Edmund Burke in the Tavern

Abstract

The association of the public house with the plebeian radical movement in the 1790s has diverted attention from the function of the eighteenth-century tavern, which (unlike the alehouse) was typically a highly refined space for elegant dining. The London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, where Richard Price and the Revolution Society gathered after hearing Price's sermon, was one of the grandest, most elegant taverns in all of Europe, providing dinners to London's wealthy commercial classes, and to East India Company employees in particular. In his writings on the French Revolution, Burke understands the tavern as the headquarters of a commercial class whose bureaucratic regime has begun to compromise English freedoms. Burke's concern about metropolitan tavern meetings is not with the threat of an incipient democratic movement prompted by the “lower orders,” but with the consequences of a public sphere dominated by wealthy merchants who patronize London's exclusive tavern societies. Burke's concerns about the French Revolution owed more to his role as a prosecutor in the Warren Hastings trial than is often acknowledged.