Coffee Houses - a history
Coffee Houses - Strand and Covent Garden
How markedly the coffee-houses of London were differentiated from each other by
the opening of the eighteenth century is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than
in Steele's first issue of the Tatler. After hoodwinking his readers into
thinking he had a correspondent "in all parts of the known and knowing world,"
he informed them that it was his intention to print his news under "such dates
of places" as would provide a key to the matter they were to expect. Thus, "all
accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article
of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning,
under the title of the Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you shall have from
Saint James's Coffee-house, and what else I have to offer on any other subject
shall be dated from my own apartment."
Several days elapsed ere there was anything to report from the Grecian
coffee-house, which was situated in Devereux Court, Strand, and derived its name
from the fact that it was kept by a Greek named Constantine. When it does make
its appearance, however, the information given under its name is strictly in
keeping with the character Steele gave the house. "While other parts of the town
are amused with the present actions, we generally spend the evening at this
table in inquiries into antiquity, and think anything news which gives us new
knowledge." And then follow particulars of how the learned Grecians had been
amusing themselves by trying to arrange the actions of the Iliad in
chronological order. This task seems to have been accomplished in a friendly
manner, but there was an occasion when a point of scholarship had a less placid
ending. Two gentlemen, so the story goes, who were constant companions, drifted
into a dispute at the Grecian one evening over the accent of a Greek word. The
argument was protracted and at length grew angry. As neither could convince the
other by mere words, the resolve was taken to decide the matter by swords. So
the erstwhile friends stepped out into the court, and, after a few passes, one
of them was run through the body, and died on the spot.
That the Grecian maintained its character as the resort of learned disputants
may be inferred from the heated discussions which took place within its walls
when Burke confused the public with his imitation of the style and language of
Bolinbroke in his "Vindication of Natural Society." All the critics were
completely deceived. And Charles Macklin in particular distinguished himself by
rushing into the Grecian one evening, flourishing a copy of the pamphlet, and
declaring, "Sir, this must be Harry Bolinbroke; I know him by his cloven foot!"
[Illustration: GRECIAN COFFEE-HOUSE.]
Even if it were not for that fatal duel between the two Greek scholars, there
are anecdotes to show that some frequenters of the house were of an aggressive
nature. There is the story, for example, of the bully who insisted upon a
particular seat, but came in one evening and found it occupied by another.
"Who is that in my seat?"
"I don't know, sir," replied the waiter.
"Where is the hat I left on it?"
"He put it in the fire."
"Did he? damnation! but a fellow who would do _THAT_ would not mind flinging me
after it!" and with that he disappeared.
Men of science as well as scholars gave liberal patronage to the Grecian. It was
a common thing for meetings of the Royal Society to be continued in a social way
at this coffee-house, the president, Sir Isaac Newton, being frequently of the
parties. Hither, too, came Professor Halley, the great astronomer, to meet his
friends on his weekly visit to London from Oxford, and Sir Hans Sloane, that
zealous collector of curiosities, was often to be met at the Grecian. Nor did
the house wholly lack patrons of the pen, for Goldsmith, among others, used the
resort quite frequently.
Goldsmith was also a faithful customer of George's coffee-house which was
situated close to the Grecian. This was one of the places to which he had his
letters addressed, and the house figures in one of his essays as the resort of a
certain young fellow who, whenever he had occasion to "ask his friend for a
guinea, used to prelude his request as if he wanted two hundred, and talked so
familiarly of large sums" that no one would have imagined him ever to be in need
of small ones. It was the same young fellow at George's who, whenever he wanted
credit for a new suit from his tailor, used to dress himself in laced clothes in
which to give the order, for he had found that to appear shabby on such
occasions defeated the purpose he had in view.
Most likely Goldsmith sketched his certain young fellow from life. There was
another frequenter of the place who would have provided an original for another
character study. This was that Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale,
of whom the story is told that having one day changed a piece of silver in the
coffee-house, and paid twopence for his cup of coffee, he was helped into his
carriage and driven home, only to return a little later to call attention to the
fact that he had been given a bad halfpenny in his change and demand another in
exchange. All this was in keeping with the character of the man, for despite the
fact that he had an income of forty thousand pounds a year, he was notorious for
his miserly conduct, and would not pay even his just debts.
