Link

The link is lewdpicture.omeka.net, though it is titled "Eighteenth Century Pornography."  My apologies, you have witnessed my baby steps in the world of digital scholarship.

Digital Project

My digital project is available to view at Omeka.net/eighteenthcenturypornography.  I have created a directory of images from the long eighteenth century that would have circulated in print culture in multiple formats.  Though James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson illustrated contemporary images of sex, most of the pornography available at print shops came from older works that were continually reprinted.  Aretino's Postures and Aristotle's Masterpeace were two prominent works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that enjoyed enormous popularity in the eighteenth century.  The directory is searchable by category.  To focus on some of the anti-clerical pornography that attacked the morals of the Catholic Church, type in "religious."  Since I will be researching the Gaze and its significance, I have made this directory searchable by the keywords "voyerism" and "Gaze."  This will allow me to examine different aspects of the "multiplicity of gazes" that the reader takes part in when viewing these images.  The cultural norms and class and gender clues hidden away in obscene prints is fascinating.  When attacking the Church, architectural luxury mingles with sexual depravity to show the overindulgent Catholics in the worst possible light.  The homosexual scene of French officers comments on the Army as well as homosexual activity, and the bourgeois women, secreted away in luxury, who entertain dalliances in their parlors, says much about the anxieties of the private domestic sphere.  I hope you enjoy!

Newest Draft

Polishing the Public Sphere: The Ascendance of Middle Class Mores in the Early Modern British Coffeehouse

The urban landscape of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century London was characterized by change and novelty. With the emergence of newspapers and ephemera addressed to a largely literate public, new ideas and patterns of behavior could be disseminated across a wide arena quickly and uniformly. The British coffeehouse provided a new urban space which fostered ideas of middle class propriety alongside a novel commodity. For the price of a penny, a man could patronize a coffeehouse, enjoy an exotic beverage, read the newspapers and conduct business. Private masculine space, which existed in the homes of the elite who could afford it, was now offered in public. The coffeehouse offered a unique public sphere that was literary, cultural, and self improving-traits that were later associated with bourgeois values.


The emergence of a middle class in eighteenth century Britain was closely tied to the development of a new market economy. A wider array of choice allowed consumers to express individual taste through the purchase of tangible goods. At the same time, a population shift from the country to the urban space of the city cut long established ties and networks of neighborly support and surveillance that had been part of rural existence. The city, with a dense and unknown population, ensured anonymity and daily contact with strangers. The coffeehouse emerged as a new public sphere where elite men could indicate their class through an established set of rituals and behaviors that reinforced their superior status. The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was a battle site where the ascendant middle class developed a set of coded rituals that came to be associated with the bourgeois for centuries to come. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's newspapers, The Tatler and The Spectator, published from 1709-1712, laid the foundations for the middle class mores that have continued to indicate class and status through the twenty first century.
Though individualism is often traced to the beginning of the Enlightenment or the watershed moment of the French Revolution, the emergence of the coffeehouse in seventeenth century Britain clearly demonstrates the existence of individualism a century before. By articulating a new set of rules in publicly circulated newspapers, Addison and Steele were introducing new notions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors that would govern public space. The Tatler and The Spectator were not the only voices in the eighteenth century urban milieu but they were becoming louder, and by mid century public behavior was dictated by middle class norms grown from Whiggish notions of propriety, not from royal courts or kings. Nobles now adapted their behavior to ideas of politeness born out of the market economy. Whereas previously Court manners had trickled down to the lower classes, now manners escalated from the middle class upward to the nobility.

Urban anonymity complicated rank. The hierarchy of court life did not translate to the city, where elites often had to share public space with their social inferiors. In a society where rank dictated treatment, it was important to have a system where status could be immediately indicated to strangers. Gentility, manners and politeness came to be associated with elites. By defining the rules of politeness, the newly formed middle class asserted authority and claimed space and importance in a hierarchy based on class. The evolution of the British coffeehouse from an elite group of virtuosi to a haven for merchants reflects the struggle and eventual triumph of the middle class for dominance of the public sphere.

The public sphere of the coffeehouse illuminates broader social anxieties, gender tensions, and political unrest. The eighteenth century witnessed the heyday of the British coffeehouse, which declined sharply in the nineteenth century. This essay will examine the function of the masculine public sphere of the British coffeehouse to answer questions about gender, class, and power. Why were coffeehouses almost exclusively male, even though women were not prohibited from entering? Why were there no female coffeehouses? Were coffeehouses elite spaces, despite their claims of egalitarian bonhomie?

The success of coffee in the early modern British market is somewhat miraculous. Travelers to the Levant observed the Turkish coffee drinking ritual, and elite gentleman interested in experiencing this exotic beverage had to go to great difficulty to prepare what must have been a disappointing first taste. George Manwaring, the founder of Manwaring's Coffeehouse, one of the most famous of the British coffeehouses, admitted he found coffee, “nothing toothsome, nor hath any good smell.” Early modern drinkers of coffee often commented on it's bitterness and unappealing taste, likening it to soot, burned crusts of bread, and other unappetizing chemicals and foods. This should not surprise the modern coffee drinker. Though twenty-first century consumers get a much more stable and uniform coffee experience, coffee is not a drink given to children and there is a sharp divide of people who take their coffee black and those who must make it palatable with the addition of sugar, milk, or other additives to mask its bitterness. While many modern drinkers learn to appreciate the taste of coffee over time, they have a reason to; the caffeine in coffee is the reward for getting through the initial unpleasantness. Early modern drinkers of coffee, however, were unaware of caffeine or its affects on the body. How then, did coffee spread in popularity when the one benefit of it was unknown? Early modern men and women had a vast pharmacopia of substances that were both food and medicine. Within this paradigm, it was possible to view coffee as a new discovery that might taste unpleasant, but aided the body in some way. William Lithgow believed coffee aided digestion, finding it “good to expell the cruditie of raw meates.”

