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Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere Author(s): Brian Cowan Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, Critical Networks (Spring, 2004), pp. 345-366

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This content downloaded from 194.27.18.18 on Fri, 01 May 2015 01:13:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ,JL . Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere

Brian Cowan

Recent critical and historical studies of post-Restoration England have been fascinated with the thought that the period saw the emergence of something called a "public sphere" and that the coffeehouse was a central locus for it. J?r gen Habermas used the British "model case" as the prototype for his now famous thesis that a novel form of bourgeois public life (b?rgerliche ?ffentlichkeit) de veloped in the century preceding the French Revolution, and he used the history of the coffeehouse in post-Restoration London as his prime example of the pre cise sort of social form that this public sphere took.1 In this influential account, the coffeehouse is portrayed as a social space dedicated to high-minded discourse on a wide range of affairs; it is also assumed to be open to any man who wanted to participate in the discussions conducted therein, regardless of social rank. More recent to studies have tended agree and have argued that coffeehouses were actu more even ally accessible than Habermas assumed at first.2 As such, the coffee house offers the perfect example for what Habermas wanted to call his nascent

"bourgeois public sphere."

One of the main sources for Habermas's concept of the public sphere was the ideal image of coffeehouse society presented in the periodical journalism of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.3 Habermas's bourgeois public sphere origi nated in what he thought was an increasing ability to distinguish between the private subject and public life. The public sphere constituted the forum in which came private subjects together to exercise their reason: itwas an "?ffentlichkeit von Privatleuten"?a public of private subjects. One of the most important means by which this happened was through the development of a variety of new forms

Brian Cowan is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Social Life of Coffee: Curiosity, Commerce and Civil Society in Early Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 3 (2004) Pp. 345-366.

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of social interchange and communication between these private subjects, coffee most houses, clubs, and the press being among the prominent examples. For Hab ermas, the "moral weeklies" (a misnomer since their papers were published as often as three or six times a week) of Addison and Steele were central to the construction of a public sphere in the literary world?an apolitical literarische ?ffentlichkeit in his formulation?and they provided the template in England for what would later become a full blown "public sphere in the political realm" (poli tische ?ffentlichkeit). As such, this process offered the critical foundation for the expression and legitimacy of a truly democratic, and a truly reasonable, public

opinion.4

Habermas bases his judgment on the undeniable popularity of the works of Addison and Steele. This much is clear. Their journals, the Tatler (1709-11), the Spectator (1711-14), and the Guardian (1713) were an instant success in a literary marketplace where periodical publications were by and large commer cially unsuccessful and could be sustained only through partisan political patron age.5 Addison's "modest computation" was that he could count on 60,000 to 80,000 readers for each issue. The papers attracted avid subscribers among indi viduals as well as coffeehouses that catered to large numbers of readers; Addison estimated as many as twenty readers for each copy printed.6 Copies of the Specta tor papers also circulated well outside metropolitan London. They were often coun enclosed in letters from metropolitan readers to their correspondents in the tryside.7 Within the first year of its publication, provincial societies had sprung up in order to encourage the reading of the Spectator. With the approval of both Addison and Steele, a "Gentleman's Society" was founded on 3 November 1711 in which a group of Spectatorial aficionados would gather together at Younger's Coffeehouse in Spalding to read the paper and to discuss the moral lessons con tained in each issue's essay. Similar endeavors took place in Scotland as well.8 The success, influence, and enduring popularity of the Tatler and espe cially the Spectator papers are well known and indisputable. It is less obvious that Addison and Steele were the champions of a public sphere as Habermas and his many admirers would maintain.9 This essay builds a case for concluding that they were not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics. "The Spectator project," as I shall call the collaborative periodical prose writing of Addison and Steele in the later years of Queen Anne's reign, put the reform and the discipline of public sociability at the heart of its agenda. A crucial aspect of this social reform project was to close off and restrain, rather than to open up, venues for on concern. public debate and especially public debate matters of political Far from championing an easily accessible coffeehouse society, unrestrained newspa per reading, and political debate in the public sphere, the Spectator project aimed as to reign in and discipline these practices. The Spectatorial public sphere, such it was, did not encourage or even condone Habermas's "political public-ness" (poli tische ?ffentlichkeit), it sought to tame it and make it anodyne. This conclusion should be less surprising than it seems. Despite the ap pearance of numerous recent studies detailing the putative rise of a public sphere in post-Restoration England, it is difficult to find many outright and principled defenders of such an ideal public sphere in the political culture of the time. This was an issue upon which both Whigs and Tories could agree.10 While both sides

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were willing to engage in practical political action in the public sphere?actions such as petitioning, coffeehouse debate, club organization, and especially the dis semination of political propaganda?few Whigs or Tories were willing to counte nance a normative public sphere in the Habermasian sense. The Spectatorial chal lenge was aimed at precisely those social spaces and discursive practices that Habermas singled out as the constitutive elements of his public sphere. Properly understood in the mental world of the Spectator project, the coffeehouse was not the practical realization of the Habermasian public sphere, it was rather the seat of a whole host of anxieties about proper behavior in that public space. Coffee house activities such as newspaper reading, political discussion, and club social ization were all objects of the Spectatorial reform project. The object of this refor mation was not the perpetuation of a rational public sphere. The goal was rather to construct a social world that was amenable to the survival of Whig politics during a time in which the future of Whiggery was unclear. Although the Whiggery of Addison and Steele was well known in their own day and continues so today, the precise nature of their partisan politics re mains as opaque as itwas when the papers were originally published. Some critics have emphasized Addison's and Steele's nonpartisan moderation in their periodi cal prose, while others have observed the "flagrantly partisan" Whiggery of the essays.11 More recently, the papers have emerged in the work of Lawrence Klein and others as the product of a new Whig ethic of "politeness." Klein in particular has cogently argued that the Spectator project aimed to elevate the social status of the coffeehouse in the course of a Whig "struggle for politeness."12 This essay refines Klein's interpretation of Spectatorial Whiggery as part of a more general culture of politeness by arguing that the Spectator project, and the reform of coffeehouse society that it promoted, was a powerfully effective response to the crisis of Whig political fortunes in the later years of Queen Anne's reign. It also insists that the Spectatorial essays of 1709-14 were a specific means of reacting to the high Tory resurgence of those years. As such, the Spectator project must be seen as distinct from the later works of both Addison and Steele and indeed the course of Whig politics in the later eighteenth century. The argument of this essay does not extend its purview to the equally contentious early years of George I's reign, years which saw the independent emergence of new periodical prose by both Addison and Steele. Their came to an collaboration end after Addison contributed a couple of desultory essays to Steele's journal The Lover (1714). Addison continued to produce essays as in journals such the Freeholder (1715-16) and the Old Whig (1719), while Steele worked away at new projects such as The Englishman (1714-15), the Plebian (1719), and several other periodicals. After the Hanoverian accession, Addison and Steele would increasingly find themselves at odds with one another as Addi son to found himself attached the post-junto Whig ministries of James Stanhope and Robert Spencer, the second earl of Sunderland, while Steele sided with Robert Walpole's Whig opposition. Addison profited from his patron first and took the state office of secretary of along with Sunderland in 1717. Steele's allegiance would off only pay after 1721, when Walpole became chancellor of the exchequer and subsequently rewarded his ally with ministerial patronage.

