1700's London Coffeehouse Culture

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345Cowan/ Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 3 (2004) Pp. 345366.

R. SPECTATORANDTHE COFFEEHOUSE

PUBLIC SPHERE

M

Brian Cowan is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University and the author ofThe SocialLife of Coffee: Curiosity, Commerce and Civil Society in Early Modern Britain (New Havenand London: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

Brian Cowan

Recent critical and historical studies of post-Restoration England have

been fascinated with the thought that the period saw the emergence of something

called a public sphere and that the coffeehouse was a central locus for it. Jr-

gen Habermas used the British model case as the prototype for his now famousthesis that a novel form of bourgeois public life (brgerliche ffentlichkeit) de-veloped in the century preceding the French Revolution, and he used the history

of the coffeehouse in post-Restoration London as his prime example of the pre-

cise sort of social form that this public sphere took.1 In this influential account,

the coffeehouse is portrayed as a social space dedicated to high-minded discourse

on a wide range of affairs; it is also assumed to be open to any man who wanted

to participate in the discussions conducted therein, regardless of social rank. More

recent studies have tended to agree and have argued that coffeehouses were actu-

ally more accessible than even Habermas assumed at first.2 As such, the coffee-house offers the perfect example for what Habermas wanted to call his nascent

bourgeois public sphere.

One of the main sources for Habermass concept of the public sphere was

the ideal image of coffeehouse society presented in the periodical journalism of

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.3 Habermass bourgeois public sphere origi-

nated in what he thought was an increasing ability to distinguish between the

private subject and public life. The public sphere constituted the forum in which

private subjects came together to exercise their reason: it was an ffentlichkeit

von Privatleutena public of private subjects. One of the most important meansby which this happened was through the development of a variety of new forms


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346 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 3

of social interchange and communication between these private subjects, coffee-

houses, clubs, and the press being among the most prominent examples. For Hab-

ermas, the moral weeklies (a misnomer since their papers were published as

often as three or six times a week) of Addison and Steele were central to the

construction of a public sphere in the literary worldan apolitical literarische

ffentlichkeitin his formulationand they provided the template in England forwhat would later become a full blown public sphere in the political realm (poli-tische ffentlichkeit). As such, this process offered the critical foundation for theexpression and legitimacy of a truly democratic, and a truly reasonable, public

opinion.4

Habermas bases his judgment on the undeniable popularity of the works

of Addison and Steele. This much is clear. Their journals, the Tatler (170911),the Spectator (171114), and the Guardian (1713) were an instant success in aliterary marketplace where periodical publications were by and large commer-

cially unsuccessful and could be sustained only through partisan political patron-

age.5 Addisons modest computation was that he could count on 60,000 to

80,000 readers for each issue. The papers attracted avid subscribers among indi-

viduals as well as coffeehouses that catered to large numbers of readers; Addison

estimated as many as twenty readers for each copy printed.6 Copies of the Specta-tor papers also circulated well outside metropolitan London. They were oftenenclosed in letters from metropolitan readers to their correspondents in the coun-

tryside.7 Within the first year of its publication, provincial societies had sprung up

in order to encourage the reading of the Spectator. With the approval of bothAddison and Steele, a Gentlemans Society was founded on 3 November 1711

in which a group of Spectatorial aficionados would gather together at Youngers

Coffeehouse in Spalding to read the paper and to discuss the moral lessons con-

tained in each issues essay. Similar endeavors took place in Scotland as well. 8

The success, influence, and enduring popularity of the Tatler and espe-cially the Spectator papers are well known and indisputable. It is less obvious thatAddison and Steele were the champions of a public sphere as Habermas and his

many admirers would maintain.9 This essay builds a case for concluding that they

were not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics. The Spectatorproject, as I shall call the collaborative periodical prose writing of Addison andSteele in the later years of Queen Annes reign, put the reform and the discipline

of public sociability at the heart of its agenda. A crucial aspect of this social

reform project was to close off and restrain, rather than to open up, venues for

public debate and especially public debate on matters of political concern. Far

from championing an easily accessible coffeehouse society, unrestrained newspa-

per reading, and political debate in the public sphere, the Spectator project aimedto reign in and discipline these practices. The Spectatorial public sphere, such as it

was, did not encourage or even condone Habermass political public-ness (poli-tische ffentlichkeit), it sought to tame it and make it anodyne.

This conclusion should be less surprising than it seems. Despite the ap-

pearance of numerous recent studies detailing the putative rise of a public sphere

in post-Restoration England, it is difficult to find many outright and principled

defenders of such an ideal public sphere in the political culture of the time. This

was an issue upon which both Whigs and Tories could agree.10 While both sides


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were willing to engage in practical political action in the public sphereactions

such as petitioning, coffeehouse debate, club organization, and especially the dis-

semination of political propagandafew Whigs or Tories were willing to counte-

nance a normative public sphere in the Habermasian sense. The Spectatorial chal-

lenge was aimed at precisely those social spaces and discursive practices that

Habermas singled out as the constitutive elements of his public sphere. Properlyunderstood in the mental world of the Spectator project, the coffeehouse was notthe practical realization of the Habermasian public sphere, it was rather the seat

of a whole host of anxieties about proper behavior in that public space. Coffee-

house activities such as newspaper reading, political discussion, and club social-

ization were all objects of the Spectatorial reform project. The object of this refor-

mation was not the perpetuation of a rational public sphere. The goal was rather

to construct a social world that was amenable to the survival of Whig politics

during a time in which the future of Whiggery was unclear.

Although the Whiggery of Addison and Steele was well known in their

own day and continues so today, the precise nature of their partisan politics re-

mains as opaque as it was when the papers were originally published. Some critics

have emphasized Addisons and Steeles nonpartisan moderation in their periodi-

cal prose, while others have observed the flagrantly partisan Whiggery of the

essays.11 More recently, the papers have emerged in the work of Lawrence Klein

and others as the product of a new Whig ethic of politeness. Klein in particular

has cogently argued that the Spectator project aimed to elevate the social status ofthe coffeehouse in the course of a Whig struggle for politeness.12 This essay

refines Kleins interpretation of Spectatorial Whiggery as part of a more general

culture of politeness by arguing that the Spectator project, and the reform ofcoffeehouse society that it promoted, was a powerfully effective response to the

crisis of Whig political fortunes in the later years of Queen Annes reign. It also

insists that the Spectatorial essays of 170914 were a specific means of reacting to

the high Tory resurgence of those years.