Coffee was a new addition to the extensive early modern drug culture. Already familiar with ergot, henbane, banque or bang, opium, and other substances, early modern Europeans were importing several mind-altering drugs from Asia by the seventeenth century. Ale was the favorite intoxicant of the British, however, who ignored and failed to adopt opiates and hallucinagenics as their Asian neighbors did. Some drinkers experimented with coculus india, a sedative sometimes added to beer to heighten the effects of the alcohol, but this was only popular for a short time before Parliament made it illegal in 1701. The draw of this drug had been the enhancement of alcohol, the British were not as interested in drugs for their own sake.
Unlike other foreign medicines and drugs, however, coffee was not an intoxicant. Though they did not identify caffeine, early modern society understood that coffee was “a drink at once to make us sober and merry” and did not have the adverse affects of alcohol.

Despite the concern for public morals, the happy drunk was still acceptable, if only because he was politically harmless. “The honest drunken curr is one of the quietest subjects his majesty has, and most submissive to a monarchyal government. He would not be without a king, it it were no other reason than meerly drinking his health.”

The first English men to drink coffee in the 1650s were Oxford scholars studying the Levant. This new and exotic beverage gained popularity with the virtuosi-elite men who collected cabinets and rooms of curiosities to display to their friends. For the virtuosi, coffee conveyed exoticism and status, much like a rare stuffed bird or a piece of ancient statuary. It was the middle class, however, who would transform coffee from an exotic brew for foppish dilettantes to the sober fuel of business men.

Early virtuosi were mocked as dilettantes. Their carefully crafted intellectual elitism and perusal of the exquisite marked them as suspicious. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, however, the virtuosi began to decline as the Whiggish middle class ascended, taking over the coffeehouse as their favorite place of business. By associating coffee with productivity and commerce, merchants and business men ensured that Whig values dominated the social atmosphere of this urban space. Addison and Steele are often credited with establishing the modern middle class, and through the mouthpiece of Mr. Spectator, a fictional character who wrote weekly essays on proper behavior and who had much to say about coffeehouse conduct, the coffeehouse began a longtime association with politeness and a new urban civility. The observations of Mr. Spectator and Isaac Bickerstaff formed a didactic prescriptive literature aimed to correct the excessive burden of formal manners and inform the middle class how to behave in public. “Previously”, Addison thought, “conversation, like the Romish religion, was so encumbered by show and ceremony that it stood in need of a Reformation to retrench its superfluities, and restore it to its natural good sense and beauty. At present therefore an unconstrained carriage, and a certain openness of behavior are the height of good breeding. The fashionable world is grown free and easie, our manners, sit more loose upon us; nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence.” Middle class understandings of taste began to dictate acceptable modes of public behavior in eighteenth century urban space, especially the British coffeehouse.

The shift from rural to urban living during the seventeenth century created new needs and functions for city dwellers. By examining the functions of the coffeehouse it is possible to see the new needs of urban space being fulfilled at the same time new anxieties were introduced. The bucolic lull of the country was sharply contrasted with the anonymous bustle of commerce of the cities, but the atmosphere of the coffeehouse was both brisker and more business oriented than the tavern and more social than the Inns of Court, the Custom-House, and even the Exchange. The virtuosi had begun to migrate to urban space in the seventeen century, but these innovators were not the first to do so. Cowan asserts, “In their migration from country to the town, the virtuosi were merely following a much larger, slower, and more profound transformation in the modes of gentry sociability which saw the rise of the London “season” and its national marriage market, the residential development of London’s West End, and the privatization of the social ideal of good hospitality.
The rise in civility and the turn from the country toward urban space was part of a larger movement that shifted and reconfigured class and gender roles.

This bourgeois domination of the public sphere had a decidedly Whiggish turn. Markman Ellis notes the shift from a courtly code designed to display both power and wealth, “to a more bourgeois, commercial, and feminized code, given to the display of benevolence and sensibility. In addition to demonstrating belonging through manners, the bourgeois used new patterns of consumption and display became integral to refinement and taste. The tea table, with its ceremony and association with gossip, became associated with the feminine private sphere, while the coffeehouse and its association with political talk, reason, and ideas became associated with masculine urban culture.

The refinement of the coffeehouse in eighteenth century Britain was part of a wider refinement of behavior in the public sphere. Masculinity and manners were closely entwined, and the new masculinity emphasized spareness and restraint. The old fashioned and tedious courtly manners of aristocratic life, so prominent during the Restoration, were now under attack by Whiggish sympathizers. There was reason to teach manners. Public urban venues were often the source of physical violence. The tavern, street, and courtyard were often sites of fighting. Neighborhood arguments, small disagreements, and old grudges could be ignited after a night spent drinking at the tavern, and even the coffeehouse itself witnessed rudeness and occasional violence. An eighteenth century engraving depicts two gentlemen in disagreement. The first gentleman throws his dish of coffee in the face of the other.

The first years of the eighteenth century marked a turn toward public manners. Through newspapers like the Spectator, early modern readers participated in what historians have called a 'culture of improvement' that advocated proper behavior and civility to others. Dueling, vanity, vulgar language, libertinism, and violence were decried while modesty, virtue, good nature and beauty were promoted. Because Mr. spectator was so socially active, he was able to criticize the foibles of people's public behavior. The Tatler's Issac Bickerstaff, like Mr. Spectator, was on a mission to “Expose the false arts of Life, to pull off the Disguises of Cunning, Vanity, and Affectation, and to recommend a general Simplicity in our Dress, our Discourse, and our Behavior.”

