Introduction

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Brief history: coffee's entrance into British society

Coffee, one of several exotic “soft drugs”(Cowan,7) introduced into European culture from the orient between the 16^th and 18^th centuries, was believed to have medical properties, such as curing headaches and easing stomach pains. Like tobacco (see Snuff Boxes), it was advertised for the cure of ailments and was sold by apothecaries and physicians from the second half of the 17^th century.  However, the main reason for its growing popularity in England in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries was the curiosity of the emerging intellectual and fashionable middle class (particularly the so-called virtuosi)  and their desire for novelty. Antony Clayton, in London's Coffee Houses, indicates this desire, claiming that an "important part of coffee's appeal to Western Europe was its perception as an exotic, oriental product from a mysterious far-away region. It was part of a new range of imported luxuries including Tea, sugar, tobacco..."(Clayton,8) 

 

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Described by 16^th and 17^th century travellers to the Ottoman , Persian and Mughal empires, the rituals involved with coffee drinking were seen as part of exotic customs of the orient, whilst the mood-changing properties of the strange black liquid fascinated the English virtuosi. According to Cowan (p.30), “No other country took to coffee drinking with quite the same intensity as the British”. The fashionable and social nature of coffee drinking led to the establishment of coffee-houses in England, firstly in Oxford in 1650 and then, from 1652, in London. By 1734, according to the trade directories, there were 551 coffeehouses in the British capital (Cowan,154), frequented not only by intellectuals and businessmen, but by an increasing range of other social classes. Almost from the beginning two different types of coffee house emerged in London – the grand fashionable establishments in the wealthiest sections of the City of London, where business was conducted and politics discussed, and the more modest “local” coffee houses situated in the less fashionable parts of the metropolis. Meanwhile, in London at least, coffee was also increasingly consumed at home.

 

Exploring literature, studies and discussion contemporary to 18th Century coffee drinking, it appears that this exotic, fashionable and fascinating/sometimes controversial product from empire developed a host of social implications, from medicine to politics to gender conventions.

 

Coffee's increasing societal presence and relevance 

The chart below, generated using Google Books Ngram Viewer, represents the frequency of the word "coffee" in the entire corpus of British English literature available to the Google Books records between 1600-1900 (dates selected by myself). This visual is a helpful indicator of the great increase of interest in coffee during the eighteenth century: note, in particular, the sharp increase in this word usage from around 1750. After the establishment of several coffee-houses in England at the end of the previous century, the 1700s brought explosion of popular interest and direct interaction with the stimulant. Yet coffee was not simply embraced and celebrated as the new fashion, and much of literature's increased occupation with coffee in the eighteenth century involved varied discussion and controversy on the coffee-drinking craze. 

 

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Health and Mental Welfare

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During the Eighteenth Century, imports from Empire were increasingly becoming commodities of everyday life. Coffee, as well as tea and tobacco (often in the form of snuff), excited discussion on the effects of substance on mood and health, all three usually popular in public coffee-houses. In a rapidly evolving consumer culture,  such substances became increasingly popular as physical and mental stimulants, as well as for their apparent relief of various ailments. Significantly reflecting the sensation of empire and import becoming a part of everyday fashion, social life and popular medical theory, markets surrounding these stimulants grew rapidly; indeed, Cowan notes the "peculiarly positive reception of coffee as an exotic, mood-altering substance in the medical marketplace of early modern England."(14) For further information on the increasing popularity and emerging marketplace around these imported soft drugs, see the pages on Snuff Boxes and Tea. These considerations supplement that of the social effect of coffee in the eighteenth-century, as "the complex of these relatively new and exotic consumer "luxuries" formed an interlocking complement of consumption habits. The success of one aided the progress of the others in establishing themselves as English consumer habits."(Cowan,44) 

 

With the growing import and usage of coffee in England, much of literature's concern with the substance involved the discussion of its effect on the drinker's health. The survey of such literary conversation interestingly reveals varied theories and arguments. 