As such, the Spectator project must be seen as distinct from the laterworks of both Addison and Steele and indeed the course of Whig politics in the

later eighteenth century. The argument of this essay does not extend its purviewto the equally contentious early years of George Is reign, years which saw the

independent emergence of new periodical prose by both Addison and Steele. Their

collaboration came to an end after Addison contributed a couple of desultory

essays to Steeles journal The Lover (1714). Addison continued to produce essaysin journals such as the Freeholder (171516) and the Old Whig(1719), whileSteele worked away at new projects such as The Englishman (171415), the Plebian(1719), and several other periodicals. After the Hanoverian accession, Addison

and Steele would increasingly find themselves at odds with one another as Addi-

son found himself attached to the post-junto Whig ministries of James Stanhopeand Robert Spencer, the second earl of Sunderland, while Steele sided with Robert

Walpoles Whig opposition. Addison profited from his patron first and took the

office of secretary of state along with Sunderland in 1717. Steeles allegiance would

only pay off after 1721, when Walpole became chancellor of the exchequer and

subsequently rewarded his ally with ministerial patronage.


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Addisons and Steeles collaborative efforts in the Tatler and the Specta-tor were rather different from their more blatantly partisan exercises in the worldof Tory exclusion and Jacobite rebellion that emerged after Queen Annes death

on 1 August 1714. This difference was noted by contemporaries as well, most of

whom compared Addisons and Steeles later partisan writings of George Is reign

unfavorably to their Spectatorial periodicals.13 Spectatorial Whiggery was bornout of the collapse of junto Whiggery in 170910. The resurgence of high church

Toryism occasioned by Henry Sacheverells firebrand preaching at St. Pauls ca-

thedral on 5 November 1709 and his subsequent show trial in the first months of

1710 laid the groundwork for the cashiering of junto Whig ministers and the

election of a solidly Tory parliament later in the year. The Spectator project was aproduct of this crisis of Whig political fortunes.14 Addison and Steele implicitly

challenged high church politics and morality in their essays and they did so through

advocating a wholesale reform of the constituent elements of Habermass public

sphere. This was a bold and ultimately a successful attempt to make periodicalprose a legitimate means through which a Whig message could be conveyed to a

broad public without appearing to engage in the vulgar and disreputable parti-

sanship that had largely characterized the journalistic media before the interven-

tions of Isaac Bickerstaff, Mr. Spectator, and Nestor Ironsides.

Addison and Steele used the coffeehouse milieu in their periodical essays

as a sort of virtual stage on which they might expose the foibles and follies ofsocial life in public spaces. Steeles Isaac Bickerstaff makes the edifying intent of

the papers explicit in his dedication to the collected edition of the Tatler papers:The general purpose of this paper, is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the

disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general sim-

plicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour.15 Their efforts to effect a

reformation of manners in the coffeehouses in particular were applauded by John

Hughes, who wrote to the Tatlers Isaac Bickerstaff not long after it commencedpublication:

No body (I think) before you, thought of a way to bring the stage as it

were into the coffee-house, and there attack those gentlemen who

thought themselves out of the reach of raillery, by prudently avoiding its

chief walks and districts. . . . In pursuing this design, you will always

have a large scene before you, and can never be at a loss for characters

to entertain a town so plentifully stockd with em. The follies of the

finest minds, which a philosophic surgeon knows how to dissect, will

best employ your skill. (T64, 1:4467)

Although he correctly identified the role of the coffeehouse in Bickerstaffs moral

chidings, Hughes was overly generous in his praise of the Tatlers originality. Mostnotably, the coffeehouse had been the main conceit for public sociability used by

the Tory satirist Edward Ward in his periodicals The Weekly Comedy: As it isDayly Acted at Most Coffee-Houses in London (1699), the London Spy (16981700), as well as in his pamphlet poems The School of Politicks: Or, the Hu-mours of a Coffee-House (1690; 1691) and Vulgus Britannicus: Or The British


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Hudibras (1710; 1711). Wards purpose in these works was the standard satiricalone of scourging vice and villany in society at large but not with respect to

particular persons.16 What distinguishes Wards satire from Addison and Steeles

project was that Ward offered little prospect that things could be any better in the

modern city. For Ward, urban coffeehouse society was a den of frivolous news

reading, foppish display, and dishonest trade at its best; at its worst, it was thelivery of discontent which served as a gathering place for disaffected subjects,

most often dissenters.17

The Spectator project sought to adapt this Tory satire of the coffeehouseand used it to promote a new and more positive vision for the prospects of urban

sociability. Here then is the reason why Addison and Steele chose to single out the

coffeehouse as the primary venue for their reformation of public manners: a truly

reformed coffeehouse might stand out as a respectable alternative to the Sachev-

erellite Tory claim that only the Church of England can offer a solid foundation

for the moral revitalization of society.18

What were the vices Addison and Steele sought to tame? A unifying con-

cern in the Spectatorial critique of manners was a desire to tame what the authors

saw as an excessive taste for novelty, gallantry, and fashion that prevailed in

the coffeehouses of early eighteenth-century London (S, 49, 1:209). Such a thirstfor novelty was thought to be not only unbecoming of a man, but also a depraved

misuse of the public sphere. It was a violation of the restraint, good taste, anddecorum that were construed to be proper behavior in coffeehouse society. The

pursuit of new things simply for the sake of their being new was considered to be

an irrational vice that must be tamed. The worst offender in this regard was the

newsmonger, and his natural home was the coffeehouse.

Attacks on the inordinate appetite of the English public for news were a

commonplace of seventeenth-century satire, and they were deployed most readily

by servants of the crown who had an interest in controlling the flow of informa-

tion to the public outside the confines of the court.19 Roger LEstrange set forth

his reasons for tightly controlling the news in 1663, not long after his appoint-

ment as chief licenser of the press for the restored monarchy. Even supposing the

press in order [and] the people in their right wits, he declared a Publick Mercu-

ry should never have my vote; because I think it makes the multitude too familiar

with the actions, and counsels of their superiours, too pragmaticall and censori-

ous, and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right, and licence,

to be meddling with the government. This was printed, paradoxically, in the

first issue of his own licensed newspaper, The Intelligencer (166366), whoseonly purpose he thought was to redeem the vulgar from their former mistakes,

and delusions, and to preserve them from the like for the time to come.20 Such

were the fears of the Restoration court and its most vehement defenders, and

these royalists were the prime motivators behind the various attempts to suppress

the kingdoms coffeehouses in the later seventeenth century.21

Although the demand for news was great and the publishers of post-

Restoration England worked hard to supply that demand with a growing number


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their papers.33 Together, Addison and Steele expressed some of the most impor-

tant criticism of the news culture of early-eighteenth-century England through

their Spectator project.