The bourgeois minded Whigs rejected the elaborate, the courtly, and the excessive. In contrast to their old fashioned and royalist-minded rivals, they championed spareness even in dress. The periwig of a generation earlier was therefore as out of fashion as excessive gallantry or vulgarity, and the man of reason was governed by restraint. The Tatler and Spectator promoted simplicity in dress and censured “French Fashions” and other excesses. The early years of the eighteenth century introduced cheaper clothing, particularly in the category of Spitalfields silks and printed muslins. It was now possible for the lower classes to imitate the cut and colors of the fashionable for a fraction of the price. Though aniline dyes were still more than a century in the future, the lower classes were able to wear cheap replicas of high fashions modeled by the rich. The cheaper versions looked it, and elite men and women used satire and ridicule to maintain their hold on setting the fashion. The middle class could stay away from suggestions of inferiority from their betters and the cost of expensive clothing by reforming dress. By banning garish colors from their wardrobe, they avoided falling short of their social superiors sartorial magnificence and at the same time held moral authority for refusing to succumb to the fickle novelty of the market. Blues, browns, blacks, and other neutral colors had the added advantage of looking cleaner longer. Samuel Pepys monthly wash day was quite diligent by early modern standards, and few yellows, pinks, and oranges would last a month without laundering.
The fop, who paid too much attention to his appearance, was doubly suspect. His vanity suggested Royalist politics and courtly sympathies at the same time it contrasted with a new masculine identity, placing the fop closer to a foolish woman than a rational man.

The origins of the British coffeehouse were steeped in scholarship and subversion. Orientalist scholars sipped “coffa, blacke as soote” to compliment their study of the Levant. Though Turkey held fascination and was regarded as profoundly exotic, it was not a Christian country and was widely associated with pederasty. By the 1660s, Peter Stahel, a famed chemist and “great hater of women” began to offer instruction in chemistry to a select group of Oxford virtuosi at Tilliard's coffeehouse. . Seventeenth century coffeehouses in University towns were often seen as an invitation to corruption. Scholars were prohibited to enter both taverns and coffeehouses because they distracted them from study, but also because they encouraged rebellion in the social order. The coffeehouse seemed to invite improper rebellion in the form of criticism towards respected leaders-in this case-college tutors. Indeed, the decline of current scholarship was attributed to “coffy houses, to which most scholars retire and spend much of the day in hearing and speaking of news, [and] in speaking vily of their superiors.” The threat of criticism from social inferiors led Cambridge University to take drastic measures. Cambridge coffeehouses had to agree that they would “suffer no scholars of this University, under the degree of Masters of Arts, to drink coffee, chocolate, sherbett, or tea...except their tutors be with them.
The anxiety about the coffeehouse centered not on the beverage being served, but on the social conventions that accompanied it. In contrast to the tavern, where hi jinks and merry behavior could be traced to the effects of alcohol, coffeehouses were dangerous not because of the coffee they served but because of the conversation they allowed. The coffeehouse was self consciously constructed as a “penny university ” where anyone might be a scholar, but elitism was maintained by making fun of these inferior pretenders by criticizing their Latin and Greek. As one educated patron observed, “But did you but hear /their Latin I fear/ You'd laugh till you burst your breeches.

Despite claims that the coffeehouse was welcoming to all for the cost of a penny, choosing to patronize the coffeehouse was a way some elites chose to separate themselves from plebeian company. While the tavern remained the raucous and bawdy arena for prostitutes and the lower class workers of both sexes, the coffeehouse and tea table provided sober and polite alternative publics for men and women to demonstrate taste, politeness, and class superiority through consumption and ritual. The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was not merely another venue for drinking, but a unique public experience where men could meet and evaluate other men, discuss topics that were taboo in mixed company, and conduct business. Elite men dictated the accepted behavior in the coffeehouse, and what they deemed unacceptable reveals much about their social anxieties.

At the same time men were elevating their social status by following politics and joining clubs to discuss intellectual ideas, womens' speech was becoming devalued. Bourgeois values reinforced the notion of a masculine public and feminine domestic sphere. Women's value now lay in their ornamental qualities and their ability to entertain in style. As an adjunct to her husband's status, a wife sought to enhance his regard by performing her entertainment duties with aplomb, making him look good through her efforts. The wife and home were often displayed together to invited guests, and formal teas were an extension of domestic hospitality. The tea table was the domain of the mistress of the home and was not replicated in the coffeehouse. Class and taste could be effectively signaled to guests at the tea table, which ”... provided an opportunity for men and women to mix in a more intimate private setting than a ball and thus create a smaller public which could encompass sensibility. Here a family was judged by the taste displayed through their tea equipage and the grace with which the presiding woman served tea and dispensed “chat.”

The private sanctum of all male space in a mansion gave elite men most power, but the all male space of different public venues could adopt many of the same criteria of private male sanctums within the home. Elite men needed space where they could relax from the rigid demands of social politeness. Mixed company demanded trivial conversation and specifically excluded the topics of politics and philosophy. Certain rituals in the elite home separated the sexes, and it was after dinner when the men retired to smoke and the ladies to gossip that gender specific interaction took place within the home. These social rituals were beginning to become hallmarks of politeness for elites, and thus the separation of men and women for social interaction became tied to notions of politeness and class.

