The Bedford Coffee-House, at Covent Garden, was described by its proprietors as “the emporium of wit, the seat of criticism and the standard of taste.” When Button’s fell out of favor, the Bedford became the new hangout for actors and writers. Some of its famous frequenters were: Garrick, Samuel Foote, Richard Sheridan, Hogarth, Fielding, and William Collins. In January 1754, the premiere issue of the Connoisseur, edited by Coleman and Thornton, stated, “This coffee-house is every night crowded with men of parts. Almost everyone you meet is a polite scholar and a wit.”
Watercolor drawing of the Lion’s Head sign for Button’s Coffee House, London. It was designed by Hogarth and erected by Addison in 1713. (W.H.Ukers, All about Coffee)
Lloyd’s Coffee-House, in Lombard Street, was founded by Edward Lloyd around 1688. There the captains and merchants of England’s burgeoning sea trade met and cut deals with underwriters and insurance brokers to protect their investments from the hazards of expeditions that could last many months and take them through many uncertainties of weather and welcome. This was the beginning of two institutions, the Royal Exchange Lloyd’s, which, at least prior to its recent financial boondoggle, was the largest insurance company in the world, and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping.
Thomas Garraway’s Coffee-House, on Exchange Alley in Cornhill, which served as an auction house, is mentioned by Addison, Pope, and Swift. Jonathan’s Coffee-House, also in Exchange Alley, referred to in the Tatler and Spectator, was a center of trading in company shares. Shares in the South Sea Company, formed in 1711 by the earl of Oxford to advance trade with Spanish America, were, together with its ill-fated imitators, hotly traded there. The speculation spread, and confidence men took advantage of the public’s eagerness to share in the wealth expected from the New World by selling them stock in impossible ventures that quickly went bankrupt. Although the South Sea Company’s investors initially saw their holdings multiply tenfold, the enterprise soon failed and left them with nothing.
The Grecian Coffee-House in Devereux Court, Essex Street, Strand, was first presided over by Constantine, a Greek immigrant. It was attended by Addison and Steele, who dated his learned articles in the Tatler from there, as well as by Goldsmith and many members of the Royal Society. There Ralph Thoresby (1658–1725), an antiquarian and topographer from Leeds, witnessed “Dr. Douglas dissecting a dolphin lately caught in the Thames,” evidently a favorite stunt of the members of the group, which had performed the same procedure while meeting at Tillyard’s.
Certain coffeehouses seemed to hold special attraction for men in particular professions or “callings.” Child’s Coffee-House, a favorite of the Spectator crowd, was popular with the clergy and the members of the Royal Society as well. Old Slaughter’s Coffee-House on St. Martin’s Lane was opened by Thomas Slaughter in 1692. It is remembered for the painters who assembled there, including Hogarth and Gainsborough. Tom’s Coffee-House, named for Thomas West, its proprietor, was located on Russell Street, Covent Garden, the theater district. After the curtain fell, the cream of the audience and performers would collect there, including Johnson, Goldsmith, and Garrick. It became a private club in 1768.
Don Saltero’s Coffee-House was founded in 1690 by John Salter, a former servant of Sir Hans Sloane, on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Salter, described by Steele in 1709 as “a Sage of thin and meagre Countinance,” decorated his establishment with strange curios and memorabilia, which Steele called “extraordinary absurdities.” Salter, who had been nicknamed “Don Saltero,” or “Old Salt,” by an English admiral, was, to put it mildly, a colorful character. While tending his famous house, he performed the services of a barber, including therapeutic bleeding, shaving, and pulling teeth, free of charge, played the violin, and wrote poetry. From his time as valet to Sloane (1660–1753), an Irish physician, scientist, traveler, and collector, Salter developed a passion for accumulating curiosities, including “Tiger’s tusks, the skeleton of a guinea pig, the Pope’s candle, a fly-cap monkey, Mary Queen of Scots pincushion, and pair of Nun’s stockings.” Although Steele thought little of these oddities, they attracted large crowds. When Salter died in 1728, he took with him the coffeehouse’s distinctive atmosphere, but the business survived until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, at the time when Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) moved to the same street.
White’s Chocolate House, founded in 1697 by Francis White on St. James’s Street, was converted about thirty-five years later into a stylish club whose members were “the most fashionable exquisites of the town and court.” Even in its early coffeehouse days, it charged high prices and was frequented by the upper classes. According to Escott, it was the “one specimen of the class to which it belongs, of a place at which, beneath almost the same roof, and always bearing the same name, whether as coffeehouse or club, the same class of persons has congregated during more than two hundred years.” It still exists today, and patrons look out a bay window dating from the time of George Bryan “Beau Brummell”—1755. At White’s and other clubs, such as Boodle’s and Brooks’, also on St. James’s Street, admission was by subscription only, and extravagant gambling continued all night. These became the resorts of the aristocrats, military officers, and important government officials.
