FEATURE: PUBLIC FACES AND
PUBLIC SPACES
What was Masculine about the Public
Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse
Milieu in Post-Restoration England
by Brian Cowan
The notion of a public sphere has been one of the great success stories of
recent historical writing.1 While the term was first adumbrated by Jiirgen
Habermas, who thought that his public sphere was surely a 'category of
bourgeois society', and thus historically traceable to the paradigmatic rise
of the bourgeoisie before the French Revolution, most historians interested
in his formulation have dropped his Marxisant teleology. Much recent
scholarship has also sought to push back the point at which one can trace
the emergence of a distinct sort of 'public sphere', Habermasian or otherwise.2 The term has recently been applied in the studies of such various
topics as poor relief, print culture, and petitioning, to name but a few of the
many histories to appropriate the concept.3 Like the ever-rising middle class
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Fig. 1. Interior of a Coffeehouse, Anon., English, c. 1705.
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or the always-separating masculine and feminine spheres, it seems that
every era has had its own public sphere. The term has become so fluid that
with a little imagination it can be applied to almost any time and any place.
All societies have in various ways made provision for a certain degree of
public discourse and in this respect, they have all had their respective public
spheres. With a little ingenuity regarding their sources, one might well
expect archaeologists to start claiming the emergence of a 'Paleolithic
public sphere'. The variety of public spheres on offer from historians makes
it increasingly difficult to generalize about the concept. Although there are
many recognizable elements of what we might want to call a public sphere
in various different historical contexts, each social space had its own peculiarities, especially with regard to the ways in which that space was gendered
for men and women. This article addresses the peculiarities and the gendered character of the English coffeehouse in its first century of existence,
from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century.
The coffeehouse is an especially important institution because it has been
singled out by Habermas in particular and successive historians in general
as the central institution of the English 'public sphere'.
Much of the recent debate about the gendered nature of the coffeehouses
has focused on the question of whether women were or were not allowed
to enter within their walls. It has often been taken for granted that coffeehouses were considered off limits for women.4 But the recent revival of
interest in the social significance of the coffeehouse phenomenon has provoked some scholars to claim that if women can be shown to have been
present in a coffeehouse, this must also be taken as evidence for women's
full-fledged participation in a wider 'public sphere'.5 One historian has gone
so far as to claim that 'the emergence of coffee houses benefited women',
because 'in their early days, coffee houses welcomed men and women of
diverse classes, exposing them to and perhaps engaging them in political
discourse and news'.6 This method of argumentation is not a particularly
helpful way of addressing the problem. The presence of women in the
coffeehouses cannot be taken as clear-cut evidence of their equal participation in the English public sphere. It should rather be seen as a starting
point for further inquiry.7 Of course space is always gendered in ways that
make occupying it a different experience for women than for men.8 What
then were women doing in the coffeehouses when they were present? What
sorts of women went to coffeehouses? Most importantly, it is crucial to
move beyond simple questions of sex differences in favour of probing more
deeply the gendered culture of the coffeehouse. What did the men and the
women who frequented them think about their participation in coffeehouse
society and how did they see such participation in relation to prevailing
notions of proper masculine or feminine behaviour? These are the questions I want to pose here, and in answering them we shall find that coffeehouse society, and thus much of the public sphere of which it was a
significant part, was indeed considered to be a predominantly masculine
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
129
space. It is important, however, not to mistake the coffeehouse in particular for a much wider 'public sphere'. Although the coffeehouse milieu has
much to teach us about the ways in which public life was imagined and
experienced in Post-Restoration England, it can hardly be expected to comprehend the totality of such ideals and experiences. The coffeehouse was a
fundamental institution of the English public sphere, but it is worth remembering that it was not the only one. 9
Why should early modern historians care about the public sphere at all?
Although the concept was introduced by Jurgen Habermas in a Habilitationsschrift first published in 1962, it did not begin to have a major impact
on historians until the work was translated into French in 1978 as L'Espace
publique and into English even later, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.10 The delayed reception of public-sphere theory
by historians cannot of course be attributed to a lack of access to Habermas's German text. The growing appeal of the concept was rather the result
of the slow decline of unreconstructed social history and the linguistic and
cultural turns in the discipline during the 1980s and afterwards.11
Habermas's notion of a 'public sphere' offered historians a new way to
conceptualize the relationship between social and ideological change by
positing the emergence in the long eighteenth century of a new social basis
for, and new ideas about, public life. Habermas thought that this new 'public
sphere' provided an important intermediary body between the absolutist
state and private individuals. He claimed that although it arose first in the
'world of letters' (literarische Offenlichkeit) as a 'public sphere in apolitical
form', it ultimately became a full-blown 'public sphere in the political
realm', (politische Offenlichkeit) and as such it offered the critical foundation for the expression and legitimacy of democratic public opinion. 12 For
Habermas, the eighteenth-century public sphere was important in worldhistorical terms because it seems to offer the closest thing to an actuallyexisting example of what he would later develop into the notion of an 'ideal
speech situation', that is, the conditions in which individuals may freely
engage in rational and critical debate about the political and ethical issues
of the day and come to a universally agreed-upon conclusion.13 Although
implicated in its origins as a 'category of bourgeois society', the eighteenthcentury public sphere seemed to Habermas to be a golden age of uncorrupted public opinion before the rise of a capitalist culture industry and the
mass media permanently distorted it.
The importance of the public-sphere concept to Habermas's critical theory
is therefore rather easy to understand. What is slightly less clear is why early
modern historians should only so recently have seized upon the notion with
such vigour. Perhaps a major reason for the success of the public-sphere
concept has been the way in which it can be adapted by a historian of almost
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THE PROBLEM OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
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any persuasion to fit his or her own take on the course of early modern
history. For neo and post-Marxists, Habermas has provided a convenient
means by which to reinject a certain amount of historical materialism; while
for revisionist historians of the French Revolution, talk of a public sphere
offers a chance to discuss how a critical form of 'public opinion' might be
much more an independent product of discursive changes than the expression of an emergent bourgeois society.14 In early modern English historiography, the public-sphere concept has only very recently begun to provide
food for thought, primarily by those 'post-revisionist' scholars who see much
more scope for critical public opinion than the (English) revisionist paradigm
has allowed.15
The ironies don't stop here. Even the historians of private life have found
inspiration from a work about the emergence of a public sphere, for Habermas locates his 'bourgeois public-ness' (burgerliche Offenlichkeit) in the
development of a civil society that was composed of 'private' individuals
with interests separate from those of the public realm of state authority
(Gewalt). The 'authentic public sphere' was 'constituted by private people',
and it stood in contrast to the inauthentic public that was located in the state
and court society.16 Habermas's formulation here converges with the
problem to which Philippe Aries thought 'the entire history of private life'
could be reduced: 'how did the transition take place from a form of sociability in which private and public are confounded to one in which they are
distinct, and in which the private may even subsume or curtail the public?'17
In this new world, in which a clear distinction was drawn between the public
sphere and a private life, some historians see the cultural origins of the
revolutionary changes that inaugurated the modern age, most notably
through the French Revolution. The influential work of Roger Chartier is
remarkable in this respect for the way in which it assimilates Habermas's
public sphere to Norbert Elias's civilizing process. For Elias, modern
'privacy' began in the court society that Habermas found to be emblematic
of an outmoded and 'inauthentic' mode of public-ness. Chartier's later
work, while retaining its allegiance to both Elias and Habermas, has never
attempted to reconcile this fundamental conflict.18 Other historians of the
eighteenth century have quite rightly observed that the boundaries between
the public and the private were never quite clear. Thus, for Sarah Maza, 'a
central feature of [the] "public sphere" was . . . paradoxically, a preoccupation with matters common to the scattered "subjectivities" of its inhabitants and which we would call "private" - communication, criticism and
debate about intimate matters such as love, marriage, child-rearing, and
family life'.19 Maza's observation further refines Habermas's belief that the
public sphere first emerged in 'apolitical' literary discussion before allowing for critical debate on those affairs of state that were traditionally considered off limits - 'arcana imperW. The public political world and an
apolitical private life were never as distinct as Habermas, Elias, or Aries had
supposed.
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Nevertheless, Habermas's focus on the relationship between public and
private lives has provided feminist historians with a helpful means of
explaining changes in women's lives in the early modern period, and in particular, with insights about their access to political power. Even before the
translation of Habermas's work into English, Joan Landes had declared
controversially that 'the bourgeois public is essentially, not just contingently, masculinist'.20 Landes's work has been criticized from a variety of
different quarters - most notably on the grounds that her association of the
'bourgeois' public sphere solely with Rousseau and the Jacobin Revolution
ignores Habermas's original distinction between an 'authentic' public
sphere that in France was located primarily in the private salons run by
women and the inauthentic public-ness of the absolutist state - but her
general interpretation of the period has not lost its partisans.21 Perhaps
Landes's particular mix of Habermas and feminist theory has held sway for
so long, despite its obvious shortcomings in terms of historical detail,
because it has fit so well with the master narrative of women's history, the
story of the emergence of separate spheres for men and women.22
Aside from the fortuitous lexical convergence upon the notion of
'spheres' as an analytic category, the history of the public sphere and that
of gendered separate spheres also share a common analytic concern with
figuring how the boundaries between public and private changed over time.
They share a roughly similar chronology as well: both the formation of a
public sphere and the separation of male and female spheres are considered
eighteenth-century processes. Kathryn Shevelow's study of representations
of femininity in the eighteenth-century periodical press immediately brings
a notion of the public sphere to mind as she explores the efflorescence of
an early modern print culture in which women were significant participants.
Yet she also argues that this participation did not preclude the construction
of an increasingly powerful identification of femininity with domesticity.