To honor elite women, men in mixed company were expected to exercise restraint and refrain from conversation about trade subjects she would not have the intellectual capacity to discuss. Vulgar language, bawdy stories, and overly merry behavior could not be part of heterosocial gatherings.
The public sphere could not have existed without the availability of public space. The coffeehouse as a structure was necessary before the bonhomie of coffeehouse conversation could exist. The increase in all male space outside the home was a necessary step to the masculine publics that shaped early modern discourse and was in turn shaped by it. The coffeehouse was easily imported to Britain from the East because there was already an understanding of masculine social space predicated on drinking. Though the coffeehouse was an elite space dedicated to a sober drink, it was still understood to be set up on the basic framework of the tavern. The first English travelers to the East called the coffeehouses they saw there “Turkish Ale Houses,” though they hastened to add that no ale was served.

Early modern coffeehouses were plain wooden structures with windows and servants, very similar to established public houses and taverns. Broadsides, engravings, and windows allowed the public to see and be seen. Often following a Turkish theme, coffeehouses offered a novel new public that claimed to be free of social distinctions. Virtuosi were the first to claim space in the coffeehouse and establish it as an adjunct intellectual space, similar to other clubs and intellectual societies where members self consciously constructed egalitarian brotherhood where there were no distinctions of rank. Though this emerged during the same century that witnessed the execution of Charles I and a political movement that called for the abolition of rank and the adoption of universal male suffrage, noted historian Brian Cowan argues that this was not meant to promote social leveling but it was rather a means by which the genteel manners of the new metropolitan “Town” were to be distinguished from what were perceived to be the excessive and stifling formalities of the past. Rank played an enormous role in regulating the public sphere of the coffeehouse, but class rather than noble title was judged to be important. Rather than a hierarchy with nobles at the top, middle class men reconfigured the rules to benefit their own rise in society. Their successful ascension over nobles necessitated the removal of noble titles in the race for social primacy. In “The Rules and Orders of the Coffee House”, a verse admonished patrons that, “first Gentry, tradesman, all are welcome hither, / And may without affront sit down together: /Pre-eminance of place, none here should mind, /But take the next fit seat that he can find:/Nor need any, if finer persons come, rise up to assign to them his room.

The British coffeehouse was the basis for Jurgen Habermas's theories about the new public sphere that originated in the eighteenth century. Habermas defined the public sphere as a place where the private subject experienced public life. In the eighteenth century British coffeehouse, the identity of the private subject was publicly on display and taste, culture, and opinion could mingle without interference from the expected traditions and norms of court life. Identity and new ways of thinking and experiencing were essential to the public sphere, and the coffeehouse was one of the new public spaces to admit private individuals expressing their personal tastes. The private sphere is linked to bourgeois consumption through the desire of the individual to express taste and personality. Politeness and civility were the hallmarks of middle class consciousness, and despite the claims that coffeehouses were places where rank and title were cast aside in favor of mutual respect and conversation, gender norms, class, and behavior were vigilantly policed in the eighteenth century British coffeehouse.

The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was located in the so-called public sphere of urban sociability that mixed consumption and politeness outside the home. Though similar in many ways to the alehouse and public tavern, the coffeehouse promoted a more genteel and sober atmosphere than taverns, which were associated with low life, prostitution, and misbehavior. Cowan observes that “Although they were hardly cordoned off from the social world of the “better sort,” public drinking houses were commonly thought to be places conducive to misbehavior. And if many found this to be part of their allure, few people wished to be known s one who made a regular practice out of frequenting taverns or alehouses.

Addison and Steele's reformation of manners resulted in a legacy of accepted modes of behavior and taste that even in the twenty-first century resonate with the middle class. Manners and taste displayed the semiotics of class for elite men and women, and Mr. Spectator informed them when these changed. Middle class taste was not the only taste available, but it was becoming a loud voice in a public conversation about propriety, and as the eighteenth century wore on, middle class manners and mores were the lingua franca of polite society. In light of eighteenth century views of propriety, the absence of women in the coffeehouse makes sense because it was a public meeting place for commerce and masculine social exchange, much like the Bourse or the Inns of Court. Just as the middle class woman did not frequent the tavern or the Rota club, she also did not frequent the coffeehouse.

Much of eighteenth century socializing was based the mutual consumption of a drink. The nature of the drink dictated the nature of the company surrounding the drink, and thus the experience. Ale, coffee, and tea were not mere selections from a menu, but culturally understood experiences that demanded specific space and a code of public interaction. The coffeehouse existed in self-conscious opposition to the tavern and allowed patrons to order coffee or an assortment of alcoholic beverages without the plebeian culture of the tavern. Coffeehouse culture was in many ways a departure from public space that had been held in common and allowed cross class interaction. The tavern had always been accessible to elite men, though they had to tolerate the “patina of low life” associated with it. The coffee house was widely celebrated as being accessible to all, but in reality was aimed at attracting the middle class and making them comfortable with aristocrats or wealthier and more powerful men, not aiding the lower orders in leveling social standing with their superiors. The choice between coffeehouse and tavern was further separated by making alcoholic drinks available at the coffeehouse, thus allowing elites to tipple in respectability.

Whereas Restoration era coffeehouses were dens of political iniquity, eighteenth century coffeehouse culture sought to promote gentility that had not existed in the previous century. Through the literary public sphere of Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator, an emerging politeness and taste defined the Whiggish middle class gentleman against his old fashioned aristocratic counterpart and the crude mannered, low class ruffian of the tavern. The new culture of bourgeois politeness owed much to the circulation of didactic reading materials, most prominently The Spectator. Through the circulation of this newspaper, people as far away as Scotland could practice a new refinement of manners that was coming to define the public sphere.