Among the intellectual and artistic vanguard, Augustan civility was losing favor to self-imposed Romantic rustication. Coffeehouse conversation, with its sophisticated urban and urbane banter, held little attraction for William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his confederates, who affected to celebrate the natural, rural, and commonplace. Of course, though the Romantics deserted the coffeehouses and “the smoke, the mud, and the cries of London,”53 which Johnson had so loved, and went hiking around the countryside in search of pastoral inspiration, they did not leave their coffee or tea behind. In his voluminous notebook diaries, Coleridge troubles to record the following recipe for making coffee, in an entry dated December 1802:
One half of the white of an egg—a cup of tepid water after the egg has been beat up—Water enough to make the Coffee moist whatever it be
—Then put in the ground Coffee, (one heaped Coffee Cup to six cups of boiling water to be after put in) mix up the Coffee with the beat up egg & tepid water
then put it into the Coffee Boiler, & add boiling water in the proportion of 6 to 1—put it on a quick fire—& let it boil up, two or three times. Then throw it into the China or Silver Coffee pot thro’ a Strainer
After boil & decant the Coffee grains & use the Decantia instead of hot water the next time.54
As these instructions show, at least until the early nineteenth century the Turkish taste for boiled and reboiled coffee, a brew that must have been strong enough to rattle a person’s bones, was still current in England. As for the egg, it seems to have repeatedly made its way into English coffee and tea cups, as witness Waller’s Chinese recipe for tea.55
Tea also figured into the lives of the Romantic poets. Coleridge was familiar with at least several varieties of tea, and he took time to complain in verse of the increase in their cost.56 He valued “lean mutton and good Tea” at dinnertime. Tea was not entirely indispensable at breakfast—whiskey could be made a serviceable replacement. The egg seemed de rigueur:
Arrived at Letir Finlay, IX oclock
all in bed—they got up—scarce any fire in; however made me a dish of Tea & I went to bed.—Two blankets & a little fern & yet many Fleas!—Slept however till 10 next morning
no more Tea in the House—3 Eggs beat up, 2 glasses of Whisky, sugar, & 2/3rds of a Pint of boiling water I found an excellent Substitute.57
Lord Byron, a fellow Romantic poet, in his later years became a tea enthusiast, writing that he “Must have recourse to the black Bohea,” and calling green tea “the Chinese nymph of tears.”
The Tea Party, cartoon drawing by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), in which the afternoon gathering is lampooned as an excuse for romantic disportment and the affectation of a blackamoor attendant. (Photo courtesy of Frick Art Reference Library)
Teatime in England
Peter Kalm (1715–79), a Swedish traveler, commented that in England, unlike in his homeland, a breakfast consisting of tea and toast was enjoyed by everyone who could afford it. Toast was an English invention that continued to surprise foreigners into the early nineteenth century; one theory is that the English devised toast in order to help counteract the cold, damp climate. Chocolate was sometimes substituted for tea at breakfast, but coffee only rarely. In London, when the men left for the day, the women often had their servants bring tea or chocolate to their bedrooms. Meanwhile, in the countryside, the traditional breakfast of bread and cheese, still served with beer or cider, remained common until about 1800. Tea’s ascendancy was promoted by the powerful East India Company, which persuaded the government to lower the high duties on tea, a move that greatly helped to bring the beverage within the reach of the average Englishman.
From Coffeehouse to Clubhouse, Tea Garden, Tea Shop, and Tavern
By 1750, the traditional London coffeehouse was dead. No longer was it the favored men’s forum for transacting business, reading newspapers, exchanging ideas about art, science, and manners, and sharing the day’s gossip.58 In the hopes of increasing their profits, coffeehouse keepers increasingly promoted sales of alcoholic drinks, taking one of the first steps in the decline of the coffeehouse as a bastion of learned conversation and affable good manners. Already by the time of Hogarth (1697–1764), the coffeehouses were less centers of intellectual exchange than dens of the demimonde, where pimps not poets commanded the floor. An illustration of this transformation is found in Hogarth’s painting Morning (1738), depicting Tom King’s Coffee-House, which by then had become a bordello managed by King’s widow, Moll, before later becoming a fashionable club.59 Daniel Defoe, after visiting Shrewsbury in 1724, wrote:
I found there the most coffeehouses around the Town Hall that ever I saw in any town, but when you come into them they are but ale houses, only they think that the name coffeehouse gives a better air.60
These vanished coffeehouses, in their rough splendor, were frequently transformed into clubhouses, taverns, or, as tea increased in popularity, tea gardens and teahouses catering to women and serving all three caffeinated beverages accompanied by crumpets and desserts. The tea gardens and teahouses entertained a large new patronage of caffeine, for England had been the only country in the West to deny women access to the coffeehouse.