'During the eighteenth century, as upper and middle-class English women
began to participate in the public realms of print culture, the representational practices of that culture were steadily enclosing them within the
private sphere of the home', she declares.23
A similar argument for the growing exclusion of women from the eighteenth-century public sphere has been offered even more explicitly by Paula
McDowell. Her study of the participation of women in the London booktrade from the Exclusion Crisis to the Walpolean Ascendancy (1678-1730)
effectively merges the story of the development of a public sphere with the
separation of gendered spheres. While she finds that the London press of
the late seventeenth-century was open to women's participation in that
public world, particularly because women saw their own roles in it as part
of a 'collective, social, and essentially unsexed' experience little different
from that of men, McDowell sees the public sphere of Walpolean England
as a very different place indeed.24 In the mid-eighteenth century, women
were no longer welcomed as stationers, authors of political or religious
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polemic, or even as street hawkers and ballad singers. Instead, she finds a
're-constructed', and newly sanitized, 'polite' public sphere in which
women's role had been fundamentally altered.25 No longer imagined as the
'unsexed' subjects of a sovereign or as the voices of religious faith, women
in this new polite public sphere can find acceptance only as refined ladies
whose primary purpose is to uplift and enliven the conversation and the
manners of the men. At the same time, McDowell detects an alteration in
the state's regulation of the public sphere: by 1730, the government had
abandoned all hope of censoring the press and had adopted 'the more realistic goal of efficient counter-exploitation of the press'.26 Thus the legitimation of public opinion and the separation of gendered spheres went hand in
hand. While she is quick to point out that these changes are not essential
characteristics of a unified 'bourgeois public sphere' but rather the contingent products of a process of exclusion and containment in which members
of alternate 'impolite' publics were shut out from the reconstructed 'public
sphere as a polite zone', McDowell's story concurs in many ways with the
main contours of Joan Landes's argument.27
Not everyone has agreed that the emergence of a public sphere was
accompanied by the exclusion of women from it. Steve Pincus has made the
most powerful argument for the early emergence in Restoration England
of 'a public sphere in the Habermasian sense' that was 'not gender or class
exclusive', and indeed was widely accepted by the vast majority of the late
seventeenth-century English political nation.28 Similarly, the studies by
Lawrence Klein, Dena Goodman and Daniel Gordon of eighteenth-century
ideals and practices of polite sociability have emphasized the important role
of women in the public sphere, especially as conversationalists in salons and
literary societies.29 Most recently, Bernard Capp has brought to attention
early modern women's 'lively public life in the street, at the market and at
church', and Amanda Vickery's important study of genteel women in late
eighteenth-century northern England has argued that 'the female public
world was both larger and much less menacing than historians have often
allowed'.30 Women were active participants, she points out, in the public life
of the Georgian cities which saw an 'urban renaissance' in the eighteenth
century as well as in those numerous voluntary associations that are so
crucial to the civil society comprised by the Habermasian public sphere.31
So there is at present very little agreement on the extent to which women
were excluded from the early modern public sphere. Here we return to the
problem introduced at the outset of denning the contours of that public
sphere. The concept of the public sphere remains so capacious, and its constituent parts so variegated, that it is difficult to make generalizations about
it.32 Although there are many recognizable elements of what we might want
to call the public sphere, each milieu nevertheless had its own peculiarities
and its own gendered character. Women had always played a prominent
role in shaping the common gossip and public oral culture of the city
streets,33 while the Restoration era seems to have been something of a
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
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It will be helpful in this discussion to distinguish between what I shall call
the normative and the practical public sphere. The difference between the
two is roughly that between thoughts and deeds, or better, between the prescriptive social 'ought' and the descriptive 'is' or, in this case, 'was'. The normative public sphere consisted of the ideals of action and comportment that
obtained in public life, while the practical public sphere should be understood as the messy everyday realities of that public life. Of course, this
difference is not as simple, nor as distinct, as it seems. There was both a
theory and a practice for both the normative and the practical public
spheres. Norms were often enacted into social action, even if only through
the writing of prescriptive literature. Words are also deeds, as the speechact linguistics of J. L. Austin and the Cambridge school historians of political thought have taught us. 38 Even more importantly, there is a 'theory' to
the practice of everyday life.39 Nevertheless, the public sphere was (and is)
imagined in a manner quite different from the ways in which it was enacted
in daily life. Now Habermas thought that the eighteenth century saw the
emergence of a public sphere in which the normative and the practical converged - indeed that was the essence of its world-historical significance. But
upon closer examination, it-appears that the distinction between the ideals
and the realities of the public life actually remained operative throughout
the period.
My focus will be on the anxieties in both theory and practice that plagued
the emergence of a public sphere in the coffeehouses of post-Restoration
England; and these anxieties were significantly gendered. The normative
public sphere was commonly understood to be a masculine domain, but the
practical public sphere saw a close intermingling of masculine and feminine,
public and private, rational and irrational, discourse and action, and even
the civil and the uncivil. So if one wants to pose the question - what was
masculine about the public sphere? - it is necessary to be clear at the outset
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watershed for both the theory and the practice of female authorship in the
world of print culture and dramatic writing.34 Debating societies were a late
eighteenth-century phenomenon, possibly modelled on the social template
set by the coffeehouses, and they offered a prominent locus for feminine
participation in public political discourse.35 While the primary locus for the
'public sphere' in England is commonly taken to be the coffeehouse, studies
of eighteenth-century France have focused on the very different social
milieu of aristocratic salons. To a certain extent, these different emphases
properly reflect the very different social worlds of the English and the
French enlightenments, but they also signal the problems inherent in linking
the two, especially with reference to an all-encompassing and undifferentiated 'culture of politeness'. 36 Politeness and publicity had many different
apparitions over the course of the long eighteenth century, and it is fruitless
to try to lump them all together under a single rubric. 37
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about precisely which public sphere we are talking about. Let us begin by
addressing the public sphere as it was imagined in the coffeehouse milieu.
FOPS OR POLITICIANS? MASCULINITY IN THE
PUBLIC SPHERE
It is very natural for man who is not turned for mirthful meetings of men,
or assemblies of the fair sex, to delight in that sort of conversation which
we find in coffee-houses.41
Here the coffeehouse was promoted as a venue for male sociability that
complemented, but was separated from, mixed-sex meetings with ladies or
those less serious gatherings among men that perhaps took place in clubs or
at alehouses or taverns.
The strongest evidence that the coffeehouse was commonly thought to
be a male preserve was that the term 'women's coffeehouse' was used to
describe those exceptional, and thus remarkable, instances in which women
gathered together in a public setting to consume coffee and discourse on
'politics, scandal, philosophy, and other subjects'.42 Had women been considered to be a familiar part of the usual coffeehouse milieu, then there
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Consider these two images of the coffeehouse. (Figs 1 and 2) One is sober
and serene, the other chaotic and conflict-ridden. In the first image, the
coffeehouse is portrayed as a site for polite conversation, the cultivation of
connoisseurship in the arts - note the pictures on the walls and the conversation that they seem to provoke among the coffeehouse patrons - as well
as the quiet contemplation of the daily news or the latest political pamphlet.40 In the second print, we find a mob scene. This 'coffeehouse mob' is
in a very similar setting - note the recurrence of the pictures, the prints and
newspapers, as well as the coffee-boy and the matron at the bar - but the
patrons are engaged in anything but civil conversation. The first coffeehouse scene presents the public sphere as it was imagined it should be, with
everything in its proper order, while the second presents a vision of the
public sphere in disarray. This fear of a public sphere gone awry continued
to haunt discussions of the role of the coffeehouse in English society from
its first inception until well into the eighteenth century.
The first thing we should note about both images is that all of the patrons
are men, and this is the way coffeehouse society was imagined to be. It was
not that women were prohibited from entering any coffeehouse: such hard
and fast rules did not exist, nor was there any need for them. It was more
that the activities commonly associated with coffeehouse society - especially debate on political or learned topics, business transactions, and the like
- were also considered to be traditionally masculine activities or responsibilities. Richard Steele set forth the masculine ideal in the opening lines of
his essay in the Spectator.
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Fig. 2. The Coffeehouse Mob, 1710
Frontispiece [Edward Ward|, The Fourth Part of Vulgus Brillanicus: or, the British
Hudibras, London, James Woodward, 1710: significantly retitled "The Westminster Calf's
Head Club'.
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would have been little point in remarking upon the existence of a special
coffeehouse for the ladies. But that coffeehouses were seen as sites of exclusively masculine sociability does not mean that they remained unproblematic preserves of patriarchal power. Far from it: as a single-sex milieu firmly
located in the forefront of the normative public sphere, the coffeehouse was
the seat of a whole host of anxieties about the proper regulation of masculine behaviour.
No-one knew this better than Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Their
periodical papers, the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian used the
coffeehouse as a sort of virtual stage on which they might expose the foibles
and follies of masculine comportment in the public sphere. The papers were
at once entertaining and didactic, and they were an instant success in the
highly-competitive English literary marketplace. While in periodical publication, the Spectator was selling at the remarkable number of 3,000 to 4,000
copies per day. Addison's 'modest computation' was that each paper was
read by about twenty people.43
What were these men most worried about? What sort of coffeehouse
behaviour caused the most concern? One of the major targets of the Tatler
and Spectator papers was the effeminate male. (Fig. 3) Now 'effeminacy'
was an especially fluid term of abuse in early modern England, used to criticize a varieties of perceived masculine vices and inadequacies. It was not
exclusively associated with homosexuality, as is often assumed.44 The stock
type characters of the fop, the beau, the town gallant, and the excessively
Frenchified 'petit maitre' were seen as the bane of the polite coffeehouse
society by Addison and Steele. These characters were understood to be men
who devoted an excessive amount of their attention to the presentation of
the self, and especially to such putatively trivial (and feminine) matters as
fashion, exhibitionism, over-decorous ceremony, and the protocols of
politeness. Such precise attention to manners and propriety was considered
women's work, and in a man it invited the censure of his peers. The prolific
Huguenot Abel Boyer defined a beau as a man who 'has all the folly, vanity,
and levity of a woman'.45 Such was the paradox of the gendered division of
polite labour in genteel society: women bore the burden of maintaining the
standards of etiquette, and yet femininity was also blamed for the excesses
of that labour.