There was another legend connected with George's which Horace Walpole ought not
to have destroyed. In telling a correspondent of the amusement with which he had
been reading Shenstone's letters, he took occasion to characterize as vulgar and
devoid of truth an anecdote told of his father, Lord Orford. This was the story
that his father, "sitting in George's, was asked to contribute to a figure of
himself that was to be beheaded by the mob. I do remember something like it,"
Walpole continued, "but it happened to myself. I met a mob, just after my father
was put out, in Hanover-square, and drove up to it to know what was the matter.
They were carrying about a figure of my sister." Walpole traded so largely in
traditional stories himself that it was ungrateful of him to spoil so good a
one.
On the way to Bedford Street, where Wildman's coffee-house was situated, the
pilgrim will pass the site of the Somerset coffee-house, which was notable in
its day from the fact that some of the letters of Junius were left here, the
waiters being paid tips for taking them in. Wildman's was notorious as being the
favourite headquarters of the supporters of John Wilkes, and hence the lines of
Churchill:
"Each dish at Wildman's of sedition smacks;
Blasphemy may be Gospel at Almacks.
Peace, good Discretion, peace,--thy fears are vain;
Ne'er will I herd with Wildman's factious train."
Among the notable coffee-houses of Covent Garden were the Bedford, King's,
Rawthmell's and Tom's. The first was situated under the Piazza, and could count
among its patrons Fielding, Pope, Sheridan, Churchill, Garrick, Foote, Quinn,
Collins, Horace Walpole and others. Its characters, according to the
Connoisseur, 'afforded a greater variety of nearly the same type as those to be
found at George's. It was, this authority asserts, crowded every night with men
of parts. Almost every one to be met there was a polite scholar and a wit.
"Jokes and _bon mots_ are echoed from box to box; every branch of literature is
critically examined, and the merit of every production of the press, or
performance at the theatres, weighed and determined. This school (to which. I am
myself indebted for a great part of my education, and in which, though unworthy,
I am now arrived at the honour of being a public lecturer) has bred up many
authors, to the amazing entertainment and instruction of their readers."
But the Bedford coffee-house has a more sensational association. It was here,
according to Horace Walpole, that James Hackman spent his last few hours of
freedom ere he murdered Martha Ray as she was leaving Covent Garden theatre on
the night of April 17th, 1779. No tragedy of that period caused so great a
sensation. Miss Ray had for some years been the mistress of the Earl of
Sandwich, at whose house Hackman first met and fell in love with her. There are
good reasons for believing that his love was returned for a time, but that
afterwards Miss Ray determined to continue in her irregular relation with the
nobleman. On learning that his suit was wholly hopeless, Hackman conceived the
plan which had so fatal an ending. The question as to whether the fact that he
provided himself with two pistols was proof that he intended to take his own
life as well as that of Miss Ray was the theme of a warm discussion between Dr.
Johnson and his friend Beauclerk, the latter 'arguing that it was not, and the
former maintaining with equal confidence that it was.
King's coffee-house was nothing more than a humble shed, an early representative
of the peripatetic coffee-stall which is still a common sight of London streets
in the early morning. Kept by a Thomas King who absconded from Eton because he
feared that his fellowship would be denied him, it was the resort of every rake
according to Fielding, and, in the phrase of another, was "well known to all
gentlemen to whom beds are unknown." On the other hand Rawthmell's was an
exceedingly fashionable house, and witnessed the founding of the Society of Arts
in 1754. It had another claim to slight distinction as being the resort of Dr.
John Armstrong, the poet of the "Art of Preserving Health," and a man so
generally unsociable that one acquaintance described him as having a rooted
aversion against the whole human race, except a few friends, and they were dead!
Judging from a poetical allusion of 1703, Tom's coffee-house was at that time a
political resort. A little later it was distinguished for its fashionable
gatherings after the theatre. A traveller through England in 1722 records that
at Tom's there was "playing at Picket, and the best of conversation till
midnight. Here you will see blue and green ribbons and Stars sitting familiarly,
and talking with the same freedom as if they had left their quality and degrees
of distance at home." But the most interesting picture of this house is given by
William Till. He writes: "The house in which I reside was the famous Tom's
Coffee-House, memorable in the reign of Queen Anne; and for more than half a
century afterwards: the room in which I conduct my business as a coin dealer is
that which, in 1764, by a guinea subscription among nearly seven hundred of the
nobility, foreign ministers, gentry, and geniuses of the age--was made the
card-room, and place of meeting for many of the now illustrious dead, and
remained so till 1768, when a voluntary subscription among its members induced
Mr. Haines, the then proprietor, to take in the next door westward, as a
coffee-room; and the whole floor _en_ suite was constructed into card and
conversation rooms." It seems that the house took its name originally from the
first landlord, a Captain Thomas West, who, driven distracted by the agony of
gout, committed suicide by throwing himself from his own windows.
