The Coffee House as an Institution

A penny at the door of a London coffee house in the sixteen-eighties bought a seat, a dish of coffee and the use of whatever had been left on the tables, which meant the newspapers, the shipping lists and the pamphlets of the week. [A] The houses are often credited with inventing public discussion, and the claim asks more of them than they can carry. [B] They were open to men with a penny and the ability to read, a minority in that city, and the talk inside was no freer than the licensing laws allowed. [C]

[D] What they did do is easier to state and more interesting. A coffee house gathered into one room the people who needed the same information, and different houses gathered different trades: the marine underwriters took one, the natural philosophers another, the booksellers a third. A merchant could learn in an hour what a letter would have taken a fortnight to tell him, and the price he agreed there was made out of everything the room knew. The decline of the houses in the next century is therefore not a puzzle. Cheap newspapers, a faster post and the exchange floor did the same work for more people at less cost, and an institution that exists to move information does not survive the arrival of a better carrier.