Foppery, then, was the result of men importing female politeness into the
masculine public sphere. It is somewhat disingenuous therefore to say that
the female private sphere is 'where the important action takes place' in
Enlightenment sociability, for this ignores the restrictions placed on female
participation in masculine single-sex milieux such as the coffeehouse and
inflates the importance of domestic politeness outside of this carefullypoliced domain. Especially in England, the 'important action' of Enlightenment sociability did not take place in the salons, which hardly existed at
all.46
Philip Carter has noted that 'men's participation within the public
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Fig. 3. The Compleat Beau, 1696.
Frontispiece, Anon., An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex, 16%.
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-z £
Fig. 4. A Beau of Button's Coffeehouse, c. 1730,
William Hogarth, W. Dickenson, London, 1 March 1786. based on an original drawing by
William Hogarth ( c 1730) in the collection of Samuel Ireland.
sphere provided opportunities not only for confirming one's masculinity
but also for exposing oneself to ridicule'.47 In the vicious and verbose
world of Augustan literary production, such an opportunity to scoff at the
follies of others was not readily forsaken by either the polite essayists or
other grub-street hacks of lesser repute.48 The Taller ordered the servants
at St James's Coffeehouse and White's Chocolate House to ensure that
effeminate pretty fellows be barred from entering these bastions of polite
public sociability.49 Bickerstaff's disdain for these effeminate coffeehouse
patrons bears a striking resemblance to the ridicule heaped upon the
'mollies', another group of urban social deviants defined more by their
sexuality than by the fops" obsession with self-display.50 In a like manner,
the Female Tatler encouraged the purging from polite society of 'all effeminate fops', or those 'impudent beau-Jews . . . who so far from being admitted into civil society, ought to be expell'd [from] the nation'.51 The fop and
the beau are often cast as French or Jewish in their manners - the implication being that native English manliness is free from the vices of wealthy
foreigners.
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• Mini, fnit
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Yet it would have been nearly impossible to ban the fop from coffeehouse society, for the coffeehouse was part and parcel of the fop's social
round. Boyer's beau Sir John Foppington made White's Chocolate House
his 'stage', 'where after a quarter of an hour's compliment to himself in the
great glass, he faces about and salutes the company', takes his snuff among
them with due affectation and begins to discourse on matters of fashion,
diet, or his affairs with various French ladies. Sir John also frequents Tom's
Coffeehouse 'to learn some piece of news' or Will's Coffeehouse, 'to gather
some fragments of wit', but his purpose in doing so, far from seeking edification, is to gather more material for his idle banter. 52 While the fop was an
habitue of coffeehouse society, his fault lay in using the coffeehouse as a
stage for self-serving or frivolous ends rather than as a place to share the
news of the day in good company and engage in sober discourse about it.
Of course a beau was such only in the eyes of his beholder: no one would
admit to being a fop. It was a term of abuse that one hurled at one's enemies
rather than a means of self-identification. Although the term had been used
to connote foolishness for centuries, it gained a particular association with
urban fashionability by the later seventeenth century.53 To Daniel Defoe,
by 1726, the terms fool, fop, and beau were all synonymous.54 Similar terms
became current in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such
as the 'pretty fellow', the 'beau', or the 'petit maitre\ Many of these terms
were taken from the French, partly because their effeminacy and their
stereotypically excessive devotion to the vicissitudes of fashion were commonly understood to be the peculiar vices of a court society, and no court
was more degenerate in this respect than Versailles.55 Despite the attempts
by Augustan moralists to view the fop as an identifiable 'other' who might
be excluded from polite society, the stereotype emerged out of these moralists' concerns that the coffeehouse world was not what it should be. Instead
of a civil space for learned discussion on serious matters, they feared that
the coffeehouse had become a venue for cheap gossip and egotistic self promotion. To purge the coffeehouses of foppery therefore required that the
patrons learn to distinguish between politeness and priggishness, between
tastefulness and ostentation, and between really valid news and worthless
gossip.
This was no easy task, for such judgements were always conditional and
subject to negotiation, if not outright contestation. Were the fops unwelcome intruders into this hallowed ground of good taste? Or, more
troublingly, were the dictators of good taste themselves perhaps prone to
the excesses of foppery? This was the conclusion reached by the poet who
claimed that Will's Coffeehouse 'is cramm'd eternally with beaus', including not only its literary wits but even the proprietor Will Urwin himself.56
While Will's Coffeehouse was the most prominent target, primarily because
of its fame as the centre of post-Restoration London's literary life, the
problem of foppery in polite society was hardly limited to that locale alone:
it was a vice endemic to all coffeehouses that catered to an elite clientele.57
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The danger posed by this threat was substantial, for if carried to an
extreme, coffeehouse foppery was thought to lead to the even more serious
vices of atheism, debauchery, and a general disrespect for all authority. Such
a 'town-wit' was a man with no restraint whatsoever:
One of the greatest fears about metropolitan coffeehouse society was that
when its relative openness to all comers was combined with the freedom of
discourse found there, it would become a vital breeding ground for atheism.
When he deigns to consider matters more profound than the best way of
adjusting his cravat, or powdering his wig, the 'town-beau' reveals himself
to be as impious as he is shameless:
His religion . . . is pretended Hobbism, and he swears the Leviathan may
supply all the leaves of Solomon, yet he never saw it in his life . . .
however, the rattle of it at coffee-houses, has taught him to laugh at
spirits, and maintain there are no angels but those in petticoats, and
therefore he defies heaven.59
This then was the true danger of coffeehouse foppery: if no restraint in
manners was upheld, then thefloodgateswould be thrown open and society
would soon be awash with vice.
The critical discourse of the coffeehouses in particular was thought to
promote the spread of atheist thinking.60 Coffeehouses were forums for talk
and debate as much as they were simple drinking houses, and this emphasis on free speech was feared to be the first step on the road to free thought.
Among the coffeehouse wits, lamented one tract, 'atheism . . . is not now
owned with a blush, but on the contrary, esteemed a piece of gallantry, and
an effect of that extraordinary wit in which we pretend to excell our ancestors'.61 Atheism was also understood more generally to be a product of
urban society, and the London metropolis in particular. In the city, so the
argument went, men were freed from the traditional ways of thinking and
could therefore contemplate what had been heretofore unthinkable - a
world without God. Visitors to London were often shocked at the toleration for freethinking that seemed to prevail in the city. Thomas Hunt
reported to Matthew Henry in 1692 that he found 'much of Atheisme . . .
and great coldness in religion, among such a concourse of people as frequent
this citty' of London.62 To Robert Boyle, London was 'this libertine city'.63
Such views have been endorsed by Michael Hunter, one of the most prominent historians of early modern atheism, who sees the metropolitan 'culture
of "wit", an educated but not scholarly environment in which intellectual
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His mind [is] used to whistle up and down in the levities of fancy, and
effeminated by the childish toyings of a rampant imagination finds itself
indisposed for all solid imployment, especially the serious exercises of
piety and virtue.58
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
The reformation of male coffeehouse manners was a serious matter for
Augustan moralists because it cut to the heart of the social order that they
envisioned for their new Britain. Coffeehouses were theoretically open to
all subjects regardless of class or merit, and they were the prime sites for
the activities upon which a prosperous urban and open society depended to
flourish: political discourse, mercantile business, and cultural criticism.
Women had little place in this scheme of things.67 Indeed several issues of
the Spectator were devoted to the particular problems posed by the presence of women in the coffeehouses, mostly in the capacity of servants or as
proprietors. Such women were liable to become 'idols', or the recipients of
undue if not immodest attention from the men who patronized the coffeehouses in which they worked. One letter to the paper complained that
these idols sit and receive 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.68
Such was the danger of mixed company in the world of the coffeehouse.
Women were distractions from the serious business of masculine employments, even when their ostensible purpose there was only to serve the men.
Even worse, thought the critics of coffeehouse society, the status of women
workers in the coffeehouses as women located in, but not full participants of,
the public sphere meant that they often had to endure the unwanted attention and suggestions of their patrons. One female coffeehouse-keeper complained to the Spectator in a letter that she cannot help hearing:
the improper discourses [my customers] are pleased to entertain me with.
They strive who shall say the most immodest things in my hearing: At the
same time half a dozen of them loll at the bar staring just in my face,
ready to interpret my looks and gestures, according to their own imaginations.69
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agility was at a premium', as the most fertile breeding ground for unbelief
in late seventeenth-century England.64 Of course the defenders of wit were
at pains to emphasize that skilful intelligence and urbane manners hardly
made one an atheist, for in and of itself 'wit is no ways scurrilous and
profane'.65 Whether or not atheism actually flourished in the free-and-easy
chatter of London's coffeehouses is beside the point, however, for the widespread belief that it did is indicative of the intense anxieties raised by the
combination of an urban setting, the valorization of wit, and the predominantly masculine society found in the coffeehouses.66
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All of these anxieties about coffeehouse masculinity were voiced not only
by the declared enemies of coffeehouse society but also by its own patrons.
The wits of Will's Coffeehouse and their successors, Addison and Steele,
who held court at Button's Coffeehouse, were all particularly concerned to
police the boundaries of propriety in the coffeehouses because those locales
were precisely the setting in which the leaders of the political, mercantile,
and cultural orders of British society socialized.72 To a large extent, their
criticisms of the fops, the beaus, the wits, the newsmongers, the politicians
and even the simple bores of coffeehouse society were directed against
themselves and their fellows. Foppery was a vice to which anyone was
potentially prone, even a Joseph Addison or a Richard Steele, and thus they
saw it as the particular duty of their new urban moralism to bring these masculine failings to the attention of their readers.73
If the objects of the reform of male coffeehouse manners were clear,
what then did the ideal coffeehouse society look like? Again, Addison and
Steele provided the template in the Spectator, their essay in issue 49 represents the coffeehouse as 'the place of rendezvous to all that live near it,
who are thus turned to relish calm and ordinary life'. The most judicious use
of the coffeehouse, Steele claims, is by those 'men who have business or
good sense in their faces, and come to the coffeehouse either to transact
affairs or enjoy conversation'. These are men whose 'entertainments are
derived rather from Reason than Imagination', and their natural leader is a
character Steele dubs 'Eubulus', a wealthy but not ostentatious man who
serves his fellows in 'the office of a Council, a Judge, an Executor, and a
Friend to all his Acquaintance, not only without the profits which attend
such offices, but also without the deference and homage which are usually
paid to them'.74 Perhaps it is here in the idealized mental world of Richard
Steele that wefindHabermas's sober, rational, public sphere of private men
coming together to exercise their reason in public. But it was difficult to find
in the real coffeehouses of London.
