The coffee-house is one of the exemplary innovations of London in the early eighteenth century (1660-1760), celebrated for its distinctive sociability, its encouragement of discussion and debate, its role in the circulation of news, and for its openness to newcomers, even though women were notoriously excluded.

The lecture surveys these developments, and considers the role of literature in shaping the debate on, and in, the coffee-houses of London. The nature of coffee-house debate, and its place in the Enlightenment media landscape, made it central to histories of public opinion and civil society written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The lecture concludes by thinking about the legacy of the coffee-house in the Starbucks era.

Biography:
Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Coffee-House: a Cultural History (2004) and editor of Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (2006). In addition, his books include The Politics of Sensibility: race, gender and commerce in the sentimental novel (1996), The History of Gothic Fiction (2000), Empire of Tea, as co-author (2015), Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England (2010); and Science and Reading in the Eighteenth Century (2023).