All about coffeeUkers, William H. (William Harrison)
History
All about coffee
Ukers, William H. (William Harrison)
Coffee; Coffee Industry; Drinking customs
St. James's was a Whig house frequented by members of Parliament, with a
fair sprinkling of literary stars. Garraway's catered to the gentry of
the period, many of whom naturally had Tory proclivities.
One of the notable coffee houses of Queen Anne's reign was Button's.
Here Addison could be found almost every afternoon and evening, along
with Steele, Davenant, Carey, Philips, and other kindred minds. Pope was
a member of the same coffee house club for a year, but his inborn
irascibility eventually led him to drop out of it.
At Button's a lion's head, designed by Hogarth after the Lion of Venice,
"a proper emblem of knowledge and action, being all head and paws," was
set up to receive letters and papers for the _Guardian_.[82] The
_Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ were born in the coffee house, and probably
English prose would never have received the impetus given it by the
essays of Addison and Steele had it not been for coffee house
associations.
Pope's famous _Rape of the Lock_ grew out of coffee-house gossip. The
poem itself contains one charming passage on coffee.[83]
Another frequenter of the coffee houses of London, when he had the money
to do so, was Daniel Defoe, whose _Robinson Crusoe_ was the precursor of
the English novel. Henry Fielding, one of the greatest of all English
novelists, loved the life of the more bohemian coffee houses, and was,
in fact, induced to write his first great novel, _Joseph Andrews_,
through coffee-house criticisms of Richardson's _Pamela_.
Other frequenters of the coffee houses of the period were Thomas Gray
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Garrick was often to be seen at Tom's in
Birchin Lane, where also Chatterton might have been found on many an
evening before his untimely death.
_The London Pleasure Gardens_
The second half of the eighteenth century was covered by the reigns of
the Georges. The coffee houses were still an important factor in London
life, but were influenced somewhat by the development of gardens in
which were served tea, chocolate, and other drinks, as well as coffee.
At the coffee houses themselves, while coffee remained the favorite
beverage, the proprietors, in the hope of increasing their patronage,
began to serve wine, ale, and other liquors. This seems to have been the
first step toward the decay of the coffee house.
[Illustration: A TRIO OF NOTABLES AT BUTTON'S IN 1730
The figure in the cloak is Count Viviani; of the figures facing the
reader, the draughts player is Dr. Arbuthnot, and the figure standing is
assumed to be Pope]
The coffee houses, however, continued to be the centers of intellectual
life. When Samuel Johnson and David Garrick came together to London,
literature was temporarily in a bad way, and the hack writers of the
time dwelt in Grub Street.
It was not until after Johnson had met with some success, and had
established the first of his coffee-house clubs at the Turk's Head, that
literature again became a fashionable profession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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