All About Coffee, William H. Ukers [short story to read .txt] 📗
- Author: William H. Ukers
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In A Brief and Merry History of Great Britain we read:
There is a prodigious number of Coffee-Houses in London, after the manner I have seen some in Constantinople. These Coffee-Houses are the constant Rendezvous for Men of Business as well as the idle People. Besides Coffee, there are many other Liquors, which People cannot well relish at first. They smoak Tobacco, game and read Papers of Intelligence; here they treat of Matters of State, make Leagues with Foreign Princes, break them again, and transact Affairs of the last Consequence to the whole World. They represent these Coffee-Houses as the most agreeable things in London, and they are, in my Opinion, very proper Places to find People that a Man has Business with, or to pass away the Time a little more agreeably than he can do at home; but in other respects they are loathsome, full of smoak, like a Guard-Room, and as much crowded. I believe 'tis these Places that furnish the Inhabitants with Slander, for there one hears exact Account of everything done in Town, as if it were but a Village.
At those Coffee-Houses, near the Courts, called White's, St. James's, Williams's, the Conversation turns chiefly upon the Equipages, Essence, Horse-Matches, Tupees, Modes and Mortgages; the Cocoa-Tree upon Bribery and Corruption, Evil ministers, Errors and Mistakes in Government; the Scotch Coffee-Houses towards Charing Cross, on Places and Pensions; the Tiltyard and Young Man's on Affronts, Honour, Satisfaction, Duels and Rencounters. I was informed that the latter happen so frequently, in this part of the Town, that a Surgeon and a Sollicitor are kept constantly in waiting; the one to dress and heal such Wounds as may be given, and the other in case of Death to bring off the Survivor with a Verdict of Se Devendendo or Manslaughter. In those Coffee-Houses about the Temple the Subjects are generally on Causes, Costs, Demurrers, Rejoinders and Exceptions; Daniel's the Welch Coffee-House in Fleet Street, on Births, Pedigrees and Descents; Child's and the Chapter upon Glebes, Tithes, Advowsons, Rectories and Lectureships; North's Undue Elections, False Polling, Scrutinies, etc.; Hamlin's, Infant-Baptism, Lay-Ordination, Free-Will, Election and Reprobation; Batson's, the Prices of Pepper, Indigo and Salt-Petre; and all those about the Exchange, where the Merchants meet to transact their Affairs, are in a perpetual hurry about Stock-Jobbing, Lying, Cheating, Tricking Widows and Orphans, and committing Spoil and Rapine on the Publick.
In the eighteenth century beer and wine were commonly sold at the coffee houses in addition to tea and chocolate. Daniel Defoe, writing of his visit to Shrewsbury in 1724, says, "I found there the most coffee houses around the Town Hall that ever I saw in any town, but when you come into them they are but ale houses, only they think that the name coffee house gives a better air."
Speaking of the coffee houses of the city, Besant says:
Rich merchants alone ventured to enter certain of the coffee houses, where they transacted business more privately and more expeditiously than on the Exchange. There were coffee houses where officers of the army alone were found; where the city shopkeeper met his chums; where actors congregated; where only divines, only lawyers, only physicians, only wits and those who came to hear them were found. In all alike the visitor put down his penny and went in, taking his own seat if he was an habitue; he called for a cup of tea or coffee and paid his twopence for it; he could call also, if he pleased, for a cordial; he was expected to talk with his neighbour whether he knew him or not. Men went to certain coffee houses in order to meet the well-known poets and writers who were to be found there, as Pope went in search of Dryden. The daily papers and the pamphlets of the day were taken in. Some of the coffee houses, but not the more respectable, allowed the use of tobacco.
From a broadside entitled Wonders on the Deep. Figure 2 is the Duke of York's Coffee House
Mackay, in his Journey Through England (1724), says:
We rise by nine, and those that frequent great men's levees find entertainment at them till eleven, or, as in Holland, go to tea-tables; about twelve the beau monde assemble in several coffee or chocolate houses; the best of which are the Cocoatree and White's chocolate houses, St. James', the Smyrna, Mrs. Rochford's and the British coffee houses; and all these so near one another that in less than an hour you see the company of them all. We are carried to these places in chairs (or sedans), which are here very cheap, a guinea a week, or a shilling per hour, and your chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.