The coffeehouse harbored a masculine public sphere, but women were often present in the coffeehouse. 'Coffee women' as they were called, often owned their own shops or were employed serving the beverage to patrons, and maids, servants, and prostitutes participated in the day to day runnings of the coffeehouse. These women, however, were not part of the public sphere-they were disregarded the way slaves and servants always were by their elite employers and were not participants. Elite women did not patronize the coffeehouse because appearing in public would have suggested a sexual and class based transgression in the same way appearing at a public house would mark one as a public woman, and therefore a prostitute. Coffeehouses were not unique in assigning a male purview to their space; this was the case with most early modern urban venues.

The coffeehouse was gendered as masculine space, but there were no specific rules barring women from entry. Indeed, most engravings of the eighteenth century coffeehouse feature women behind the coffee bar in the role of proprietress. In the case of women, class commingled with gender to restrict women’s access to the coffeehouse. Genteel women would have been discouraged from attendance by the association of coffeehouse space with sexual danger, and also because of new ideas of propriety and class advocated by bourgeois norms. Though it was gauche to draw attention to one's self as a man, it was doubly so for a woman. The class based transgression for women appearing in public was perhaps more compelling to keep elite women out of the public eye than was the fear of sexual danger.

Women in the coffeehouse were not ladies. They were not necessarily prostitutes, although Ceasare de Chaussere claimed that he saw a coffeehouse that was a temple to Venus. Women present in the coffeehouse were servants, and as such were 'invisible' to the early modern patron. There could be a sexual frisson, but it was on a case by cases basis, as prostitutes were not a frequent feature of coffeehouse life. Most surviving prints and pictures of the coffeehouse depict a woman dispensing cups at the bar, and it was this position that caused trouble. These 'idols' as some were called, were idolized by male customers, who were overcome with their beauty. Even if the girl behind the counter were modest and did not welcome advances from male patrons, her work put her in a position (literally) where she could not protest or get away from innuendo and suggestion. In a complex understanding of gender norms, this woman was the source of anxieties about men wasting time and succumbing to temptation. With the associations of coffee and the coffeehouse with sober work and industry, these women were viewed as responsible for keeping men from their work. In a letter to the Spectator, a writer tattled on men enamored by these coffeehouse idols, “these idols sit and received all day long the adoration of the youth...I know in particular, goods are not entered as they ought to be at the Custom-House, nor law-reports perused at the Temple, by reason of one beauty who detains the young merchants too long near Change, and another fair one, who keeps students at her house when they should be at study.” Apparently the men are not accountable for their actions, but the woman, obliged by her job to stay behind the counter, retains responsibility for the negligent clerks all over the city. The interesting subtext is that young men are not doing their job. Young men, who might hold more appeal to the girl at the coffee bar, waste business time flirting. Older men with more power and position might have repelled the 'idol' and are taking out their frustrations on her and her admirers, both of whom would have been under the authority of older, powerful men.

The rules governing the coffeehouse were similar to rules governing other all-male social space. The assumption of learning, particularly of reasoned, philosophical learning, and political debate were appropriate topics of conversation when ladies were not present precisely because eighteenth century beliefs about gender coupled with understandings of politeness allowed elite men to discuss these subjects in the absence of ladies. Women were present, as servants, coffeehouse owners, and prostitutes, but elite men did not recognize them as actors because they were of a lower class. Servants and slaves were usually treated as non-entities by elites in eighteenth century; at the very least their presence was discounted, but often they were simply ignored.

The coffeehouse was both a dangerous place where hierarchy and tradition might be discarded or ignored as well as a sober and industrious place where working men could gather. Praise and criticism of the coffeehouse highlights the different social anxieties present in early modern Britain. Gender norms and class differences caused the most social anxiety for early modern urban dwellers. Whereas seventeenth century tracts had long used the metaphorical “battle for the breeches” to discuss gender tensions, eighteenth century coffeehouse discourse was more subtle. Here, femininity was attacked through the figures of the fop and the beau, men who paid too much attention to manners and appearance. Abel Boyer criticized the beau as a man who “has all the folly, vanity, and levity of a woman.”

In the seventeenth century, coffeehouses were criticized as venues where unregulated conversation threatened the established social order. At the macro level, they were associated with rebellion against the King, and at the micro level, with undermining the authority of college tutors over their students. By the eighteenth century, however, the coffeehouse had gained a reputation as a sober public space for the discussion of news and business. Instead of facing criticism from a wary public, the institution of the coffeehouse served as a tool of social control, where gender roles were policed and rules of politeness were enforced.

The eighteenth century revolution in middle class manners was inherently linked to the market economy and the new understanding of politeness and urban civility promoted by the Tatler and the Spectator within the public sphere of the British coffeehouse. Within this culture of improvement, elite men and women refined their manners, learned the art of conversation, and “plucked the thorns from life” to make it more palatable, amusing, and pleasant.

New Draft

Hello all,

Thank you for looking over my essay in it's first horrible rough draft.  I will be posting a revised essay on this blog either tonight or this weekend.  I have torn it to pieces several times, but no doubt it needs further cutting and reworking.  Look for a new post in the next few days and I will see you in class on Tuesday.

Thanks,

JMD

Coffee Essay

Hi everyone,

Here is the rough sketch of the essay-I need to replace words-I use "whiggish middle class" far too much.

