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‘ Once the Receptacles of Malcontents ’: Coffee-House Culture in the 1780s .
Edward Hardiman ( PhD in History , Keele University )
Abstract
This article is born out of my thesis research , which looks at sociability in Britain between 1770-1795 . More specifically , it looks at the print culture surrounding the late eighteenth-century coffee-house , and how this print culture acts as an important medium for understanding the coffee-house as a space in which conceptions of privacy , politeness , and sociability are all deeply contested . The coffee-house also serves as a microcosm of larger cultural conflicts within eighteenth-century society and how they changed throughout time . The coffee-house was by no means the polite and enlightened spaces that many social commentators of the early eighteenth century had hoped it would become . However , there was still a broad cultural understanding that the coffee-house was able to accommodate intellectual conversation , more so than other public spaces . The coffee-house offered a sober alternative to a society that had just seen an end to the gin-crazed decades of the mid eighteenth century . Moreover , the increasing number of private rooms allowed intellectual societies and debating clubs to establish semi-permanent spaces which further supported this image of the coffee-house as a space for sober , rational discussion . However , as the French Revolution took an increasingly radical turn ,