Herein, then, lay much of the import and the urgency of Addison's claim
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It was difficult to conceive of a role for women in the ideal coffeehouse
society that did not fit into the pre-existing stereotypes of either the virtuous servant or the vicious prostitute. But what is even more interesting in
the Spectator's accounts of female coffeehouse workers is that the object of
reform was not the women, but the men.70 It was the men who wasted their
time doting on 'idols' at the coffee-bar or who made lewd and improper suggestions to the coffee-woman who served them. Addison and Steele did not
suggest that respectable women should not keep coffeehouses, indeed they
emphatically endorsed the suggestion that 'it is possible a woman may be
modest, and yet keep a publick house', but rather they thought it necessary
that male behaviour in the coffeehouses be self-controlled.71 The coffeehouse was a key site of masculine social discipline.
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
143
NO PLACE FOR A LADY: WOMEN, COFFEEHOUSES
AND THE PRACTICAL PUBLIC SPHERE
Despite the masculinist tenor of coffeehouse society, it remains the case that
women were important and vital participants in the functioning of the
coffeehouses, even if their contributions were belittled by contemporaries.
Could women participate in the newsmongering, the politicking, and the
learned discussions that were taken to be the mainstay of masculine coffeehouse sociability? In theory, there is no reason why any woman who found
her way into a coffeehouse could not have joined the conversations there,
but in practice there is no evidence of any woman actually taking part in a
coffeehouse debate. Understanding this absence requires that we take into
consideration the distinctions of class and status as well as gender, for it was
the women of England's social elite who were most significantly absent from
coffeehouse society. The coffeehouses of London were simply no place for
a lady who wished to preserve her respectability.
This is not to say that one cannot find any evidence of gentlewomen ever
going to a coffeehouse, but the exceptions prove the rule. First and foremost, the cases are few and far between. Even the most indefatigable proponents of the openness of coffeehouses to genteel women have been able
to uncover only a handful of references. Thomas Bellingham noted in his
diary that one evening's socialization in Preston included meeting 'with
severall women att ye coffee house . . . and came home very late'. 77 Was this
a normal occasion? It seems unlikely: there is only one such reference in
Bellingham's diary, and it is worth remembering that the locale was a
Preston coffeehouse, a place far removed from the metropolitan ideal set
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that his Mr Spectator desired to be known as the one who 'brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and
assemblies, at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses'.75 In other words, he wanted
to make the coffeehouses and suchlike places safe for philosophy, and to do
so required that they be purged of the vice, disorder, and folly that Mr Spectator so often observed within them. Much the same could be said of course
of the tea table, that stereotypical breeding ground for 'scandal' spread by
female gossips.76 These were not entirely the same sort of spaces, however:
the coffeehouse was a male preserve and was clearly demarcated as a
'public' house, while the tea table was seen as a space presided over by
women, and was properly located within the 'private' domestic household.
Addison may have claimed that the Spectator's appeal was universal, but
this does not mean that he considered all of the spaces in which the journals should be received were equivalent. Addison and Steele understood far
more than Habermas or his epigones that the practical public sphere of
early eighteenth-century England was such a complex and variegated entity
that it often defied the attempts of even its champions to describe it, let
alone to discipline it.
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Another important exception is the case of the auction, particularly sales
of fine art. Coffeehouse auctions welcomed ladies as customers at their
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by the numerous coffeehouses of London. In early eighteenth-century
London, we learn from Jonathan Swift that 'a gentlewoman from Lady
Giffard's house', whom he supposed to be the mother of Esther Johnson,
his beloved 'Stella', 'had been at the coffee house to inquire for' Mrs
Rebecca Dingley.78 Should we take this as evidence that gentlewomen regularly whiled away the hours in the coffeehouses and made them their haunts
in the same way that Dryden turned Will's coffeehouse into his second
home? If so, it is surprising that there are no other references to Dingley's
coffeehousing in Swift's voluminous correspondence with Stella or anyone
else in his circle. Indeed there are few such references in any later Stuart
sources.79
Some exceptional women may have moved with relative ease in the
company of the coffeehouse, especially when they had specific business to
attend to. Hester Pinney, as a successful single woman in the lace business,
seems to have had no difficulties dealing with the stockjobbers at Garraway's and Jonathan's coffeehouses when she had to attend to business
related to her investments in the South Sea Company and other joint-stock
ventures, or to maintain her contacts with West-India merchants.80 But
there could have been few single women as successful as Pinney, for, as
Richard Grassby notes, 'spinsters exercising a trade or craft were the exception in propertied society'.81
On some exceptional occasions gentlewomen found acceptance as a part
of coffeehouse society, but these do not disprove the rule of their general
exclusion from it. The coffeehouses of Bath and Tunbridge, those famous
watering holes for the social elite, served both men and women when they
doubled as gambling houses.82 But then, Bath was not London. Neither was
gambling an activity that fit well with the coffeehouse ideal. Furthermore,
as favoured locales for rest, recreation and match-making Bath and Tunbridge were particularly open to female sociability in ways that did not
resemble the more businesslike social scene in the London coffeehouses.
The coffeehouses at Bath also differed from those in London in that they
strove to offer a haven from the partisan divisions and conflicts that were
common in metropolitan coffeehouses. In a Bath coffeehouse, John Toland
claimed, 'a Tory does not stare and leer when a Whig comes in, nor a Whig
look sour and whisper at the sight of a Tory'.83 These coffeehouses were
more like the 'coffee-rooms' at an eighteenth-century opera house: both
were mixed-sex variants on a single-sex template set by the male coffeehouse world of London.84 They adapted the cachet of sobriety and politeness attached to the male coffeehouses and translated it into a social milieu
characterized more by leisure than by business. A similar suspension of the
usual gendered proprieties seems to have obtained in Paris during the fairs
of St Germain and St Laurence, when French ladies would often frequent
the cafes.85
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
145
Why were women not just permitted but actively invited into the coffeehouse world at auction time? An auction was a special event, a temporary
moment when the normal business of the coffeehouse was either suspended
or superseded by the more important business of conducting the sale.
Women were especially welcome at auctions of fine art because they were
acting in the service of their household. A lady who bid for a number of
pictures at auction was presumably doing so in order to furnish her home
with a judicious collection. Thus her intrusion into the normally masculine
coffeehouse world could be justified as an exceptional occurrence necessary
to advance the prestige of her household. 89
These important exceptions aside, we find abundant evidence that the
rounds of urban genteel sociability were patterned differently for men and
for women, although they were not mutually exclusive. An exemplary
source for the different patterns of male and female urban-elite sociability
may be found in James Brydges's journal of his years in London from the
beginning of 1697 to the end of 1702. Here Brydges meticulously recorded
the patterns of his coffeehouse going, and although he often travelled
around the town with his wife, it is remarkable that she never accompanied
him to the coffeehouses he visited. On 1 October 1697, he noted that 'my
wife set me down at Tom's coffeehouse', while she went off to make her own
visits. When her visits were finished, Brydges's wife would return again to
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sales. Auctioneers went out of their way to encourage women to feel comfortable during the course of a coffeehouse sale. Edward Millington even
offered separate accommodation for his prospective female purchasers
when he conducted his sales at the Barbados Coffeehouse in Cornhill: 'Conveniency of galleries', at the coffeehouse he noted, 'is set apart for ladies
and gentlewomen', and he added 'attendance is given for viewing'.86 But
even here, where women were welcomed into a coffeehouse, a separate
gallery for ladies was established, thus again reinforcing the sense that they
were temporarily intruding upon a masculine preserve. Women had been
among the earliest patrons of art auctions and their attendance at the sales
was regularly courted by the auctioneers. The London auction 'season'
followed the movement of gentry families in and around the metropolis.
Auctions were held 'for the diversion and entertainment of the gentlemen,
ladies, &c.' in Epsom and Tunbridge Wells in the summer months, when
much of the beau monde had migrated there to drink the spa waters. 87 Presumably most women came to the auctions to purchase pictures fit for
hanging in their houses, either in London or the country, although some
were eager amateurs of the master painters as well. Lady Rutland, for
example, was keen to acquire some of the best works from the 1682 auction
of Sir Peter Lely's collection. Many women may have attended the auctions
not to make a purchase, but rather to acquaint themselves with the fundamentals of the art of painting and the social conventions of art appreciation
by viewing the works for sale and by observing the tasteful purchases of
other connoisseurs. 88
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Just as it would be wrong to presume that gentlewomen had unfettered
access to coffeehouse society, it would also be wrong to presume that all
women were made to feel unwelcome in the coffeehouses. Women of a less
exalted social status found it much easier to enter a coffeehouse than their
genteel sisters, not least because the majority of them were there to serve
the male patrons.
Paula McDowell's study of female engagement with post-Restoration
print culture has revealed much about the importance of women as hawkers
of pamphlets and other forms of cheap print. It is unsurprising that these
women often showed up in the London coffeehouses to sell their wares.