 

Medical advantages 

For many writers, from literary to medical professions, coffee was seen as a powerful new tool in the treatment of poor health and discomfort.  In particular, coffee was attributed to curing headaches, easing the stomach and aiding breathing.       

 

Dr Allen’s Synopsis medicinae (1730, ECCO), a collection of medical advice, offers various claims in defense of coffee as a form of medicine. In "Willis' Opinion", for example, "an Infusion of Coffee... drank like tea" is recommended for the "Cure of... distemper" and headache (132). Similarly, Etmuller maintains that the "drinking of tea and coffee is very good" to "Cure a Head-ach"(133). This text also recommends that "in difficulties of Breathing the drinking of Coffee wonderfully helps and lays the Inflation most certainly and powerfully of any thing"(390). 

 

Indeed, such beliefs are not only evidenced in medical journals, but were included in fiction, such as  in Robert Bage's novel Mount Henneth (1782,ECCO):" Mine [my head] aches a little too, says I, and I shall be much obliged to you Mrs Betty for a dish of coffee. She rang the bell. A footman entered. I saw by this she was determined not to leave us. I took my coffee in silence"(263). Not only does such discourse in fiction show the influence of medical discussion and beliefs surrounding coffee upon society, but implies a reason for its increased popularity in the home and domestic life as a sort of store-cupboard remedy. 

 

Early evidence of such medicinal ideas come in the form of promotion for coffee and the first coffee-houses, such as the advertisement below:

 

 A 1652 handbill advertising St. Michael's Alley, the first coffee shop in London. It is held in the British Museum

 

Clearly, the early commercialization of the coffee trade made grand claims of its varied health benefits for a range of drinkers, some of which- such as its preventative properties against miscarriages in pregnant women- seem astounding today. Nonetheless, coffee was gaining increasing public interest as an exotic, powerful and mood-altering luxury; positive discourse surrounding the drink allied it with medical secrets from the mystic 'East'. Such representation in literature was significant, as Cowan notes: "the virtuoso readers of travel literature and accounts of the commodities of exotic cultures, were the first Englishmen to learn about, write about, and indeed to drink coffee."(14) Indeed, the culture that would develop from this fashionable fascination and initial exclusivity, including the development of new literary forms in coffee-house magazines like The Spectator and The Tatler, would alter conventions of social interaction across the eighteenth-century.

 

Mental stimulation

Additionally to claims of physical benefits, coffee was often upheld for its effect on the human mind. Balzac, in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, offers an amusing account of his appreciation of coffee's mental stimulation:

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army on the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensign to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.  (http://www.web-books.com/Classics/ON/B0/B701/37MB701.html)

 

Belief in coffee's stimulating effect on the mind was significant in its effect on culture, coffee-houses rapidly becoming more and more significant as places of high-minded discussion of subjects of academia, philosophy and politics. This is explored further in section "Coffee and Spaces" (below).

 

 

Negative effects on health

Despite the appraisal of coffee  in many writings as a miraculous cure for an array of health complaints, some argued that it was, in fact, detrimental to the body. From the late seventeenth-century, inquiries and debate arose around this subject, such as the Royal Society's investigations, prompted by a paper by Dr John Goddard that"occasioned...debate among the fellows thereafter"(Cowan,28). One of the concerns proposed was the possibility of "apopleptic fits or paralysis" from "the overconsumption of coffee"(Cowan,28); the exoticism of this product was evidently not only a cause for its fashionability, but for skepticism and anxiety in regards to health.

 

A significant criticism of coffee in and around the eighteenth-century was its apparent detrimental effects upon fertility. Coffee was believed by some to lower libido and even to "render men impotent and women barren"(Cowan,41). According to several writers and physicians, this was due to coffee "being a substance hot and dry in the second degree", thus having "the tendency to dry up" the fluids and moisture in the body that aid in sexual function. One of the physicians who followed this idea was Montpellier physician, Daniel Duncan, who claimed that a "hot and dry temperament and climate are least proper for fertility"(cited in Cowan,41).

