David BrandonGloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2007.
$9.95/paper
Though contemporary coffee culture can easily be caricatured—with mindlessly consumptive Starbucks addicts to one side, and proto-revolutionary, pseudo-bohemian college kids who smoke and have existential crises to the other—what many fail to realize is that coffee, itself that most divisive of beverages, was long associated with a thriving, influential public. David Brandon, channeling J¸rgen Habermas and a host of other historians, succinctly writes of the coffee house as an instrumental place in the birth of the "public sphere": "they [coffee houses] were one among a number of social institutions including taverns, clubs, journals, newspapers and periodicals which allowed people of the time to meet either in person or via the printed word and to create, give voice to, exchange and take in new ideas, opinions and perspectives" (79). Though coffee today has moved beyond the grotty diners of the immediate post-War era and is now sold in all manner of fashionable boutiques, its current cachet is simply one in a line of historical moments in which coffee and its sale as been essential not only to a worldwide market economy, but also to a shared sense of social space.
David Brandon's Life in a 17th Century Coffee Shop is a strong introduction, and handy reference resource, for this rich era of/in coffee history. It has its limitations and faults—it is very, very short (90 pages, though this conforms to the format of "The Sutton Life Series," for better or worse), not especially scholarly (the trade-off being that is therefore highly readable, though not thoroughly documented), and somewhat repetitive in its descriptions and formulations. With these core criticisms in mind, it is still a delightful read, a font of almost instant expertise in the cultural history of the period. As a work interested in the social situation of 17th century Britain (with particular emphasis on London), it necessarily steps outside of the boundaries of the coffee shop proper, and addresses class, economic, and intellectual-historical concerns.
The London-centrism, of which many works of British history and thought are accused and found guilty, is herein justifiable: Brandon acknowledges the presence of coffee shops in other city centers (Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, etc), but explains that what was an exceptional business in many parts of the country became an absolute craze in the capital. By 1714, the greater London area had over 1,000 coffee houses, and moreover "such was the central role that the coffee houses played in the life of late seventeenth- and eighteenth- century London that gentlemen were often associated more with the coffee houses they frequented than with the homes in which they lived" (2). A provisional list of such gentlemen is impressive. Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe continued to visit coffee houses even after the outbreak of plague in 1665 (16). John Dryden presided over Will's Coffee House in Covent Garden, a fact which made him an instantly public figure whose poems and taste defined a generation (51). The Grecian Coffee House, near the Strand, was the seat of many of the Fellows of the Royal Society, including Sir Isaac Newton (54).
Though coffee (in America, for example) is now enjoyed across class, gender and racial boundaries, it was a beverage of a relatively limited set in 17th century Britain. In his characterization of the typical coffee drinker, Brandon relates: "The London coffee house allowed a respectably dressed man, after paying an inclusive admission charge of one penny, to enter well-heated premises furnished not unlike the taverns of the time, where he could smoke a long clay pipe filled with tobacco provided by the management" (25). The clientele was almost exclusively male—in many cases, women were totally barred, thus positioning the 17th century coffee house as a precursor to the private men's drinking clubs of the 19th century—though the proprietress, or wife of the shop's owner, would often be on hand. Like the Greek agora, it was assumed that this place for the public circulation of news, ideas, and opinion was a place for a male citizenry. This can be contrasted with that other emergent space of the 17th century, one more dangerous yet more obviously open, the gin palace. Generally frequented by the very poor, despondent, or addicted, the gin palace served a strong, dangerous alcohol, often consumed in mass quantity to the point of collapse, to men and women. One need only compare Hogarth's "Gin Lane" print to "Beer Street," to which he could have added "Coffee Court," or some such—what would have then been a productive, fashionable, and culturally recognized space of consumption, in oppositions to the dire poverty of gin. That said, the coffee house could have benefited from the participation of women, though this would be realized in the aristocratic space of the next century, the salon.
The book's most interesting chapter, "The Everyday Life of the Coffee House," details many of the practices and novelties that became associated with these places. In addition to providing a place where coffee was consumed, tobacco smoked, and snuff taken, the coffee house fine-tuned social niceties which were to spill into other quotidian experiences. The coffee shop sometimes acted as a de facto reference or lending library; served in the codification of the national postal service (the shop was a point of fixed distribution); pioneered the ballot-box system for voting; and was a place where public notices and ephemera could be posted long before the classified section of newspapers (or, dare one think, Craigslist) (29-32).
In the end, Life in a 17th Century Coffee Shop's quickness, its possible consumption over a sturdy cup of coffee, is more an asset than liability. Just as news notices in the 17th century were meant to be read and subsequently discussed, so too can this book be passed around—and debated—with relative ease.