Like LEstrange and Defoe before them, Addison and Steele used the news-

paper form to convey their disapproval for the practice of newsmongering. Once

we recognize this apparent contradiction, it becomes difficult if not impossible to

make any simple association between the seventeenth-century news revolution

and the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere. In its ideal form, the public

sphere envisioned by the Spectatorial periodical essay was a carefully policed forum

for urbane but not risqu conversation, for moral reflection rather than obsessionwith the news of the day or the latest fashions, and for temperate agreement on

affairs of state rather than heated political debate.34 In other words, it was not

envisioned as an open forum for competitive debate between ideologies and inter-

ests, but rather as a medium whereby a stable socio-political consensus could be

enforced through making partisan political debate appear socially unacceptable

in public spaces such as coffeehouses or in media like periodical newspapers.

For the new Whigs such as Addison and Steele, just as much as for old

Tories like LEstrange, coffeehouse discourse was best when it was politically tran-

quil. All parties, both Whig and Tory, shared an aversion to widening popular

participation in the political public sphere. Tim Harriss arguments on the re-

course by the Restoration court to appeals for popular support as a last ditch

resort apply with equal validity for the partisan political culture of the early eigh-

teenth century.35

The popular politics with which recent historians have been soenamored were extremely unpopular to the politicians of late-seventeenth and

early-eighteenth-century England. Despite the practical necessity of such appeals

to popular support in a cutthroat world where even the dynastic succession re-

mained in doubt, the politicization of the public sphere remained a move that was

only made in extremis. Tarring his Whig and dissenting opponents with the brushof vulgar popularity was a propagandistic button that LEstrange could not resist

pushing at every available opportunity. For their part, Addison and Steele de-

plored the intrusion of the rabble of mankind, that crowd our streets, coffee-

houses, feasts, and publick tables into the debates on the state of the politicalnation.36 The major difference between the Whig moralists and the chief Restora-

tion Tory propagandist was that the Spectator project shifted the burden of re-sponsibility for controlling the public sphere from the repressive vigilance of the

servants of the state to the self-awareness of the individual.37 The politeness

espoused by Mr. Spectator was a social ethic in which the regulation of proper

behavior, both through external shaming as well as internalized guilt, was as im-

portant as social polish or an urban lifestyle. Whig politeness was a form of

policing just as stringent, and just as socially exclusive, as Tory persecution.

While they took on the appearance and the publishing schedule of a news-paper, the Tatler and Spectator were not themselves newspapers. Although theTatler included some traditional news items in its pages when it began publica-tion, such content gradually diminished over time, and it was entirely absent from

the Spectator project. Addison proudly announced that my paper has not a sin-gle word of news, a reflection in politicks, nor a stroke of party.38 Addison and

Steele deemed traditional news to be either too controversial (that is, factional) or


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too trivial, and they became increasingly critical of both its producers and its

consumers in their writings. They understood that the periodicity of a newspaper

created a constant expectation among the reading public that something news-

worthy would occur on a regular basis. Thus they claimed that the news writer

was bound to become the greatest advocate of continuing the war against France,

because war stories filled copy and sold papers. Without a war, the news writerswould be forced to invent stories, as Steele claimed happened during the (relative-

ly pacific) reign of Charles II, when one could not furnish out a single paper of

news, without lighting up a comet in Germany, or a fire in Moscow, [and] . . .

prodigies were grown so familiar that they had lost their name.39 Even worse,

Steeles Bickerstaff maintained, the style of the news writers was so confusing and

the reliability of their reports so tenuous that their writings seize the noddles of

such as were not born to have thoughts of their own. The consequences of read-

ing such ill-mannered prose was severe:

The tautology, the contradictions, the doubts, and wants of confirma-

tions, are what keep up imaginary entertainments in empty heads, and

produce neglect of their own affairs, poverty, and bankruptcy, in many

of the shop-statesmen; but turn the imaginations of those of a little

higher orb into deliriums of dissatisfaction, which is seen in a continual

fret upon all that touches their brains.40

On the other hand, if newsreaders were fed with the right sort of edifying infor-

mationthe kind that might daily instil into them . . . sound and wholesome

sentimentsthe vulgar public might be spared the confusion and the despairthat ensued from reading the news offered by grub-street hacks. News readers

were therefore the blanks of society, truly tabulae rasae, who could be alteredfor good or for ill by the kinds of works they read.41

Those who read the wrong papers were prone to become newsmon-

gers. Addison and Steele often caricatured the newsmonger as a man who had

an inordinate interest in the affairs of other countries, and especially their matters

of state. Richard Steele devoted several issues of his Tatler to the story of anupholsterer, known as the greatest newsmonger in our quarter, who drove his

business into bankruptcy and his family into poverty as a result of his chasingafter news rather than attending to his affairs. Steele concludes by stating that he

intended the story for the particular benefit of those worthy citizens who spend

more time in a coffeehouse than in their shops, and whose thoughts are so taken

up with the affairs of the Allies [in the War of the Spanish Succession], that they

forget their customers (T, 155, 2:373).

The upholsterers news obsession was presented as a particularly English,

and even more so a Tory, vice.42 Steeles Bickerstaff drew a parallel between the

upholsterers political fantasies and the chivalric delusions of Cervantess Don

Quixote. The newspapers of this island are as pernicious to weak heads in En-

gland as ever books of chivalry to Spain, he declared (T, 178, 2:471). Althoughthe upholsterers chastisement is supposed to be aimed at the vices to which all

Englishmen are prone, he is nevertheless clearly identified as a Tory sympathizer:

his favorite journals include Tory publications such as the Post Boy, the Modera-tor, and the Examiner; among the Whig papers, only Jacques de Fonvives Post-


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Man caught his eye.43 In other papers, Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator ridicule thosereaders who trust the veracity of John Dyers high Tory newsletters.44 Like Quixote,

English Tories such as the upholsterer or Sir Roger de Coverley are consistently

portrayed by Addison and Steele as hopelessly out of date, romantic daydreamers

who may be enjoyed for the quaint humor, the warm companionship and enter-

tainment their company provides, but they are also clearly marked out as unsuit-able for serious political responsibility.45 It is another testament to the success of

the Spectator project that the Quixotic Tories such as Coverley and the upholstererbecame some of the most popular characters introduced in the papers.

