Addison and Steele: London Coffeehouses
The contemporary coffee shop yearns nostalgically – almost subconsciously
– for the coffee culture of a bygone era. It aspires to a representation of the
coffee house galvanised during the 18th century; a romantic perception
nurtured by the writing of figures like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.
It is in literary works such as these that the most enduring descriptions of
18th-century coffee house culture survive. At the dawn of the 1700s, London
was becoming Britain’s first 24-hour consumer society. This was a period
that welcomed coffee, tea, porcelain, sugar, chocolate, dictionaries, novels
and newspapers. It became the fashion to drop into club-like coffee houses,
where people could discuss politics, literature, culture and their own lives.
Thanks to technological advances and lapses in licensing rules, news and
gossip now permeated the printed world.
It was into this society that Joseph Addison and Richard Steele released a
periodical titled The Spectator in 1711 (no relation to the magazine of the
same name). This paper’s manifesto was to fill these coffee houses with
knowledge, culture, ideas and – above all – conversation. The paper’s
fictional editor modestly claimed: “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me,
that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and
colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-
houses.”
The main correspondent in The Tatler was the fictional Isaac Bickerstaffe.
He wrote his articles out of the various coffeehouse locations of early
eighteenth-century London. In the first issue he explained that readers would
receive:
Poetry under that of Will’s coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian;
foreign and domestick news…from Saint James’s Coffee-house – The
Tatler, April 23rd, 1709.
In fact, these periodicals were designed to be read and discussed in
coffeehouses. The coffeehouse was, in the words of Brian Cowan, ‘a unique
social space’ where, irrespective of rank, men (and it was primarily men
who frequented coffeehouses) could gather together and discuss the news of
the day, as illustrated by the image ‘Interior of a Coffeehouse held by the
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British Museum’. Look closely at the image, and you can see that whilst the
men are enjoying their coffee, there are copies of a periodical freely
available to them.
The correspondents in The Spectator were an interesting lot, and these
fictional characters were supposed to represent an eighteenth-century
gentleman’s coffeehouse club: there was Mr. Spectator who ‘lived in the
world, rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of the people’. Next
there was Sir Roger De Coverley, who was the “nice old man” type – a Tory
Lord whose political views no one really took very seriously. After the
aristocracy members of the increasingly influential middling sorts were
represented: Andrew Freeport, a merchant; a lawyer from the Inner Temple;
a retired army officer named Captain Sentry; a rakish young gentleman
named Will Honeycomb, and finally an unnamed clergyman (who visited
the coffeehouse club but seldom).
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are founders of the publication The
Spectator. Steele was an Irish writer/politician, while Addison was an
English writer/politician. The first edition was published in March 1711.
The Spectator is a British conservative magazine published weekly, and is
the oldest continuously published English magazine.
An important aspect and distribution method of The Spectator involves the
London coffeehouses, such as those pictured in Figure 1. In entry No. 10 of
the publication, Addison and Steele learn from their publisher that three
thousand copies of each issue are distributed, but each issue receives around
twenty readers, resulting in approximately sixty thousand views per issue.
This statistic is made possible through the common gathering of people at
London coffeehouses. It is at these coffeehouses that the masses can gather
and discuss politics and current events, sharing and rereading papers that are
then left for the next crowd.
Addison and Steele characterize the three types of people in No. 10 that they
wish to reach with their publications. The first type set are the scholars of
society; “the Fraternity of Spectators, who live in the World without having
anything to do in it”. The second are what they refer to as the “blank slates”
of society – those that have nothing to talk of until they have read the daily
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news. The third group is generally that of women, who apparently have
nothing but idle time on their hands and must be in need of entertainment.
Although there are not specific names brought into this essay, these three
types of people are personified and developed as though they we specific
individuals.
Another entry, No. 49, also personifies three different types of people that
Addison and Steele are seeking to make a point about. In this entry, Addison
and Steele observe the atmosphere of the London coffeehouses, illustrating
the purposes that each type of person chooses to pass their time there. The
first character introduced is Mr. Beaver – a personification of those
pretentious aristocrats who pass their early mornings in the coffeehouse. All
seek Mr. Beaver’s opinion; “none cane pretend to guess what steps will be
taken in any one court of Europe ‘till Mr. Beaver has thrown down his pipe”.
The second wave of people that inhabit the coffeehouses are those referred
to as men formed by society, “the word Neighborhoods”. These are just the
middle class businessmen type, who in fact have the highest regard from
Addison and Steele. The last type that utilizes these coffeehouses are those
personified as “Eubulus”: the wealthy man who has his hand in every corner
of society.
In these entries, Addison and Steele use their observations to write their
personal essays for The Spectator. There is not any research done or any
interviews conducted; rather it is their experience that lends to the credibility
of their essays. Addison and Steele are considered to be the fathers of
journalism, beginning this trend of observational writing that sets the
audience in a specific scene, giving a rounded, more full experience than just
conveying mere facts and quotes. And the scenes they place us in – the
London coffeehouses – truly represented a different side of London than had
previously been known. These gathering places brought out the middle class,
creating a new scene that Addison and Steele set about to capture.
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