 

Such literary discussion influenced public opinion towards the exotic new stimulant. A notable example was 'The Women's Petition Against Coffee', which claimed in 1674 that coffee "made men as unfruitful as the sandy deserts, from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought" (Edward Bramah, Tea & coffee: a modern view of three hundred years of tradition, Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 17 Jan 1972 p 46). These women attributed coffee to the nation's falling birthrate and criticised the tendency of male society to centre around coffee-houses and coffee-drinking. As shall be investigated later, coffee-houses generally excluded women and public coffee-drinking became a characteristically male activity. The extent to which this and other female protests were solely critiquing coffee itself or were more against the male societal practice that sprung from it is certainly debatable.

 

Image: front page for the petition (http://cdn.gopetition.com/images2/news/news232.jpg)

 

 

Additionally, the strength of this bitter black liquid was often cause for concern. In The Best and easiest method of preserving uninterrupted health to extreme old age(1748), it is stated that whilst "[t]hey who are fat and corpus may bear to drink it strong" for the benefit of "contract[ing]" the "Fibres of their Stomachs" and having a "laxative" effect, the drink is warned as potentially "hurtful" to others,. In particular, those who are "lean" are advised to "not drink it unless very weak, and then mix'd with Sugar and Milk"(61-62). Such implications certainly differ from other literature that presents coffee as a new miraculous cure for multiple ailments.

 

Indeed, issues over the effects of coffee on health continued to be discussed into the nineteenth-century, as is evident in William Andrus Alcott's Tea and Coffee (1839). Alcott warns his reader of the dangers of the soft drug society inherited from the eighteenth century: "Even coffee and tea, the common beverage of all classes of people, have a tendency to debilitate the digestive organs"(47). Clearly, both the popularity of coffee- a "narcotic", according to Alcott- and the debate of its physical effect continued to grow from the 1700s. Alcott goes on to state that soft drugs, including coffee, "do not nourish us at all, but only irritate our nervous system": "a foreign body in the system... indeed gives momentary strength, but in the end, weakens us"(158). In this work, prevailing arguments for the benefits of coffee on health are recognised and then dismissed, such as the idea of its being "necessary to assist the stomach in digesting", which is deemed "absolutely ridiculous" in the case of anyone with "any measure of what can be called health"(160). 

 

Alcott's final word is somewhat extreme, claiming that "no person can be in the habitual use of the smallest quantity of tea or coffee" in any form "without more or less deranging the action of the stomach and liver and, ultimately... of the whole system", as well as eventually "abridging human happiness and human life"(162). Certainly, coffee was by no means entirely accepted, nor had protest against its usage faded away, by the nineteenth-century. The ardour of Alcott's argument, after consideration in this work of various medical and literary opinions, demonstrates the extremity of this debate. However, as Alcott admits, coffee was still one of the "common beverages" of everyday life for a huge proportion of society and, of course, its widespread popularity lives on today.

 

Evidently, opinions on coffee and health were in no way unified across the 1700s, acting rather as a ready subject for debate. Nonetheless, in spite of, or perhaps enhanced by this controversy, the eighteenth-century marked a period where coffee became ubiquitous in English society.

 

 

Coffee, Spaces and Behaviour

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The coffee-house

Central to the explosion of popular coffee-drinking, the establishment of coffee-houses in urban England would generate an important new cultural space for eighteenth-century society. Coffee houses were frequented almost exclusively by men, with various social exchanges taking place  as an accompaniment to drinking coffee, including those detailed below:

 

• Academic discussion and activity

Coffee-houses became popular spaces for academic and literary discussion, so much so that they were often called "penny universities", "because the price of a dish of coffee provided hours of sociality and talk"(Cambridge Companion,16). Coffee-house culture helped contribute to the "public prominence of poetry" in particular, "because of what was at the time a certain fluidity between writing and orality, texts and talk"(16). In this way, coffee became associated with great academic literary men, a certain 'literati', and writers frequently met to drink coffee and discuss ideas.