Naturally, there was considerable overlap between the age of coffee and the age of tea and among the people who frequented the coffeehouses and those who frequented the teahouses. Addison and Steele, who, as we have seen, were noted hangers-out at several literary London coffeehouses, were also partial to the new fashion of a “dish of tea.” Apparently attempting to capitalize on its popularity, they wrote in the Spectator (1711) that “I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the teaequipage.”61
A few of the clubs are worth mentioning for our story. The most famous was a Whig club, the Kit-Cat Club, founded in the early eighteenth century by Steele, Addison, Congreve, and their associates. They convened in the house of Christopher Cat, or Kat, in Shire Lane. Cat, a pastry chef, was noted for his mutton pies, an English favorite. These pies, nicknamed “Kit-cats,” became eponymous for the club.
An early Tory club, which came into existence in 1711, while the coffeehouse still reigned supreme, was the Brothers’ Club, founded, on the suggestion of Swift, by Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a philosophical writer influenced by Locke. After the accession of George I, Bolingbroke had fled to France, where he remained until 1725, when he returned to practice political journalism alongside Swift and Pope, whose “Essay on Man” he is supposed to have influenced. The declared purpose of the Brothers’ Club was “to advance conversation and friendship” and support and encourage the work of men of letters.
The Cocoa-tree Club, on St. James’s Street, was converted from the early chocolate house of the same name. It first served as a den of Tory and then of Jacobite political discussion. As revealed in Horace Walpole’s correspondence, the Cocoa-tree Club had become a fashionable gambling house by the 1740s, where, as in increasing numbers of similar establishments, young aristocrats would exchange thousands of pounds nightly on a single throw of the dice or turn of a card.
Dr. Samuel Johnson is an excellent symbol of this transitional era, for, although he founded several coffeehouse circles, he was one of the earliest great English proponents of tea drinking. Jonas Hanway (1712–86), an English merchant, reformer, philanthropist, and traveler, crossed pens with Dr. Johnson in the matter of whether tea was injurious or wholesome. In Hanway’s book, especially entitled Journal of an Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston-upon-Thames, to which is added an Essay on Tea, considered as Pernicious to Health, obstructing Industry and Impoverishing the Nation (London, 1756), he earnestly condemned tea on the grounds that it weakened the nerves, rotted the teeth, ruined women’s looks, diminished the stature of men, and caused other infirmities and, further, that the time wasted brewing and drinking it, according to his calculations, cost the nation £166,666 a year, an enormous amount of money in the eighteenth century.62 He had particular distaste for expensive frivolity, into which category he put both tea and the equipment required. It is no surprise that Hanway’s opinions did not sit well with Johnson, who, according to his biographer, Sir John Hawkins (1719–89), was “a lover of tea to an excess hardly credible.” Hawkins states, “Whenever it appeared, he was almost raving, and called for the ingredients which he employed to make the liquor palatable. This in a man whose appearance of bodily strength has been compared to Polyphemus.”63
In articles published in The Literary Magazine in 1756 and 1757,64 Johnson turned his caustic wit against the man who had dared impugn his favored beverage. Apparently following the prescription of Dr. Buntekuh, Johnson became famous for drinking thirty to forty cups of tea daily. He calls himself
a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.
With increasing numbers of fashionable people and social climbers of the era, Johnson also enjoyed taking tea in what became known as the “tea gardens.” Gardens, which were really city parks, had been popular recreational centers for Londoners at least since the dedication of New Spring Gardens in 1661 under the reign of Charles II. Their higher destiny, however, was not realized until 1732, when New Spring Gardens was renamed Vauxhall Gardens and was made over into London’s first tea garden. Vauxhall Gardens featured outdoor walks lit by thousands of lamps, band-stands, performers, dancing, fireworks, and food and drink, including, of course, coffee, tea, and chocolate. The success of Vauxhall Gardens was followed in 1742 by the opening of Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, which, though much smaller, featured a small lake, an Oriental-style house, and a Venetian-style villa. It also boasted a large circular room called the “Rotunda,” with an ornate colonnade and enormous fireplace which was used to keep things lively on cool evenings. Still a third famous tea garden was Marylebone, frequented by Horace Walpole (1717–97) and George Frideric Handel (1685–1759).
These gardens rapidly overtook the established coffeehouses in popularity, perhaps in large part because, unlike the coffeehouse, they were open to women as well as men. They became great favorites of the women, and their patronage attracted the men. Perhaps also because of the preeminence of their female clientele, these gardens became more and more identified with “the elegant Regale,” or tea accompanied by bread and butter, which was sometimes included in the steep price of admission. Whether on their account, or as a result of
a confluence of forces, including decreased duties, tea became the national beverage of England contemporaneously with the fashionableness of these gardens.
At the same time as the tea gardens were flourishing, the institution of the tea shop was also on the rise as a women’s favorite. In 1717, Thomas Twining converted Tom’s Coffee-House into a tea shop, which he called the Golden Lion. By the middle of the eighteenth century, such tea shops were separated by a widening social gulf from the increasingly disreputable coffeehouses. Later, these teahouses were to become among the fashionable sites for afternoon tea.
Heroines of Caffeine: Mary Tuke Founds a Tea Dynasty, and Anna of Bedford Starts a Tea Tradition
The World of Caffeine Page 26