It was not until after the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza in 1662 that tea became an English pastime, preoccupation, and emblem of national life, displacing the ales, wines, and spirits that in England, no less than on the Continent, “habitually heated or stupefied” the brains of both ladies and gentlemen, “morning, noon, and night.”34 The infanta of Portugal, twenty-two at the time of her wedding, brought with her the richest dowry in Europe, almost double what any king had ever received before. Lisbon had replaced Venice as the European mart for silks, fine cottons, indigo, myrrh, spices, such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves, and Oriental gems and pearls, and the Portuguese aristocrats, the most sophisticated on the Continent, had become accustomed to such exotic luxuries. Although tea had not been among the prizes with which the Portuguese traders had returned in their heyday, by the time of this marriage it had nevertheless become known and popular there among the upper classes.
Among the array of treasures included in Catherine’s dowry were a large chest filled with tea and the title to the colony of Bombay. In consequence of the first gift, green tea, served without milk and sipped from handleless Chinese bowls of blue-andwhite porcelain, instantly became a fad at court. It was prepared by pouring hot water directly onto the leaves. In consequence of the second, the British East India Company acquired a natural harbor that offered access to all the riches of India, a resource it had long coveted and had unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Cromwell to purchase. With this gift, Portugal’s access to the Eastern trade, which her explorers had been the first to chart, was functionally ended, and the Dutch finally became what they had proclaimed themselves to be, the “Lords of the Southern Seas.” This Dutch supremacy did not sit well with Charles II. He instigated a series of wars between the Dutch and English, in pursuit of which the English king created in his East India Company a kind of shadow government, with the authority to make war and coin money.
Catherine’s seminal role in bringing tea to England is celebrated in the famous poem by Edmund Waller (1606–87), written for the queen’s twenty-third birthday in 1663, “On Tea commended by Her Majesty,” in which he pays a tribute not only to Catherine and tea, and to the first for introducing the second, but offers an unknowing tribute to caffeine as “the Muse’s friend.” 35
Catherine also brought sugar into general use in England, where honey had been the most common sweetener. Sugar, used as ballast in her ship when she sailed from Portugal, became increasingly available as the Eastern markets now opened to the English. Along with tea, sugar was destined to become a major source of profit for the British East India Company.
With tea’s growing popularity outside the court, new methods of preparing it appeared. In the Book of Receipts (London, 1669), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), an English naval commander and eccentric intellectual, wrote that Philip Couplet (1623– 92), a Flemish Jesuit missionary, returned in 1659 from a journey to China and provided Waller with a recipe for tea calling for a couple of raw egg yolks. According to Digby, the priest, who promulgated the knowledge of tea throughout London in the 1660s, had advised that this brew was perfect for those occasions on which you “come home very hungry after attending business abroad, and do not feel like eating a competent meal.”36 Supposedly the eggs helped the tea to settle the stomach and the tea helped the eggs to diffuse throughout the bloodstream.
In fashion, Catherine’s court was ever at the vanguard. Soon all of London found reason to acquire tea services, fabricated of porcelain, silver, or pewter, depending on the purchaser’s resources. In the coffeehouses tea had been brewed and stored in kegs like beer and served exclusively to men without ceremony. After Catherine’s arrival and tea’s entry into the life of the aristocracy, the expensive tea leaves were stored by variety in compartmentalized caddies made of wood, tortoiseshell, brass, or silver, which featured a lock to secure them from pilferage by servants. Other appurtenances included thimble-sized china cups and a crystal bowl for blending varieties of tea.
