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

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17Cite

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19Cowan, 230