Interesting, as has been seen, as are the associations which cluster round the
coffee-houses of this district already mentioned, their fame is slight compared
with the glory of the houses known as Will's and Button's.
Macaulay has given us a glowing picture of the wits' room on the first floor at
Will's. Through the haze of tobacco smoke with which he filled the apartment we
can see earls, and clergymen, and Templars, and university lads, and
hack-workers. We can hear, too, the animated tones in which discussions are
being carried on, discussions as to whether "Paradise Lost" should have been
written in rhyme, and many another literary question of little interest in these
modern days. But, after all, the eye does not seek out earls, or clergy, or the
rest; nor does the ear wish to fill itself with the sound of their voices. There
is but one face, but one voice at Will's in which the interest of this time is
as keen as the interest of the seventeenth century. That face and voice were the
face and voice of John Dryden.
Exactly in what year Dryden first chose this coffee-house as his favourite
resort is unknown. He graduated at Cambridge in 1654, and is next found in
London lodging with a bookseller for whom he worked as a hack-writer. By 1662 he
had become a figure of some consequence in London life, and a year later his
first play was acted at the King's theatre. Then, in the pages of Pepys, he is
seen as the centre of that group of the wits which he was to dominate for a
generation. "In Covent Garden to-night," wrote Pepys under the date February
3rd, 1664, "going to fetch home my wife, I stopped at the great Coffee-house
there, where I never was before; where Dryden, the poet, I knew at Cambridge,
and all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole, of our
college. And, had I had time then, or could at other times, it will be good
coming hither, for there, I perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse."
With what persistence this tradition survived, the tradition of Dryden as the
arbiter of literary criticism at Will's is illustrated by the story told by Dr.
Johnson. When he was a young man he had a desire to write the life of Dryden,
and as a first step in the gathering of his materials he applied to the 'only
two persons then alive who had known him, Swinney and Cibber. But all the
assistance the former could give him was to the effect that at Will's.
Coffee-house Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was set by the
fire in winter, and removed to the balcony in summer; and the extent of Cibber's
information was that he remembered the poet as a decent old man, judge of
critical disputes at Will's. But happily a more detailed picture of Dryden as
the centre of the wits at Will's has survived. On his first trip to London as a
youth of seventeen, Francis Lockier, the future dean of Peterborough, although
an odd-looking boy of awkward manners, thrust himself into the coffee-house that
he might gaze on the celebrated men of the day. "The second time that ever I was
there," Lockier said, "Mr. Dryden was speaking of his own things, as he
frequently did, especially of such as had been lately published. 'If anything of
mine is good,' says he, ''tis Mac Flecknoe; and I value myself the more upon it,
because it is the first piece of ridicule written in Heroics.' On hearing this,
I plucked up my spirit to say, in a voice just loud enough to be heard, that
'Mac Flecknoe was a very fine poem; but that I had not imagined it to be the
first that ever was writ that way.' On this, Dryden turned short upon me, as
surprised at my interposing; asked how long I had been a dabbler in poetry; and
added, with a smile, 'Pray, sir, what is it that you did imagine to have been
writ so before? 'I named Boileau's _Lutrin_, and Tassoni's Secchia _Rapita_,
which I had read, and knew Dryden had borrowed some strokes from each. ''Tis
true,' said Dryden, 'I had forgot them.' A little after Dryden went out, and in
going spoke to me again, and desired me to come and see him next day. I was
highly delighted with the invitation; went to see him accordingly, and was well
acquainted with him after, as long as he lived."
As a companion to this picture in prose there is the poetic vignette which Prior
and Montague inserted in their "Country Mouse and the City Mouse," written in
burlesque of Dryden's "Hind and Panther."