If it be fine weather we take a turn into the park till two, when we go to dinner; and if it be dirty, you are entertained at picquet or basset at White's, or you may talk politics at the Smyrna or St. James'. I must not forget to tell you that the parties have their different places, where, however, a stranger is always well received; but a Whig will no more go to the Cocoatree than a Tory will be seen at the Coffee House, St James'.
The Scots go generally to the British, and a mixture of all sorts go to the Smyrna. There are other little coffee houses much frequented in this neighborhood—Young Man's for officers; Old Man's for stock jobbers, paymasters and courtiers, and Little Man's for sharpers. I never was so confounded in my life as when I entered into this last. I saw two or three tables full at faro, and was surrounded by a set of sharp faces that I was afraid would have devoured me with their eyes. I was glad to drop two or three half crowns at faro to get off with a clear skin, and was overjoyed I so got rid of them.
At two we generally go to dinner; ordinaries are not so common here as abroad, yet the French have set up two or three good ones for the convenience of foreigners in Suffolk street, where one is tolerably well served; but the general way here is to make a party at the coffee house to go to dine at the tavern, where we sit till six, when we go to the play, except you are invited to the table of some great man, which strangers are always courted to and nobly entertained.
Mackay writes that "in all the coffee houses you have not only the foreign prints but several English ones with foreign occurrences, besides papers of morality and party disputes."
"After the play," writes Defoe, "the best company generally go to Tom's and Will's coffee houses, near adjoining, where there is playing at picquet and the best of conversation till midnight. Here you will see blue and green ribbons and stars sitting familiarly and talking with the same freedom as if they had left their equality and degrees of distance at home."
Designed by Hogarth, and put up by Addison, 1713 From a water color by T.H. Shepherd
Before entering the coffee house every one was recommended by the Tatler to prepare his body with three dishes of bohea and to purge his brains with two pinches of snuff. Men had their coffee houses as now they have their clubs—sometimes contented with one, sometimes belonging to three or four. Johnson, for instance, was connected with St. James's, the Turk's Head, the Bedford, Peele's, besides the taverns which he frequented. Addison and Steele used Button's; Swift, Button's, the Smyrna, and St. James's; Dryden, Will's; Pope, Will's and Button's; Goldsmith, the St. James's and the Chapter; Fielding, the Bedford; Hogarth, the Bedford and Slaughter's; Sheridan, the Piazza; Thurlow, Nando's.
Some Famous Coffee Houses
Among the famous English coffee houses of the seventeenth-eighteenth century period were St. James's, Will's, Garraway's, White's, Slaughter's, the Grecian, Button's, Lloyd's, Tom's, and Don Saltero's.
St. James's was a Whig house frequented by members of Parliament, with a fair sprinkling of literary stars. Garraway's catered to the gentry of the period, many of whom naturally had Tory proclivities.
One of the notable coffee houses of Queen Anne's reign was Button's. Here Addison could be found almost every afternoon and evening, along with Steele, Davenant, Carey, Philips, and other kindred minds. Pope was a member of the same coffee house club for a year, but his inborn irascibility eventually led him to drop out of it.
At Button's a lion's head, designed by Hogarth after the Lion of Venice, "a proper emblem of knowledge and action, being all head and paws," was set up to receive letters and papers for the Guardian.[82] The Tatler and the Spectator were born in the coffee house, and probably English prose would never have received the impetus given it by the essays of Addison and Steele had it not been for coffee house associations.
Pope's famous Rape of the Lock grew out of coffee-house gossip. The poem itself contains one charming passage on coffee.[83]
Another frequenter of the coffee houses of London, when he had the money to do so, was Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe was the precursor of the English novel. Henry Fielding, one of the greatest of all English novelists, loved the life of the more bohemian coffee houses, and was, in fact, induced to write his first great novel, Joseph Andrews, through coffee-house criticisms of Richardson's Pamela.
Other frequenters of the coffee houses of the period were Thomas Gray and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Garrick was often to be seen at Tom's in Birchin Lane, where also Chatterton might have been found on many an evening before his untimely death.
The London Pleasure Gardens
The second half of the eighteenth century was covered by the reigns of the Georges. The coffee houses were still an important factor in London life, but were influenced somewhat by the development of gardens in which were served tea, chocolate, and other drinks, as well as coffee. At the coffee houses themselves, while coffee remained the favorite beverage, the proprietors, in the hope of increasing their patronage, began to serve wine, ale, and other liquors. This seems to have been the first step toward the decay of the coffee house.
The figure in the cloak is Count Viviani; of the figures facing the reader, the
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