The coff eehouse was an institution central to the organisation of public life in early eighteenth-century London. The close connection between the essay periodical and the coff eehouse becomes especially clear in the very fi rst issue of The Tatler:
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of White’s Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will’s Coff ee-house;
Learning, under the title of The Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will
61 Altick, The English Common Reader 45.
62 ibid., 46.
63 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture 2.
have from St. James’s Coff ee-house; and what else I have to off er on any other subject, shall be dated from my own apartment.64
The subject matter is divided and ordered in the text according to diff erent sections, each emanating from the particular place – coff eehouse, chocolate house, or private apartment – where the topic in question is most likely to be discussed. The paper’s design thus traces London’s social geography: The coff eehouses stand as newsprint analogues of actual places, public and private.65 As Erin Mackie has stated, “at the coff eehouse, every man could take up the mantle of statesman, politician, and critic.”66 A new kind of public disassociated from the pre-existing sphere of public authority surrounding the state and court was housed in the new urban coff ee venue. Here, all types of news became generally accessible and were opened to questioning and rational debate. The coff eehouses presented a microcosm of London’s social world, which in turn was compiled in the essay periodical. Linking the periodical to the coff eehouse was a necessity which was not only acknowledged as such by The Tatler, but also by The Female Tatler. As a woman, however, Mrs. Crackenthorpe faced a severe problem: She was not allowed to frequent coff eehouses, but as a "proper"
editor persona, access to coff eehouse circles was essential. Emphasising her popularity as a hostess, she solves the problem as follows:
Not that my drawing room ever had the least ill character, tho’ a foolish baronet once call’d it the scandal offi ce. But as I am courteous to all persons, and strangers have the same respect paid ’em as my former acquaintance, half the nation visits me, where I have a true history of the world; and to oblige those who are absent from me, by turns, shall endeavour to give it ’em again.
I shall date all my advices from my own apartment, which comprehends, White’s, Will’s, the Grecian, Garraway’s, in Exchange-Alley, and all the India houses within the Bills of Mortality. Since grave statesmen, airy beaus, lawyers, cits, poets and parsons, and ladies of all degrees assemble there, each person delivers himself according to his talent, which gives me a superfi cial smattering of all of ’em.67
64 Mackie, The Commerce of Everyday Life 50.
65 ibid., 45.
66 ibid.
67 Morgan, ed., The Female Tatler 2.
The account that Mrs. Crackenthorpe gives of her own venture starts with a self-deprecatory comment, indirectly associating her locus of gathering, her drawing room, with a scandal offi ce. She plays with the image and title of her own paper, arousing interest while performatively distancing herself from scandal. She brings up the trope of gossip, inextricably linked to women’s conversation, to make clear that this is not what she is interested in as an editor. An utter paradox, as my analysis will show. But this proclamation serves to reassert Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s discursive authority, to show that she "is someone", that she has "her proper place" in the social world of her time. She presents herself as a generous, open-minded hostess, welcoming old friends and new guests, thereby emphasising the variety of her social conduct, a stratagem which serves to create interest in her paper. The self-confi dent claim
“half the nation visits me,” though clearly a hyperbole, serves to demonstrate her social standing, to demarcate her role as an "intelligencer of the public sphere". Mrs. Crackenthorpe holds that she has “a true history of the world,”
repeatedly stressing her competence and social pre-eminence. Like the initial issue of The Tatler, the fi rst Female Tatler is urged to establish a link between itself and popular coff eehouses. Mrs. Crackenthorpe thereby shows that she does not "stand back" from The Tatler by mentioning the same coff eehouses, namely White’s, Will’s, The Grecian; she even names more than were listed in the debut-Tatler.
Instead of her frequenting coff eehouses, she imports coff eehouse-culture and its actors to her private apartments: The coff eehouse comes to her and gathers in her drawing room, not the other way round. It is understood that she does not mention the fact that as a woman, she was not admitted to coff eehouses:
She gallantly circumvents this tiny obstacle on her way to becoming a premier society lady and periodical editor. Putting the rule to the test, she gives a representative selection of her company, mentioning statesmen, lawyers, poets and others. By asserting how varied and widely stratifi ed her social conduct is, she again emphasises her qualifi cation and authority as a periodical writer. It is interesting to note that neither statesmen nor poets are frequent focuses of The Female Tatler, and lawyers are mostly represented in a very bad light. But those paradoxes will be the subject of analyses in later chapters. The Female Tatler mentions these professions because their representatives constitute the social groups that in turn make up the coff eehouses’ clientele and the periodical’s readership.
The main underlying paradigm that organises social spaces is the juxtaposition between public and private: Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s private apartments in juxtaposition to the public world of the coff eehouse. Private, coded as female, and public, coded as male, are contradistinctions that organise contemporary thought, allowing the rhetorically feminine narrative voice, the speaker of The Female Tatler, to either reassert or transgress present boundaries, as will be shown in the analysis parts of the dissertation. Before focusing on these questions, however, the history of the coff eehouse will be briefl y summarised in order to explain why it was of such great social importance.
Coff eehouses became the centres of literary and political criticism between 1680 and 1730. First introduced to Europe as a drug, coff ee was reported to eff ect major transformations in the drinker. In the early seventeenth century, travellers to the Near East gave reports of an aromatic drink with invigorating eff ects. A travel book from 1609 that contains descriptions of coff eehouses in Arabia, Turkey and Egypt explains: “Their coff a houses are more common than Ale houses in England; but they use not so much to sit in the houses as on benches on both sides of the streets […] if there be any news, it is talked of there.”68 From the start, coff ee drinking was understood to be primarily a social experience, associated with the spreading of news and the burgeoning of open public discussion. The coff ee-house experience arrived on the scene in England in 1650, when a Jewish immigrant from Turkey set up a shop in Oxford. It was in the capital, however, “that the institution really took off and became a vital part of the fabric of urban life.”69 Equally exotic were tea and chocolate, which were also advertised in periodicals.
The coff eehouse was characterised by special rules of conduct that discouraged swearing, gambling, rowdiness and sedition, and encouraged relaxed sociability and the improvement of conversation. No alcoholic beverages were sold. Because coff ee was cheap and customers were welcome to linger for an hour or two without ordering more, the coff eehouse was a
68 Anonymous, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Consisting of Authentic Writers in Our Own Tongue: And Continued with Others of Note, That Have Published Histories, Voyages... Relating to Any Part of the Continent of Asia, Africa, America, Europe... With a Great Variety of Cuts, Prospects, Ruins, Maps, and Charts. (London: T. Osborne), 1745, 797.
69 Mackie, The Commerce of Everyday Life 15.
place where members of the various social classes met. In his famous study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas explains:
There was a certain parity of the educated, between members of the aristocracy and bourgeois intellectuals. The coff eehouse not merely gave access to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shopkeepers.70
A very diverse clientele came together to discuss about politics, news, and other matters of public interest. Periodicals acted as facilitators for these discussions. They initiated what Erin Mackie has called a closed circuit of production and consumption. Thereby, she means that the commercial periodical press and coff eehouse society entered into a mutually fruitful dialogue: “Presumably written, and even generated in the discussions at particular coff eehouses, each section in The Tatler is in turn circulated and read in coff eehouses, refuelling the conversation.”71 This interdependency between periodical and coff eehouse is an important communicative element, framing the relationship between writer, authorial voice, and reader.
The omnipresence of printed material and the advent of new discursive spaces like the coff eehouse in turn produced new discursive forms. But how exactly did the "newly enlightened public" discuss and debate? Which were the discursive frameworks members of the "polite enlightened public" adapted their mode of behaviour, their choice of topics and vocabulary to?