 

One of the avid members of this society of coffee-house academics was Alexander Pope. Mr Addison recalls his somewhat infamous fervour for academic pursuits in his frequent coffee-house debates: "Pope, who whatever his other good qualities might be, certainly was not much troubled with good nature, was one evening at Button’s coffee-house, where he and a set of literati, had got poring over a manuscript of the Greek comic poet, Aristophenes, in which they found a passage they could not comprehend."( [ Mr Addison] Interesting anecdotes, memoirs, allegories, essays, and poetical fragments, Tending to amuse the fancy, and inculcate morality.London : Printed for the author, 1794. Volume 9 p. 281)

 

Artist William Hogarth also recorded Pope discussing literary matters in Button’s coffee house in 1730 in the image included below, taken from www.williamhogarth.org (though probably a copy). Pope is thought to be opposite the seated figure.

 

In fact, Pope was so keen on the coffee-house as a space for thinking that he had a seat reserved for him which offered a "Speculative Angle" over the coffee-room(FOOTNOTE: Alexander Pope in a letter to Henry Cromwell, 29 August 1709, as quoted by Maynard Mack in Alexander Pope: a Life (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1985. p145) The fact that such a literary darling of Eighteenth Century culture appears to have found this space essential for his academic thought reflects the significance of the societal practice that sprang from the growing coffee-drinking craze. This was the time of "modish coffee-house philosophers", as John Brown described in 1751. (Brown,137) (John Brown · Essays on the characteristics · 1751. London: Printed for C. Davis)

 

However, Coffee houses were not just places for discussion or reflection, but became a venue for more formal educational activities. Lectures were arranged and advertised in newspapers such as The Guardian, for which Button's Coffee House acted as an office for founder Richard Steele. In such an advertisement, readers were informed of a series of lectures in Button's coffee house: "Beginning January 11, 1713-14, a course of philosophical lectures on mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, ... . This course of experiments is to be performed by Mr William Whiston and Francis Hauksbee"  (http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/PrintHT/Coffee_houses.html)

 

           

• Political discussion 

Coffee-houses were not only important literary but political meeting spaces.

 

1712   Pope Rape of Locke i, in Misc. Poems 361   Coffee, (which makes the Politician wise, And see thro' all things with his half shut Eyes)

 - a wonderful line of the poem, really demonstrating Pope's striking satire- coffee's belonging to the political domain implied- even though criticizing/mocking the politicians involved! -not just coffee house, but drink itself, key to political world

 

-Criticism of politics/court continues- similar use of tea in this syllepsism/zeugma: where the queen “dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.” -part of frivolous social interaction... (?!)

 1752   D. Hume Polit. Disc. i. 1   What we can learn from every coffee-house conversation.

 

 Image- The Coffee House Politicians, 1733 (Clayton,26)

 

 

• Business
  

  

Coffee-houses acted as an ideal venue for the conduct of business and the gathering of commercial and other information, and several prestigious institutions can trace their origins to coffee-houses. Perhaps the most famous of these was the insurance market Lloyd's of London, which originated in a coffee house founded by Edward Lloyd in  Tower street in about 1688, moving to Lombard Street in 1691, where merchants and insurers met together to share shipping news and make insurance deals.  Meanwhile, stockbrokers tended to congregate in another coffee house in the City of London to conduct their business - Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley - which became the forerunner of the London Stock Exchange.