McDowell emphasizes that they were 'anything but the passive distributors
of other people's political ideas'. Rather, she argues, they were powerful
agents in shaping the modes and forms of political discourse of the time,
through their keen understanding of tastes and desires for news and printed
ephemera and their local knowledge of their customers, which passed back
to the newswriters and Grub Street printers who produced the works they
sold.93 This may have been the case, but the women hawkers were hardly
full-fledged participants in the masculine public sphere to whose needs they
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pick him up at the coffeehouse.90 Clearly, Mrs Brydges saw-the domestic
visit as her particular social duty, while Mr Brydges - a young gentleman on
the make in London society - found his niche in the world of the coffeehouses.91
Entirely 'separate spheres' for men and women did not exist in postRestoration London, but neither was there one gender-neutral social world
in which both men and women had an equal place. Perhaps then it would
be better to imagine two interlocking spheres of masculine and feminine
activity, rather than two separate ones. Some putatively 'public' activities,
such as attending the theatre, shopping, going on walks or visiting the pleasure gardens, were commonly engaged in by men and women together, while
others, such as club-life and coffeehousing, remained a male preserve.
Recognizing these differences might help to close the gap between the views
of Kathleen Wilson, for whom 'stridently gendered and exclusionary
notions of political subjectivity . . . played central roles in consolidating
oppositional categories of the domestic and public spheres', and those of
Lawrence Klein, who emphasizes that 'women were found in all sorts of
places that... were public'.92 It is evident that Wilson and Klein are thinking of two very different sorts of public spheres: the former of the magisterial realm of state power and high politics, and the latter of the world of
commercialized leisure that developed independently of the state. In all of
these cases in fact the degree of public-ness (openness to all comers) and
private-ness (exclusivity) varied, and the principals of exclusion often varied
along lines as diverse as class, status, political affiliation, regional identity,
or ethnicity as well as sex.
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
147
During the 1690s, when such fears were seized upon and inflamed by the
Societies for the Reformation of Manners, John Dunton published his discontent with the growing association between coffeehouses and the sins of
bawdry. He thought
That it is an horrid disgrace, considering the reproach that coffeehouses
in by-places have now brought upon themselves, that any such should be
suffered, or at least that the numbers of them should not be regulated, it
were becoming our magistrates to make an inquiry into these abuses, for
what else can be thought to be the design of coffeehouses in such places,
where most of the neighbourhood are men who work for their bread
before they eat it, and where to be sure there is also an ale-house or two,
of whose liquor labouring men have more need; such places serve only
to ensnare apprentices and youngmen, who if they had not such temptations might perhaps never be debaucht. And it is also worthy the consideration of the magistrates, whether a young woman, or sometimes two
together should be suffered to set up such houses, seeing 'tis highly
reasonable to suspect they design rather to expose themselves to sale
than their coffee . . . This city is not without instances of coffee-womens
having been debaucht, even in some of the best frequented and most
populous places of the city, under their husbands noses, which demonstrates the inconveniency of exposing women at publick bars in this loose
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catered. These poor and often illiterate women made their way into the
coffeehouses, but were not considered to be a legitimate part of the milieu.
To be sure, McDowell is acutely aware of the limitations placed on them by
their class and their gender: for her it was precisely these limitations that
masked the work they performed in facilitating the flow of information in
the coffeehouse milieu.
Most commonly, women were found in coffeehouses as the proprietors
of these establishments: more than twenty per cent of coffeehouse keepers
who paid the poll taxes in 1692 and 1693 were women.94 These working
women thus earned the title 'coffee-woman'.95 The term was not an entirely
honourable one, however. Just as ale-wives were considered suspect
because they opened up their homes in order to serve their customers, so
were the coffee-women also exposed to charges that their business was not
altogether licit.96 The low social status of the coffeehouse-keeper only
served to accentuate the coffee-woman's vulnerability to the solicitations of
her customers, many of whom were of a higher social station. The coffeewomen Anne Rochford and Moll King were both subject to public satires
in which their rise from a humble background to prosperous coffeehousekeepers was tainted by the implication that they owed their success to
prostitution rather than pure business acumen.97 Despite their attempts to
distinguish themselves from public houses that served alcohol, the coffeehouses also fell prey to the same anxieties about urban immorality and disorder that plagued the taverns and alehouses.
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age, wherein few of 'em have so much virtue as to withstand the repeated
assaults which they must expect it so exposed, and therefore its much
more commendable to see none but men and boys in a coffeehouse, except
circumstances be such as can't admit of it.
Almost apologetically, Dunton hastened to add that:
Dunton's tirade reveals at once both the practical access that working
women had to coffeehouses and at the same time his intense anxieties about
the propriety of such access.
Dunton's alarmist complaints may also be usefully read as a guide to the
norms of coffeehouse society at the end of the seventeenth century. He
notes that coffeehouses are not fit for areas of town inhabited by the labouring classes, who turn to alehouses for recreation and nourishment. Thus the
only possible purpose a coffeehouse might have in such a neighbourhood is
as a front for a bawdy-house. The coffeehouse was a fit place for gentlemen
of leisure, Dunton suggests, but not for the lower classes, whose interests
there must needs be licentious.
It is indeed striking how often coffeehouse women are associated with
prostitution by Dunton's contemporaries. Ned Ward's London Spy insinuated the women who frequent one widow's coffeehouse do so with the hope
that 'the lewdness of the Town' might bring 'a cully [gullible person] in their
way'.99 The German traveller to London, Cesar de Saussure, warned that
many coffeehouses were but fronts for a brothel, in which, he advised, 'you
are waited on by beautiful, neat, well-dressed, and amiable, but very dangerous nymphs'.100 Prostitution itself was understood at the time to be not just
simply the exchange of sexual services for money, but rather part of a
broader and more diffuse spectrum of sexual immorality. A 'whore' was not
necessarily a prostitute pure and simple, but a woman who was thought to
have violated communal standards of sexual propriety.101 A sure-fire way
of breaking these codes and thus gaining a reputation for unchastity was by
frequenting public houses such as taverns, alehouses or coffeehouses.102
Complaints that coffeehouse women were little more than whores were
not entirely unfounded. The London church courts and the quarter-sessions
records of the City of London provide evidence of women's presence in city
coffeehouses, but most were either running the business or were servants.103
Female patrons of coffeehouses were associated in such records with either
sexual immorality or some other form of criminal activity.104 For example,
one Elizabeth Way frequented coffeehouses and taverns with a group of
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this is not designed as a satyr against all coffeehouses, nor yet against
such as are kept by women of unspotted reputation, whereof there are
diverse in and about the city; but certainly it must be allowed that being
the weaker sex, they neither ought to expose themselves, nor to be
exposed in such numbers by others to those abominable temptations.98
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
149
CONCLUSION: DISCIPLINING THE PUBLIC SPHERE
After this survey of the various ways in which women could find themselves
a part of the coffeehouse scene, it can no longer be maintained that women
were simply excluded from the social world of the English coffeehouse. It
seems just as clear, however, that it would be equally wrong to assume that
women had the same unfettered access to the coffeehouses as men. This
would be to ignore the important ways in which daily life, and the spatial
experience of it, was (as it remains) fundamentally shaped by cultural
notions of gendered propriety. In this way, the masculine ideal of the coffeehouse public sphere impinged upon the actual ways in which that space was
used. Even if some women could and did enter into the metropolitan coffeehouses, they could never join the company there and feel entirely 'at
home' with the men.
Gender was not the only means by which access to the coffeehouse public
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men who were later accused of running a money-laundering operation for
clipped coins.105 Sometimes the immorality took place in the coffeehouse
itself.106 The company at one coffeehouse in the parish of St Clement Danes
was startled by the sound of a woman's voice next door. Their curiosity thus
piqued, one man from the crowd, Christopher Dent, peeped through a hole
into the room, where he saw a woman named Hannah Barnes and a man
she called by the name of Parker with her drinking of sack. How long Dent
continued to observe the two is unclear, but apparently it was long enough
for him to see 'Hannah lying on a bed in the room with her coats up above
her belly, and Mr. Parker between her leggs, lying upon her and committing the foul crime of adultery with her'.107 It is not clear from this account
whether the adjacent room was another part of the coffeehouse, or whether
it was a separate tenement. But then, this raises another important matter:
the permeability of the coffeehouse space. The coffeehouse was also a
domicile for keeper and family, and it was often located next to other
private residences as well. Often the 'coffeehouse' was little more than a
special room in a private house that was reserved for serving coffee to
guests.
This meant that the dividing line between the public space of the coffeehouse and the private space of the household was never clear-cut.108 If the
public coffeehouse was just another room within a larger private domicile,
then it was of course open to intrusion (and surveillance, as we have seen)
from the other members of the household. While beginning to make her
way as a lace retailer in London, Hester Pinney lodged above a coffeehouse,
as well as over taverns and in the households of professionals.109 A Mrs
Lloyd also spent several nights at the Amsterdam Coffeehouse in 1715.u0
Women lodgers such as Pinney and Lloyd certainly must have overheard
bits of coffeehouse gossip and perhaps even joined the company there on
occasion while they lived in the building.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 Earlier versions of this article were presented to the 11th Berkshire Conference on the
History of Women (Rochester, New York) and seminar audiences at the Universities of
Harvard, Utah, Leeds and London, to whom I am grateful for their comments and criticism.
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sphere was restricted. Social class, regional, professional or political affiliations, as well as idiosyncratic personal preferences all fractured the social
world of the coffeehouse in smaller pieces - and they did not form a homogenous whole. Coffeehouse society, and all the more the English public
sphere of which it was a part, was a variegated set of separate publics rather
than a unitary one. The resulting voice of the coffeehouses then sounded
much more like the confused chatter of the tower of Babel than it did the
product of a sober, rational ideal-speech situation. Controlling this chatter
thus remained high on the agenda for everyone concerned with the state of
public life in post-Restoration Britain, and one of the best means of control
was to regulate access, either through formal legal means or through the
self-disciplinary chiding of the moralists discussed here.111
If coffeehouse society was neither as unitary nor as open as it has sometimes been imagined, then is the concept of a 'public sphere' still a useful
way of describing this social world? The appeal of the phrase, evocative as
it is of both the public/private distinction and its grounding in social space,
is obvious, but perhaps the concept has been over-exploited. When historians can find 'public spheres' in nearly every time and every place, and
scholars blithely jettison the original Habermasian formulation of the term
in favour of definitions that more properly suit their interests, the analytic
purchase of the concept is much diminished. Students of the 'long eighteenth century' in Britain in particular might be better off returning to a
phrase of proper eighteenth-century provenance and continued contemporary interest as well: 'civil society'.112 The most important insight of the
public-sphere concept has been its useful focus on the development over the
course of the long eighteenth century of new institutions that provided a
zone of interaction and mediation between state and society. In other
words, it has returned our attention to the development of what Enlightenment thinkers called civil society.
