to be censored before it could be performed on the stage.

William Wycherley

Etherege did not portray anything he would have been ashamed to do himself, but Wycherley viewed Society as one based on hypocrisy, although he nevertheless wrote to satisfy his audience. Shadwell's comedies were criticised by Dryden, but he had a talent for reproducing contemporary conversation. John Crowne, according to Sutherland, would have written less indecently had the audience not been so demanding. On the whole these men were member of the very Society they were holding up for ridicule. But this should not be seen as a criticism of the world in which they lived. They were projecting an image of the morality of the day and making fun of it, much as Oscar Wilde did in the 1890s.

If these men were attempting to meet the demands of their audience, it must follow that the audience enjoyed what was being offered to it. This begs the question, who went to the theatre? The theatre audience was not just an extension of the court. Theatre-going was an habitual part of day-to-day living for those of the ‘town’. Newton, John Locke, and Mr and Mrs Pepys were frequent attenders. In 1668 Samuel Pepys went to the theatre 73 times in eight months. Davenant’s innovative use of scenery and his inclination towards farce drew in a more bourgeois and less intellectually demanding audience. When the two companies merged in the 1690s farcical comedy became more popular as intellectual standards lowered.

Samuel Pepys

Audiences often contained many people who were seeing the play for a second or third time, and in general these were the fashionable people living outside the city, while quite often the London middle classes shunned the theatres as haunts of iniquity. Many among the audience attended just to be seen in public. They loved wit, cleverness and fine language.

If we are to assume that Restoration Society itself stimulated the new comic impulse, then nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the plays themselves. The most common style was the Comedy of Intrigue, where the plot involved one or more cynical gallants who sought to seduce a number of brisk young ladies. There was also the Comedy of Humours, the purpose of which was to inculcate morality by displaying humours - caricatures of folly and vice - upon the stage.

Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and Farquhar built their plays on these stock formulae. Their plays were often called Social Comedies as they contained some social criticism, dealing wittily with the manner, but more often they are classed as Comedies of Manners. In The Man of Mode (Etherege) and The Way of the World (Congreve), a contrast within Society is portrayed very clearly. There are those who intelligently uphold the standards imposed, and those who are ludicrous through failing to do so. Lynch [3] defined this as the ‘unfailing identification mark’ of all Restoration comedy.

Dorset Gardens playhouse in 1673

Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman Street was too concerned with ‘low’ characters to please the Restoration audience. The returned Cavaliers perhaps expected nothing but eulogy from their playwrights. Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662) was a more pleasing portrayal of middle class vulgarity, portraying two Cavaliers as person of high quality in contrast. In Etherege’s plays, his libertine attitude is expressed through the young men of fashion who are normally the heroes, and sometimes through the witty young women whom they marry. Later in the period the rake-hero gives way to the man of sense, and the influence of the female part of the audience begins to be felt, as the rake is reformed. A well-established character is the English Francophile, easily recognisable at a time when a large part of Society had spent many years in France, and when the king displayed pro-French tendencies.

A well-known and fairly typical example of Restoration comedy is Etherege’s The Man of Mode. John Dennis said of it, “Upon the first acting of this Comedy it was generally believed to be an agreeable Representation of the Person of Condition of both sexes, both in Court and Town.” [4] There is no certainty that the characters are meant to be real people. They reflect Etherege’s success in creating an image of contemporary Society which would be eagerly approved. The character Dorimant’s sexual ambition is a sustaining force in the comedy, but carries with it a threat of disorder. This is controlled in the first place by the Town which imposes its own decorum. To join a company at Lady Townley’s house, Dorimant has to resort to imposture. Character contrasts define and limit Dorimant’s role. Sir Fopling Flutter (yes, really!) provides the folly to contrast with Dorimant’s wit. Sir Fopling parodies many of Dorimant’s actions, showing their limitations and raising doubts as to their value.

Thomas Betterton played the irresistible Dorimant in 
George Etherege's Man of Mode. 

Witty conversation is the main test of social ‘fitness’. In Sir Martin Mar-All (Dryden) Millisent takes up with her husband’s servant because Sir Martin lacks wit. The finer characters inspire sympathetic laughter, but the comedies exhibit many foolish city wives, and doting and miserly city husbands who do not receive any sympathetic treatment. Supported as it was by the landed classes, Restoration drama was not at the forefront of social thinking and expressed only accepted ideas. The non-conformist mercantile community was not treated kindly.

So again, we find the dramatists meeting the demands of their patrons. The Royalist courtiers in the early years of the period remembered only too well the London Financiers’ support for the Commonwealth. Wycherley’s Alderman Gripe (Love in a Wood) was ‘seemingly precise, but a covetous, lecherous, old usurer of the City.’ Congreve, born ten years after the Restoration, continued this tradition with his Alderman Fondlewife (The Old Bachelor).

William Congreve

Naturally, Restoration comedy was not without its critics. Collier, an Anglican Stuart loyalist, believed the stage was conducive to sin. Wit came under attack; Blackmore considered it to be primarily ornamental. He saw the purpose of literature as the inculcation of religiosu and ethical principles. Both these men drew strong support from the merchant class. Most critics wanted to modify the treatment of the merchant in the theatre. [5]

These plays were not a literal copy of the life and manners of the age; the dramatists were presenting a picture of the smart set of the day not as it really was, but perhaps ridiculing how it liked to imagine itself. It is clear that this section of Society took no offence. The brilliance of the new court brought a new brilliance to the English stage. The expectations and demands of the audience were fulfilled. This audience was reacting against the Puritan days, and it saw plays which portrayed that reaction with a new carefree attitude. It saw its morality satirised, its way of life caricatured. Those who saw themselves treated unsympathetically were critical, the fashionable were enthusiastic.

Scene from Etherege's Love in a Tub

Restoration comedy was a product of its age. Playwrights were willing to satirise a Society of which they were a part. The audience was prepared to laugh at itself.

Restoration Society produced Restoration comedy, and this comedy was a reflection of that Society.


*Society with a capital S: the upper classes, essentially.
[1] Six Restoration Plays - Ed. John Harold Wilson
[2]English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century
[3]The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy
[4] Dramatist d1734
[5] Sir Richard Blackmore - preface to Heroick (poem 1695) and Collier - ‘Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage’ 1698

Additional reading:
The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden
The Ornament of Action - Peter Holland
Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding - John Loftis

[All above images are in the public domain]

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Annie Whitehead is a history graduate and prize-winning author. Her first novel, To Be A Queen, is the story of Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great, who came to be known as the Lady of the Mercians. It was long-listed for the Historical Novel Society’s Indie Book of the Year 2016, and it has been awarded a B.R.A.G. Gold Medallion.

Her second novel, Alvar the Kingmaker, is a tale of intrigue, deceit, politics, love, and murder in tenth-century Mercia. It charts the career of the earl who sacrificed personal happiness to secure the throne of England for King Edgar, and, later, Aethelred the Unready. It too has just been awarded a B.R.A.G. Gold Medallion.

Most recently, she has contributed to the anthology of short stories, 1066 Turned Upside Down, in which nine authors re-imagine the events of 1066, and which has just been awarded HNS Editors’ choice and long-listed for Book of the Year 2017.

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