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Addison's and Steele's collaborative efforts in the Tatler and the Specta tor were rather different from their more blatantly partisan exercises in the world of Tory exclusion and Jacobite rebellion that emerged after Queen Anne's death on 1 August 1714. This difference was noted by contemporaries as well, most of whom compared Addison's and Steele's later partisan writings of George Fs reign unfavorably to their Spectatorial periodicals.13 Spectatorial Whiggery was born out of the collapse of junto Whiggery in 1709-10. The resurgence of high church Toryism occasioned by Henry Sacheverell's firebrand preaching at St. Paul's ca thedral on 5 November 1709 and his subsequent show trial in the first months of 1710 laid the groundwork for the cashiering of junto Whig ministers and the election of a solidly Tory parliament later in the year. The Spectator project was a product of this crisis of Whig political fortunes.14 Addison and Steele implicitly challenged high church politics and morality in their essays and they did so through advocating a wholesale reform of the constituent elements of Habermas's public sphere. This was a bold and ultimately a successful attempt to make periodical prose a legitimate means through which aWhig message could be conveyed to a broad public without appearing to engage in the vulgar and disreputable parti sanship that had largely characterized the journalistic media before the interven tions of Isaac Bickerstaff, Mr. Spectator, and Nestor Ironsides.

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Addison and Steele used the coffeehouse milieu in their periodical essays as a sort of virtual stage on which they might expose the foibles and follies of social life in public spaces. Steele's Isaac Bickerstaff makes the edifying intent of the papers explicit in his dedication to the collected edition of the Tatler papers: "The general purpose of this paper, is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the to a sim disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and recommend general plicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour."15 Their efforts to effect a reformation of manners in the coffeehouses in particular were applauded by John Hughes, who wrote to the Tatler's Isaac Bickerstaff not long after it commenced publication:

a to as No body (I think) before you, thought of way bring the stage it were into the coffee-house, and there attack those gentlemen who

thought themselves out of the reach of raillery, by prudently avoiding its ... chief walks and districts. In pursuing this design, you will always can never at a have a large scene before you, and be loss for characters to entertain a town so plentifully stock'd with 'em. The follies of the a to will finest minds, which philosophic surgeon knows how dissect, best employ your skill. (T 64, 1:446-7)

Although he correctly identified the role of the coffeehouse in Bickerstaff's moral chidings, Hughes was overly generous in his praise of the Tatler's originality. Most notably, the coffeehouse had been the main conceit for public sociability used by the Tory satirist Edward Ward in his periodicals The Weekly Comedy: As it is Dayly Acted at Most Coffee-Houses in hond?n (1699), the London Spy (1698 1700), as well as in his pamphlet poems The School of Politicks: Or, the Hu mours of a Coffee-House (1690; 1691) and Vulgus Britannicus: Or The British

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Hudibras (1710; 1711). Ward's purpose in these works was the standard satirical one of scourging "vice and villany" in society at large but not with respect to particular persons.16 What distinguishes Ward's satire from Addison and Steele's project was that Ward offered little prospect that things could be any better in the modern city. For Ward, urban coffeehouse society was a den of frivolous news reading, foppish display, and dishonest trade at its best; at its worst, it was "the livery of discontent" which served as a gathering place for disaffected subjects, most often dissenters.17

The Spectator project sought to adapt this Tory satire of the coffeehouse and used it to promote a new and more positive vision for the prospects of urban sociability. Here then is the reason why Addison and Steele chose to single out the coffeehouse as the primary venue for their reformation of public manners: a truly reformed coffeehouse might stand out as a respectable alternative to the Sachev erellite Tory claim that only the Church of England can offer a solid foundation for the moral revitalization of society.18

What were the vices Addison and Steele sought to tame? A unifying con cern in the Spectatorial critique of manners was a desire to tame what the authors saw as an excessive taste for novelty, "gallantry, and fashion" that prevailed in the coffeehouses of early eighteenth-century London (S, 49, 1:209). Such a thirst for novelty was thought to be not only unbecoming of a man, but also a depraved misuse of the public sphere. It was a violation of the restraint, good taste, and decorum that were construed to be proper behavior in coffeehouse society. The pursuit of new things simply for the sake of their being new was considered to be an irrational vice that must be tamed. The worst offender in this regard was the newsmonger, and his natural home was the coffeehouse.

Attacks on the inordinate appetite of the English public for news were a commonplace of seventeenth-century satire, and they were deployed most readily by servants of the crown who had an interest in controlling the flow of informa tion to the public outside the confines of the court.19 Roger L'Estrange set forth reasons his for tightly controlling the news in 1663, not long after his appoint as ment chief licenser of the press for the restored monarchy. Even "supposing the press in order [and] the people in their right wits," he declared "a Publick Mercu ry should never have my vote; because I think itmakes the multitude too familiar with the actions, and counsels of their superiours, too pragmaticall and censori ous, and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right, and licence, to be meddling with the government." This was printed, paradoxically, in the first issue of his own licensed newspaper, The Intelligencer (1663-66), whose only purpose he thought was "to redeem the vulgar from their former mistakes, and delusions, and to preserve them from the like for the time to come."20 Such were the fears of the Restoration court and its most vehement defenders, and these royalists were the prime motivators behind the various attempts to suppress the kingdom's coffeehouses in the later seventeenth century.21 Although the demand for news was great and the publishers of post Restoration England worked hard to supply that demand with a growing number