The emergence of the middle class in eighteenth century Britain was closely tied to the new market economy. A wider array of choice allowed consumers to express individual taste through the purchase of commodities. At the same time, a shift from the country to the urban space of the city cut long established ties and networks of neighbors that had been part of rural existence. The city, with a dense and anonymous population, ensured anonymity with strangers. The new urban space for the middle class was the site of the coffeehouse, where Whiggish middle class men could indicate their class through an established set of rituals and behaviors that reinforced their elite status.¹ The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was a battle site where the newly created middle class sought to reinforce their elite status by ensuring that their rules emerged as the dominant discourse for urban behavior. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's newspapers, The Tatler and The Spectator, published from 1708-1711, laid the foundations for the middle class mores that have continued to indicate socioeconomic status through the twenty first century.

Though individualism is often traced to the beginning of the Enlightenment or the watershed moment of the French Revolution, the emergence of the coffeehouse in seventeenth century London clearly demonstrates the existence of individuals a century before. By articulating a new set of rules in publicly circulated newspapers, Addison and Steele were introducing new notions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors that would govern public space. The Tatler and the Spectator were not the only voices in the eighteenth century urban milieu but they were becoming louder, and by mid century public behavior was dictated by middle class norms grown from Whiggish notions of propriety, not from royal courts or kings. Nobles now adapted their behavior to ideas of politeness born out of the market economy. Whereas previously Court manners had trickled down to the lower classes, now manners escalated from the middle class upward to the nobility.

Urban anonymity complicated rank. The hierarchy of court life did not translate to the city. In a society where rank dictated treatment, it was imporant to have a system where status could be immediately indicated to strangers. Gentility and superior status came to be associated with elites. By defining the rules of politeness, the newly formed middle class asserted authority and claimed space and importance in a hierarchy of class. The evolution of the British coffeehouse reflects the struggle of the middle class for dominance of the public sphere.

The public sphere of the coffeehouse illuminates questions about social anxieties, gender tensions, and political unrest. The eighteenth century witnessed the heyday of the British coffeehouse, which declined sharply in the nineteenth century. This essay will examine the function of the masculine public sphere of the British coffeehouse to answer questions about gender, class, and power. Why were coffeehouses almost exclusively male, even though women were not prohibited from entering? Why were there no female coffeehouses? Were coffeehouses elite space, despite their claims of egalitarian bonhomie?

The first Europeans to drink coffee in the 1650s were Oxford scholars studying the Levant. This new and exotic beverage gained popularity with the virtuosi-elite men who collected cabinets and rooms of curiosities to display to their friends. For the virtuosi, coffee conveyed exoticism and status, much like a rare stuffed bird or a piece of ancient statuary. It was the middle class, however, who would transform coffee from an exotic brew for foppish dilettantes to the sober fuel of business men.

Early virtuosi were mocked as dilettantes. Their carefully crafted intellectual elitism and perusal of the exquisite marked them as suspicious. With the advent of the Spectator and the Tatler, however, the virtuosi began to decline as the whiggish middle class ascended, taking over the coffeehouse as their favorite place of business. By associating coffee with productivity and commerce, Whig values dominated the social atmosphere of this urban space. Addison and Steele are often credited with establishing the modern middle class. The observations of Mr. Spectator and Isaac Bickerstaff formed a didactic prescriptive literature aimed to correct the excessive burden of formal manners and inform the middle class how to behave in public. “Previously, Addsion thought, “conversation, like the Romish religion, was so encumbered by show and ceremony that it stood in need of a Reformation to retrench its superfluities, and restore it to its natural good sense and beauty. At present therefore an unconstrained carriage, and a certain openness of behavior are the height of good breeding. The fashionable world is grown free and easie, our manners, sit more loose upon us; nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence.”²

This burgoise domination of the public sphere had a decidedly Whiggish turn. In addition to demonstrating belonging through manners, new patterns of consumption and display became integral to refinement and taste. The tea table, with its ceremony and association with gossip, became associated with the feminine private sphere, while the coffehouse and its association with political talk, reason, ideas became associated with masculine urban culture.

The origins of the British coffeehouse were steeped in scholarship and subversion. Orientalist scholars sipped “coffa, blacke as soote” to compliment their study of the Levant. By the 1660s, Peter Stahel, a famed chemist and “great hater of women” began to offer instruction in chemistry to a select group of Oxford virtuosi at Tilliard's coffeehouse.³ . Seventeenth century coffeehouses in University towns were often seen as an invitation to corruption. Scholars were prohibited to enter both taverns and coffeehouses because they distracted them from study, but also because they encouraged rebellion in the social order.⁴ The coffeehouse seemed to invite improper rebellion in the form of criticism towards respected leaders-in this case-college tutors. Indeed, the decline of current scholarship was attributed to “coffy houses, to which most scholars retire and spend much of the day in hearing and speaking of news, [and] in speaking vily of their superiors.”⁵

Cambridge University coffeehouses had to agree that they would “suffer no scholars of this University, under the degree of Masters of Arts, to drink coffee, chocolate, sherbett, or tea...except their tutors be with them.⁶

The anxiety about the coffeehouse centered not on the beverage being served, but on the social conventions that accompanied it. In contrast to the tavern, where hi jinks and merry behavior could be traced to the effects of alcohol, coffeehouses were dangerous not because of the coffee they served but because of the conversation they allowed. The coffeehouse was self consciously constructed as a “penny university⁷” where anyone might be a scholar, but elitism was maintained by making fun of these inferior pretenders by criticizing their Latin and Greek. “But did you but hear /their Latin I fear/ You'd laugh till you burst your breeches.⁸

Despite claims that the coffeehouse was welcoming to all for the cost of a penny, choosing to patronize the coffeehouse was a way some elites chose to separate themselves with plebeian company. While the tavern remained the raucous and bawdy arena for prostitutes and the lower class workers of both sexes, the coffee house and tea table provided sober and polite alternative publics for men and women to demonstrate taste, politeness, and class superiority through consumption and ritual. The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was not merely another venue for drinking, but a unique public experience where men could meet and evaluate other men, discuss topics that were taboo in mixed company, and conduct business. The accepted behavior in the coffeehouse was dictated by elite men, and the unaccepted behavior reveals much about the social anxieties of these men.

