Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse

Abstract

The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse – the presumption that there was a ‘golden age’ of British coffeehouse society in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries which entered into a state of decline during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and finds it wanting. The article suggests that the history of the coffeehouse public sphere is better understood in terms of a transformation from an early modern ‘performative publicity’ to a Romantic style of public life which reflected changing notions of the relationship between the self and society that have been identified by cultural historians of the Romantic age. Rather than trying to identify the moment of its decline, historians should try to explain the continuing vitality of the coffeehouse, and by extension the coffeehouse public sphere, as they have evolved over the course of the last three and a half centuries.