However popular the Spectatorial critique of newsmongering may have

been, it was not accepted uncritically by all. The very popularity of the essays

invited a variety of contested readings of their meaning and import. One reader of

Steeles caricature of the upholsterer shifted the blame for his ruin from his turn-

ing politician to the refusal of his customers, primarily persons of quality, to

pay their accounts.46 Steele was obviously stung by the response, for he responded

in Tatler no. 180 by admitting that the complaint was far from groundless andused it as the occasion for writing an essay on the need for all subjects, whatever

their social status, to honor their debts and financial obligations (T, 180, 2:478).

Criticism of popular newsmongering had of course been the mainstay of

Restoration-era complaints against the rise of the coffeehouses. Samuel Butlers

Theophrastan characters included the intelligencer who frequents clubs and

coffee-houses [as] markets of news, along with a newsmonger who is a re-

tailer of rumour and the coffee-man who attracts his customers primarilythrough allowing them to read and share the news. His caricatures were part of a

commonplace satire of the late seventeenth-century coffeehouse news industry.47

These satires did not abate in the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe cited approv-

ingly Steeles story of the upholsterer and went on to advise the aspirant trades-

man that state news and politics . . . is none of his business.48 Letters to the

political upholsterer became a regular feature in the Whiggish newspaper TheDaily Courant(170235) and graphic satires of tradesmen involved in news andpublic affairs to the detriment of their own business continued to be produced

(fig. 1). Addison and Steele even invented a neologism for their newsmongeringbte noire: a quidnunc, from the Latin for what now? or whats the news?49

The name seems to have struck a chord with their readers, for the term remained

in common currency well into the nineteenth century (fig. 2).50

Aside from the waste of time involved in chasing after the inconsequen-

tial trivia of news, this sort of mania for information was also seen as suspect

because it contributed to the degradation of the quality of coffeehouse discourse

itself. This was the purpose behind the Spectatorial reform of coffeehouse society.

To call a piece of news coffeehouse discourse in post-Restoration England was

instantly to diminish its value and its trustworthiness, for it was equated withgossip, or mere rumor.51 Jonathan Swift protested that it is a great deal below

me to spread coffeehouse reports and often declared that he did not bother to go

to coffeehouses because they were unreliable gossip centers.52 Sir Leoline Jenkins,

secretary of state for Charles II, thought it unwise to measure the temper of the

nation by the humour of our coffee houses, for he believed that the bulke of the

nation is not so injust, nor so ill natured as the opinionated men who dominated


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Figure 1. The Blacksmith lets his Iron grow cold attending to the Taylors news, etching and

engraving. From Oxford Magazine (June 1772), BM Sat. 5074. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Li-brary, Yale University, 772.6.0.2.


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Figure 2. Quid nunc, or the upholsterer shaving, etching and engraving. From Every Mans Mag-azine (December 1771). The figure of Spectatorial satire, the political upholsterer, is also derided asa Quid nunc in this print.Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 771.12.0.5.


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coffeehouse conversations.53 The purveyor of such rumors, the coffeehouse states-

man, or the coffeehouse politician, was another stock figure of ridicule. And

much like the newsmonger, he was seen as an inept commentator on affairs, more

interested in self-display than in making any substantial contribution to the for-

mation of public opinion. He was an amateur, a veritable armchair critic who

knew little of the real stakes involved in public affairs and yet was always eager tooffer his ill-considered advice on those matters. A Restoration-era satire com-

plained that theres no man comes . . . [to a coffeehouse], but hes a great master

in state affairs, and can ex tempore dictate any thing (as he thinks) worthy to beacted by a council, or Parliament.54 The trope was taken up by Addison and

Steele in their moral essays, and the coffeehouse politician remained a stock fig-

ure of ridicule for more than a century.55 In the Regency era, William Hazlitt

could still find a receptive audience for a critical essay on coffeehouse politicians

in his Table Talk (182122).56

In this respect, then, the irresponsible chatter of masculine coffeehouse

politicians was hardly distinguishable from womens domestic gossiping.57 Such

comparisons had been a standard trope in the satirical literature on coffeehouse

conversation almost as soon as it became a phenomenon of note in Restoration

London. A 1667 broadside proclaimed in doggerel verse that at the coffeehouse,

Here men do talk of everything, / With large and liberal lungs, / Like women at

a gossiping. Another feared that men by visiting these Stygian tap-houses [coffee-

houses] will usurp upon [womens] prerogative of tatling, and soon learn to excel

us in talkativeness: a quality wherein our sex has ever claimed preheminence.58

These were precisely the sort of analogies that Addison and Steele sought to rob

of their aptness through their efforts to purge coffeehouse conversation of its

triviality, its unreliability, and thus, its effeminacy. Steeles Tatler claimed to havetaken its title in honour of the fair sex, but its real intent was to reform the

practice of discourse itself, to turn idle tattling into polite conversation.59 Daniel

Defoe was less sanguine about the prospects for the perceived Spectatorial reform

of coffeehouse discourse. The tea-table among the ladies, and the coffeehouse

among the men, he declared, seem to be places of new invention for a deprava-

tion of our manners and morals, places devoted to scandal, and where the charac-

ters of all kinds of persons and professions are handled in the most merciless

manner, where reproach triumphs, and we seem to give ourselves a loose to fall

upon one another in the most unchristian and unfriendly manner in the world.60

In other words, there was still little difference between womens private gossip

and mens public discourse.

It should not be thought that gossip and newsmongering were the only

targets of the Spectatorial critique of coffeehouse talk. Addison and Steele also

took aim at anyone whose conversation did not measure up to their standards of

discursive decorum, the general rule of which was That men should not talk toplease themselves, but those that hear them (T, 264, 3:337). Thus their satireshit hard at time-wasting coffeehouse orators, such as loquacious bores, boasters,

projectors, pedants, sardonic laughers, over-zealous gesticulators, and even sing-

ers and whistlers.61 Steeles Isaac Bickerstaff called for the utter extirpation of

these [offending] orators and story-tellers, which I look upon as very great pests

of society. Bickerstaffs pronouncement here was not intended to be universally


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applied; he offered a specific dispensation from the rule to the fair sex, thereby

further reinforcing the distinction between regulated, serious male discourse and

feminine chatter, the regulation of which was a hopelessly lost cause to the censo-

rious Isaac Bickerstaff.62 But it was crucial that masculine coffeehouse society be

made safe for worthy conversation. The consequences of the long and tedious

harangues and dissertations which [the superficial coffeehouse statesmen] dailyutter in private circles were similar to those that Bickerstaff had claimed were

also caused by newsmongering: the breaking of many honest tradesmen, the

seducing of several eminent citizens, the making of numberless malecontents, and

. . . the great detriment and disquiet of Her Majestys Subjects (T, 268, 3:3512).