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of titles?especially when they could get away with such activities during the lapses of the Licensing Act from 1679-85 and after 1695?periodical news pub lication faced a serious legitimation crisis in early modern England.22 The lapsing of the licensing act in 1695 was not universally welcomed and it did not herald a new age of an English "free press," although it has sometimes appeared so in retrospect.23 Early-eighteenth-century serial publications were associated with the ephemeral, satirical, deeply partisan, and highly unreliable news and propaganda war products of the seventeenth-century civil and Restoration crises of authori ty.24The periodical was a genre akin to the scandalous and disreputable libel, and periodical prose writers were highly suspect and controversial figures.25 Sir Roger L'Estrange gambled away much of his already tenuous social credibility by embarking on his news-writing ventures such as The Intelligencer and even more so through his fiercely polemic journal The Observator (1681 87), but L'Estrange evidently thought that the risk was worth taking in order to counter the threat to the Stuart monarchy posed by Whig politics in the 1680s.26 By dedicating The Observator "to the IGNORANT, the SEDITIOUS, or the SCHIS MATIC ALL Reader," L'Estrange eschewed the usual decorum of dedicating a publication upwards to a worthy patron and instead chose to remonstrate down ward to "the multitude," a populist strategy that was only marginally justified by its avowed purpose of reproving faction, by which he mainly meant chastising Whigs.27 Although the Observator successfully managed to shift the terms of po litical debate in the early 1680s decisively in favor of the Tories, L'Estrange never gained much respect for his propagandistic efforts and even he had to face the prospect of official prosecution on several occasions. His publisher Joanna Bro me was prosecuted in December 1682, and in the next year Robert Stephens, a royal messenger of the press who harbored a grudge against L'Estrange, attempt ed several times to prosecute L'Estrange for publishing a "newspaper" contrary so to royal command.28 Like many other periodical prose writers, L'Estrange de nied that he was in fact engaged in publishing a newspaper. "How long has it ... been news to reply upon libells?" he asked: "How long has it been news; when the honour, and authority of the crown, and of the church are openly attacqued and defam'd in printed libells, to defend the government in printed replies?"29 L'Estrange complained to the secretary of state Leoline Jenkins that his loyalist efforts in publishing the Observator had gone unrecognized and largely unre warded. "I have Cassandra's fate upon me, not to be believed when I speak truth, nor am I supported against villains in the most necessary services I can render," he lamented.30 He would later cease publication of the Observator by royal com mand in early 1687.31 High-flying royalists such as L'Estrange were not the only ones concerned with restraining the English taste for news. Daniel Defoe had made the criticism of news writing and newsmongering a staple of his writing for this periodical the Review (1704-13). Defoe claimed that his was not any ordinary newspaper or propaganda piece, rather he took it as his task to offer "needful rectifications" to the "absurdities and contradictions" often found in the periodical press.32 The Spectator project borrowed heavily from Defoe's innovations in the Review, Ad dison and Steele adapted the club motif from Defoe's "Scandalous Club" in his journal, and they also reiterated his criticism of the periodical news industry in

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their papers.33 Together, Addison and Steele expressed some of the most impor tant criticism of the news culture of early-eighteenth-century England through their Spectator project. Like L'Estrange and Defoe before them, Addison and Steele used the news paper form to convey their disapproval for the practice of newsmongering. Once we recognize this apparent contradiction, it becomes difficult if not impossible to make any simple association between the seventeenth-century news revolution and the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere. In its ideal form, the public sphere envisioned by the Spectatorial periodical essay was a carefully policed forum for urbane but not risqu? conversation, for moral reflection rather than obsession with the news of the day or the latest fashions, and for temperate agreement on affairs of state rather than heated political debate.34 In other words, it was not envisioned as an open forum for competitive debate between ideologies and inter ests, but rather as a medium whereby a stable socio-political consensus could be enforced through making partisan political debate appear socially unacceptable in public spaces such as coffeehouses or in media like periodical newspapers. For the new Whigs such as Addison and Steele, just as much as for old Tories like L'Estrange, coffeehouse discourse was best when itwas politically tran quil. All parties, both Whig and Tory, shared an aversion to widening popular participation in the political public sphere. Tim Harris's arguments on the re course by the Restoration court to appeals for popular support as a last ditch resort apply with equal validity for the partisan political culture of the early eigh teenth century.35 The popular politics with which recent historians have been so enamored were extremely unpopular to the politicians of late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century England. Despite the practical necessity of such appeals to popular support in a cutthroat world where even the dynastic succession re mained in doubt, the politicization of the public sphere remained a move that was only made in extremis. Tarring his Whig and dissenting opponents with the brush of vulgar popularity was a propagandistic button that L'Estrange could not resist pushing at every available opportunity. For their part, Addison and Steele de plored the intrusion of "the rabble of mankind, that crowd our streets, coffee houses, feasts, and publick tables" into the debates on the state of the political nation.36 The major difference between theWhig moralists and the chief Restora tion Tory propagandist was that the Spectator project shifted the burden of re sponsibility for controlling the public sphere from the repressive vigilance of the servants of the state to the self-awareness of the individual.37 The "politeness" espoused by Mr. Spectator was a social ethic in which the regulation of proper behavior, both through external shaming as well as internalized guilt, was as im as portant social "polish" or an urban lifestyle. Whig politeness was a form of as policing just stringent, and just as socially exclusive, as Tory persecution. While they took on the appearance and the publishing schedule of a news paper, the Tatler and Spectator were not themselves newspapers. Although the some Tatler included traditional "news" items in its pages when it began publica tion, such content gradually diminished over time, and itwas entirely absent from the Spectator project. Addison proudly announced that "my paper has not a sin gle word of news, a reflection in politicks, nor a stroke of party."38 Addison and Steele deemed traditional news to be either too controversial (that is, factional) or

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too trivial, and they became increasingly critical of both its producers and its consumers in their writings. They understood that the periodicity of a newspaper created a constant expectation among the reading public that something "news worthy" would occur on a regular basis. Thus they claimed that the news writer was bound to become the greatest advocate of continuing the war against France, because war stories filled copy and sold papers. Without a war, the news writers would be forced to invent stories, as Steele claimed happened during the (relative ly pacific) reign of Charles II, when one "could not furnish out a single paper of . . . news, without lighting up a comet in Germany, or a fire inMoscow, [and] prodigies were grown so familiar that they had lost their name."39 Even worse, Steele's Bickerstaff maintained, the style of the news writers was so confusing and the reliability of their reports so tenuous that their writings "seize the noddles of such as were not born to have thoughts of their own." The consequences of read was severe: ing such ill-mannered prose

The tautology, the contradictions, the doubts, and wants of confirma tions, are what keep up imaginary entertainments in empty heads, and produce neglect of their own affairs, poverty, and bankruptcy, in many of the shop-statesmen; but turn the imaginations of those of a little a higher orb into deliriums of dissatisfaction, which is seen in continual fret upon all that touches their brains.40

On the other hand, if newsreaders were fed with the right sort of edifying infor . . . mation?the kind that might "daily instil into them sound and wholesome sentiments"?the vulgar public might be spared the confusion and the despair that ensued from reading the news offered by grub-street hacks. News readers were therefore "the blanks of society," truly tabulae rasae, who could be altered for good or for ill by the kinds of works they read.41

Those who read the wrong papers were prone to become "newsmon as a man who gers." Addison and Steele often caricatured the newsmonger had an inordinate interest in the affairs of other countries, and especially their matters of state. Richard Steele devoted several issues of his Tatler to the story of an as in our who drove his upholsterer, known "the greatest newsmonger quarter," business into bankruptcy and his family into poverty as a result of his chasing after news rather than attending to his affairs. Steele concludes by stating that he intended the story "for the particular benefit of those worthy citizens who spend more time in a coffeehouse than in their shops, and whose thoughts are so taken up with the affairs of the Allies [in the War of the Spanish Succession], that they forget their customers" (T, 155, 2:373). The upholsterer's news obsession was presented as a particularly English, and even more so a Tory, vice.42 Steele's Bickerstaff drew a parallel between the upholsterer's political fantasies and the chivalric delusions of Cervantes's Don Quixote. "The newspapers of this island are as pernicious to weak heads in En gland as ever books of chivalry to Spain," he declared (T, 178, 2:471). Although to the upholsterer's chastisement is supposed to be aimed at the vices which all as a Englishmen are prone, he is nevertheless clearly identified Tory sympathizer: his favorite journals include Tory publications such as the Tost Boy, the Modera tor, and the Examiner; among the Whig papers, only Jacques de Fonvive's Post

