Talking Heads / Housing Coffee

Perhaps because of the publication Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Yale University Press, 2005); Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Phoenix, 2005), etc., but more probably because of the expansion of blogs (and the decline of newspapers) had everyone scrambling back to an earlier age and technology of communication shift (from newsbooks to newspapers, from taverns to coffeehouses).  In any case, the last five years have seen numerous online musings:  Coffee-houses vs. Salons; a review of Cowan considering the Coffeehouse Mob; a discussion of the public sphere From the Coffee House to the World Wide Web (though I am unsure how the image Hogarth's Treating fits, given that that is clearly a tavern/private dining room); Notes on Coffee (though perhaps it should be titled Notes on Habermas); a long article "Coffee and Civilization," by Scott Horton (Harper's, August 20, 2007); and recently "Coffee Society."

The concluding chapter of Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England discusses coffee-houses quite a bit, in relation to London's mercantile and insurance developments, aristocratic sociability, and, of course, the nascent public sphere. I worry whether coffeehouses can be all things to all people; but they certainly were a prominent early modern feature.  (We don't use the picture at left in Early Modern England or Sources and Debates, though I believe it is circa 1705.)  For more on coffeehouses and modernity, see Drinking as Enlightenment? (below).  To resist the Whiggish idea that coffeehouses developed everything new about the modern public sphere, see Philip Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Polity Press, 2010), 235, where everything "associated with the Enlightenment coffeehouse had been promulgated through the council chambers and parish vestries of England for the previous one hundred years"!

Drinking as Enlightenment?

• People often credit their ideas to individual “Eureka!” moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His tour takes us from the “liquid networks” of London’s coffee houses to Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch to today’s high-velocity web. ("Where good ideas come from: Steven Johnson"; TEDGlobal, July 2010, Oxford, 17:46)

This podcast (blog talk?) begins in early modern England, as all digital humanities should I suppose.  Dr. Johnson (not that one) makes a couple of suspect claims.  First, the Oxford coffeehouse probably dates from 1654 not 1651 (as most claim); and the first coffeehouse in the British Isles was probably in London about the same time [Brian Cowan, "Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse," History Compass 5, 4 (June 2007): 1180–213]. Second, coffeehouses (like taverns) often had private rooms and/or high-backed boxes as well as a public table(s) [John Barrell, “Coffee-House Politicians,” JBS 43, 2 (2004): 206-32].  So we cannot state that coffeehouses always privileged openness ("connecting) over proprietariness ("property").  The talk does point to the importance of examining spaces, sociability, and networks, however.  Then and now.