The Spectatorial attack on newsmongering seized upon a deep-seated

anxiety within early modern English political culture that was shared by bothsides of the Whig/Tory divide. What made the Spectator project distinctivelyWhiggish was its equally pointed attack on the intrusion of religious fervor, and

particularly high church religiosity, into the public political domain.63 In Septem-

ber 1710, Addison devoted Tatler no. 220 to an account of his church thermom-eter, a device for measuring the religious temperament of any location, but used

particularly in the London coffeehouses. The scale of the church thermometer

begins with ignorance at the bottom and proceeds upwards to infidelity,

lukewarmness, and on to the happy medians of moderation, the CHURCH

(a perfect mean), and zeal. At the top of the scale lay the high church extremesof wrath and persecution, which ultimately lead one back to ignorance (T,220, 3:150). Here Addison invokes the famous characterization of the Anglican

Church as a proper via media between Roman Catholic popery and dissentingfanaticism. This much was uncontroversial, but at a time when the substantially

disruptive Sacheverellite riots had shocked Londoners just months before and

when Sacheverell himself was still at large making a heros progress around the

country and influencing the electoral fortunes of the Whigs much for the worse, a

call for moderation in church affairs could only be read as a plea for the Whigs.64

This was especially true when Addison took pains to point out that his happyecclesiastical median was to be found most stable around the Royal Exchange

and the Whig-dominated Bank of England and that share prices never rose when

the thermometers temperature rose to high church extremes (T, 220, 3:151).

At a moment when the Tories had seized the political initiative by ap-

pearing as popular defenders of a church in danger, it served Whig purposes well

to deflect attention away from the politics of religion and indeed to portray those

who did make the state of the church a political issue as unreasonable fanatics,

full of wrath and persecutory ignorance. At the time of Sacheverells trial, the

Tatler refused to engage with the serious constitutional questions raised by theaffair and dismissed its significance as causing little more disruption than the

cancellation of a benefit concert, the diversion of readers attention away from

their regular newspapers, and a significant increase in the consumption of cold

chickens because the ladies of the town have made Westminster Hall into a dining

hall as they observe the proceedings of the trial (T, 140, 2:305; T, 141, 2:306; T,142, 2:310). This sort of dismissal was bound to infuriate Tory readers who sought


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to focus public attention on the mistreatment of Doctor Sacheverell at his Whig-

party-managed show trial before the House of Lords.65 Indeed, the only charac-

ters who take Sacheverell seriously in the Tatler or Spectator are the politicalupholsterer, who studies night and day in order to be master of the whole con-

troversy, and two misguided Tory women whose devotions to the Doctor are

less intellectual than they are improperly affectionate and emotional.66 Addisonand Steele damn high church Toryism by association, rather than attack it direct-

ly, through their Spectator project.

The religious issue was identified by Addison and Steeles critics as key to

their partisan Whiggery. Although the Tatler and Spectator papers succeeded largelyto the degree that they did in fact avoid engaging in the partisan tit-for-tat that

had characterized other Whig periodicals such as John Tutchins rapidly anticler-

ical Observator (170212), the Tory critic William Wagstaffe noted that the churchwas ill-treated by Mr. Spectator. The clergy have thought themselves a little un-

handsomely, if not hardly, treated by you in some places, he complained in an

open letter to the Spectator printed in the proministerial journal The Plain Dealerin 1712.67 Another Tory pamphlet thought that the profession, as well as char-

acter of the clergy are too sacred for the trivialness of such papers as the Specta-tor.68 These accusations hit home in a way that other attempts to associate SteelesIsaac Bickerstaff with radical Whiggery, a coterie of all true Republican spirits

filled with a hearty zeal to the good old cause, could not.69

Here then was the source of much of the success of the Spectator project.

It gradually managed to shift the discussion away from the contentious issues ofreligious politics, issues in which the Whig case had increasingly lost points to the

Tory high church revanche, and it dissociated Whiggery from the controversialconstitutional principles (such as the contractual origins of government or the

right of resistance to a sovereign power) that had become the focus of Sachever-

ells trial. In the short term, when Whig goals were the prosecution of Sacheverell

and a desperate attempt by the junto ministers to retain hold on office, the Tatlerand Spectator might well have been seen to have a mild political influence, butin the long run, they provided the foundations for a view of Whiggery as moder-

ate, progressive, and polite.70

The formidable afterlife of the Spectator project inthe rest of the long eighteenth century would attest to this success. Both the Tatlerand Spectator remained in print throughout the next century in several editions,and their works were read assiduously and taken to heart by their readers, both

male and female.71 The characters and concepts introduced in the papers, such as

the political upholsterer and the ecclesiastical thermometer, remained useful fig-

ures in later eighteenth-century Whig writings, and of course the model of the

moral essay in periodical format would be emulated again and again.72 The pro-

totype for a successful new political strategy had been set.

The resounding ideological success of the Spectator project may indeedaccount for some of the misinterpretations of Addisons and Steeles regard for

the public sphere. Because their own papers were so popular and so well received,

and because they themselves were so well ensconced in the London coffeehouse


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16/22


who chose to fight high church Tory clericalism through the very unpolite mode

of scholarly erudition.79 This was also true for those politicians who found them-

selves fully excluded from the political world of the Hanoverian Whig ascenden-

cy such as the former Tory secretary of state for Queen Anne, Henry St. John,

Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, Habermass prime example of an early public-

sphere politician, used a very different strategy than the Spectator project whenhe launched his journal The Craftsman (172650) as the voice of political oppo-sition to the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. Already disgraced and unlikely to

return to office under the current regime, Bolingbroke had less to lose in the

1720s than Addison and Steele had in the early 1710s, and thus he was at greater

liberty to criticize the ministry. Through his persistent attacks on the corruption

of the Walpolean regime in print, Bolingbroke established a position as the anti-

minister of the early Hanoverian polity. In a political culture still very wary of

the emergence of any new fourth estate to challenge the established constitu-

tion of king, lords, and commons, Bolingbrokes practice of opposition politicsfound an accepted place in the structure of political debate, not least because he

effectively deployed a Whiggish language of ancient constitutionalism against a

regime which sought to present itself as the guardian of Whiggish virtues.80 Al-

though Spectatorial Whiggery did not advocate a public sphere in the political

realm, later variants of Whig politics and Whig politicians certainly had no such

qualms about doing so themselves. A political culture of critique emerged in

eighteenth-century Britain, despite the reservations of its oligarchical governors.81

