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Coffee-House Politicians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

John Barrell
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 206 - 232
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2004

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References

1 For a very thoughtful account of how Frost placed himself within the socially highly stratified reform movement of the early and mid 1790s, see Epstein, James, “‘Equality and No King’: Sociability and Sedition; The Case of John Frost,” in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840, ed. Russell, Gillian and Tuite, Clara (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 43–61, esp. pp. 49–50Google Scholar. Epstein and I were working on the Frost case independently of each other and had each completed our own essays before we first saw the other’s: the points of similarity between the two, therefore, though here and there quite striking, are coincidental. Epstein's excellent essay is mainly concerned to use Frost's case to map the various social spaces in which radicalism was lived and performed in the 1790s. Though the argument of my piece, as will appear, is rather different, there is much in Epstein's that adds to it, and which I wish I had thought of. See also Epstein, , “Spatial Practices/Democratic Vistas,” Social History 24, no. 3 (1999): 294–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Directory to the Nobility, Gentry, and Families of Distinction, in London, Westminster, &c. (London, [1793?]), p. 32Google Scholar; The New Patent London Directory (London, [1793?]), p. 51Google Scholar.

3 See Bondeson, Jan, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale (London, 2000), pp. 46, 48Google Scholar.

4 Howell, T. B., ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, 21 vols. (London, 1816)Google Scholar, and A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Year 1783 to the Present Time, vols. 22–30 (London, 1816), 22:486, 500Google Scholar (hereafter cited as ST 22).

5 The layout of coffee houses is well-illustrated in various caricatures in the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum (BM). For the open table, see, e.g., A Meeting of City Politicians (BM 5613) and Apothecaries, Taylors &c. Conquering France and Spain (BM 5614); for boxes like box-pews, see Full and Half-Pay Officers (BM 7082); and for boxes made of facing settles, see The Coffee-House Patriots (BM 5923). Boxes divided by curtains are illustrated in Thomas Rowlandson's The Coffee House, printed in Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), p. 37Google Scholar.

6 There cannot have been many Savignacs in London. Paul was probably related to the hosier Charles Savignac, who kept a shop at 147 Strand; see The General London Guide; or, Tradesman's Directory for the Year 1794 (London, [1794?]), p. 51Google Scholar.

7 ST 22:487, 485.

8 ST 22:482–84.

9 Thale, Mary, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge, 1983), p. 27Google Scholar.

10 Erdman, David V., Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia, Mo., 1986), pp. 242–43Google Scholar.

11 Morning Chronicle (1 January 1793).

12 The letter is quoted also in ST 22:494n., and see cols. 492n.–493n.

13 See Morning Post (14 February 1793).

14 Werkmeister, Lucyle, A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793 (Lincoln, Neb., 1967), p. 236Google Scholar.

15 Morning Post (30 July 1793), which refers simply to a “Coffee-house in Mary-le-bone,” but I am aware of no other coffee house in the parish that might have housed such a society—presuming the society existed at all.

16 See Morning Post and Oracle (19 December 1793). The story of Frost's indiscretion, trial, and punishment may be followed in Werkmeister, , The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), pp. 365, 372–74Google Scholar, and her Newspaper History of England, pp. 135, 142–43.

17 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 36, 30Google Scholar; Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York, 1978), p. 81Google Scholar.

18 Sennett, Fall of Public Man, p. 81; Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 36.

19 The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 14 vols. (London, 1815–22), 5:245–46Google Scholar; Foner, Philip S., ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 2:513Google Scholar; The Reign of Felicity, Being a Plan for Civilizing the Indians of North America … in a Coffee-House Dialogue (London, 1796)Google Scholar. There has been much excellent recent work on the coffee house, often focused on questions of gender, though mostly concerned with the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: see Clery, Emma, “Women, Publicity, and the Coffee-House Myth,” Women: A Cultural Review 2, no. 2 (1991): 168–77Google Scholar; Pincus, Stephen, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (December 1995): 807–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, Lawrence, “Coffeehouse Civility, 1660–1714: An Aspect of Post-courtly Culture in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1997): 30–51Google Scholar; Berry, Helen, “‘Nice and Curious Questions’: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury,” Seventeenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 257–76Google Scholar, “All Englands Rarityes Are Gathered Here: The World of the Athenian Mercury (1691–97),” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 8, no. 2 (2000): 23–44Google Scholar, and “Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King's Coffee House and the Significance of ‘Flash Talk,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001): 65–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cowan, Brian, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (Spring 2001): 127–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ellis, Markman, “Coffee-Women, ‘The Spectator’ and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Eger, Elizabeth, Grant, Charlotte, o Gallachoir, Cliona, and Warburton, Penny (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 27–52Google Scholar. There are useful glances at the later history of coffee houses in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 33–40; and Langford, Paul, “British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997): 53–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 ST 22:471–73.

