The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715-1716

"Dudley Ryder went to a coffee house about six times a day, apart from Sundays. He really wouldn’t have wanted to live in London if there had been no prospect of going to a coffee house. He doesn’t detail how much coffee he drank, so I can’t say that he was physically addicted, but certainly going into that space — the smoky candlelit space where you could talk to anyone — was woven into his social life in a way that seems quite extraordinary today. He would go to five or six different ones in the space of the same day. In that sense, he is the epitome of what Addison christened the ‘coffee-house politician,’ people with an opinion on everything, even though their opinion doesn’t really matter. Yes he was. He had a favourite coffee house: John’s, in spitting distance of the Royal Exchange. Then, like lots of other middle-class males — and it was always males, women didn’t really go in unless they were prostitutes — he had a handful of second choices. One was Tom’s Coffee House, which was in Devereux Court, in the Temple. He also liked the London Coffee House and the Hackney Coffee House which was near where the old part of Mare Street is. He used to drop in there on his way back to visit his family. He’d sometimes walk from his family home in Hackney to his lodgings in the Temple [a journey of just over four miles], back to Hackney, then back to his lodgings all in the same day and think nothing of it. He was a member of the mobile classes in both senses, in the literal sense but also in the figural sense in that he was an avid social climber, ruthlessly ambitious. The coffee houses were absolutely instrumental to his project to remould himself in the image of someone better. I think it’s absolutely crucial because it’s a micro-history and it challenges a lot of the broad brushstrokes you get in these epic, sweeping narratives of London: the fantastic books you get by Roy Porter, Peter Ackroyd , or Stephen Inwood, that tell the entire story of the history of London. What’s crucial in history is that you see all that — or at least part of that — from one idiosyncratic vantage point. That’s Dudley Ryder. You can read general history books as much as you like about the importance of politeness, but it’s only after you read him talking about how he was stung by a wasp multiple times at lunch, and he was in absolute agony, but he says ‘I’m not going to show I’m in any flicker of pain and I’m going to bear this with courage like a noble Greek because people will think more highly of me.’ It’s only when it’s real like that that it begins to matter. People talk about the impact of the media in very general terms, but it’s only when you hear what’s going on in his head when he dips into a pernicious Tory newspaper that you begin to understand the partisanship of the press. Of course the flip side is you can’t just have history as this mosaic of very particular accounts because then you wouldn’t be able to generalise at all. You need interplay and when it’s done well it’s done really well. I’m thinking of The Voices of Morebath , a book about the impact of the Reformation on a tiny Devonshire village. The Diary is an amazing read. Pepys is a brilliant diarist, and one of the reasons for that — beyond the fact that he’s an intriguing individual, he’s not particularly religious, and he’s quite salty — is that he lived through cataclysmic events: the Plague and the Fire, and the only invasion of London since the Norman Conquest. Whereas Ryder doesn’t live through anything particularly epic. There’s the Jacobite Rebellion on, but beyond that the most exciting thing that really happens in terms of national events is that the Thames freezes over and he goes ice-skating on it. But it’s all about the nitty-gritty: what do you eat after you get pissed in a tavern? What’s the 18th century takeaway? What do you do in a mug house? How would you spend the two hours you’ve got to kill before you go out to dinner? These little portraits of everyday life, middle class life at least, make it such a valuable source. It sobered people up, for a start. Before coffee everyone was either slightly or very drunk all day long because you couldn’t drink river water — or to some extent well water because people used to fall in and their bodies would decompose — unless you had a death wish. One might say the arrival of coffee triggers a dawn of sobriety and that lays the foundation for spectacular economic growth, as people are thinking clearly for the first time in their history. But more fundamental is the idea of sociability, that people should be allowed to have opinions on stuff that matters. That anyone who could afford to go into a coffee house did actually have a right to pass their judgement on whether the king was right to go to war with Spain, or on the dying words of the mendacious fishmonger who was hanged for coin clipping. I’m not saying for a minute these opinions were taken into account by the political elite, because they weren’t. But the idea that talking to and watching people are actually passports for improving yourself, and ultimately to a better life, is very powerful. “Before coffee everyone was either slightly or very drunk all day long because you couldn’t drink river water unless you had a death wish.” It also helps develop civility and sociability. In the 16th century, at least, if you looked at someone the wrong way, if disagreements got out of hand, it could end up in violence or a duel. But in the coffee house people acted with a degree of decorum and equanimity. If you disagreed with someone you tried to persuade them that you were right and they were wrong. That’s a shift. There were a few exceptions. I might mention one argument in the Grecian Coffee House about how to scan a Greek word in the correct way that became so barbarically pedantic that after about three hours it was deemed — I think by everyone else in the coffee house — the only way to resolve this would be for the men to fight a pistol duel outside. They did, and in the course of it one of the combatants, one of the pedantic grammarians, had his eye shot out in a scene worthy of the Odyssey itself. So there were exceptions. But overall you’re embracing the modern world, that’s what coffee did more than any of these other drugs that we’ve been talking about."