Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789

E. Wesley Reynolds

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350247253
• eBook ISBN: 9781350247246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book argues that coffeehouses and the coffee trade were central to the making of the Atlantic world in the century leading up to the American Revolution. Fostering international finance and commerce, spreading transatlantic news, building military might, determining political fortunes and promoting status and consumption, coffeehouses created a web of social networks stretching from Britain to its colonies in North America. As polite alternatives to taverns, coffeehouses have been hailed as 'penny universities'; a place for political discussion by the educated and elite. Reynolds shows that they were much more than this. Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World 1650-1789, reveals that they simultaneously created a network for marine insurance and naval protection, led to calls for a free press, built tension between trade lobbyists and the East India Company, and raised questions about gender, respectability and the polite middling class. It demonstrates how coffeehouses served to create transatlantic connections between metropole Britain and her North American colonies and played an important role in the revolution and protest movements that followed.

Part I Coffee’s transatlantic society

1 ‘Trifling’, an urban experience

A writer in ‘The Trifler’ column of the Aberdeen Magazine with the provocative pseudonym ‘Nich. Nonentity’ complained that his stay in Aberdeen during the winter of 1788–9 was not nearly leisurely enough. The city musicians only stayed a few weeks at a time, concerts ran only once a week during the cold months and socials ended before the season was usually expected to begin. Golf, the local sport, was only played during the day, and the card tables were scarce of players three out of every four nights. The people themselves were the ‘methodical and stupid’ types; those who engrossed themselves in the ‘vulgar cares’ of their shops kept to their own families and were judicious in their use of liquor. The writer lamented that his prospects for city refinements may be forever dried up:

Alas! when I reflect on the happy six months I once spent in London! Ah! London is the place for triflers, Sir – In a morning I rode on my nag for a few hours – came home at 3 o’clock to dress, which employed me very seriously till 5, when I went to the coffee-house to dine, where I was sure to meet with my fellow-creatures – about 8 I went to the play, where I remained until ten – then to the coffeehouse or tavern, or perhaps a dance, masquerade, or other entertainment … Next day, and every day the same, with the agreeable variations of auctions – morning concerts – learned pigs – fencing matches – sales of horses – reviews – card parties., &c. &c. &c. Why I left this land of delights, I cannot now inform you; my father obliged me to it, and added some motives which I have now quite forgotten.¹

Whether the young man’s alias was the description of a genuine third party or the product of the satiric imagination of the editor, the gentleman’s plight embodies the social aspirations of an entire age. He was describing an urban attitude, a social atmosphere which found its centre in London. It was above all a British experience, where consumption and public life ran into one, with an English language of sociability to accompany it. Yet, the focal point of his exercise in ‘trifling’ was deceptive. Without colonial materials found across the Atlantic world, London’s urban atmosphere would have been deprived of its most novel social engagements. The new delights available to eighteenth-century urbanites were the products of a colonial system. Shopkeepers, coffeehouse owners and opera houses imported the smells, tastes and textures of the British Atlantic trade network and assembled them into a material culture of pleasure. But the coffeehouse was one important feature that made eighteenth-century public life uniquely sociable, pleasurable and frequent. Here, the middling sorts of the Anglo world standardized their public urban experience by consuming colonial products and then venturing forth to the theatres or pleasure gardens. The night on the town most often began with coffee. If Mr ‘Nonentity’ had not been so obsessed with finding the absence of society embodied in his own name, he would have noticed that Aberdeen too was changing, as wealthy visitors like himself throughout the British Atlantic world expected the same sorts of entertainments.