 

Image: Lloyd's Coffee house (from http://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/The+Coffeehouse+Culture) 

 

Button's Coffee House, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, had many literary customers and became a useful centre for news gathering and distribution. As previously mentioned, Richard Steele used it as an office for the Guardian,  which he began to publish in 1713 and continues to be hugely successful in the present day. http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/PrintHT/Coffee_houses.html

 

In his memoirs, Henri Misson de Valbourg recalls how coffee-houses facilitated conduction of business, particularly, it is implied, for their foundation:"You have a Dish of Coffee, you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you don't care to spend more"(1698, translated 1719)(Clayton,19) With an atmosphere and refreshment that were stimulant, both physically and socially, and crucially cost-effective with a low admittance fee, coffee-houses served eighteenth-century societies as accessible public offices and meeting-rooms for businessmen and networking. 

 

 

• Social networking

During the eighteenth-century, society was shifting. As well as "massive population growth in the capital... due mainly to immigration from the rest of England and Europe", Clayton notes the significance of "the displacement of many communities that resulted from the devastation of the Great Fire of 1666."(Clayton,17) In the consequent social climate, the coffee-house offered a space for affordable and sober sociability, and it became "common practice for a newcomer to visit [a]...coffee house in order to find social contacts."(Clayton,17)

 

By 1730, an observer's comment documented in A Brief and Merry History of Great Britain claimed that "Coffee-Houses are the constant Rendezvous for Men of business, as well as the idle People, so that a Man is sooner ask'd about his Coffee-House than his Lodgings". Universally, it seems, the coffee-house and its chief beverage offered for men the opportunity to forge new relationships, whether for academic, business or just sociable ends, so far so that one's identity was partly acknowledged by "his Coffee-House". This commentator goes on to reflect upon the diverse, but constantly conversational, interactions the coffee-house space provided for eighteenth-century male society: "They smoak Tobacco, game and read Papers of Intelligence; here they treat of Matters of State, make Leagues with Foreign Princes, break them again, and transact Affairs of the Last Consequence of the Whole World."(Cited in Clayton, page 22)

 

• Social outlet

 

Despite the association of coffee and coffee-houses, at least commercially, with high-minded thinkers, businessmen and political discussion, literature also reveals a recurring perception of these customers being arrogant, argumentative and violent.  In the eighteenth century, Roger North stated, “‘the mischief is arrived to perfection, and not only sedition and treason, but atheism, heresy, and blasphemy are publicly taught in diverse of the celebrated coffee-houses…and it is as unseemly for a reasonable, conformable person to come there, as for a clergyman to frequent a bawdy house.’”

[Roger North, Examen: or, an enquiry into the credit and veracity of a pretented complete history (London, 1740), p. 141. Quoted in Brian Cowan, “The rise of the coffeehouse reconsidered,” 22]

 

 

 

This was despite the rules laid down for acceptable coffee-house behaviour, such as:

 

Coffee at home: domestic role

Whereas the coffee-house acted as an almost entirely male social space, coffee was increasingly drunk by both men and women in the home, at several different times of the day and in several locations (garden, parlour etc). Though coffee-houses remained important social spaces, coffee became more widely consumed in tea gardens and in domestic spaces, and the coffee-house held less of a monopoly over coffee-drinking. In All About Coffee(2009), William H. Ukers notes that, by the second half of the eighteenth century, "[t]he use of coffee...was well established in the homes as a breakfast and dinner beverage, and such consumption more than made up for any loss sustained through the gradual decadence of the coffee house."(Ukers,82)

 

Evidence indicates that coffee was not just drunk at home for medicinal purposes, but for leisurely social occasions. In Bage's Mount Henneth, for instance, Mr Sutton’s letter to his sister details such an occasion: "In this [garden] pavilion we were drinking coffee in the afternoon after the English manner"(235). In The history of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, [1751], by Eliza Fowler Haywood, coffee is shown again in a leisurely social setting at home: "It being near breakfast time, they [Miss Flora and Miss Betsy] went down together into the parlour, and as they were drinking coffee..."(139). In both of these scenes, coffee does not appear a form of public ritual or official discussion, but for stimulation as part of domestic routine-particularly in the parlour- and more relaxed conversational purposes. 