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Man caught his eye,43 In other papers, Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator ridicule those readers who trust the veracity of John Dyer's high Tory newsletters.44 Like Quixote, English Tories such as the upholsterer or Sir Roger de Coverley are consistently portrayed by Addison and Steele as hopelessly out of date, romantic daydreamers who may be enjoyed for the quaint humor, the warm companionship and enter tainment their company provides, but they are also clearly marked out as unsuit able for serious political responsibility.45 It is another testament to the success of the Spectator project that the Quixotic Tories such as Coverley and the upholsterer became some of the most popular characters introduced in the papers. However popular the Spectatorial critique of newsmongering may have been, it was not accepted uncritically by all. The very popularity of the essays invited a variety of contested readings of their meaning and import. One reader of Steele's caricature of the upholsterer shifted the blame for his ruin from his "turn ing politician" to the refusal of his customers, primarily "persons of quality," to pay their accounts.46 Steele was obviously stung by the response, for he responded in Tatler no. 180 by admitting that the complaint was "far from groundless" and used it as the occasion for writing an essay on the need for all subjects, whatever their social status, to honor their debts and financial obligations (T, 180, 2:478). Criticism of popular newsmongering had of course been the mainstay of Restoration-era complaints against the rise of the coffeehouses. Samuel Butler's Theophrastan characters included the "intelligencer" who "frequents clubs and coffee-houses [as] markets of news," along with a "newsmonger" who is "a re tailer of rumour" and the "coffee-man" who attracts his customers primarily through allowing them to read and share the news. His caricatures were part of a commonplace satire of the late seventeenth-century coffeehouse news industry.47 These satires did not abate in the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe cited approv ingly Steele's story of the upholsterer and went on to advise the aspirant trades man news ... that "state and politics is none of his business."48 Letters to the "political upholsterer" became a regular feature in the Whiggish newspaper The Daily Courant (1702-35) and graphic satires of tradesmen involved in news and public affairs to the detriment of their own business continued to be produced even (fig. 1). Addison and Steele invented a neologism for their newsmongering b?te noire: a "quidnunc," from the Latin for "what now? or "what's the news?"49 The name seems to have struck a chord with their readers, for the term remained in common currency well into the nineteenth century (fig. 2).50 Aside from the waste of time involved in chasing after the inconsequen tial trivia of news, this sort of mania for information was also seen as suspect because it contributed to the degradation of the quality of coffeehouse discourse was itself. This the purpose behind the Spectatorial reform of coffeehouse society. To a news call piece of "coffeehouse discourse" in post-Restoration England was to instantly diminish its value and its trustworthiness, for it was equated with or gossip, mere rumor.51 Jonathan Swift protested that "it is a great deal below me to spread coffeehouse reports" and often declared that he did not bother to go to coffeehouses because they were unreliable gossip centers.52 Sir Leoline Jenkins, secretary of state for Charles II, thought it unwise to "measure the temper of the nation by the humour of our coffee houses," for he believed that "the bulke of the nation is not so injust, nor so ill natured" as the opinionated men who dominated

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wm*

i/A*>/?)/tte?om/f/t Mr/tfj ?./roti t/nw cold ? /? '//ft' '/f/f//i">/%'/ // '//%/. .._-., tf//f',ff/f.-/tf/

Figure 1. "The Blacksmith lets his Iron grow cold attending to the Taylor's news," etching and engraving. From Oxford Magazine (June 1772), BM Sat. 5074. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Li brary, Yale University, 772.6.0.2.

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Figure 2. "Quid nunc, or the upholsterer shaving," etching and engraving. From Every Man's Mag azine (December 1771). The figure of Spectatorial satire, the political upholsterer, is also derided as a 'Quid nunc' in this print. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 771.12.0.5.

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coffeehouse conversations.53 The purveyor of such rumors, the "coffeehouse states man," or the "coffeehouse politician," was another stock figure of ridicule. And was seen an much like the newsmonger, he as inept commentator on affairs, more interested in self-display than in making any substantial contribution to the for mation of public opinion. He was an amateur, a veritable armchair critic who knew little of the real stakes involved in public affairs and yet was always eager to offer his ill-considered advice on those matters. A Restoration-era satire com no man comes ... a a master plained that "there's [to coffeehouse], but he's great in state affairs, and can ex tempore dictate any thing (as he thinks) worthy to be acted by a council, or Parliament."54 The trope was taken up by Addison and Steele in their moral essays, and the coffeehouse politician remained a stock fig ure of ridicule for more than a century.55 In the Regency era, William Hazlitt could still find a receptive audience for a critical essay on coffeehouse politicians in his Table Talk (1821-22).56

In this respect, then, the irresponsible chatter of masculine coffeehouse politicians was hardly distinguishable from women's domestic gossiping.57 Such comparisons had been a standard trope in the satirical literature on coffeehouse as soon as a note conversation almost it became phenomenon of in Restoration London. A 1667 broadside proclaimed in doggerel verse that at the coffeehouse, "Here men do talk of everything, /With large and liberal lungs, / Like women at a gossiping." Another feared that "men by visiting these Stygian tap-houses [coffee houses] will usurp upon [women's] prerogative of tailing, and soon learn to excel us a our sex ever in talkativeness: quality wherein has claimed preheminence."58 These were precisely the sort of analogies that Addison and Steele sought to rob of their aptness through their efforts to purge coffeehouse conversation of its triviality, its unreliability, and thus, its effeminacy. Steele's Tatler claimed to have taken its title "in honour of" the fair sex, but its real intent was to reform the to turn into Daniel practice of discourse itself, idle tattling polite conversation.59 Defoe was less sanguine about the prospects for the perceived Spectatorial reform of coffeehouse discourse. "The tea-table among the ladies, and the coffeehouse to new a among the men," he declared, "seem be places of invention for deprava to tion of our manners and morals, places devoted scandal, and where the charac ters of all kinds of persons and professions are handled in the most merciless we seem to ourselves a loose to fall manner, where reproach triumphs, and give upon one another in the most unchristian and unfriendly manner in the world."60 In other words, there was still little difference between women's private gossip and men's public discourse. It should not be thought that gossip and newsmongering were the only targets of the Spectatorial critique of coffeehouse talk. Addison and Steele also took aim at anyone whose conversation did not measure up to their standards of men not to discursive decorum, the general rule of which was "That should talk satires please themselves, but those that hear them" (T, 264, 3:337). Thus their hit hard at time-wasting coffeehouse orators, such as loquacious bores, boasters, over-zealous and even projectors, pedants, sardonic laughers, gesticulators, sing ers and whistlers.61 Steele's Isaac Bickerstaff called for "the utter extirpation of as these [offending] orators and story-tellers, which I look upon very great pests was to of society." Bickerstaff's pronouncement here not intended be universally

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applied; he offered a specific dispensation from the rule to the "fair sex," thereby further reinforcing the distinction between regulated, serious male discourse and feminine chatter, the regulation of which was a hopelessly lost cause to the censo rious Isaac Bickerstaff.62 But itwas crucial that masculine coffeehouse society be

made safe for worthy conversation. The consequences of "the long and tedious harangues and dissertations which [the superficial coffeehouse statesmen] daily utter in private circles" were similar to those that Bickerstaff had claimed were also caused by newsmongering: "the breaking of many honest tradesmen, the seducing of several eminent citizens, the making of numberless malecontents, and ... the great detriment and disquiet of Her Majesty's Subjects" (T, 268, 3:351-2).