Whether we call it a part of civil society or the public sphere, the postRestoration coffeehouse milieu was at the forefront of these developments.
It was precisely because the coffeehouse arose in this contested middle
ground between the magisterial realm of high politics and the more
mundane world of everyday life that it became the site of a series of ongoing
conflicts about how proper order in both the British state and metropolitan
society should be constituted. Try as they might, neither the servants of the
state nor the witty moralists could ever succeed in fully disciplining the
coffeehouse public sphere.
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
151
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2 Steven Pincus points to the Restoration as the key date in England, ' "Coffee Politicians Does Create": Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture', Journal of Modern
History 67. Dec. 1995, pp. 807-34; but the concept is used for much earlier periods in David
Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660, Cambridge
University Press, 1999, and Peter Lake, 'Puritans, Papists, and Players: Was There a "Public
Sphere" in Elizabethan England?', unpublished MS, 1999.1 am grateful to Professor Lake for
allowing me to read this essay in advance of publication.
3 Diane Willen, 'Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: the Case of the
Urban Working Poor', Sixteenth Century Journal 19: 4, 1988, pp. 559-75; Alexandra Halasz,
The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,
Cambridge University Press, 1997; David Zaret, 'Petitions and the "Invention" of Public
Opinion in the English Revolution', American Journal of Sociology 101: 6,1996, pp. 1,497-555;
and his Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early
Modern England, Princeton University Press, 2000.
4 Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: a History of the Coffee Houses, Macmillan,
London, 1956, p. 88; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence,
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1989, p. 33; Craig Calhoun, 'Introduction: Habermas and the
Public Sphere', in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 1992, p. 43 n. 18; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: the Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth
Century English Fiction, Norton, New York, 1990, p. 378, n. 22; Paul Langford, A Polite and
Commercial People: England 1727-1783, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 101; G.J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University
of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 92; and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture,
and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 47.
5 This is most forcefully expressed in Pincus, '"Coffee Politicians Does Create"'; and
Helen Berry, '"Nice and Curious Questions": Coffee Houses and the Representation of
Women', in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury', Seventeenth Century 12: 2, autumn 1997: pp.
257-76; but see also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making,
University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 112 and Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society
1650-1850, Longman, London, 1998, pp. 277-8.
6 Lois Schwoerer, 'Women's Public Political Voice in England: 1640-1740', in Women
Writers and the Early Modern English Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith, Cambridge
University Press, 1998, p. 62; compare C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England:
Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p. 77.
7 Compare E. J. Clery, 'Women, Publicity, and the Coffee-House Myth', Women: a
Cultural Review 2: 2, 1991, pp. 168-77.
8 See Barbara Hanawalt, 'At the Margins of Women's Space in Medieval Europe', in her
'Of Good and III Repute': Gender and Social Control in Medieval England, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1998, pp. 70-87; as well as Robert C. Davis, 'The Geography of Gender in
the Renaissance', in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith Brown and Robert C.
Davis, Longman, London, 1998, pp. 19-38.
9 See Tony Claydon, 'Sermons and the Public Sphere', in The English Sermon Revised,
ed. Peter McCullough and Lori Ann Ferrell, Manchester University Press, 1999.
10 Jurgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Offenlichkeil, Hermann Luchterhand Verlag,
Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962; and his L'espace public: archeologie de la publicize comme
dimension constitutive de la societe bourgeoise, transl. Marc B. de Launay, Payot, Paris, 1978;
and Structural Transformation. Important reviews of the reception of Habermas by early
modern historians include: Robert Darnton, 'An Enlightened Revolution?', New York Review
of Books, 24 Oct. 1991; Dena Goodman, 'Public Sphere and Private Life: toward a Synthesis
of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime', History and Theory 31, 1992,
pp. 1-20; the essays in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun; and John Brewer, 'This,
That, and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries',
in Shifting the Boundaries, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter Press,
1995.
11 I am grateful to Martin Jay for discussing Habermas's relationship with his first work;
see also Habermas, 'Further Reflections on the Public Sphere', in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Calhoun, pp. 421-61.
12 Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 29-30; and compare his Strukturwandel der
Offenlichkeit, p. 45.
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13 Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School,
Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 55-95, and David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory:
Horkheimer to Habermas, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, pp.
260-7, 330-50, are both useful guides to Habermas's brand of critical theory.
14 Among the Marxisants, the most prominent has been Colin Jones, 'Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change', in Rewriting the French Revolution, Oxford
University Press, 1991, pp. 69-118; and 'The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement,
the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution', American Historical
Review 101:1, Feb. 1996, pp. 13-40. The revisionist appropriation of Habermas in French historiography is most apparent in Keith Michael Baker, 'Public Opinion as Political Invention',
in his Inventing the French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 167-99,337-45;
'Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by
Habermas', in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, pp. 181-211; and Mona Ozouf,
'Public Opinion at the End of the Old Regime', Journal of Modern History 60 (suppl.), 1988,
pp. S1-S21.
15 See especially: Peter Lake, 'Review Article', Huntington Library Quarterly 57: 2,1994,
pp. 167-97; Lake, 'Puritans, Papists, and Players'; and Pincus, '"Coffee Politicians Does
Create"'.
16 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 30; and compare the lucid explication in
Goodman, 'Public Sphere and Private Life', pp. 4-6.
17 Philipe Aries, 'Introduction', to A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance,
ed. Roger Chartier; transl. Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1989, p. 9; compare Goodman, 'Public Sphere and Private Life', pp. 8-12.
18 Roger Chartier, 'Introduction', in A History of Private Life, ed. Chartier, pp. 15-19;
Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane, Duke
University Press, Durham NC, 1991, pp. 20-37, and compare pp. 184-5; and Chartier, On the
Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
1997, pp. 79-80, and compare pp. 107-43.
19 Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: the Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary
France, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993, p. 13.
20 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1988, p. 7.
21 Goodman, 'Public Sphere and Private Life', pp. 14-20; Baker, 'Defining the Public
Sphere', pp. 201-2; Daniel Gordon, 'Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment
Conception of Public Opinion', French Historical Studies 17: 4, fall 1992, pp. 899-901; and
compare the more tempered criticisms of Sarah Maza, 'Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the
Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gorden and David Bell', French Historical Studies 17: 4,
fall 1992, pp. 942-56.
22 For a review and powerful critique of this literature, see Amanda Vickery, 'Golden
Age to Separate Spheres? a Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's
History', Historical Journal 36: 2, 1993, pp. 383-414; and compare Shoemaker, Gender in
English Society.
23 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: the Construction of Femininity in the
Early Periodical, Routledge, London, 1989, p. 1; and compare Lawrence Klein, 'Gender,
Conversation, and the Public Sphere', in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and
Practices, ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 101-2.
24 Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London
Literary Marketplace 1678-1730, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 125. (Walpolean England
refers to the years of Whig ascendancy, c. 1720-42.)
25 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, pp. 9-10.
26 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, p. 32.
27 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, pp. 9-10; 285-7 (at 289).
28 Pincus, '"Coffee Politicians Does Create"', p. 811. Compare the similar conclusions
in Helen Berry,' "Nice and Curious Questions"'.
29 Klein, 'Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere'; Dena Goodman, The Republic
of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY,
1994; Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French
Thought, 1670-1789, Princeton University Press, 1994.
30 Bernard Capp, 'Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England',
in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
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Steve Hindle, Macmillan, London, 1996, p. 139; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter:
Women's Lives in Georgian England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1998, p. 228.
31 For a study of eighteenth-century urban life which emphasizes women's participation,
see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town,
1660-1770, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989.
32 Compare here the observations and attempts to define a set of distinct public 'spheres'
in Lawrence Klein, 'Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century:
Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure', Eighteenth-Century Studies 29: 1,
fall 1995, pp. 97-109.
33 Penelope J. Corfield, 'Walking the City Streets: the Urban Odyssey in EighteenthCentury England', Journal of Urban History 16: 2, Feb. 1990, pp. 132-74; and Arlette Farge,
Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, transl. Rosemary Morris
(1992), Penn State Press reprint, University Park PA, 1994.
34 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, University
of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 180-1, 413-5; McDowell, Women of Grub Street; and Catherine
Gallagher, Nobody's Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820,
University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, esp. chaps 1-2 on Aphra Behn:
but see also Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1998, pp. 54-8, for the
continuing importance of manuscript publication as a refuge for female authors.
35 Donna Andrew, 'Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780', Historical Journal
39: 2, 1996, pp. 405-23; Mary Thale, 'Women in London Debating Societies in 1780', Gender
and History 7: 1, 1995, pp. 5-24.
36 For studies which emphasize the reciprocal influence of French and English conceptions of each other's respective Enlightened culture, see Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without
Sovereignty and Lawrence Klein, 'The Figure of France: the Politics of Sociability in England,
1660-1715', Yale French Studies 92,1997, pp. 30-45.
37 For some important fissures in the discourse of politeness, see Brian Cowan,
'Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism', Journal of British
Studies 37: 2, April 1998, pp. 111-38.
38 For an introduction to both of these bodies of theory, see the essays in Meaning and
Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully, Princeton University Press, 1988.
39 Compare Klein, 'Gender and the Public/Private Distinction', p. 101, which relies on
the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens. This is also the premise upon which the practice
theory of Pierre Bourdieu is built, as in his classic Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge
University Press, 1977.
40 The positive valence of this portrayal of coffeehouse society is called into question
however by the presence on the walls of a paper declaring 'Here is right lyes' along with others
which bear the names of the Grub-street writers D'Urfey and Fletcher. Although the words
are not clear in the figure reproduced here, they are clearly visible in the version held by the
British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings. Compare the similar print of a coffeehouse interior in Bodleian Library [Bod], Douce Prints W.I.2. (203), and reproduced in Klein,
'Coffeehouse Civility', p. 34.