This passion for tea and porcelain took on a life of its own in England and grew even greater after Charles II died and Catherine returned to her homeland. It grew greater still when William and Mary took the throne; Mary brought from Holland an enthusiasm for both that reinforced what Catherine had begun. By the time Anne (r. 1702–14), Mary’s sister, succeeded her as queen, the practice of taking tea was a necessary element of a fashionable life. Anne held court at a circular tea table adorned with a silver tea service, and, in imitation of her, women all over England began buying similar tables at which they too could sip Chinese tea from small porcelain bowls. Aristocratic ladies paid calls upon one another, embarking on little adventures that were enlivened by gossip to become more interesting than merely formal ceremonial occasions: “a sip of Tea, then for a draught or two of Scandal to digest it,…till the half hour’s past and [callers] have disburthen’d themselves of their Secrets, and take Coach for some other place to collect new matter for Defamation.”37 Samuel Johnson, a celebrated tea maniac, who comments elsewhere that sugar tongs were among the “common decencies” of the tea service, describes his encounter with and triumph over the rigors of this social event:
The lady [who] asked me for no other purpose but to make a zany of me, and set me gabbling to a parcel of people I knew nothing of. So I had my revenge of her; for I swallowed five and twenty cups of her tea, and did not treat her to as many words.
The Honeymoon, a print by British artist John Collett, c. 1760. The tea table and its furnishings are carefully depicted, complete with a fashionable tea urn, symbolically topped with a pair of lovebirds, as the newlyweds enjoy their morning tea. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
The standing social ritual of taking afternoon tea at about 5 o’clock, often including invited guests, did not begin until the 1840s.
It was during Anne’s reign that beer was finally superseded as breakfast fare, in England at least, by tea and toast. In 1710 the Tatler reports that in place of a breakfast of “three rumps of beef,…tea and bread and butter…have prevailed of late years.”38
The Great Conversation: The Coffeehouses and the Writers of England
Tavern and court represented and promoted the excessively exclusionary proclivities of the early Restoration. But, by the early eighteenth century, a time that might be called the age of converging sensibilities, leaders in taste were progressively withdrawing from the extremes of both vulgarity and courtliness pursued by the previous generation. The common became more refined, by the dissemination of letters and the ideal of gentlemanly conduct and restraint; and the elite became more ordinary, as they mixed increasingly in the culture of their common countrymen. The coffee-house, where every sort of person might assemble, and where use of the newly popular drug caffeine stimulated conversation, was ideally suited to foster the inclusionary predilections of the day. It is not extravagant to claim that it was in these gathering spots that the art of conversation became the basis of a new literary style and that a new ideal of general education in letters was born.
The writers who frequented the coffeehouses entered a forum in which those from different social classes had occasion to mingle and exchange opinions, and their enthusiasm for the rough energy and extemporaneous disclosure typical of caffeine-animated coffeehouse conversation engendered new conventions in English prose. Before the coffeehouse, English expository and narrative prose was predominantly laconical and monolectical; that is, most of what was said was said briefly and in one voice.39 With the rise of the coffeehouse, expansive prose dialogue enjoyed a remarkable vogue. Diverse writers, from hack pamphleteers to sophisticated essayists, churned out the prose dialogues that became by their better efforts highly esteemed. Many writers of the time celebrated the formal beauty of the dialogue, in which the interplay of opposing elements is artfully represented. Philip Stubbs (1665–1738), F.R.A.S., for example, a divine and author of the Platonic-style Dialogue on Beauty (1731), argued that harmony was the essence of beauty and spo
ke for many of his generation when he asserted that the dialogue, which is founded on harmony, “enlivens Philosophy with the Charms of Poetry.”40
The engaging style of the prose dialogue, new in English, a literary image of living conversation 41 and an expository technique that aimed at persuading instead of mandating, was only one aspect of a broader cultural upheaval. Changes in beliefs about the social good, resulting in part from an ebullient, unprecedented, and vigorous mixing of classes and peoples, were under way in England. The encounters among strangers, newly possible in the coffeehouses, and the drug that provoked and animated their exchanges helped initiate the development of new ideals of humanism and popular education. The critic Harold Routh comments about the way in which the coffeehouse discussions began to advance these ideals:
Conversation has a strange effect upon nascent ideas. He who has trained his mind by an exchange of thoughts in conversation, becomes more subtle and pliable than when he has nourished his spirit exclusively by reading. He speaks in more pithy sentences, because the ear cannot, so easily as the eye, follow long periods…. Thus the middle classes began to complete their education. Coffee houses provided them with a place for the interchange of ideas and for the formation of public opinion. They were (although those who frequented them were not fully conscious of the fact) brotherhoods for the diffusion of a new humanism—and only at these foci could an author come into contact with the thought of his generation.42
This part played by the coffeehouse is also acknowledged by Dobrée, who portrays it as the matrix out of which a new literature and a movement to disseminate learning arose:
each coffeehouse would seem to have provided the ephemeral literature of the day, whether haunted by parsons, men of letters, city clerks, chairmen, footmen, or wooltraders…. There would be some items which although as topical as could be, and thus popular, would also, by the chance that they were written by men of genius, induct the unsuspecting into the house of literature.43
As the prose dialogue became a favorite literary form, the new manner of down-to-earth, middle-class directness also became fashionable. As this happened, poetry lost all trace of its seventeenth-century courtliness, often becoming, as in Pope’s works, philosophically and morally didactic, and so more practical, engaging, and less remote. Prose for the first time replaced poetry as the common medium of drama; in place of blank verse or couplets, theatergoers now heard prose exchanges judged to represent genuine conversation more faithfully than metered language could.
The simpler, freer style had many sources. Among them were the scientific writings of the members of the Royal Society. Another were the publications of Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704), a journalist and pamphleteer who in his magazine, The Observator (1681–87), frequently couched his political attacks in a dialogue of questions and answers. His prose has been well described as “colloquial, forceful, and conversational.”44
If innumerable works exemplify the literary movement that used conversation as the model for the forms of entertainment and instruction, Swift’s book A complete Collection of polite and ingenuous Conversation (London, 1738), written under the pseudo nym Simon Wagstaff, Esq., is the movement’s epitome. In this book Swift satirizes the “stupidity, coarseness, and attempted wit of the conversation of fashionable people.”45 In three dialogues, characters such as Lord Sparkish, Miss Notable, Lady Smart, Tom Neverout, and others provide an animated, good-natured sampling of truisms, catch phrases, repartees, and other conversational commonplaces that “to adorn every kind of discourse that an assembly of English ladies and gentlemen, met together for their mutual entertainment, can possibly want.”
The English coffeehouse as a place in which men of every degree intermingled socially, in familiarity, was not to last long. While they endured, these coffeehouses offered democratic resorts in which, for a penny, a man could sit in comfort drinking coffee, and smoke, read, or converse in a manner marked by what Francis Maximillian Mission (1650–1722), a French traveler, called “the universal liberty of speech among the English.”46 By the 1760s and 1770s, however, the coffeehouses and chocolate houses yielded precedence to fashionable new clubs that showcased the aristocracy and had less and less to do with literature. One exception was a long-unnamed coffee-house club, later called “The Literary Club,” founded in 1764, that maintained the old traditions and provided the ideal forum for eliciting Samuel Johnson’s conversational skill, which, in the words of Macaulay, “was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send back every ball that he threw.”47 Like the Rota, which had convened at a different Turk’s Head coffeehouse more than a century before, this club, at the Turk’s Head on Gerrard Street
gradually became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook.
The nine original members, one for each of the Muses, were, in addition to Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Sir John Hawkins, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Nugent, Mr. Beauclerk, Mr. Langton, and Mr. Chamier. It was expanded to thirtyfive, so reports Johnson’s follower James Boswell, a young Scottish lawyer of good family, described by Macaulay as “a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous,” whose conversation made clear to all “that he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no eloquence.” One of several sources of friction between Johnson and Boswell was their disparate drinking habits.48 Johnson stuck to tea, explaining that, though he had consumed alcoholic drinks at the university “without being the worse for it,” he had found himself inclined to excess and sworn off their use so as to keep his mind clear, while Boswell was “a wine-bibber, and indeed little better than a habitual sot.” In 1791 Boswell wrote an account of the club’s history. Some say that the pursuit of the literary profession in England became fashionable only with this club’s advent.49
This immense mixing and broadening of tastes, so concordant with the culture of the coffeehouse and its mix of popular and academic, was nowhere better exemplified than in the great success of Daniel Defoe and the various collaborative publications of Addison and Steele. Of his goals, Addison said, “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I brought philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses.”