 

Frances Brooke's novel, The Excursion [1785], notes another, even more intimate setting for drinking coffee, as Mrs Herbert and Miss Villiers are described to be "drinking their coffee in Mrs Herbert’s dressing room when a servant threw open the door"(208), interrupting this close conversation. The same novel implies another occasion for coffee, when "[t]he whole constellation of friends, the Montagues included, were drinking their coffee after dinner"(255). Though notably different times and supposedly different degrees of formality of occasion (dressing-room to dinner party), coffee is still suggested to be used to fuel and create occasion for sociability and discussion. In the latter example, it seems to be used specifically to extend a social occasion and the time spent with friends.  

 

Gendered spaces?

Clearly, coffee-drinking was not solely a public, out-of-the-house activity. Interestingly, coffee at home seems more connected with a female domain: unlike the numerous accounts of male interaction in coffee-houses, the examples above all involved mixed or even solely female society. This seems to align coffee with the function of Tea in the home. According to Clayton, drinking tea "was more of a domestic activity or ceremony than the public consumption of coffee in a coffee house"(31), yet here coffee seems to serve a similar purpose. It appears that this somewhat feminine space came out of a lack of female access to coffee-house culture. 

There is some contestation about how far women were allowed in coffee-houses. Bramah, for example, argues that this was space intended for men to engage in activities without females and that women were disallowed from joining in coffee-house activities(Bramah,47). Cowan, on the other hand, claims that women were not "prohibited from entering any coffeehouse", and even that "[w]omen were a vital part of coffeehouse society"(Cowan,228). But this was largely "as proprietors of coffee houses, often in partnership with their husband"(Clayton,98), including "perhaps the most notorious coffee-woman"Cowan,168), Moll King, whose coffee-house was a setting for "late-night rakish carousing and prostitution"(166). Clearly, women were not entirely absent from the coffee-house. However, historians seem to agree that "the activities commonly associated with coffeehouse society- especially debate on political or learned topics, business transactions, and the like- were considered to be traditionally masculine"(228)

 

For writer Daniel Defoe, though gossiping was engaged upon by members of both sexes, he claimed that it was "[t]he tea-table among the ladies, and the coffeehouse among the men" that were "places of new invention for a deprivation of our manners and morals, places devoted to scandal"(Cited in Cowan,242-3). Although women would often drink coffee at home and men drink tea at coffee-houses, activity that surrounded these beverages appears to have been strictly gendered by the space in which they were taken. Men would often drinking coffee at home as well as publicly- as is evidenced on multiple occasion in Boswell's London Journal, 1762-63, where coffee is consumed in both private and public settings, both alone and in company- but incidences involving "read[ing] the political papers"(51),  conversations of a philosophical and "literary" nature(257) and "serious conversation"(266) are generally attached to the public coffee-house and its male patrons. 

 

Image: 

 

Despite Cowan maintaining that women were never explicitly excluded from the coffeehouse, he suggests that public perception of women that lead to their exclusion: "[e]ven when their ostensible purpose there was only to serve the men, women were distractions from the serious business of masculine employments."(244) Certainly, inn the case of Moll King's coffee-house as a space for prostitution, one can see some of the evidence that may have supported such a view and threatened literature's idealistic view of the coffee-house as a space for the male intellectual and entrepreneurial elite and masculine activity. 

Cowan goes on to explain that, as "there is no evidence of any woman actually taking part in coffeehouse debate", "it was the women of England's social elite who were most significantly absent from coffeehouse society. The coffeehouses of London were simply no place for a lady who wished to preserve her respectability"(246). Interestingly, whereas "penny universities" were famously accessible and affordable for men of all backgrounds and class seemed of no issue, there was a prevalent aversion to female encroachment upon this space of fraternity. Therefore, where women are depicted in literature and art in relation to coffee, it is not surprising that this is generally in a position of servitude in a coffee-house or presiding over the female space of the tea-table, "the stereotypical breeding ground for "scandal" spread by female gossips", as opposed to the "clearly demarcated... male preserve" of the coffee-house(Cowan,246). 

