A Penny Worth o' Creativity and a Saucerful of Secrets: Exploring a Culture of Collaborative Authorship, Intellectualism, and Urban Inspiration in the Coffee-Houses of Eighteenth Century London
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Date
2016-01-01
Department
English
Program
Texts, Technologies, and Literature
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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
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Abstract
The purpose of this project is to trace the intellectual arc of the eighteenth century London coffee-house from rise, height of influence, to the inevitable fall from prominence. I argue that a strong reactionary literary Romanticist movement founded in the work of William Wordsworth has largely erased all trace of a vibrant intellectual coffee culture founded in the early Empirical Baconian Methodology, and refined in the work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. I argue that the eighteenth-century coffee-house deserves in depth treatment for the rare glimpse it provides into a dynamic and collaborative writing culture which flouted societal norms and empowered any man who entered the establishment. My argument is timely as well. My investigation of the cultural and political implications of the coffee-house and coffee-house culture reveals important resonances between the collaborative spirit of the coffee-house and our own contemporary digital writing culture.