Creativity

In 1660 as coffee houses became more and more popular each began to attract a certain crowd and began to house certain types of people. The Soldiers could be found at Old or Young Man’s, people of the Whig party at St. James or Smyrna Coffee House, and people of the Tory party at Cocoa-Tree or Ozinda’s. People involved in literature would be found at Will’s. Will’s was a coffee house owned by William Urwin, but made famous by its constant patron and its presiding literary genius, John Dryden. Located in Russel Street, Covent Garden, one of the most fashionable parts of London, this coffee house became a hub of literary critiques and discussions that inspired many famous authors, leaving many of them in debt to both Will’s and Dryden for what they learned or absorbed while attending such a discussion within Will’s. One of these legendary writers, Alexander Pope, first visited Will’s at the ripe age of


"Peep o'day Boys &Family Men at the Finish, a scene near Covent Garden" (London coffee-shop scene), (Antique Prints, website)

 twelve years old. In fact, Pope’s famous Rape of the Lock  rose out of coffee house gossip. Will’s and Dryden also had a great influence during this time on William Congreve and Joseph Addison. It was not long before Will’s became known as the Coffee house of the “Wit’s”. However, Will’s did have its critiques. Among those who did not speak highly of Will’s was Jonathan Swift who once said in his Hints to an Essay on Conversation:
 

The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Will’s
Coffee house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble; that
is to say, five or six men who had writ plays or at least prologues, or had share in
a miscellany, came thither, and entertained one another with their trifling composures
in so important an air, as if they had been the noblest of human nature, or that the fate
of kingdoms depended on them…. [The students] listened to these oracles, and
returned home with great contempt for their law and philosophy, their heads filled
with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and belles letteres.

Another not so positive critique was put forth by the future Earl of Halifax. His critique is specifically on Dryden and how Dryden had a tendency not to acknowledge who influenced him in his writing. However, this critique written in the form of a parody of one of Dryden’s pieces The Hind and the Panther, Halifax’s version entitled The Hind and the Panther transcended, to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, also gives a critique on the Wit’s. Below is a brief extract from this work:

 

But above all…
Is the poetic Judge of Sacred Wit,
Who does i’ the darkness of his glory sit.
And as the Moon who first received the light,
With which she makes these Nether Regions bright;
So does he shine, reflecting from afar,
The rayes he borrowed from a better star
For rules from which Corneille and Rapin flow,
Admir’d by all the scribbling herd below,
While he does dispense unerring truths,
‘Tis schism…offence
to question him, or trust your private sense.

(Ellis 58-67)

John Dryden
(Island of Freedom, website)
By 1712 this house of Wit’s had come to an end, as with Dryden’s death, Will’s lost popularity. The community of writers found their new place to gather at Button’s Coffee House, also located in Russel Street, Covent Garden. Joseph Addison initially was responsible for the popularity of Button’s, however; the positive response and attendance of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift helped raise the coffee houses popularity as well. Still, Button’s is perhaps most remembered for the Lion’s Head Letter Box, where people could drop pieces they had written for publication in The Guardian, a local newspaper. Of this Lion’s head Addison says:
 

This head is to open a most wide and voracious mouth, which shall take
in such letters and papers as are conveyed to me by my correspondents…
Whatever the lion swallows I shall digest for the use of the public…it shall
be set up in Button’s coffee-house in Convent-garden, who is directed to
shew the way to the lion’s head, and to instruct young authors how to
convey his works in the mouth of it with safety and secrecy.
By 1754 the wits could be found at Bedford Coffee house. The Bedford Coffee house attracted such writers as Henry Fielding, William Hogarth, Charles Churchill, and Oliver Goldsmith and “like its predecessors it was ‘the emporium of wit, the seat of criticism, and the standard of taste’” (Pelzer, website). However, also like its predecessor’s the function of Bedford’s as a place for the Wit’s to meet became a thing of the past, as private clubs began forming and other more standardized institutions where memberships were necessary. However, even though using coffee houses for this function became obsolete, these coffee houses were the centers of English literary life for over a hundred years.
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