This was the time the first true newspapers appeared, successors to odd journals such as Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691– 97), in which questions about scientific, theological, literary, and social matters were asked and answered. Defoe, a coffeehouse habitué and admirer of Dunton’s publication, launched the Review (1704–13), a newspaper that he published three times a week. Written almost entirely by Defoe himself, it featured opinion pieces about political matters and initiated the tradition of editorial journalism. In speaking of his methods of courting readers, Defoe expounds the ideal of popularizing culture that animated Addison and Steele and many other leaders of coffeehouse conversations. By his style, Defoe explains that, in addressing a wide audience, he attempted to “wheedle them in (if it be allowed that expression) to the knowledge of the world; who, rather than take more pains, would be content with their ignorance, and search into nothing.” Because some of these early news publications featured verse, they even served as their readers’ introduction to poetry:50
It was possibly in this way that a mass of new readers, intent in the first instance upon the actual, the practical, the useful, came to regard verse as a natural medium, would read at first, perhaps, Defoe’s “True Born Englishman,”…and finally to better things…even Pope’s “Windsor Forest.”51
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729) were two towering figures of early London journalism and coffeehouse literary life, perhaps best remembered for the daily Spe
ctator, which they edited together. This publication was read by almost every literate person in London, especially the women, and was frequently read aloud to the illiterate. In contrast with Pope, their contemporary and rival, who addressed the elite, these famous collaborators spoke to a middleclass audience of businessmen and professionals, the mixed company who frequented the coffeehouses of London at the turn of the eighteenth century. The two had met at the Charterhouse public school where for a while at least, according to Pope’s malicious pen, they had been homosexually involved. Steele grew up to be a profligate debtor, although he settled down somewhat after his marriage in 1707, while Addison became a man of income and influence at court.
Addison held his own intellectual court at Button’s Coffee House (founded by his longtime retainer Button) on Russell Street, Covent Garden, where the favored among his followers gathered to enjoy his discourse, which, reportedly, combined “merriment with decency and humour with politeness,” and in conversations with such luminaries as Dryden and Pope, “reconciled wit and virtue after a long and disastrous separation.”52 Button’s boasted a mailbox with a lionine figurehead, designed by Hogarth in imitation of the lion of Venice, that was set up by Addison to receive mail sent to his publication the Guardian. Meanwhile, the Spectator, which had been born on a Button’s coffeehouse table, was in demand in other coffeehouses throughout the city. Around 1720, the popularity of Button’s coffeehouse declined, following Addison’s death and Steele’s retirement to Wales.
Many other coffeehouses, in which some of the more memorable conversations in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century London undoubtedly transpired, figured in the traditions of London letters. Will’s Coffee-House, named for its proprietor, William Unwin, was frequented by poets and men of letters, such as Wycherley, Addison, Pope, and Congreve. In the first issue of Steele’s periodical Tatler, April 12, 1709, Steele states that the publication would feature “all accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and entertainment…under the article of White’s Chocolate House, all poetry from Will’s, all foreign and domestic news from St. James’, and all learned articles from the Grecian.” Will’s is especially remembered for the literary disputes, which Dryden (1631–1700) presided over. Johnson wrote, in his Lives of the English Poets, that Dryden had assigned to himself an “armed chair, which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony…. From there he expressed his views on men and books, surrounded by an admiring crowd who said “ay” to all his remarks.” Will’s was the leading competitor of Button’s among the literati.
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