21 ST 22:499.

22 London Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer 49 (1780): 197Google Scholar.

23 ST 22:484, 499.

24 ST 22:501–2.

25 ST 22:501–2.

26 ST 22:506, 502–3.

27 ST 22:473, 476, 516–17, 485.

28 ST 22:481, 510, 511.

29 That this was the situation also in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is suggested in Cowan, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” the best recent discussion of the women-in-coffee houses question. According to the poet, bigamist, and informer John Taylor, the comic actress Mrs. Lessingham used “to assume man's attire and frequent the coffee-houses” (this probably in the 1770s), which does not suggest that women found it easy to visit such places; see Taylor, , Records of My Life, 2 vols. (London, 1832), 1:5–6Google Scholar.

30 ST 22:510.

31 Hodgson, William, The Commonwealth of Reason (London, 1795), p. viiiGoogle Scholar. For Hodgson, see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “William Hodgson”; for Pigott, see Rogers, Nicholas, “Pigott's Private Eye: Radicalism and Sexual Scandal in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Societe Historique Canadienne 4 (1993): 247–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and more especially two essays by Mee, Jon: “‘A Bold and Free-Spoken Man’: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott,” in Cultures of Whiggism, ed. Womersley, David (Newark, Del., in press)Google Scholar, and “Libertines and Radicals in the 1790s: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott,” in The Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cryle, Peter and O’Connell, Lisa (London, 2004)Google Scholar. The case and trial of William Hodgson are briefly but perceptively glanced at by Epstein, in “Equality and No King,” pp. 45–47, and in his “From Ritual Practice to Cultural Text,” Memoria y Civilizacion 3 (2000): 127–60Google Scholar.

32 Goodwin, Albert, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 54–55Google Scholar; Hans, Nicholas, “Franklin, Jefferson, and the English Radicals at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98, no. 6 (1954): 406–26Google Scholar.

33 “List of Coffee-Houses,” The New Patent London Directory, 1795 (London, [1794?])Google Scholar; Roach's London Pocket Pilot (1793), quoted in Lillywhite, Bryant, London Coffee Houses (London, 1963), p. 339Google Scholar.

34 Except where noted, my account of the events in the London Coffee House is taken from the transcription of the testimony of the prosecution witnesses in Hodgson's trial and his cross-examination (ST 22:1021–32).

35 [Pigott, Charles], The Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, 3d ed. (London, 1792), pp. 13–16Google Scholar; Pigott, Charles, Persecution: The Case of Charles Pigott: Contained in the Defence He Had Prepared, and Which Would Have Been Delivered by Him on His Trial, If the Grand Jury Had Not Thrown Out the Bill Prepared against Him (London, 1793), p. 29Google Scholar.

36 Pigott, Persecution, pp. 30–31. This last remark must have struck William Fielding, who led the prosecution at the subsequent trial, with a sense of déjà lu; in the comedy The Coffee-House Politician by William's more famous father Henry, the character Dabble reads to his table companions a passage from a newspaper that begins: “Fontainbleau, January 23. Yesterday his majesty went a hunting.” In the play, of course, the humor lies in the fact that Dabble thinks such a trivial item of news could conceivably be worth reading aloud. See The Coffee-House Politician; or, the Justice Caught in His Own Trap, in The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., with an Essay on His Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq., 10 vols (London, 1821), 1:421Google Scholar.

37 Pigott, Persecution, p. 26.

38 Oracle (3 October 1793); for the bail, see Morning Post (5 October 1793); for the charge of corruption, see Mee, “A Bold and Free-Spoken Man.”

39 For Hodgson's description of his plight in jail, see his The Case of William Hodgson, How Confined in Newgate, etc. (London, 1796)Google Scholar.

40 ST 22:953–1023.

41 Oracle (10 December 1793).

42 World (10 December 1793).

43 The Times (19 December 1793). Interestingly, however, the London did not entirely lose its liberal character in the 1790s. According to the Oracle (24 October 1794), when the jury that had just acquitted John Horne Tooke on a charge of high treason retired to the London, it “was received by a great number of Gentlemen with shouts of joy. One of them obtaining an audience, addressed them in this laconic speech—‘gentlemen, you have saved your country.' Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!”

44 ST 22:1028.

45 Ibid., pp. 1023–24, 1026–31.

46 These two accounts are Hodgson, The Case of William Hodgson, and The Commonwealth of Reason.

47 Pigott, Persecution, pp. 14, 45. The pamphlet is advertised in the Morning Chronicle (4 December 1794) as published on that date.

48 Pigott, Persecution, p. 44.

49 For the visit, see Mee, “A Bold and Free-Spoken Man”; Pigott, Persecution, pp. 47–48.

50 Pigott, Persecution, p. 17.

51 Boswell's various London Journals are full of such overheard conversations; see also the letter of 1793 by “Mr. A.B.,” reprinted in Girtin, Tom, Doctor with Two Aunts: A Biography of Peter Pindar (London, 1959), p. 135Google Scholar. The point that partitions were “only tokens” was made most clearly at the Jew's Harp House and tea gardens in Marylebone Fields, where the privacy of the boxes was “guarded by painted deal-board soldiers”; see Wroth, Warwick, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1896), p. 113Google Scholar.