The public sphere could not have existed without the availability of public space. The coffeehouse as a structure was necessary before the bonhomie of coffeehouse conversation could exist. The increase in all male space outside the home was a necessary step to the masculine publics that shaped early modern discourse and was in turn shaped by it.

Early modern coffeehouses were plain wooden structures with windows and servants, very similar to established public houses and taverns. Broadsides, engravings, and windows allowed the public to see and be seen. Often following a Turkish theme, coffeehouses offered a novel new public that claimed to be free of social distinctions. Virtuosi were the first to claim space in the coffeehouse and establish it as an adjunct intellectual space, similar to other clubs and intellectual societies where members self consciously constructed egalitarian brotherhood where there were no distinctions of rank. Though this emerged during the same century that witnessed the execution of Charles I and a political movement that called for the abolition of rank and the adoption of universal male suffrage, noted historian Brian Cowan argues that this was not meant to promote social leveling but it was rather a means by which the genteel manners of the new metropolitan “Town” were to be distinguished from what were perceived to be the excessive and stifling formalities of the past.⁹ Rank played an enormous role in regulating the public sphere of the coffeehouse, but class rather than noble title was judged to be important. Rather than a hierarchy with nobles at the top, middle class men reconfigured the rules to benefit their own rise in society. Their successful ascension over nobles necessitated the removal of noble titles the race for social primacy. In The Rules and Orders of the Coffee House, a verse admonished patrons that, “first Gentry, tradesman, all are welcome hither, / And may without affront sit down together: /Pre-eminance of place, none here should mind, /But take the next fit seat that he can find:/Nor need any, if finer persons come, rise up to assign to them his room.¹⁰

The British coffeehouse was the basis for Jurgen Habermas's theories about the new public sphere that originated in the eighteenth century. Habermas defined the public sphere as a place where the private subject experienced public life.¹¹ In the eighteenth century British coffeehouse, the identity of the private subject was publicly on display and taste, culture, and opinion could mingle without interference from the expected traditions and norms of court life. Identity and new ways of thinking and experiencing were essential to the public sphere, and the coffeehouse was one of the new public spaces to admit private individuals expressing their personal tastes. The private sphere is linked to bourgeois consumption through the desire of the individual to express taste and personality. Politeness and civility were the hallmarks of middle class consciousness, and despite the claims that coffeehouses were places where rank and title were cast aside in favor of mutual respect and conversation, gender norms, class, and behavior were vigilantly policed in the eighteenth century British coffeehouse.

The eighteenth century British coffeehouse was located in the so called public sphere of urban sociability that mixed consumption and politeness outside the home. Though similar in many ways to the alehouse and public tavern, the coffeehouse promoted a more genteel and sober atmosphere than taverns, which were associated with low life, prostitution, and misbehavior. Cowan observes that “Although they were hardly cordoned off from the social world of the “better sort,” public drinking houses were commonly thought to be places conducive to misbehavior. And if many found this to be part of their allure, few people wished to be known s one who made a regular practice out of frequenting taverns or alehouses.¹²

Addison and Steele's reformation of manners resulted in a legacy of accepted modes of behavior and taste that even in the twenty-first century resonate with the middle class. Manners and taste displayed the semiotics of class for elite men and women, and Mr. Spectator informed them when these changed. Middle class taste was not the only taste available, but it was becoming a loud voice in a public conversation about propriety, and as the eighteenth century wore on, middle class manners and mores were the lingua franca of polite society. In light of eighteenth century views of propriety, the absence of women in the coffeehouse makes sense because it was a public meeting place for commerce and masculine social exchange, much like the Bourse or the Inns of Court. Just as the middle class woman did not frequent the tavern or the Rota club, she also did not frequent the coffeehouse.

Much of eighteenth century socializing was based the mutual consumption of a drink. The nature of the drink dictated the nature of the company surrounding the drink, and thus the experience. Ale, coffee, and tea were not mere selections from a menu, but culturally understood experiences that demanded specific space and a code of public interaction. The coffeehouse existed in self conscious opposition to the tavern and allowed patrons to order coffee or an assortment of alcoholic beverages without the plebeian culture of the tavern. Coffeehouse culture was in many ways a departure from public space that had been held in common and allowed cross class interaction. The tavern had always been accessible to elite men, though they had to tolerate the “patina of low life” associated with it.¹³ The coffee house was widely celebrated as being accessible to all, but in reality was aimed at attracting the middle class and making them comfortable with aristocrats or wealthier and more powerful men, not aiding the lower orders in levelling social standing with their superiors.¹⁴ The choice between coffeehouse and tavern was further separated by making alcoholic drinks available at the coffeehouse, thus allowing elites to tipple in respectability.