 

In both spaces, despite the different implications of surrounding activity, coffee was certainly an indicator of sociability and discussion. It was a drink that marked rituals of conversation, both for male intellectual debate and polite female conversation. 

 

 

 

OED'Coffee-House':

1704   Swift Full Acct. Battel between Bks. in Tale of Tub 257   Coffee-house Wits -satirical/sneeering- full of people who at least saw themselves as intellectual & witty

 

The Cambridge Companion...: "Available libations included tea and chocolate", etc, "but coffee itself was the social lubricant of choice, especially appropriate for the stimulant society represented by coffee-house habits and habitues. Coffee houses provide, among their many historical contributions, a striking example of the importance of conversation and the continuity between text and talk. The daily and weekly papers started the gossip of the day... publications of all sort... served as mini-libraries and contemporary archives."(17)

-centres of Enlightenment thinking... exclusive of women- alternate space to university...

...certainly a political space, a space for hearing- and perhaps overhearing- news, gossip and 'philosophies'- coffee provided an excuse for such talk/prompted such discussion by acting as a marker for an appropriate place to do so.

Miscellaneous 

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Coffee and gender (associations)

-Compare women at the tea table (Cowan)-Tea

Comparative image: very female space...

gossip & scandal!

 

-Bach- Coffee Canata- about trying to convince a daughter not to drink coffee! Satirical... 

humorous one act operetta about a stern father's attempt to check his daughter's indulgence in the much loved Saxon habit of coffee drinking

-Here is a performance of the final chorus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOaADFq9yOg

Die Katze lässt das Mausen nicht,
The cat does not leave the mouse,
Die Jungfern bleiben Coffeeschwestern.
young ladies remain coffee addicts.
Die Mutter liebt den Coffeebrauch,
The mother loves her cup of coffee
Die Großmama trank solchen auch,
the grandmother drank it also.
Wer will nun auf die Töchter lästern!
Who can blame the daughters!

English Translation by Francis Browne (June 2005)

 

Partly an ode to coffee and partly a stab at the movement in Germany to prevent women from drinking coffee (it was thought to make them sterile), the cantata includes the aria "Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have coffee..."

Prussia's Frederick The Great attempted to block imports of green coffee in 1775 as Prussia's wealth is drained. He condemned the increase in coffee consumption as "disgusting" and urged his subjects to drink beer instead. He employed coffee smellers, who stalked the streets sniffing for the outlawed aroma of home roasting. Public outcry changes his mind.

http://www.realcoffee.co.uk/Coffee-Encyclopedia/History/Coffee-in-Europe/

 

 The etiquette of coffee-drinking

Despite the association of coffee and coffee-houses, at least commercially, with high-minded thinkers, businessmen and political discussion, literature also reveals a recurring perception of these customers being arrogant, argumentative and violent.

• Bawdy house behaviour (need e.g.s) 
• Pictures on 226-7- civilized vs. uncivilized male spaces..

 

 

 

 

 

 

• -codes of conduct- really felt this was necessary?!
• -ideals of conduct and politeness 
• -caricatures- in eighteenth century, very revealing satirical lens/tool! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coffee and divination

The universal spectator. By Henry Stonecastle, of Northumberland, Esq; ...

 

London : printed for J. Pemberton, A. Ward, E. Symon, J. Clarke, D. Browne, R. Nutt, T. Worral, and T. Astley, M.DCC.XXXVI. [1736].

p.126 But this wonderful Science of casting Coffee Grounds though an Invention of the Moderns, is equal in

 Use and Value to all  the Ways of Foreknowledge amongst the Ancients

 

The adventures of a black coat. Dublin, MDCCLXII. [1762]