41 The Spectator no. 49, 26 April 1711; in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, five vols,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965, vol. 1, p. 208. Compare The Taller no. 10, 3 May 1709; in The
Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, three vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, vol. 1, p. 89. The
masculine (public) coffeehouse was often contrasted with the feminine (domestic) tea table,
as in Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Tradesman (1726), Alan Sutton reprint, Gloucester, 1987, pp. 133^1.
42 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady —, 1 April [1717], Adrianople in The Complete
Letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, three vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1965, vol. 1, p. 314; for a ladies' coffeehouse in Bath, see Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of
Humphrey Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp, with revisions by Paul-Gabriel Bouce (1771), Oxford
University Press reprint, 1984, p. 40 (quoted); compare Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's
Daughter, pp. 258, 342 n. 82.
43 Spectator no. 10, 12 Mar. 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. 1, p. 44; and compare Bond, 'Introduction', pp. xxv-xxvii, lxxxiii.
44 For a detailed study of the discursive variety of 'effeminacy', see Philip Carter, 'Mollies,
Fops, and Men of Feeling: Aspects of Male Effeminacy and Masculinity in Britain, c. 1700-1780',
D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1995; and compare Kathleen Wilson, 'Citizenship, Empire,
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and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720-90', Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:1,1995, pp.
76-8; Cowan, 'Reasonable Ecstasies'; and George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and
Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999, esp. pp. 44-80.
45 [Abel Boyer], The English Theophrastus: Or the Manners of the Age, being the Modern
Characters of the Court, the Town, and the City (1702), 3rd edn, Bernard Lintott, London, 1708,
p. 53; compare the coffeehouse anecdote in George Coleman, The Circle of Anecdote and Wit:
to which is added, a choice selection of toasts and sentiments, J. Bumpus, London, 1821, p. 19.
46 Compare here Gordon, 'Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender', p. 903 (quoted).
47 Philip Carter, 'Mollies, Fops, and Men of Feeling', p. 24; and compare his 'Men About
Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban
Society', in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Barker and Chalus, p. 57.
48 See for instance the doggerel verse on 'The Compleat Fop' (1685) in Bod., MS Firth
c.15, pp. 181-2; and National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, MS D25.F38,
pp. 618-9; Twelve Ingenious Characters: Or, Pleasant Descriptions, of the Properties of Sundry
Persons and Things, S. Norris, London, 1680, pp. 30-6; and The Character of the Beaux,
publisher unknown, London, 1696.
49 Tatler no. 26, 9 June 1709; in ed. Bond, vol. 1, pp. 200,198-200.
50 Compare Edward Ward, The History of the London Clubs: Or, the Citizens' Pastime,
J. Dutten, London, 1709, pp. 28-9 (also reprint in The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections
from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998, pp. 549-50);
and see the poems, 'Jenny Cromwell's complaint against sodomy 1692/3' (which rails against
the sodomite's 'bragging round the Chocolate House'), and 'The Womens Complaint to
Venus', both in British Library [BL], Harley MS 7315, fos. 224v, 285r.
51 The Female Tatler no. 3, 11-13 July 1709; in The Female Tatler, ed. Fidelis Morgan,
Dent, London, 1992, pp. 5-6.
52 [Boyer], The English Theophrastus, pp. 55-6; compare Anon., An Essay in Defence of
the Female Sex (1696), Source Book Press reprint, New York, 1970, p. 72 (which seems to have
provided the template upon which Boyer elaborated); and Anon., The Country Gentleman's
Vade Mecum: Or his Companion for the Town, John Harris, London, 1699, p. 31; [Edward
Ward], The London Spy Compleat, 4th edn, J. How, London, 1709, pp. 144-5, 201-5; The
Female Tatler no. 21, 22^» Aug. 1709, and no. 34,21-3 Sept. 1709, in ed. Morgan, p. 49, p. 78.
53 See Carter, 'Men About Town', pp. 40-1; and Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
under 'fop'.
54 Defoe, Compleat English Tradesman (1726), two vols, (1745), Burt Franklin reprint,
New York, 1970, vol. 2, p. 231.
55 See, for example, the third earl of Shaftesbury's critique of court culture, discussed at
length in Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, pp. 175-94; and compare A view of
Paris, and places adjoining, John Nutt, London, 1701, p. 18.
56 'To Will's Coffeehouse' (1691), in BL, Harley MS 7317, fo. 126v, and in BL, Harley
MS 7319, fo. 366r. Compare Anon., An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, p. 79.
57 For criticisms of the beaus at Tom's Coffeehouse, see: The Humours and Conversations of the Town, p. 59; [Marie Catherine D'Aulnoy], Countess of Dunois, Memoirs of the
Court of England: In the Reign of King Charles II. Containing the amours of that prince, the
Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Argyle. - of Buckingham, - of A—n Earl of Oxford - Lord Grey,
andc. - St. Albans, two parts, J. Woodward, London, 1708, pt 2, p. 42 [repeated in new pagination]; and The Female Tatler, no. 26, 2-5 Sept. 1709, in ed. Morgan, p. 64.
58 Anon., The Character of a Coffee-House with the Symptomes of a Town-Wit, Johnathan
Edwin, London, 1673, p. 5. Note the use of 'effeminated' here as a synonym for 'enervated'.
59 T. O., The True Character of a Town Beau, Randal Taylor, London, 1692, p. 2; also
repeated verbatim in the following: [Ez. Symson], A Farther Essay Relating to the Female Sex,
A. Roper, London, 1696, pp. 113-14; The Character of a Town-Gallant: Exposing the Extravagant Fopperies of Some Vain Self-Conceited Pretenders to Gentility, and Good Breeding, W.L.,
London, 1675, p. 7; and in its 2nd edn [printed for Rowland Reynolds in the Strand, London,
1680], p. 4. Compare News from Covent-Garden or the Town Gallants Vindication, being the
debates and result of a famous club of wits, and men of humours and intrigues, assembled for
the damning of the late Character, J. T., London, 1675. On Hobbism as a 'coffeehouse philosophy', see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth Century Reactions to the
Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1962, p.
137, and Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and
the Experimental Life, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 292-3.
60 Richard Bentley to Edward Bernard, [n.d., but 28 May '1691'], in Bod. MS Smith 45,
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
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p. 147; compare Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and
Republicans, Allen and Unwin, London, 1981, p. 89; James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical
Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 84; Michael
Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 164;
and John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
1976, pp. 30,41,66,175.
61 Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town, Allen Banks, London,
1673, p. 69.
62 Thomas Hunt to Matthew Henry, 28 June 1692, in Bod. MS Eng. Letters e.29, fo.
209r.
63 Robert Boyle, 'The Christian Virtuoso', in Boyle, Works, vol. 5, p. 515.
64. Michael Hunter, 'Science and Heterodoxy: an Early Modern Problem Reconsidered',
in his Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in the late Seventeenth Century
Britain, Boydell, Woodbridge, 1995, p. 233, and see Hunter's 'The Decline of Magic Reconsidered', Unpublished typescript, 1999. One of the most important censures of this culture of
wit was Joseph Glanville, A Whip for the Droll, Fidler to the Atheist (1668) in Glanville's, A
Blow at Modern Sadducism in Some Philosophical Considerations About Witchcraft. .., 4th
edn, E. Cotes, London, 1668, pp. 159-83.
65 [Richard Flecknoe], A Treatise of the Sports of Wit, Simon Neals, London, 1675, [sig.
A3v], Positive valorizations of wit in Augustan culture may be distilled from D. Judson
Milburn, The Age of Wit 1650-1750, Macmillan, New York, 1976; and Norman Pearson, Society
Sketches in the Eighteenth Century, E. Arnold, London, 1911, pp. 86-111.
66 Astute comments on the relations between coffeehouse culture and freethought may
be found in Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its
Enemies 1660-1730, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 7 (esp. n. 24), 187; and compare
Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720, Harvester,
Hassocks, Sussex, 1976, p. 226; and Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, p. 151.
67 Compare Stephen Copley, 'Commerce, Conversation, and Politeness', British Journal
for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, 1995, p. 68.
68 Spectator no. 87, 9 June 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. 1, p. 371. Compare: The Case Between
the Proprietors of News-Papers, and the Coffee-Men of London and Westminster, Fairly Stated
[1728], R. Walker, London, pp. 12-13.
69 Spectator no. 155, 28 Aug. 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. 2, p. 107. Enough original letters to
the Spectator survive to indicate that they were genuine. For some transcriptions from manuscript, see Richmond P. Bond (ed.), New Letters to the Taller and Spectator, University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1959.
70 The reformation of male manners proposed by Addison and Steele is the subject of
Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century
English Periodical, Stanford University Press, 1998.
71 Spectator no. 155,28 Aug. 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. 2, p. 107; compare also James Miller,
The Coffee-House: a Dramalick Piece, 5. Watts, London, 1737, pp. 27-8.
72 On the translation of the centre of London literary life from Will's Coffeehouse to
Button's Coffeehouse, see Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison, 2nd edn, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1968, pp. 92, 242-4, 281, 315-7; and compare: A Poetical Contest between Toby
and a Minor-Poet of B-tt-n's Coffee-House; at a bookseller's shop near Temple Bar. Being an
imitation after the new mode of the 3rd Eclogue of Virgil... [1714?], Ferdinando Burleigh,
London. For a picture of Button's as a gathering place for prominent Whigs, see The Englishman, ser. 1, no. 36, 26 Dec. [1713]; in The Englishman, ed. Rae Blanchard, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1955, pp. 144-8.
73 For one such accusation, see Alexander Pope's enigmatic comments (April 1739) on
Addison and Steele in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, vol. 1, p. 80,
and compare Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in
the Spectator Papers, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA, 1985, p. 202 n. 24.
