Ninny-broths, Sirreverence, and a Place for Hell: Character Sketches of the Coffeehouse

Following the revival of Theophrastan-style character sketches in the seventeenth century, vitriolic explorations of character became commonplace in Restoration and eighteenth-century print culture. The original scope of the Theophrastan project was expanded to sketch the characters of fashionable and well-known places as well as people, with the spatial turn giving rise to a series of sketches on the ‘Character of a Coffee-House’ (1660–90). Even though the polite nature of the coffeehouse has been debunked in recent years, following a sustained challenge to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the bourgeois public sphere, there remains a tendency to characterise the space primarily as one of sociability and conversability. Yet early patrons would not recognise this serene quality of the coffeehouse as they “took the Place for Hell” or a “Hot-house to flux in”. This chapter addresses how character sketches document the rise of coffee culture and how print played a vital role in shaping the coffeehouse’s hegemonic status as a conversable and homosocial space. It challenges the notion that coffeehouse culture is defined by its relationship to periodical print by focusing on how early patrons characterised, defined, and recorded their experiences of these new spaces.