"Then on they jogg'd; and since an hour of talk
Might cut a banter on the tedious walk,
As I remember, said the sober mouse,
I've heard much talk of the Wits' Coffee-house;
Thither, says Brindle, thou shalt go and see
Priests supping coffee, sparks and poets tea;
Here rugged frieze, there quality well drest,
These baffling the grand Senior, those the Test,
And there shrewd guesses made, and reasons given,
That human laws were never made in heaven;
But, above all, what shall oblige thy sight,
And fill thy eyeballs with a vast delight,
Is the poetic judge of sacred wit,
Who does i' th' darkness of his glory sit;
And as the moon who first receives the light,
With which she makes these nether regions bright,
So does he shine, reflecting from afar
The rays he borrowed from a better star;
For rules, which from Corneille and Rapin flow,
Admired by all the scribbling herd below,
From French tradition while he does dispense
Unerring truths, 'tis schism, a damned offence,
To question his, or trust your private sense."
Dryden appears to have visited Will's every day. His rule of life was to devote
his mornings to writing at home, where he also dined, and then to spend the
remainder of the day at the coffee-house, which he did not leave till late.
There came a night for the poet when this regularity of habit had unpleasant
consequences. A Newsletter of December 23rd, 1679, tells the story: "On Thursday
night last Mr. Dryden, the poet, comeing from the coffee-house in Covent Garden,
was set upon by three or four fellows, and very soarly beaten, but likewise very
much cutt and wounded with a sword. It is imagined that this has happened to him
because of a late satyr that is laid at his door, though he positively disowned
it." The compiler of that paragraph was correct in his surmise. The hired
ruffians who assaulted the solitary poet on that December night were in the pay
of Lord Rochester, who had taken umbrage at a publication which, although not
written by Dryden, had been printed with such a title-page as suggested that it
was his work. A reward of fifty pounds was offered for the discovery of the
perpetrators of this outrage, but to no effect. Still it is some consolation to
know that the cowardly Rochester immediately fell under suspicion as the author
of the attack. Less reprehensible is the story told of a Mr. Finch, "an
ingenious young gentleman," who, nearly a decade later, "meeting with Mr. Dryden
in a coffee-house in London, publickly before all the company wished him joy of
his _new_ religion. 'Sir,' said Dryden, 'you are very much mistaken; my religion
is the old religion.' 'Nay,' replied the other, 'whatever it be in itself I am
sure 'tis new to you, for within these three days you had no religion at all.'"
Dryden died in 1700 and for a time Will's maintained its position as the resort
of the poets. Did not Steele say that all his accounts of poetry in the Tatler
would appear under the name of that house? But the supremacy of Will's was
slowly undermined, so that even in the Tatler the confession had soon to be made
that the place was very much altered since Dryden's time. The change had been
for the worse. "Where you used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands
of every man you met, you now have only a pack of cards; and instead of the
cavils about the turn of the expression, the elegance of the style, and the
like, the learned now dispute only about the truth of the game." This is all
confirmed by that traveller who took notes in London in 1722, and found there
was playing at Picket at Will's after the theatre.
Addison was the chief cause of this transformation. And Steele helped him. The
fact is that about 1713 Addison set up coffee-house keeper himself. That is to
say, he was the means of getting one Daniel Button, once servant with the
Countess of Warwick, to open such an establishment in close proximity to Will's.
For Addison to remove his patronage from Will's to Button's meant the
transference of the allegiance of the wits of the town also, consequently it
soon became known that the wits were gone from the haunt of Dryden to the new
resort affected by Addison. And a close scrutiny of the pages of the Guardian
will reveal how adroitly Steele aided Addison's plan. Thus, the issue of the
Guardian for June 17th, 1713, was devoted to the habits of coffee-house orators,
and especially to the objectionable practice so many had of seizing a button on
a listener's coat and twisting it off in the course of argument. This habit,
however, was more common in the city than in the West-end coffee-houses; indeed,
Steele added, the company at Will's was so refined that one might argue and be
argued with and not be a button the poorer. All that delightful nonsense paved
the way for a letter in the next number of the Guardian, a letter purporting to
come from Daniel Button of Button's coffee-house.
"I have observed," so ran the epistle, "that this day you made mention of Will's
Coffee-house, as a place where people are too polite to hold a man in discourse
by the button. Everybody knows your honour frequents this house; therefore they
will taken an advantage against me, and say, if my company was as civil as that
at Will's, you would say so: therefore pray your honour do not be afraid of
doing me justice, because people would think it may be a conceit below you on
this occasion to name the name of Your humble servant, Daniel Button." And then
there is this nadve postscript: "The young poets are in the back room, and take
their places as you directed."