52 See, e.g., the sketch of Pigott's character in An Answer to Three Scurrilous Pamphlets, Entitled the Jockey Club (London, [1792]), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; Oracle (11 November 1793).

53 Mee, in “A Bold and Free-Spoken Man,” is particularly acute on Pigott's gentlemanly attitudes and on his attitude to his gentlemanly status.

54 Oracle (8 October 1793); see Morning Post (5 October 1793).

55 Pigott, Persecution, pp. 15, 17, 19.

56 Hodgson, apparently quoting Pigott (but from a text I have not discovered) in The Commonwealth of Reason, pp. xiii–xvi.

57 Hooker, Edward Niles, ed., The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1939, 1943), 2:113Google Scholar.

58 Hampden [pseud.], Letters to the Duke of Portland, on His Dereliction of the Cause of the People (London, 1794), p. 30Google Scholar.

59 Joanna Innes points out that the Proclamation Society, an association formed in the 1780s to promote the reformation of manners primarily of the lower classes, was unwilling to recruit Fox and his circle on account of their “notoriously lax morals”; see her “Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners in Later Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Hellmuth, Eckhart (London, 1990), pp. 57–118Google Scholar.

60 Quoted, e.g., in Robinson, Edward Forbes, The Early English Coffee House (1893; reprint, Christchurch, 1972), p. 110Google Scholar.

61 Thelwall, John, Political Lectures. Volume the First–Part the First: Containing the Lecture of Spies and Informers, and the First Lecture on Prosecutions for Political Opinion (London, 1795), p. 6Google Scholar; Binns, John, Recollections of the Life of John Binns: Twenty-Nine Years in Europe and Fifty-Three in the United States (Philadelphia, 1854), p. 44Google Scholar.

62 [Smyth, Philip], The Coffee House. A Characteristic Poem (London, 1795), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.

63 [Spencer Percival], The Duties and Powers of Public Officers and Private Persons with Respect to Violations of the Public Peace (n.p., [1793]), p. 8.

64 See, esp., Thelwall, John, Peaceful Discussion, and Not Tumultuary Violence, the Means of Redressing National Grievances: The Speech of John Thelwall, at the General Meeting of the Friends of Parliamentary Reform, Called by the London Corresponding Society, and Held in the Neighbourhood of Copenhagen-House; on Monday, October 26, 1795 (London, 1795)Google Scholar.

65 Proceedings of the Friends to the Liberty of the Press ([London], 1793), pp. 8, 16Google Scholar.

66 An Address to the Public from the Friends of Freedom Assembled at Their Club, at the Goose and Gridiron, St. Giles’s (London, 1793), p. 11Google Scholar.

67 Burke, Works, 3:390–91; for Erskine, see ST 22:502. Compare William Godwin on the Loyal Associations: “My very footman from behind my chair may be enticed by the ten guineas, so liberally proffered by the new Associations, to betray me, and thus to procure to himself the accursed wages of despotism.” See his letter to Sir Archibald MacDonald, then still attorney general, on the prosecution of Crichton, signed “Mucius,” Morning Chronicle (26 March 1793). Even Thelwall imagines the new threat to freedom of speech to be felt especially keenly by the employer of servants: “even our own houses and our own tables furnish no longer a sanctuary and an altar where it is safe to offer the free incense of friendly communication; and the very domestic who eats our bread stands open-mouthed behind our chairs to catch and betray the conversation of our unguarded moments” (Political Lectures, p. 6). For more, see n. 69 below.

68 An Account of the Trial of Thomas Muir, Esq., Younger, of Huntershill (Edinburgh, n.d.), pp. 112–13Google Scholar.

69 The Parliamentary History of England (PH), 36 vols (London, 1806–20), 30:1566Google Scholar. The Foxite Whigs make the same point when they return to reflect on the Muir trial during the debates on the two bills in late 1795. Harrison, George: “A private letter dropped out of the pocket, the malice of a servant, the repetition of a conversation at table, with a thousand other circumstances, frivolous and innocent in their natures, might be magnified to dangerous portants” (PH 32:505–6)Google Scholar. Fox: “If the detestable spirit of the Scotch law respecting sedition were established in this country, then farewell to all liberty of speech! farewell to the familiarities of conversation! The servant who stood behind his chair [i.e., Fox's chair: this is speech reported in the free indirect style], if wicked enough, might betray him, and, seduced by those in power, night give information which would endanger both his liberty and his life. The abandoned maid-servant of Mr. Muir had acted in a similar manner: violating the confidence reposed in every servant by a master, she communicated to the friends of government the honest, undisguised expressions of Mr. Muir's mind” (PH 32:517).

70 PH 32:409–21Google Scholar, but esp. col. 420; Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Wellesley, Kenneth (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 16Google Scholar.