18th century coffeehouses, final installment

seventymilestobabylon:

here’s the last of my coffeehouse-related information:

I have learned that the City of London
(not to be confused with the lowercase city of London) is divided into
wards, and two of the wards are called Farringdon Within and Farringdon
Without. This has no major relevance to the coffeehouse history I’m
currently relaying. Just, I didn’t want to let that pass without
comment. Anyway, the highest concentration of coffeehouses with in the
Farringdon Within and Broad Street wards.

Different coffeehouses had different clientele – one might be the particular haunt of Scots, one
of doctors and physicians, one of Jacobites, etc. – though these
distinctions weren’t quite so rigid at places outside of London. But
there were definitely coffeehouses for Whigs and other ones for Tories,
and governments had perpetual anxiety about political unrest being fomented in these places. By, like, rabble.

In
addition to being places for debate, coffeehouses had ads and
news items posted on their walls, and people would sell news to and buy
news from coffeehouses – for instance, a House of Commons clerk might
sell news of what happened in Parliament that day, and the coffeeman
would distribute it to his clientele in printed or verbal formats. In
more official news sources, coffeehouses had to subscribe to lots of
local papers in order to have them available for patrons; if they failed
to do this (and it was expensive!), they would lose clientele.

(Incidentally, the politician Robert Harley – who under Queen Anne was kind of an ur-prime minister before the office of prime minister actually existed – had the idea to make use of the coffeehouses. He recruited people like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift to run periodicals that could serve as the mouthpiece of the government to the public. Basically they’d frame the news in the way the government wanted it to be framed! His agents also arranged for coffeehouses to get excellent rates on government-approved newspapers, which helped to ensure that they’d be in stock at all the important coffeehouses. THANKS FOR THE PROPAGANDA, GUYS.)

Regulars
at coffeehouses could also ask the proprietors to accept mail for them.
The proprietors did this basically for free and as
a favor. In the middle-late 1600s, when specie was in short supply,
coffeehouses would issue adorable lil tokens with their logo on that you
could redeem at the premises. This was very illegal, and the practice
basically died out (at least for coffeehouses) by the end of the
seventeenth century.