74 Spectator no. 49, 26 April 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. 1, pp. 210, 209-10 (quotes).
75 Spectator no. 10,12 March 1711; in ed. Bond, vol. l , p . 44. This statement is a variation
on Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.4.10, and the reading here should be compared with Klein,
Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, pp. 36-7, 42; Klein, 'Gender, Conversation, and the
Public Sphere', pp. 100, 109-10; and Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 103.
76 Spectator no. 606, 13 Oct. 1714; in ed. Bond, vol. 5, p. 72; compare Spectator no. 300,
13 Feb. 1712; in ed. Bond, 3: 73; Spectator no. 376,12 May 1712; in ed. Bond, vol. 3, p. 415; and
for the tea-table ideal, see Guardian no. 2,13 March 1713: in The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun
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Stephens, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1982, p. 46; Guardian no. 16, 30 March
1713; in ed. Stephens, p. 86.
77 19 Jan. 1689, in Diary of Thomas Bellingham: an Officer under William III, ed.
Anthony Hewitson, George Toulmin and Sons, Preston, 1908, p. 44. The social status of the
women mentioned here is unclear. Compare the readings in Pincus, 'Coffee Politicians Does
Create', p. 816; and Klein, 'Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere', p. 115 n. 29.
78 Martha Lady Giffard: Her Life and Correspondence (1664-1722) A Sequel to the Letters
of Dorothy Osborne, ed. Julia G. Longe, George Allen and Sons, London, 1911, pp. 250-1. The
letter referred to in this text is not, however, included in the standard edition of Swift's Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams, five vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963-5. Dingley's political
interests and affiliations were the subject of Swift's speculation in his Journal to Stella, ed. Harold
Williams, two vols, Oxford University Press, 1948: 1 Feb. 1712, vol. 2, pp. 477-8; 15 Jan. 1713,
vol. 2, p. 603; 3 April 1713, vol. 2, p. 652. This is worth noting, for it reminds us that the exclusion
of gentlewomen from the coffeehouse norm did not entail their complete absence from the
political culture of the day - it merely rechannelled their political influence into other quarters.
79 Hooke's Diary entry for 2 Oct. 1675 (p. 184) reads: 'At Mans. Dind with Mr. Boyle and
Lady Ranelaugh'. It is unclear whether or not Hooke visited Man's before dining with Boyle and
his sister, or whether they joined him for dinner at the coffeehouse. Given the abundant evidence
throughout his diaries for Hooke's peripatetic nature, 1 am inclined to accept the former reading
rather than that offered in Pincus, who claims ('Coffee Politicians Does Create', p. 816) that
'Hooke dined with Robert Boyle and Lady Ranelagh at Man's Coffee House in London'.
80 Pamela Sharpe, 'Dealing with Love: the Ambiguous Independence of the Single
Woman in Early Modern England', Gender and History 11: 2, 1999.
81 Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century
England,
Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 153; and compare the review of the literature on single
women's economic prospects in Sharpe, 'Dealing with Love'.
82 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 249, although even here compare p. 272, where
Borsay states that 'the ladies and gentlemen went their separate ways... the latter to the
coffeehouses', as a part of the daily routine at Bath.
83 Toland, A New Description of Epsom, with the humours and politicks of the place: in
a letter to Eudoxa, (1711) in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, Now first
publish'd from his Original Manuscripts: with Some Memoirs of his Life and Writings, two vols,
J. Peele, London, 1726, vol. 2, p. 105.
. 84 See the description of an opera house coffee-room in Fanny Burney, Evelina, ed.
Edward A. Bloom (1778), Oxford University Press reprint, 1968, p. 39.
85 John de la Rocque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy, by way of the Eastern Ocean, and
the Streights of the Red Sea: Performed by the French for the first time, A.D. 1708, 1709, 1710,
G. Strahan, London, 1726, pp. 294-5.
86 London Gazette no. 2527,27-30 Jan. 1690.
87 BL 14O2.g.l (12); London Gazette no. 2477, 22-5 July 1689; no. 2578, 24-8 July 1690;
no. 2584, 14-18 Aug. 1690; no. 2585, 18-21 Aug. 1690; no. 2781, 4-7 July 1692. On the resort
season, see Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 141-2.
88 Charles Bertie to the Countess of Rutland, 8 April 1682, in: Historical Manuscripts
Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, Part 5: The Manuscripts of his grace, the Duke of
Rutland, K.G., preserved at Belvoir Castle, two vols, H.M.S.O., London, 1889, vol. 2, pp. 67-8. In
the later eighteenth century, Anna Larpent frequently made 'educational' visits to London art
auctions: John Brewer, 'Cultural Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: the View of the
Reader', in Friihe Neuzeit-Friihe Moderne? Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Obergangsprozessen, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Gottingen, 1992, p. 380.
89 For a series of interesting letters documenting the extreme care and financial savvy
that the Countess of Rutland brought to the decoration and furnishing of her house in 1670,
see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, Part 5, vol. 2, pp. 15-18.
90 HL, Stowe MS 26/1-2, 1 Oct. 1697, quoted; 22 April 1701.
91 On the social significance of the domestic visit - and thus the potential for social power
it afforded to gentlewomen skilled in the practice of polite sociability - see: Susan Whyman,
Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England, Oxford University Press, 1999.
92 Wilson, 'Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity', p. 78; Klein, 'Gender and the
Public/Private Distinction', p. 103.
93 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, pp. 60, 84-5,102-3, and pp. 17 (quoted), 60-1. For
an example of one of many attempts to restrain the activities of these hawkers, see London
Metropolitan Archives [LMA], MJ/SBB/575 (August 1700), pp. 46-7.
Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu
157
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94 James M. B. Alexander, 'The Economic and Social Structure of the City of London',
Ph.D. Thesis, London School of Economics, 1989, p. 136.
95 OED, under 'coffee-woman'.
96 Faramerz Noshir Dabhoiwala, 'Prostitution and Police in London, C.1660-C.1760\ D.
Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1995, p. 42; compare Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: a
Social History 1200-1830, Longman, London, 1983, p. 79. On the close associations between
alewives and prostitution in medieval English culture, see Barbara Hanawalt, 'Of Good and
III Repute', p. 108.
97 The Life and Character of Moll King, Late Mistress of King's Coffee-House in Covent
Garden [1747], W. Price, London; and The Velvet Coffee-Woman: Or, the Life, Gallantries and
Amours of the late Famous Mrs. Anne Rochford, Simon Green, London, 1728. A girl's progress
from humble origins to courtesan was a well-worn theme of eighteenth-century literature; the
latter tract however, lacks the anti-court vitriol of the classic French example of the genre, the
Anecdotes sur Mme La Comptesse Du Barry (1775), on which see Robert Darnton, The
Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Norton, New York, 1995, pp. 137-66.
98 [John Dunton], The Night-Walker: or, Evening Rambles in Search After Lewd Women,
two vols, James Orme, London, 1696-7: Jan. 1697, vol. 2, pp. 8-9 (my emphasis). Compare Oct.
1696, vol. 1, p. 17. For a comprehensive review of the circumstances surrounding the publication of this periodical, see Dabhoiwala, 'Prostitution and Police in London', pp. 246-59.
99 [Ward], London Spy, p. 27.
100 Saussure, 29 Oct. 1726, London, in: A Foreign View of England in 1725-1729: the
Letters of Monsieur Cesar de Saussure to his family, ed. and transl. Madame van Muyden,
Caliban, Hampstead, 1995, p. 102.
101 On early modern conceptions of the English whore, see Laura Gowing, Domestic
Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996;
Dabhoiwala, 'Prostitution and Police in London', esp. pp. 1-92; and Tim Hitchcock, English
Sexualities 1700-1800, Macmillan, London, 1997, pp. 94-101.
102 Dabhoiwala, 'Prostitution and Police in London', p. 93, quoting the indictment of
Margaret Vemer (13 Jan. 1693) in LMA, MJ/SR/1808, ind. 45.
103 LMA, DL/C/237,17 May 1678, Cutt vs. Jacombe; LMA, DL/C/244, fos. 95v-96v, 4 May
1694, Wollasten vs. Jennings; LMA, DL/C/245, fos. 4-7, 20 Jan. 1696, Branch vs. Palmer. I
should like to thank Dr Jennifer Melville for kindly drawing my attention to these references.
104 Since these sources are the archival records of policing and prosecuting institutions, it
is of course likely that the women who appear in them should be at least suspected of some
sort of moral and/or legal wrongdoing.
105 Corporation of London Record Office [CLRO], Sessions Papers Box 2,1679-86, Sept.
1682 Sessions, 29 Aug. 1682. For another example drawn from the London church-court
records, see Peter Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London 1650-1750,
Methuen, London, 1994, pp. 252, 300, n. 223.
106 For a coffeehouse also serving as a bawdy house, see indictment of Mary Hambleton
in LMA, MJ/SP/1695, April 2, cited in Dabhoiwala, 'Prostitution and Police in London',
p. 53.
107 Deposition of Christopher Dent, in LMA, DL/C/245, fos. 194-210, 24 Nov. 1696,
Barnes vs. Barnes, quote at fo. 207r. Compare Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle
Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660—1730, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989, p. 242, to which I am indebted for drawing my attention to
this reference.
108 The ways in which putatively public concerns were imbricated in the structure of the
private lives of the middle class is explored at length and with great insight in Margaret R.
Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780,
University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996.
109 It was living above taverns, however, that especially raised the ire of her father. See
Sharpe, 'Dealing with Love'.
110 24-25 Oct. 1715 in Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715-1716, ed. William Matthews, Methuen.
London, 1939, p. 124.
111 For a detailed study of the formal means of regulating coffeehouse society, see Brian
Cowan, 'The Social Life of Coffee: Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early
Modern England, 1600-1720', Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 2000, chap. 5.
112 See Frank Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern
German and British History, New York, Berghahn Books, 2000.
Fig. 2. Timante enters Araminta's room.
Frontispiece, John Ellis, The Surprize; or, the Gentleman turn'd Apothecary, 1739.
Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Pennsylvania State University on September 19, 2016
Fig. 1. 'The Peeper, or a stolen view of Lady C's Premises'.
Insert in A Voyage to Lethe, 1741.