American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) 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 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press . Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) . Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25098064 Accessed: 01-05-2015 01:13 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Eighteenth-Century Studies. http://www.jstor.org 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. 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 346 Eighteenth-Century Studies 37/3 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 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 347 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.