Coffee House

Next to the laws of gravity, the best thing to come out of the 17th century.

The first coffee houses came into being in the 1650s. Before, people frequented taverns and ale-houses. Coffee houses had many advantages: Coffee was cheaper than beer. For a penny you got coffee (often as what is today known "bottomless cup", i.e. with unlimited refills) and you had access to pamphlets and newspapers. Moreover, people staid sober. After a visit to the coffee house you could still go to the office and do efficient work. Therefore, they were popular even with people who normally did not like taverns and ale houses (cf. Pincus 817).

In coffee-houses everyone did meet: high and low, old and young. An anonymous writer describes it as a kind of Paradise: “A coffee house is free to all comers, so they have human shape, boldly therefore let any person who comes to drink coffee set down in the very chair […]. The great privilege of equality is only peculiar to the Golden Age, and to a coffee house” (quoted in Pincus 814-815). Another writer praised it as a great university: “So great an university,/ I think there ne’er was any/ In which you may a scholar be,/ For spending of a penny” (quoted in Pincus 833).

Soberly, people informed themselves about politics and discussed politics. You did not even have to be able to read, as people would often read from newspapers and journals aloud (so-called bridging). Scholars like Jürgen Habermas thus associate coffee houses with the critical spirit of the emergent public sphere. And they also point towards the functional differentiation of society and the myth of the open elite: “there’s nothing done in all the world,/ From monarch to the mouse; / But every day or night ‘tis hurl’d / Into the coffee-house” (quoted in Pincus 820). And Thomas Shadwell wrote: “Each coffee-house is fill’d with subtle folk who wisely talk and politickly smoke” (quoted in Pincus 820).

During the Exclusion Crisis, coffee houses and taverns started having their clubs, that is: meeting places where the members paid a certain amount of money (“clubbing together”) and then they got dinner. These clubs met regularly in special rooms; apart from having dinner together, people discussed politics and literature. Some clubs were especially connected to political parties: the Whigs, for example, had the “Green Ribbon Club” (guess what its members wore on their hats?)

Source:

Steve Pincus, '"Coffee Politicians does Create": Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture', Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807-834.