Nor did the Spectatorial strategy remain a Whig preserve over the course

of the eighteenth century. To be sure, journals such as The Lay Monk (171314),The Censor (1717), and Pasquin (172224) carried on the tradition of Spectato-rial Whiggery with their apparent pose of nonpartisanship and their continued

jibes against the impolite pretensions of the high church clergy. But the polite

essay was not an intrinsically Whig medium. In the post-1715 context of Whig

oligarchy, the Spectatorial essay could, and did, serve as a venue for Tory and

even Jacobite opposition. Nathaniel Mists Jacobite-leaning Weekly Journals(171637) adopted the Spectatorial essay format as a means of making his oppo-

sition politics more palatable.82 Even more influentially, Samuel Johnson adapted

the Addisonian prose essay to his own decidedly non-Whiggish purposes in his

periodicals the Rambler (175052) and the Idler (175860).83 When he wrote hisbiographical sketch of Addisons life in 1781, Johnson remarked approvingly that

the major achievement of the Tatler and Spectator essays had been to supplycooler and more inoffensive reflections to minds heated with political con-

test.84 By the age of the American Revolution, the Whig political purpose behind

the Spectator project had become opaque and it was the legacy of the polite peri-

odical prose essay which remained first and foremost in the minds of Addisons

and Steeles readers.

Just as careful attention to the attitudes towards coffeehouse society in

the Spectator project forces us to rethink Addisons and Steeles attitudes towardsthe public sphere, so should it encourage a revision of our understanding of the

role of the coffeehouse itself in eighteenth-century public life and political cul-

ture. A powerful tension between accessibility and exclusivity runs throughout

the social, the cultural, and the intellectual histories of the coffeehouse. This should


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make us think twice before we draw any immediate and unqualified associations

between the development of coffeehouse society and the rise of an unfettered and

unproblematic public sphere.85 Public social life, and even more so, public politics

were both always problematic in early modern England, and it is very difficult to

find many normative champions of a Habermasian public sphere in the period.

The public sphere in the political realm, as Habermas called it, was born out ofthe practical exigencies of partisan political conflict, but it found few outright

defenders in the world of early modern political theory. Instead of a Habermasian

public sphere, we find in early-eighteenth-century political culture a number of

advocates for a more civilized public life, such as Addison, Steele, and their

fellow travelers in the cooperative Spectator project. This was a public life whichincludes the coffeehouse at its center to be sure, but the purpose of this civiliza-

tion of public life was not to carve out a space for the politics of democratic

reason as the Habermasian paradigm would lead us to believe.86 They wanted a

civil society, and this perhaps explains the growing popularity of the termamongst the literati of the British Enlightenment over the course of the eighteenth

century, but they did not want a bourgeois public sphere.87 Their goal was not

to prepare the ground for an age of democratic revolutionsit was to make the

cultural politics of Augustan Britain safe for a Whig oligarchy.

NOTES

Preliminary versions of this essay were delivered to audiences at the North American Conference of

British Studies in Toronto (2001) and ISECS in Los Angeles (2003). The author is especially gratefulfor helpful comments from Claude Rawson, Newton Key, and Mark Knights. Support for the re-

search for this article was provided by grants from the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino,

California, and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.

Unless otherwise indicated, all seventeenth- or eighteenth-century works cited here were published

anonymously.

1. Jrgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1989). A related treatment of the coffeehouse as exemplar of Enlightenment sociability is

found in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, (New York: Norton, 1974).

2. A comprehensive list of works on the coffeehouse invoking the public sphere rubric isunnecessary here, but see political histories such as: Steven Pincus, Coffee Politicians Does Create:

Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,Journal of Modern History 67 (December 1995):80734; Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); and literary histories such as: Terry Eagleton, The Functionof Criticism (London: Verso, 1984); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics ofTransgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986); Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writ-ing in England 16701740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Erin Mackie, Market la Mode:Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler andSpectator Papers (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniv. Press, 1997). It has achieved the status of textbook commonplace in works such as James van

Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,2001), and T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe16601789 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). Compare the more sceptical appraisals in JoadRaymond, The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century,

Prose Studies 21.2 (Aug. 1998): 10940; and Brian Cowan, The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsid-ered, Historical Journal47.1(2004): 126. On the question of gendered access to the coffeehouses,see Brian Cowan, What was Masculine About the Public Sphere?, History Workshop Journal51(February 2001): 12757.


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3. Compare Markman Ellis, Coffee-Women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the EarlyEighteenth Century, in Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clona OGallchoir, and Penny Warburton,

eds., Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation 17001830 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 2001), 2752.

4. Habermas, Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit(Darmstadt and Neuweid: Herman Luchter-

hand, 1962), 45; and Habermas, Structural Transformation, 29.5. See J.A. Downie, Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne, in Robin Myers and

Michael Harris, eds., Serials and Their Readers 16201914 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press,1993), esp. 569.

6. Joseph Addison, Spectator, ed.Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965),1:44; hereafter cited as S by issue, volume, and page number. See also Bondsintroduction(S, 1:xxvxxvii, xxxiii). For coffeehouse subscriptions, see Charles Delafayes account book of newspapers

delivered to individuals and coffeehouses (170314), Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Kew

Gardens, State Papers, (hereafter SP),9/217; and Jonathan Swift, Correspondence, ed. David Wool-ley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999 ), 1:381.

7. Peter Wentworth would enclose copies of the Spectator with his letters to his brother. In thismanner, the Spectator issues circulated quickly from London to the rest of England and abroad toplaces such as Hanover. SeeJ.J. Cartwright, ed., Wentworth Papers 17051739 (London: Wyman,1883).

8. Peter Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 228; NicholasPhillipson, The Enlightenment in Scotland, in Roy Porter, ed., The Enlightenment in NationalContext(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 268.

9. See esp. Eagleton, Function of Criticism, 1011.

10. For Tory objections, see Roger D. Lund, Guilt By Association: The Atheist Cabal and the

Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England, Albion 34.3 (Fall 2002): 391421.

