Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture ed. by Markman Ellis

Abstract

75 most emphatically not, in spite of what Mr. Gottlieb says, an Englishman. Neil Guthrie Trinity College University of Toronto Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture , ed. Markman Ellis. 4 Volumes. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. Pp. xlix ⫹ 424; xiii ⫹ 429; xii ⫹ 395; xii ⫹ 471. $595. Mr. Ellis has done a magnificent job of collecting, ordering, introducing, and annotating these four volumes; it is one of the few such collections now emerging from presses with the rapidity of openings of neighborhood Starbucks of which one can say with full conviction: this is worth the price. The four volumes are divided by period and type: I. Restoration Satire; II. Eighteenth-Century Satire; III. Drama; and IV. Science and History Writing. Each volume is prefaced by a short but useful Introduction; and the entire collection has a highly informative overview in its ‘‘General Introduction,’’ one of the most cogent and useful discussions of any topic in the eighteenth century that I have read in quite a while. Each separate text (sixty-nine in all) is introduced by several paragraphs establishing the context, offering antecedents and generic considerations, and providing bibliographical details (title pages and illustrations are also in facsimile, along with the texts). Each text is accompanied with an informative set of back notes. Volume IV contains an index to the entire collection. The reproduced pages are crisp and clear, the paper is of high quality. The ‘‘General Introduction’’ is particularly interested in reexamining the prevelant notion (inherited from the nineteenth century) that coffeehouses were institutions of ‘‘new egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation ,’’ a view underpinning the modern notion of public spaces for the free and open discussion among all classes of the ideas that would lead to democratic cultures . Mr. Ellis traces this notion to the American sociologist Hans Speier (1950), and then to Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, trans. into English, 1989). For Speier, the intent was to contrast English and German society, in order to ‘‘retrain’’ postwar Germany in the virtues of democracy; the lack of coffeehouses in Germany, he argued, was a good indication of why it ended up a fascist state. Habermas, on the other hand, found traces of a coffeehouse culture in Germany, and hence a basis for hope that a democratic culture was not totally un-Germanic. For both, the coffeehouse was a public space, but Mr. Ellis notes that Habermas in particular was more interested in the ‘‘idea’’ than in historical accuracy; in fact, he based his view of the coffeehouse culture on the work of Leslie Stephen and George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘‘nostalgic accounts . . . of the civilised values of the reign of Queen Anne.’’ They, in turn, had relied on Thomas Babington Macaulay ’s Whig mythology, which had transformed the ‘‘eighteenth-century coffee -house into a kind of pastoral, a golden age of communicative rationality .’’ Mr. Ellis notes that the texts in his collection show this notion to be inaccurate : ‘‘the coffee-house was equally the home of sedition, sectarian strife, domestic spies, incendiary rhetoric, dissension and discord.’’ In his Introduction to ‘‘Restoration 76 Satire,’’ Mr. Ellis notices the rise of the coffeehouse during the Interregnum, and hence the restored King’s dubiety about the institution. He warns us, however , that the texts he has gathered are of better use as a contribution to the history of ideas than for providing a material history of the coffeehouse. The satires, he observes, are ‘‘almost entirely hostile to the new forms of sociability and manners associated with the coffeehouse ’’; they were written by and large by Tory sympathizers, who found these meeting places filled with ‘‘sedition and anti-court sentiment, and after the rise of party in the late 1670s, with the Whig political interest.’’ Fortunately, perhaps, not all the texts are political—the spirit of Restoration bawdy lives in a piece like the anonymous ‘‘Women’s Petition Against Coffee . Representing to publick consideration the grand inconveniencies accruing to their SEX from the excessive use of that drying, enfeebling LIQUOR. Presented to the Right Honorable the keepers of the liberty of VENUS’’ (1764), in which we learn that ‘‘the continual sipping of this pittiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two...