The Spectatorial attack on newsmongering seized upon a deep-seated anxiety within early modern English political culture that was shared by both sides of the Whig/Tory divide. What made the Spectator project distinctively Whiggish was its equally pointed attack on the intrusion of religious fervor, and particularly high church religiosity, into the public political domain.63 In Septem ber 1710, Addison devoted Tatler no. 220 to an account of his "church thermom eter," a device for measuring the religious temperament of any location, but used particularly in the London coffeehouses. The scale of the church thermometer begins with "ignorance" at the bottom and proceeds upwards to "infidelity," "lukewarmness," and on to the happy medians of "moderation," the "CHURCH" (a perfect mean), and "zeal," At the top of the scale lay the high church extremes of "wrath" and "persecution," which ultimately lead one back to "ignorance" (T, 220, 3:150). Here Addison invokes the famous characterization of the Anglican Church as a proper via media between Roman Catholic popery and dissenting fanaticism. This much was uncontroversial, but at a time when the substantially disruptive Sacheverellite riots had shocked Londoners just months before and when Sacheverell himself was still at large making a hero's progress around the country and influencing the electoral fortunes of theWhigs much for the worse, a call for moderation in church affairs could only be read as a plea for the Whigs.64 This was especially true when Addison took pains to point out that his happy ecclesiastical median was to be found most stable around the Royal Exchange and theWhig-dominated Bank of England and that share prices never rose when the thermometer's temperature rose to high church extremes (T, 220, 3:151). At a moment when the Tories had seized the political initiative by ap pearing as popular defenders of a church in danger, it served Whig purposes well to deflect attention away from the politics of religion and indeed to portray those who did make the state of the church a political issue as unreasonable fanatics, full of wrath and persecutory ignorance. At the time of Sacheverell's trial, the Tatler refused to engage with the serious constitutional questions raised by the affair and dismissed its significance as causing little more disruption than the cancellation of a benefit concert, the diversion of readers' attention away from their regular newspapers, and a significant increase in the consumption of cold chickens because the ladies of the town have made Westminster Hall into a dining hall as they observe the proceedings of the trial (T, 140, 2:305; T, 141, 2:306; T, 142,2:310). This sort of dismissal was bound to infuriate Tory readers who sought

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to focus public attention on the mistreatment of Doctor Sacheverell at his Whig party-managed show trial before the House of Lords.65 Indeed, the only charac ters who take Sacheverell seriously in the Tatler or Spectator are the political upholsterer, who studies "night and day in order to be master of the whole con troversy," and two misguided Tory women whose devotions to the Doctor are less intellectual than they are improperly affectionate and emotional.66 Addison and Steele damn high church Toryism by association, rather than attack it direct ly, through their Spectator project. The religious issue was identified by Addison and Steele's critics as key to their partisan Whiggery. Although the Tatler and Spectator papers succeeded largely to the degree that they did in fact avoid engaging in the partisan tit-for-tat that had characterized other Whig periodicals such as John Tutchin's rapidly anticler ical Observator (1702-12), the Tory critic William Wagstaffe noted that the church was ill-treated by Mr. Spectator. "The clergy have thought themselves a little un handsomely, if not hardly, treated by you in some places," he complained in an open letter to the Spectator printed in the proministerial journal The Plain Dealer in 1712.67 Another Tory pamphlet thought that "the profession, as well as char acter of the clergy are too sacred for the trivialness of such papers" as the Specta tor.68 These accusations hit home in a way that other attempts to associate Steele's Isaac Bickerstaff with radical Whiggery, a coterie of "all true Republican spirits" filled with a "hearty zeal to the good old cause," could not.69 Here then was the source of much of the success of the Spectator project. It gradually managed to shift the discussion away from the contentious issues of religious politics, issues inwhich theWhig case had increasingly lost points to the Tory high church revanche, and it dissociated Whiggery from the controversial constitutional principles (such as the contractual origins of government or the right of resistance to a sovereign power) that had become the focus of Sachever ell's trial. In the short term, when Whig goals were the prosecution of Sacheverell and a desperate attempt by the junto ministers to retain hold on office, the Tatler and Spectator might well have been seen to have a "mild political influence," but in the long run, they provided the foundations for a view of Whiggery as moder ate, progressive, and polite.70 The formidable afterlife of the Spectator project in the rest of the long eighteenth century would attest to this success. Both the Tatler and Spectator remained in print throughout the next century in several editions, and their works were read assiduously and taken to heart by their readers, both male and female.71 The characters and concepts introduced in the papers, such as the political upholsterer and the ecclesiastical thermometer, remained useful fig ures in later eighteenth-century Whig writings, and of course the model of the moral essay in periodical format would be emulated again and again.72 The pro totype for a successful new political strategy had been set.

The resounding ideological success of the Spectator project may indeed account for some of the misinterpretations of Addison's and Steele's regard for were so so the public sphere. Because their own papers popular and well received, and because they themselves were so well ensconced in the London coffeehouse

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world, it is easy to assume that Addison and Steele were the great champions of a free press and an open coffeehouse society. The London coffeehouses were after all the primary site where their papers were read: Swift claimed he seldom saw a save Spectator "any where else," in the coffeehouses.73 Button's Coffeehouse was established under Addison's patronage as the center of his social life and Whig literary society more generally.74 Why would Addison and Steele not have cele brated the coffeehouse as the focus for a new urban and commercial English social order? To a certain extent they did. Mr. Spectator praised the coffeehouse as a place where "men who have business or good sense in their faces" visit "ei ther to transact affairs or enjoy conversation," and he famously declared it his intention to bring "philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses" (S, 49,1:210; S, 10, 1:44).