Whereas Restoration era coffeehouses were dens of political iniquity, eighteenth century coffeehouse culture sought to promote a gentility that had not existed in the previous century. Through the literary public sphere of Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator, an emerging politeness and taste defined the whiggish middle class gentleman against his old fashioned aristocratic counterpart and the crude mannered, low class ruffian of the tavern. The new culture of bourgeois politeness owed much to the circulation of didactic reading materials, most prominently The Spectator. Through the circulation of this newspaper, people as far away as Scotland could practice a new refinement of manners that was coming to define the public sphere.¹⁵

The coffeehouse harbored a masculine public sphere, but women were often present in the coffeehouse. 'Coffee women' as they were called, often owned their own shops or were employed serving the beverage to patrons, and maids, servants, and prostitutes participated in the day to day runnings of the coffeehouse.¹⁶ These women, however, were not part of the public sphere-they were disregarded the way slaves and servants always were by their elite employers and were not participants.¹⁷ Elite women did not patronize the coffeehouse because appearing in public would have suggested a sexual and class based transgression in the same way appearing at a public house would mark one as a public woman, and therefore a prostitute.¹⁸ Coffeehouses were not unique in assigning a male purview to their space, this was the case with most early modern urban venues.

The rules governing the coffeehouse were similar to rules governing other all male social space. The assumption of learning, particularly of reasoned, philosophical learning, and political debate were appropriate topics of conversation when ladies were not present precisely because eighteenth century beliefs about gender coupled with understandings of politeness allowed elite men to discuss these subjects in the absence of ladies. Women were present, as servants, coffeehouse owners, and prostitutes, but elite men did not recognize them as actors because they were of a lower class. Servants and slaves were usually treated as non entities by elites in eighteenth century; at the very least their presence was discounted, but often they were simply ignored.

Conclusion:

The coffeehouse was both a dangerous place where hierarchy and tradition might be discarded or ignored as well as a sober and industrious place where working men could gather. Praise and criticism of the coffeehouse highlights the different social anxieties present in early modern Britain. Gender norms and class differences caused the most social anxiety for early modern urban dwellers. Whereas seventeenth century tracts had long used the metaphorical “battle for the breeches” to discuss gender tensions, eighteenth century coffeehouse discourse was more subtle. Here, femininity was attacked through the figures of the fop and the beau; men who paid too much attention to manners and appearance. Abel Boyer criticized the beau as a man who “has all the folly, vanity, and levity of a woman.”¹⁹

In the seventeenth century, coffeehouses were criticized as venues where unregulated conversation threatened the established social order. At the macro level, they were associated with rebellion against the King, and at the micro level, with undermining the authority of college tutors over their students. By the eighteenth century, however, the coffeehouse had gained a reputation as a sober public space for the discussion of news and business. Instead of facing criticism from a wary public, the institution of the coffeehouse served as a tool of social control, where gender roles were policed and rules of politeness were enforced.

1Whig politicians championed commerce and ideals associated with the middle class “self made man”

2Cowan, 102

3cowan

4The academic gowns of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, were changed from the black of Oxford and Cambridge to red at this time. The red dye served to identify any student breaking University rules by frequenting a tavern or coffeehouse.

5Cowan, 92

6Cowan, 93

7Cowan, 101

8Cowan, 100

9Cowan, 102

10Cowan, 102

11Mr. Spectator, Cowan, 345

12Cowan, 105

13Where is this quote in Cowan??

14Cowan

15Cowan, article

16

17Cite

18

19Cowan, 230

Editing Blog

After thinking about the perils of posting rough work to English grad students,  I am returning for more!  I have tons of (hopefully) future articles which exist now as good ideas trapped in imperfect essay formats.  I would love to be able to post this on my blog and would welcome insights and suggestions as I continue to tweak and perfect my work.  If any of you have things you would like to group/peer edit, would you post them on your blogs?  I know when I am procrastinating I would much rather clean up someone else's work than tackle my own-perhaps if we had this editing network we could all give a few minutes now and then and dramatically improve work that we always mean to but never have time to do. 



After this class is over, I would like to continue with this and I would welcome any of you as contacts.  I will post more later.

Liz-thank you for your suggestions

Open Office format

This is one area where Open Office seems to have limitations.  Here is a paragraph of my essay I am working on.  If you can read it and have any questions or comments, please post them. 

In eighteenth century Britain, class and gender were becoming closely tied to a commercial market. Cheaper prices and an expanding market allowed more people than ever before to experience choice when shopping. The coffeehouse became one more purchaseable experience for men with a penny to spend. The coffeehouse was the locus of far more than an exotic brew, however, because of it's association with Addison and Steele's Spectator A wider selection became available to the lower classes, and with cheaper prices, the market could now substitute handiwork to demonstrate personal choice and taste. Instead of hand crafting objects to use as adornment, householders were hand selecting objects to convey taste. The rising awareness of men and women to the fashions and trends in clothing, entertainment, and conspicuous display shaped their manners and environments. With the introduction of coffee, tea, and other beverages that centered around public display, elite men and women demonstrated and performed class-based rituals that reinforced their status. While eighteenth century elite women entertained single sex or mixed sex company at the tea table within the confines of the home, elite men conducted their conversation in the all-male public sphere of the coffeehouse.

The coffeehouse harbored a masculine public sphere, but women were often present in the coffehouse. 'Coffee women' as they were called, often owned their own shops or were employed serving the beverage to patrons, and maids, servants, and prostitutes participated in the day to day runnings of the coffeehouse.¹ These women, however, were not part of the public sphere-they were disregarded the way slaves and servants always were by their elite employers and were not participants. Elite women did not patronize the coffeehouse because appearing in public would have suggested a sexual and class based transgression in the same way appearing at a public house would mark one as a public woman, and therefore a prostitute. Coffeehouses were not unique in assigning a male purview to their space, this was the case with most early modern urban venues.

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