At the heart of every chronicle like Mr ‘Nonentity’s’ were three recurring consumer items transmitted across the British Atlantic and usually accompanying fine wine: coffee, sugar and tobacco. The early modern consumer experiences of these products were all intertwined, since coffee and sugar were often consumed simultaneously, if not always together, and the mass interest in coffee only arose after sugar plantations in the Caribbean made it possible for the Anglo world to eventually cancel coffee’s naturally bitter taste.² Also, coffee was almost exclusively reserved, unlike tea, for public rather than private consumption, and therefore lends itself to a study of urban sociability in eighteenth-century British cities.³ Coffeehouses possessed both social mores unique to their urban environment and broader standards for consumer behaviour which reached beyond their immediate social circles. Consumer patterns of the British Atlantic world and coffeehouses are subjects with long trains of scholarly literature behind them, but no comparative analysis has been attempted to bring the two together.⁴ Scholars of British Atlantic consumption have almost entirely neglected the vital importance of coffee consumption as a means of public sociability, while literature of early modern coffee culture is almost entirely Eurocentric. On either side of the Atlantic, sources remain a problem. Endless inventories exist of the Atlantic consumer trade, but accounts of how these items were used in urban environments remain the subject of intense speculation. Nonetheless, the history of coffee should begin to move in a transatlantic direction and include the evolving complexities of broader Anglo-American modes of public consumption.

Coffeehouse culture depended upon a new consumer society of middling elites across the Atlantic world interested in London fashion and sociability. Not only were coffeehouses places of leisure, they were also resorts where investors in the business of sugar and coffee negotiated the process of urbanization in Atlantic cities. As the middling sorts in the Anglo world began to standardize their consumer habits around material culture from the colonies, they often celebrated etiquette and politeness, pleasure and excess, friendship and animosity, excitement and leisure, and all of the diversions which came with new sources of wealth and spending. The newfound wealth of the consumer revolution encouraged a new lifestyle where elites displayed their right to govern and freely socialize. They displayed their status in public venues dedicated to their use and entertainment. The draw of fashion, as emulated by colonial American consumers, was a powerful force in transforming colonial American associations into British publics.

London’s renaissance and the experience of coffee

The city of London experienced a cultural revolution from 1550 to 1750, in which merchants, clubs with a vocal press and proto-modern institutions all contributed to the loosening of London’s civic hierarchy (the Lord Mayor, the Common Council, wards and parishes). Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph R. Ward claim that ‘with the possible exception of Amsterdam, no other city on the planet did more to catalyze modernity’.⁵ The London expansion began when the Tudor dissolution of Catholic family lands in London made way for new aristocratic housing tracts at Convent Garden. Notable families and rich merchants built lavish town houses and patronized entire social districts around their new fashionable addresses, like Russell, Bedford, Clare, Salisbury, Grosvenor, Cavendish and most notably Drury Lane. Although the Whitehall–Westminster office complex was the administrative junction of the government, no London central authority presided over Westminster until the Common Council began regulating lighting, maintenance and urban markets in 1747. Joint-stock merchants challenged the chartered Livery guilds which had previously limited skilled labour to a chain of apprentices, journeymen and masters. New merchant ventures promoted a new financial elite preoccupied with luxury trade overseas. These merchants adopted a new ethos of urban sociability. Suburban families freely organized a new political and social order in their neighbourhoods by leasing their town houses to fashionable renters during London’s social ‘season’ when courts were in session. Middling sorts viewed operas in the Vauxhall Gardens and paraded horses and carriages at Hyde Park. From these stations of eminence, reformers launched new reform projects like the Foundling Hospital founded around 1741 and the Bow Street Runners organized in 1749 to lower crime. Watchmen were organized ward by ward, totalling an increase from 543 watchmen in 1642 to 672 in 1737.⁶

It was upon this exciting new backdrop that coffee made its first entrance on the London scene. Coffee’s proximity to London’s shops, theatres and pleasure gardens meant that coffeehouses were places filled with noise, games and expectant visitors. Coffeehouse men usually wished to find some form of genteel amusement, whether it took on high-life or low-life manifestations. The art of ‘trifling’ was simply the dexterous ability to combine several urban events together, to begin with a meal, to see a play and to return to the coffeehouse for discussion, games or news. Some coffeehouses were gambling dens, like the Greyhound Coffee House in London, which was outfitted with a billiards table. Others like Mary-le-Bone Gardens Coffee House were furnished with a lavish ballroom which, as one observer described, ‘was illuminated in an elegant manner with colored lamps: at one end of it women attended selling orgeat, lemonade, and other cooling liquors. This was intended as a representation of the English Coffee-house at Paris’.⁷ Gambling could be an activity in its own right, with regular customers on scheduled nights or merely a space filler until the beginning of a play. Although gentlemen frequently gambled in some of the more notable coffeehouses, gambling was a sort of low-life language across the hundreds of coffeehouses throughout London, many of which never grew in size or clientele beyond the working classes. On the other end of the social spectrum, the West End coffeehouses like Mary le-Bone Gardens Coffee House would have hosted London’s high social life and, as such, would have been displays of grandeur, in their own right, with lavish balls, a variety of drinks and possibly comic operas on their premises. It was very easy to overspend in these venues. When one needed to economize, one never went to London. One ‘trifled’ in cheaper towns. As Jane Austen explained in Persuasion (1818), ‘ “What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table …” but Mr. Shepherd felt that he could not be trusted in London, and had been skillful enough to … make Bath preferred.’⁸ London was dangerous because it was very often too expensive even for the rich!