But this praise of the coffeehouse traveled only so far as the great Whig censors of British society thought that they could dictate the terms upon which this commercial urban society was governed, and in the later years of Queen Anne's reign it was by no means clear that they would be able to do so. The Spectator project was a venture born not out of complacency, but as a means to escape the political cul-de-sac into which the Whig party had found itself led to by Anne's junto ministers. The Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian should not be read as prescient progenitors of liberal democracy and bourgeois society: Ad dison's willingness to defend theWhig regime's suspension of habeas corpus after the 1715 Jacobite rebellion gave the lie to any such pretensions.75 Still less should Addison or Steele be added to an already contentious canon of putative republi can or "civic humanist" texts.76 They must be understood as a product of the bitterly partisan, but oligarchic nevertheless, political culture of Queen Anne's reign. Addison and Steele were indeed partisan capital "W" Whigs who sought broadly to preserve the "revolution principles" of 1688-89, but by no means were they the triumphant self-satisfied Macaulayite Whigs of a later era who would later read their political victories as steps along an inexorable evolutionary path from absolutist monarchy to Parliamentary democracy. Addison and Steele had no concept of aWhig interpretation of history as it would later come to be known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.77

By virtue of its very success after the Hanoverian accession, Whiggery became perhaps the most flexible and pervasive political label of the eighteenth century. The "polite" Whiggery of the Spectator project was successful because of own extreme its malleability and its refusal to engage in overtly partisan politics at a point when the popularity of Whig principles were tenuous, but the Spectato rial strategy ultimately could not accommodate the variety of different uses to which Whig principles and politics would be put after the Hanoverian accession dramatically transformed Whig political fortunes. We should remember that both Addison and Steele largely abandoned the Spectatorial strategy during George Fs a reign in favor of return to more blatantly partisan political argument. More as radical Whigs, such John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, never adopted a polite Spectatorial pose in the criticism they voiced in Cato's Letters (1720-23) of new the Walpolean regime's attempt to cover up the scandal of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in the early 1720s.78 Nor did the radical Whig John Toland,

This content downloaded from 194.27.18.18 on Fri, 01 May 2015 01:13:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 360 Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 I 3 who chose to fight high church Tory clericalism through the very unpolite mode of scholarly erudition.79 This was also true for those politicians who found them selves fully excluded from the political world of the Hanoverian Whig ascenden cy such as the former Tory secretary of state for Queen Anne, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, Habermas's prime example of an early public sphere politician, used a very different strategy than the Spectator project when he launched his journal The Craftsman (1726-50) as the voice of political oppo sition to the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. Already disgraced and unlikely to return to office under the current regime, Bolingbroke had less to lose in the 1720s than Addison and Steele had in the early 1710s, and thus he was at greater liberty to criticize the ministry. Through his persistent attacks on the corruption of theWalpolean regime in print, Bolingbroke established a position as the "anti minister" of the early Hanoverian polity. In a political culture still very wary of the emergence of any new "fourth estate" to challenge the established constitu tion of king, lords, and commons, Bolingbroke's practice of opposition politics found an accepted place in the structure of political debate, not least because he effectively deployed aWhiggish language of ancient constitutionalism against a regime which sought to present itself as the guardian of Whiggish virtues.80 Al though Spectatorial Whiggery did not advocate a public sphere in the political realm, later variants of Whig politics and Whig politicians certainly had no such qualms about doing so themselves. A political "culture of critique" emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, despite the reservations of its oligarchical governors.81 Nor did the Spectatorial strategy remain aWhig preserve over the course of the eighteenth century. To be sure, journals such as The Lay Monk (1713-14), The Censor (1717), and Pasqu?n {1722-24) carried on the tradition of Spectato rial Whiggery with their apparent pose of nonpartisanship and their continued jibes against the impolite pretensions of the high church clergy. But the polite essay was not an intrinsically Whig medium. In the post-1715 context of Whig oligarchy, the Spectatorial essay could, and did, serve as a venue for Tory and even Jacobite opposition. Nathaniel Mist's Jacobite-leaning Weekly Journals (1716-37) adopted the Spectatorial essay format as a means of making his oppo sition politics more palatable.82 Even more influentially, Samuel Johnson adapted the Addisonian prose essay to his own decidedly non-Whiggish purposes in his periodicals the Rambler (1750-52) and the Idler (1758-60).83 When he wrote his biographical sketch of Addison's life in 1781, Johnson remarked approvingly that the major achievement of the Tatler and Spectator essays had been to supply "cooler and more inoffensive reflections" to "minds heated with political con test."84 By the age of the American Revolution, theWhig political purpose behind the Spectator project had become opaque and itwas the legacy of the polite peri odical prose essay which remained first and foremost in the minds of Addison's and Steele's readers.

Just as careful attention to the attitudes towards coffeehouse society in the Spectator project forces us to rethink Addison's and Steele's attitudes towards our the public sphere, so should it encourage a revision of understanding of the role of the coffeehouse itself in eighteenth-century public life and political cul runs ture. A powerful tension between accessibility and exclusivity throughout the social, the cultural, and the intellectual histories of the coffeehouse. This should

This content downloaded from 194.27.18.18 on Fri, 01 May 2015 01:13:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cowan /Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere 361 make us think twice before we draw any immediate and unqualified associations between the development of coffeehouse society and the rise of an unfettered and unproblematic public sphere.85 Public social life, and even more so, public politics were both always problematic in early modern England, and it is very difficult to find many normative champions of a Habermasian public sphere in the period. The public sphere in the political realm, as Habermas called it, was born out of the practical exigencies of partisan political conflict, but it found few outright defenders in the world of early modern political theory. Instead of a Habermasian public sphere, we find in early-eighteenth-century political culture a number of advocates for a more "civilized" public life, such as Addison, Steele, and their fellow travelers in the cooperative Spectator project. This was a public life which includes the coffeehouse at its center to be sure, but the purpose of this civiliza tion of public life was not to carve out a space for the politics of democratic reason as the Habermasian paradigm would lead us to believe.86 They wanted a "civil" society, and this perhaps explains the growing popularity of the term amongst the literati of the British Enlightenment over the course of the eighteenth century, but they did not want a "bourgeois public sphere."87 Their goal was not to prepare the ground for an age of democratic revolutions?it was to make the cultural politics of Augustan Britain safe for aWhig oligarchy.

NOTES

Preliminary versions of this essay were delivered to audiences at the North American Conference of British Studies in Toronto (2001) and ISECS in Los Angeles (2003). The author is especially grateful for helpful comments from Claude Rawson, Newton Key, and Mark Knights. Support for the re search for this article was provided by grants from the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.

Unless otherwise indicated, all seventeenth- or eighteenth-century works cited here were published anonymously.

1. J?rgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT as Press, 1989). A related treatment of the coffeehouse exemplar of Enlightenment sociability is found in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, (New York: Norton, 1974).

on 2. A comprehensive list of works the coffeehouse invoking the "public sphere" rubric is unnecessary here, but see political histories such as: Steven Pincus, "'Coffee Politicians Does Create': Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture," Journal of Modern History 67 (December 1995): 807-34; Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); and literary histories such as: Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986); Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writ ing in England 1670-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Erin Mackie, Market ? la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and Spectator Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997). It has achieved the status of textbook commonplace in works such as James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, T. C. 2001), and W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). Compare the more sceptical appraisals in Joad "The Raymond, Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century," Prose Studies 21.2 (Aug. 1998): 109-40; and Brian Cowan, "The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsid ered," Historical Journal 47.1 (2004): 1-26. On the question of gendered access to the coffeehouses, see Brian was Cowan, "What Masculine About the Public Sphere?," History Workshop Journal 51 (February 2001): 127-57.