Nor did that end the plot. A few days later Steele found another occasion to
mention Button's. His plan this time was to concoct a letter from one Hercules
Crabtree, who offered his services as lion-catcher to the Guardian, and
incidentally mentioned that he already possessed a few trophies which, he wished
to present to Button's coffee-house. This lion business paved the way for
Addison's interference in the clever scheme to divert the wits from Will's.
Hence that paper of the Guardian which he wound up by announcing that it was his
intention to erect, as a letter-box for the receipt of contributions, a lion's
head in imitation of those he had described in Venice, through which all the
private intelligence of that commonwealth was said to pass.
"This head," he explained, "is to open a most wide and voracious mouth, which
shall take in such letters and papers as are conveyed to me by my
correspondents, it being my resolution to have a particular regard to all such
matters as come to my hands through the mouth of the lion. There will be under
it a box, of which the key will be kept in my own custody, to receive such
papers as are dropped into it. Whatever the lion swallows I shall digest for the
use of the public. This head requires some time to finish, the workman being
resolved to give it several masterly touches, and to represent it as ravenous as
possible. It will be set up in Button's coffee-house in Covent-garden, who is
directed to shew the way to the lion's head, and to instruct young authors how
to convey his works into the mouth of it with safety and secrecy."
[Illustration: LION'S HEAD AT BUTTON'S COFFEE-HOUSE.]
That lion's head was no myth. A fortnight later the leonine letter-box was
actually placed in position at Button's, and, after doing service there for some
years, was used by Dr. Hill when editing the Inspector. It was sold in 1804, the
notice of the sale in the Annual Register stating that "The admirable gilt
lion's head letter-box, which was formerly at Button's coffee-house, and in
which the valuable original copy of the Guardian was received, was yesterday
knocked down at the Shakespeare-tavern, Cove & Garden, to Mr. Richardson, for
seventeen pounds ten shillings." It changed hands again in more recent times,
and is now the property of the Duke of Bedford, who preserves it at Woburn.
For some months after the installation of the lion's head at Button's, constant
references are made in the Guardian to that unique letter-box, Addison being
mainly responsible for the quaint conceits which helped to keep attention on the
house where it was placed. In the final number of the Guardian there is a lively
letter in response to an attack on masquerading which had reached the public via
the lion's head. "My present business," the epistle ran, "is with the lion; and
since this savage has behaved himself so rudely, I do by these presents
challenge him to meet me at the next masquerade, and desire you will give orders
to Mr. Button to bring him thither, in all his terrors, where, in defenee of the
innocence of these midnight amusements, I intend to appear against him, in the
habit of Signior Nicolimi, to try the merits of this cause by single combat."
But Addison and his lion's head and Steele were not the only notable figures to
be seen at Button's. Pope was a constant visitor there, as he was reminded by
Cibber in his famous letter. Those were the days when, in Cibber's phrase, the
author of the "Dunciad" was remarkable for his satirical itch of provocation,
when there were few upon whom he did not fall in some biting epigram. He so fell
upon Ambrose Philips, who forthwith hung a rod up in Button's, and let Pope know
that he would use it on him should he ever catch him under that roof. The poet
took a more than ample revenge in many a stinging line of satire afterwards.
Pope was cut adrift from Button's through the controversy as to which was the
better version of the Iliad, his or Tickell's. As the latter belonged to the
Addisonian circle, the opinion at Button's turned in favour of his version,
especially as Addison himself thought Tickell had more of Homer than Pope. This
ended Pope's patronage of Button's, and, indeed, it was not long ere the glory
it had known began to wane. Various causes combined to take away one and another
of its leading spirits, and when the much-talked-of Daniel Button passed away in
1730 it was to a pauper's grave. Yet farewell of so famous a house should not be
made with so melancholy a story. There is a brighter page in its history, which
dates three years earlier. Aaron Hill had been so moved by the misfortunes of
his brother poet, Richard Savage, that he had penned an appeal on his behalf and
arranged for subscriptions for a volume of his poems. The subscriptions were to
be left at Button's, and when Savage called there a few days later he found a
sum of seventy guineas awaiting him. Hill may, as has been asserted, have been a
bore of the first water, but that kindly deed may stand him in stead of genius.