The most socially diverse coffeehouses in eighteenth-century London were located in Exchange Alley, where a permanent transatlantic community of merchants ran the shipping interests, or in Covent Garden, which had the literary and political coffeehouses. Here ‘triflers’ abounded. Jonathan’s Coffeehouse and Garraway’s hosted the nation’s stock exchanges: the great games of chance which made and broke the fortunes of those who manipulated the goods of empire. As early as 1671, Garraway’s Coffeehouse auctioned off a large assortments of beaver coats and later slaves, indicating a substantial market connection to colonial America. Tea and claret were also available. That same year, the Hudson Bay Company sold stocks for an expedition of adventurers to the Hudson Bay. Jonathan Miles established Jonathan’s around 1680. Stockbrokers began moving into Jonathan’s during the 1690s, but its boom was not until 1720, when the South Sea Company unloaded many of its bonds there. Meanwhile, South Sea investment schemes at Garraway’s included up to £1,200,000 speculation in ship building, £2,000,000 in snuff manufacturing and £2,000,000 in Virginia walnuts. No less than 190 new companies organized. The ensuing uproar when the bubble burst first sounded from its coffeehouse investors, who angrily stormed out with whatever they could salvage and determined to erect a more restricted and responsible system of exchange. Stockbrokers at Jonathan’s eventually moved to Threadneedle Street in 1773 and established the Stock Exchange Coffee House, or simply ‘New Jonathan’s’. The coffee room there was exclusively reserved for brokers and merchants who paid a subscription. Dissatisfied brokers at Lloyd’s did the same thing, splitting off in 1769 and moving into the upper floor of the Royal Exchange in Cornhill in 1773.⁹

The South Sea Bubble was no small affair. It set in motion a challenge to Robert Walpole’s Whig ‘Court’ regime. Although the earl of Stanhope, Sunderland, and Charles Stanhope, secretary of the Treasury, only narrowly escaped being implicated in the scandal, the impeachment votes were very narrow indeed. Further, The London Journal and the Freedholder’s Journal upbraided Walpole’s government for running a corrupt fiscal state of stock-jobbers and monopolists who ruined fair trade. They called for a coalition opposition and the electoral results of the most contested election of the period, that of 1722, returned thirty-five more seats to the Hanoverian Tories.¹⁰

After the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720, colonial merchant coffeehouses in London began maturing and diversifying overseas investments. The Virginia Coffeehouse and the Baltic were major shipping exchanges that also brought in North American interests. In 1744, these interests united into the Virginia and Baltick Coffeehouse near the Royal Exchange in connection with a post office to receive foreign news. Up to that point, many Virginia coffeehouses existed. From 1702 to the 1720s, the Virginia Coffeehouse of Birchin Lane housed investment schemes worth thousands of pounds in wool, flannel, iron, copper, brass and trade with Germany. Pennsylvania shares were sold at the Virginia Coffee House of St Michael’s Alley in 1720. The owners of ships to Virginia and tidewater region of America moved again in 1798 to the Virginia and Maryland Coffeehouse in Newman’s Court, Cornhill. The Jerusalem Coffeehouse served as a maritime newsroom and captain’s headquarters, while the Jamaican was home to West Indian investo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I Coffee’s transatlantic society
• Part II Polishing communities and negotiating empire
• Part III Empire and revolution
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index