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3. Compare Markman Ellis, "Coffee-Women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century," in Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O'Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, eds., Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cam bridge Univ. Press, 2001), 27-52.

4. Habermas, Strukturwandel der ?ffentlichkeit (Darmstadt and Neuweid: Herman Luchter hand, 1962), 45; and Habermas, Structural Transformation, 29.

5. See J.A. Downie, "Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne," in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Serials and Their Readers 1620-1914 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1993), esp. 56-9.

6. Joseph Addison, Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 1:44; hereafter cited as S by issue, volume, and page number. See also Bond's introduction (5, l:xxv xxvii, xxxiii). For coffeehouse subscriptions, see Charles Delafaye's account book of newspapers delivered to individuals and coffeehouses (1703-14), Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Kew Gardens, State Papers, (hereafter SP), 9/217; and Jonathan Swift, Correspondence, ed. David Wool ley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999- ), 1:381.

7. Peter Wentworth would enclose copies of the Spectator with his letters to his brother. In this manner, the Spectator issues circulated quickly from London to the rest of England and abroad to places such as Hanover. See JJ. Cartwright, ed., Wentworth Papers 1705-1739 (London: Wyman, 1883).

8. Peter Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 228; Nicholas Phillipson, "The Enlightenment in Scotland," in Roy Porter, ed., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 26-8.

9. See esp. Eagleton, Function of Criticism, 10-11.

10. For Tory objections, see Roger D. Lund, "Guilt By Association: The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England," Albion 34.3 (Fall 2002): 391-421.

11. Downie, "Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne," 53. Nonpartisan readings include Bonomy Dobr?e, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 75; Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eigh teenth Century 1660-1744 (Paris, 1881; reprint London: Routledge, 1948), 245-6; Michael Ket cham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985); and Melton, Rise of the Public, 95-7. Political readings include Downie, "Periodicals and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne"; and Calhoun Winton, "Steele, the Junto and the Tatler no. 4," Modern Language Notes 72.3 (Mar. 1957): 178-82. The best study of Spectatorial politics remains Bertrand A. Goldgar, The Curse of Party: Swift's Relations with Addison and Steele (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961).

12. Lawrence Klein, "Coffeehouse Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England," Huntington Library Quarterly 59.1 (1997): 49. See also Klein, "Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists: The Case of the Spectator," in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995), 221-33; J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 235-9; and Nicholas Phillipson, "Politics and Politeness: Anne and the Early Hanoverians," in J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Schochet, eds., The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800 (Cam bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 213-45.

13. See, for example, Character of Richard St?le, esq. (London, 1713), 11, 20; John Tutchin's Ghost to Richard St?le, esq. (London, 1714); Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post 68 (29 March 1718); Henry St. John, Viscount Bolinbroke, "The Occasional Writer" no. 1 (1727), in Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols., (London: Bohn, 1844), 1:202.

14. Phillipson, "Politics and Politeness," 225.

15. Richard Steele, Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:8; hereafter cited as T by issue, volume, and page number.

16. [Edward Ward], London Spy Compleat (London, 1709), sig. A2v.

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17. Ward, School of Politicks (London, 1690), 14; see also Ward, Vulgus Britannicus (London, 1710), pt. 4, cantos 11-12.

18. Hence the Whiggish affinity with the discourse of politeness in the early eighteenth century discussed in Klein, "Coffeehouse Civility." See also Klein, "Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England," Historical Journal 32.3 (1989): 583-605; and Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).

19. See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 646 7, 684-90; and Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Li censed News 1660-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956).

20. Roger L'Estrange, Intelligencer 1 (31 August 1663); cp. Intelligencer 32 (21 April 1664), 257.

21. For different accounts of royal attempts to suppress the coffeehouses, see Pincus, "'Coffee Does Politicians Create,'" and contrast Cowan, "Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered."

22. For a revisionist account of early modern periodical publishing, see Adrian Johns, "Miscella neous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England," British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 159-86; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 174-5, 539-40; and contrast the rather more Whiggish account in James Sutherland, Restoration Literature 1660-1700 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 233-44.

23. Compare Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), with Michael Treadwell, "The Stationers and the Printing Acts at the End of the Seventeenth Century," in John Barnard and D. F.McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557-1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 755-76.

24. See Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), ch. 2; and Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).

25. Hence perhaps the resort to the use of eidola such as Isaac Bickerstaff, Mr. Spectator, and Nestor Ironsides as the voices of Addison's and Steele's essays, on which see Albert Furtwangler, "The Making of Mr. Spectator," Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 21-39.

26. See Lois Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care: Restoration Publicist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001), 138-40; and Dorothy Turner, "Sir Roger L'Estrange's Deferential Poli tics in the Public Sphere," Seventeenth Century 13.1 (1998): 85-101.

27. [L'Estrange], The Observator, 3 vols., (London, 1684-87), 1: unpaginated introduction. On L'Estrange's vernacular prose style, see T. A. Birrell, "Sir Roger L'Estrange: The Journalism of Oral ity," in Cambridge History of the Book, 4:657-661. For the wider context of this brand of loyalist populism, see Tim Harris, "'Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker': The King's Friends and the Battle for the Allegiance of the Common People in Restoration England," in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1850 (Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2001), 195-232.

28. Folger Shakespeare Library (hereafter FSL) MS I.e. 1309 (7 December 1682); PRO, SP 29/ 422, pt. 2/158; SP 29/422, pt. 2/164; SP 29/423, pt. 2/87; SP 29/424, pt. 2/151; SP 29/433, pt. 2/121. Compare Observatory 265 (1 January 1683), 323 (20 April 1683), and 144 (4 October 1684).

29. Observator 325 (23 April 1683); see also Observator 326 (25 April 1683), with Defoe's sim ilar denial in Review 5.1 (27 March 1708).

30. PRO, SP 29/425, pt. 2/75; see also SP 29/431/47.

31. For contemporary reports of the cancellation of L'Estrange's Observator by royal command, see FSL, MS I.e. 1761 (15 January 1687); Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols., (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1857), 1:392, 396.

32. [Defoe], Review 1.1 (19 February 1704): 4; see also Downie, "Stating Facts Right About Defoe's Review,'' Prose Studies 16.1 (April 1993): 8-22.

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33. See Downie, "Reflections on the Origins of the Periodical Essay: A Review Article," Prose Studies 12.3 (Dec. 1989): 296-302.

34. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 42-3.

35. See Harris, "'Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker.'"

36. T, 153, 2:361. Compare the political sociology of L'Estrange, A Memento treating of the rise, progress, and remedies of seditions (London, 1662; reprint London, 1682).

37. Scott Paul Gordon, "Voyeuristic Dreams: Mr. Spectator and the Power of Spectacle," Eigh teenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36.1 (1995): 3-23.