11. Downie, Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne, 53. Nonpartisan readings

include Bonomy Dobre, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 17001740 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1959), 75; Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eigh-teenth Century 16601744 (Paris, 1881; reprint London: Routledge, 1948), 2456; Michael Ket-cham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens: Univ.of Georgia Press, 1985); and Melton, Rise of the Public, 957. Political readings include Downie,Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne; and Calhoun Winton, Steele, the Junto and

the Tatler no. 4, Modern Language Notes 72.3 (Mar. 1957): 17882. The best study of Spectatorialpolitics remains Bertrand A. Goldgar, The Curse of Party: Swifts Relations with Addison and Steele(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961).

12. Lawrence Klein, Coffeehouse Civility, 16601714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in

England, Huntington Library Quarterly 59.1 (1997): 49. See also Klein, Property and Politenessin the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists: The Case of the Spectator, in John Brewer andSusan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995), 22133;

J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 2359;and Nicholas Phillipson, Politics and Politeness: Anne and the Early Hanoverians, in J. G. A.

Pocock and Gordon Schochet, eds., The Varieties of British Political Thought 15001800 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 21345.

13. See, for example,Character of Richard Stle, esq. (London, 1713), 11, 20;John TutchinsGhost to Richard Stle, esq. (London, 1714); Weekly Journal or Saturdays Post 68 (29 March1718); Henry St. John, Viscount Bolinbroke, The Occasional Writer no. 1 (1727), in Works ofLord Bolingbroke, 4 vols., (London: Bohn, 1844), 1:202.

14. Phillipson, Politics and Politeness, 225.

15. Richard Steele, Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:8;hereafter cited as Tby issue, volume, and page number.

16. [Edward Ward], London Spy Compleat(London, 1709), sig. A2v.


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17. Ward, School of Politicks (London, 1690), 14; see also Ward, Vulgus Britannicus (London,1710), pt. 4, cantos 1112.

18. Hence the Whiggish affinity with the discourse of politeness in the early eighteenth century

discussed in Klein, Coffeehouse Civility. See also Klein, Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early

Eighteenth-Century England, Historical Journal32.3 (1989): 583605; and Klein, Shaftesbury and

the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).19. See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 646

7, 68490; and Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Li-censed News 16601688 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956).

20. Roger LEstrange, Intelligencer 1 (31 August 1663); cp. Intelligencer 32 (21 April 1664), 257.

21. For different accounts of royal attempts to suppress the coffeehouses, seePincus, Coffee

Does Politicians Create, and contrast Cowan, Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered.

22. For a revisionist account of early modern periodical publishing, seeAdrian Johns, Miscella-

neous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England, British Journal for the

History of Science 33 (2000): 15986; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1998), 1745, 53940; and contrast the rather more Whiggish account in James

Sutherland, Restoration Literature 16601700 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 23344.

23. Compare Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 14761776 (Urbana:Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), with Michael Treadwell, The Stationers and the Printing Acts at the

End of the Seventeenth Century, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge Historyof the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 15571695 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 75576.

24. See Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Cultureand the Overbury Affair, 16031660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), ch. 2; and JoadRaymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 16411649 (Oxford: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1996).

25. Hence perhaps the resort to the use ofeidola such as Isaac Bickerstaff, Mr. Spectator, andNestor Ironsides as the voices of Addisons and Steeles essays, on which see Albert Furtwangler,

The Making of Mr. Spectator, Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 2139.

26. See Lois Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care: Restoration Publicist(Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 2001), 13840; and Dorothy Turner, Sir Roger LEstranges Deferential Poli-

tics in the Public Sphere, Seventeenth Century 13.1 (1998): 85101.

27. [LEstrange], The Observator, 3 vols., (London, 168487), 1: unpaginated introduction. OnLEstranges vernacular prose style, see T. A. Birrell, Sir Roger LEstrange: The Journalism of Oral-

ity, in Cambridge History of the Book, 4:657661. For the wider context of this brand of loyalistpopulism, see Tim Harris, Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker: The Kings Friends and the Battle

for the Allegiance of the Common People in Restoration England, in Tim Harris, ed., The Politicsof the Excluded, c. 15001850 (Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2001), 195232.

28. Folger Shakespeare Library (hereafter FSL) MS l.c. 1309 (7 December 1682); PRO, SP 29/

422, pt. 2/158;SP 29/422, pt. 2/164; SP 29/423, pt. 2/87; SP 29/424, pt. 2/151; SP 29/433, pt. 2/121.

Compare Observators 265 (1 January 1683), 323 (20 April 1683), and 144 (4 October 1684).

29. Observator 325 (23 April 1683); see also Observator 326 (25 April 1683), with Defoes sim-ilar denial in Review 5.1 (27 March 1708).

30. PRO, SP 29/425, pt. 2/75; see also SP 29/431/47.

31. For contemporary reports of the cancellation of LEstranges Observator by royal command,seeFSL, MS l.c. 1761 (15 January 1687); Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of StateAffairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols., (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1857), 1:392,396.

32. [Defoe], Review 1.1 (19 February 1704): 4; see also Downie, Stating Facts Right AboutDefoes Review, Prose Studies 16.1 (April 1993): 822.


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33. See Downie, Reflections on the Origins of the Periodical Essay: A Review Article, ProseStudies 12.3 (Dec. 1989): 296302.

34. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 423.

35. See Harris, Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker.

36. T, 153, 2:361. Compare the political sociology of LEstrange, A Memento treating of the rise,progress, and remedies of seditions (London, 1662; reprint London, 1682).

37. Scott Paul Gordon, Voyeuristic Dreams: Mr. Spectator and the Power of Spectacle, Eigh-teenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36.1 (1995): 323.

38. S, 262, 2:517. Compare S, 124, 1:507. See also C. N. Greenbush, The Development of theTatler, Particularly in Regard to News, PMLA 31.4 (1916): 63363; and Stuart Sherman, TellingTime: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 16601785 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1996), 1289.

39. T, 18, 1:14950. See also T, 11, 1:102; T, 42, 1:3056; T, 74, 1:512; S, 452, 4:904.

40. T, 178, 1:471. Here Steele invokes an understanding of the physiological consequences ofreading that was commonplace in early modern England. See Johns, Nature of the Book, ch. 6.

41. S, 10, 1:46. See also S, 4, 1:18.

42. It is ironic then that foreign admirers of the Spectatorial essay also imitated its critique of

newsmongering. Witness the case of Justus van Effen, author ofDe Hollandsche Spectator (173135), as discussed in P. J. Buijnsters, Spectatoriale Geschriften (Utrecht: HES, 1991), 589.

43. T, 232, 3:201; cp. T, 155, 2:371 and T, 178, 2:469.

44. T, 18, 1:150; T, 214, 3:125; S, 43, 1:1823. See also Freeholder, no. 22, ed. James Leheny(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 132.

