The coffeehouses of late seventeenth century London are legend as hotbeds for freedom of speech and the spread of ideas. In a retrospect of England, this unique time is eclipsed by the magnitude of the later adoption of tea as the drink of the nation. "The contest between these two beverages for the hearts and minds of the British consumer had been going on since the mid seventeenth century, with coffee in the ascendancy for the first hundred years after 1652" (Ellis 208). Tea became the beverage of choice for various reasons. The East India Company directed the trade routes by which tea arrived in England (Ellis 125). As such, they were able to fix prices to be competitive in the market. Ultimately, tea won the day because of the complication involved in making coffee. Tea was "simpler to make in the home: the leaves simply required boiling water to be poured over them, while coffee needed careful roasting and grinding before use" (Ellis 209). Because of the long journey taken by tea leaves before arriving in England, they were more lucrative as well. "By the 1730s close to a million pounds of tea a year were being important from China to Britain by the East India Company, which could sell it on the London market for four times what it had paid in China" (Schama 409). In the competitive market of early consumerist England, this was the mark of success.
While coffee may have been left behind in favor of tea in England, the shining example of freely circulating ideas remained a shining beacon in the murky times between 1650 and 1750. Society had changed drastically since Pasqua Rosee opened his shop in 1652, but rather than ridicule the past, the coffeehouse was idolized. This became especially true for academic pursuits. The coffeehouse had brought scholars and scientists together "whose work no longer kept [them] in studious isolation, like a magus or alchemist, but brought [them] into convivial communication, as a focus of collaborative research activity" (Ellis 164). While coffeehouses died away, scholars had learned that they were not alone and continued to work together.
While coffeehouses in practice varied in form, their ideal form relied on the accepted equality of all men in attendance and the respect to allow all to speak freely and courteously. It is little surprise that this concept was romanticized by rich New Yorkers in the early twentieth century.
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| Some Notes About the Coffee House: A Private Club |
Some Notes About The Coffee House, a private club: together with a list of resident and non-resident members, and including the rules of the Coffee House, rule six being that there shall be no rules. Coffee House. New York, 1926.
According to this small pamphlet, The Coffee House was a private club established in 1915. The men who formed this organization were fed up with the high costs of gentlemen's clubs and associations. They wanted to create a club with good food at minimal cost. The rules they set for themselves were: "No officers, no liveries, no tips, no set speeches, no candidates for membership, no charge accounts, no RULES". The ideal they were aspiring to was the open acceptance and non-judgmental attitude of the club as a whole.
Everything about the pamphlet reflects the coffeehouse as it was observed by Pepys, Dryden and Harrington. From the reproduction of the first page of A Coffee-house Dialogue to the stylized artwork of the cover, all signs point to the perfection of a bygone era. A perfection the members of this club sought to replicate for themselves.
Finis
The development of the coffeehouse in England was witness to an important era of political and social change. The introduction of new commodities from around the world created the opportunity for new social and public infrastructure that became essential in developing the identity of the intelligentsia in the Age of Reason. Coffee was accepted as the popular, social drug of choice and was taken with a healthy dose of local and international news. This wonderfully rich historic time is reflected in this sample of materials from the collection of The Lilly Library. The ideal of the coffeehouse continues to rule various aspects of modern life, from the morning newspaper with coffee to meeting friends for coffee to discuss the latest gossip. These qualities, along with the love of the caffeinated beverage owe their existence to the hundred year reign of the English coffeehouse.
