Habermas himself categorized coffee houses as institutions offering "social intercourse" of a non-aristocratic, non- hierarchical kind, free and open debate and the inclusion of all-comers (assuming that they were men). As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a "heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing", was "the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter".
Ellis, who teaches eighteenth-century literature and culture at Queen Mary, University of London, has already written a "cultural history" of the coffee house. Now he has gathered many of the original source materials from that book into four sturdy volumes of primary texts, in facsimile form. The first covers Restoration satire; the second, eighteenth-century satire; the third, drama; and the fourth, science and history writing. The reader can be left in no doubt that coffee houses were the object of debate, as well as a venue for it. Volume One includes broadsides and poems for and against the coffee house, from the years when it was still a great novelty. It is wonderful to read these texts at first hand, in the earthy language of the day, rather than filtered through the deadening lens of post-Habermasian theory.
The main arguments in favour of coffee houses, in the words of an anonymous satire of 1661, were that they were "free to all comers", promoted intermingling of different professions, "equality", education and free discourse, and that coffee "makes no man drunk", unlike the drinks served in ale- houses. However, in the view of this same satire, every one of these virtues had its corresponding vice. The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and "gabbling" ("Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings"). The education on offer was "a school . . . without a master". As for the proposition that "coffee makes no man drunk", the author suggests coffee houses encouraged drunkenness, because the effects of coffee "being mixt with the more drying smoak of Tobacco makes too many run to the Tavern or Alehouse to quench their thirst, which they cannot satisfy".
The same point was made in a mock- petition of 1674, The Women's Petition Against Coffee. The coffee house, in truth, was:
Only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing soop preparative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill'd themelves with a morning draught of more Ale than brewers horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain . .
. and after an hours impertinent Chat, begin to consider a bottle of Claret would do excellent well before Dinner; whereupon to the Bush they all march together, till every one of them is Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-House to drink themselves sober.
The British have used coffee as a sop for drinking themselves sober ever since.
What of the other vaunted cultural virtues of the eighteenth-century coffee house? In many cases, they are not so dissimilar to those of the modern coffee chains. The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain "you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables" because people frequent coffee houses principally to read "the PAPERS". There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between caf‰s and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, "Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers".