38. S, 262, 2:517. Compare S, 124, 1:507. See also C. N. Greenbush, "The Development of the Tatler, Particularly in Regard to News," PMLA 31.4 (1916): 633-63; and Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 128-9.

39. T, 18, 1:149-50. See also T, 11, 1:102; T, 42, 1:305-6; T, 74, 1:512; S, 452, 4:90-4.

40. T, 178, 1:471. Here Steele invokes an understanding of the physiological consequences of reading that was commonplace in early modern England. See Johns, Nature of the Book, ch. 6.

41. S, 10, 1:46. See also S, 4, 1:18.

42. It is ironic then that foreign admirers of the Spectatorial essay also imitated its critique of newsmongering. Witness the case of Justus van Effen, author of De Hollandsche Spectator (1731 35), as discussed in P. J. Buijnsters, Spectatoriale Geschriften (Utrecht: HES, 1991), 58-9.

43. T, 232, 3:201; cp. T, 155, 2:371 and T, 178, 2:469.

44. T, 18, 1:150; T, 214, 3:125; S, 43, 1:182-3. See also Freeholder, no. 22, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 132.

45. See Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), esp. 20-31.

46. Thomas Hope to Isaac Bickerstaff, 22 May 1710, in New Letters to the Tatler and Spectator, ed. Richmond P. Bond (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1959), 125.

47. Samuel Butler, Characters (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1970), 129, 177, 256-8. See also M.P., A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London, 1661); and Character of a Coffee-House with the Symptoms of a Town-Wit (London, 1673).

48. Defoe, Compleat English Tradesman (London,1726), (1839 reprint; Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), 32; see also 31, 38.

49. T, 10, 1:89. See also S, 625, 5:136-7.

see 50. OED, s. v. "quidnunc"; and for its particular association with coffeehouses, A Letter from the Quidnunc's at St. James's Coffee-House ([Dublin, 1724]).

51. Bodleian Library, MS Wood, E 40, fol. 72; Letters Addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson, ed. W. D. Christie, 2 vols., new series, nos. 8-9 (London: Camden Society, 1874), 1:73.

52. Swift, Correspondence, 1:462; see also 1:344, 601.

53. PRO, SP 104/3, fols. 16r-v.

54. City and Country Mercury 10 (8-11 July 1667).

55. T, 84, 2:36; T, 125, 2:237; and [Defoe], Vindication of the Press (London, 1718), 17; British Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, Political and Personal Satires, [BM Sat.] nos. 2010 (c. 1733), 5073 (1772), 5074 (1772), 5923 (1781); Woodward and Cruikshank, "Public House Politicians!! N. 11" (1807), Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Farmington, CT, print 807.1.2.1.1.

56. William Hazlitt, Table Talk, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (NY: AMS, 1967), 8:185-204; cp. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 140-1.

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57. For studies of the gendering of gossiping, see Steve Hindle, "The Shaming of Margaret Know sley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England," Continuity and Change 9.3 (1994): 391-419 and now Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Pr., 2003).

58. Women's Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), 3-4. See also News from the Coffeehouse (London, 1667); M. P., Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses, 4; Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), 4-5; and The City-Wif es Petition, against Coffee (London, 1700), [2].

59. T, 1, 1:15. On the femininity of idle talk, compare S, 247, 2:458-62. See also Kathryn Shev elow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989), 94-8; and Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830 (Cambridge: Cam bridge Univ. Press, 1994), 209-11.

60. Defoe, Compleat English Tradesman (1987 ed.), 133-4. Compare S, 457, 4:111-13.

61. For projectors, see: S, 31, 1:127-32; on pedants, S, 105, 1:436-8; laughers, Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stevens (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1982), no. 29, 125-6; gesticulators, Guardian, no. 84, 305-7; and singing and whistling, S, 145, 2:73.

62. T, 264, 3:337-8. See also Sherman, Telling Time, 131-3.

63. For a view of Spectatorial religion compatible with that offered here, see Lawrence Klein, "Sociability, Solitude and Enthusiasm," Huntington Library Quarterly 60.1-2 (1998): 153-77.

64. Geoffrey Holmes, "The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth Century London," in Paul Slack, ed., Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Mod ern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 232-62; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sa cheverell (London: Methuen, 1973).

65. One anonymous Tory observer of the trial kept a careful and critical manuscript account of the proceedings as a means of documenting the perceived travesty of justice therein (Beinecke Li brary, Yale University, MS Osborn MS S 13043). I am preparing a critical edition of this trial tran script with the assistance of Matthew Devlin.

66. T, 232, 3:200; S, 37, 1:157; S, 57, 1:243-4. Compare the similar representation of Sacheverell as the object of Moll's adoration in plate three of William Hogarth, "The Harlot's Progess" (1732).

67. Plain-Dealer 7 (24 May 1712).

68. "Spy Upon The Spectator" (1711), in Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, eds., Addison and Steele: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge, 1980), 232.

69. Moderator 42 (9-13 October 1710).

70. J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 161.

71. Prominent examples include Dudley Ryder, Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715-1716, ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 38, 46, 94, passim; Philip Carter, "James Boswell's Manli ness," in Tim Hitchcock and Mich?le Cohen, eds., English Masculinities 1660-1800, (London: Long man, 1999), 125; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), 61-2; and Princeton University, Firestone Library, MS Taylor 2, Caroline Stockton Commonplace Book (c.1815).

uses 72. For later of the "church thermometer," see C. P., A Proposal Humbly Offer'd to the P? t (Dublin, 1731), and perhaps most famously William Hogarth's engravings "Enthusiasm Delineat ed" (c. 1761), BM Sat. 2425, and "Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism," (1762), BM Sat. 1785.

73. Swift, Correspondence, 1:381.

74. See Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:77-8.

75. Addison, Freeholder, no. 16 (1979 ed.), 106-11. See also Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1971), 127-9.

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76. For attempts to read the Spectator project as part of a civic republican political discourse, see Iain Hampsher-Monk, "From Virtue to Politeness," inMartin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 2:85-105; and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 65-7.

77. On this distinction, see and compare Annabel Patterson, Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 1-35; and Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931).

78. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianap olis: Liberty Fund, 1995).

79. See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003).

80. On the concept of a "fourth estate" in eighteenth-century political thought, see J.A.W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1983), 58-62, and ch. 2.

81. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715 1785, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 46.

82. See Arthur S. Limouze, "A Study of Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journals" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1947), ch. 4.

83. See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 143. For different accounts of Johnson's relationship to the Addisonian precedent, see Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), 38-44; and J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 75-7.

84. Samuel Johnson, "Joseph Addison" (1781), in The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Ox ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 650.

85. See Cowan, "The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered." A fuller discussion will be offered in Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: Curiosity, Commerce and Civil Society in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming).

86. For an attempt to present the emergence of a public sphere as the prototype for modern democratic politics, see Margaret C. Jacob, "The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A Europe an Perspective," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (1994): 95-113.

87. Cowan, "What was Masculine About the Public Sphere?," 149-50.

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