45. See Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998),esp. 2031.

46. Thomas Hope to Isaac Bickerstaff, 22 May 1710, in New Letters to the Tatler and Spectator,ed. Richmond P. Bond (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1959), 125.

47. Samuel Butler, Characters (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1970), 129, 177,2568. See also M.P., A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London, 1661); and Character of aCoffee-House with the Symptoms of a Town-Wit(London, 1673).

48. Defoe, Compleat English Tradesman (London,1726), (1839 reprint; Gloucester: Alan Sutton,1987), 32; see also 31, 38.

49. T, 10, 1:89. See also S, 625, 5:1367.

50. OED, s. v. quidnunc; and for its particular association with coffeehouses, see A Letter fromthe Quidnuncs at St. Jamess Coffee-House ([Dublin, 1724]).

51. Bodleian Library, MS Wood, F. 40, fol. 72; Letters Addressed from London to Sir JosephWilliamson, ed. W. D. Christie, 2 vols., new series, nos. 89 (London: Camden Society, 1874), 1:73.

52. Swift, Correspondence, 1:462; see also 1:344, 601.

53. PRO, SP 104/3, fols. 16rv.

54. City and Country Mercury 10 (811 July 1667).55. T, 84, 2:36; T, 125, 2:237; and [Defoe], Vindication of the Press (London, 1718), 17; British

Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, Political and Personal Satires, [BM Sat.] nos. 2010 (c. 1733),

5073 (1772), 5074 (1772), 5923 (1781); Woodward and Cruikshank, Public House Politicians!! N.

11 (1807), Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Farmington, CT, print 807.1.2.1.1.

56. William Hazlitt, Table Talk, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols.(NY: AMS, 1967), 8:185204; cp. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accessionof George III(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 1401.


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57. For studies of the gendering of gossiping, seeSteve Hindle, The Shaming of Margaret Know-

sley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, Continuity andChange 9.3 (1994): 391419 and now Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, andNeighbourhood in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2003).

58. Womens Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), 34. See alsoNews from the Coffeehouse

(London, 1667); M. P., Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses, 4;

Mens Answer to the WomensPetition Against Coffee (London, 1674), 45; andThe City-Wifes Petition, against Coffee (London,1700), [2].

59. T, 1, 1:15. On the femininity of idle talk, compare S, 247, 2:45862. See also Kathryn Shev-elow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical(London:Routledge, 1989), 948; and Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 16601830 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1994), 20911.

60. Defoe, Compleat English Tradesman (1987 ed.), 1334. Compare S, 457, 4:11113.

61. For projectors, see: S, 31, 1:12732; on pedants, S, 105, 1:4368; laughers, Guardian, ed.John Calhoun Stevens (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1982), no. 29, 1256; gesticulators,

Guardian, no. 84, 3057; and singing and whistling, S, 145, 2:73.

62. T, 264, 3:3378.See also Sherman, Telling Time, 1313.

63. For a view of Spectatorial religion compatible with that offered here, see Lawrence Klein,

Sociability, Solitude and Enthusiasm, Huntington Library Quarterly 60.12 (1998): 15377.

64. Geoffrey Holmes, The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-

Century London, in Paul Slack, ed.,Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Mod-ern England(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 23262; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sa-cheverell(London: Methuen, 1973).

65. One anonymous Tory observer of the trial kept a careful and critical manuscript account of

the proceedings as a means of documenting the perceived travesty of justice therein (Beinecke Li-

brary, Yale University, MS Osborn MS S 13043). I am preparing a critical edition of this trial tran-

script with the assistance of Matthew Devlin.

66. T, 232, 3:200; S, 37, 1:157; S, 57, 1:2434. Compare the similar representation of Sacheverellas the object of Molls adoration in plate three of William Hogarth, The Harlots Progess (1732).

67. Plain-Dealer 7 (24 May 1712).

68. Spy Upon The Spectator (1711), in Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, eds., Addisonand Steele: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge, 1980), 232.

69. Moderator 42 (913 October 1710).70. J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 16891720 (Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press, 1977), 161.

71. Prominent examples include Dudley Ryder, Diary of Dudley Ryder 17151716, ed. WilliamMatthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 38, 46, 94, passim; Philip Carter, James Boswells Manli-ness, in Tim Hitchcock and Michle Cohen, eds., English Masculinities 16601800, (London: Long-man, 1999), 125; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Labaree etal. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), 612; and Princeton University, Firestone Library, MS

Taylor 2, Caroline Stockton Commonplace Book (c.1815).

72. For later uses of the church thermometer, see C. P., A Proposal Humbly Offerd to the P

t(Dublin, 1731), and perhaps most famously William Hogarths engravings Enthusiasm Delineat-ed (c. 1761), BM Sat. 2425, and Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, (1762), BM Sat. 1785.

73. Swift, Correspondence, 1:381.

74. See Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. JamesM. Osborn, 2 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:778.

75. Addison, Freeholder, no. 16 (1979 ed.), 10611. See also Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D.Bloom,Joseph Addisons Sociable Animal(Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1971), 1279.


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76. For attempts to read the Spectator project as part of a civic republican political discourse, seeIain Hampsher-Monk, From Virtue to Politeness, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner,

eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,2002), 2:85105; and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the PublicSphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 657.

77. On this distinction, see and compare Annabel Patterson, Nobodys Perfect: A New WhigInterpretation of History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 135; and Herbert Butterfield, TheWhig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931).

78. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon,Catos Letters, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianap-olis: Liberty Fund, 1995).

79. See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture,16961722 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003).

80. On the concept of a fourth estate in eighteenth-century political thought, see J.A.W. Gunn,

Beyond Liberty and Property (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens Univ. Press, 1983), 5862,and ch. 2.

81. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 17151785, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 46.

82. See Arthur S. Limouze, A Study of Nathaniel Mists Weekly Journals (Ph.D. diss.,Duke

University, 1947), ch. 4.

83. See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970),143. For different accounts of Johnsons relationship to the Addisonian precedent, see Lawrence

Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998),3844; and J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics fromthe Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 757.

84. Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison (1781), in The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Ox-ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 650.

85. See Cowan, The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered. A fuller discussion will be offered

in Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: Curiosity, Commerce and Civil Society in Early Modern Britain(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming).

86. For an attempt to present the emergence of a public sphere as the prototype for modern

democratic politics, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A Europe-

an Perspective, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (1994): 95113.

87. Cowan, What was Masculine About the Public Sphere?, 14950.

Documents

1700's London Coffeehouse Culture