Masculinity and Gatekeeping in Depictions of the Restoration Coffeehouse

Abstract

Abstract: Examining a wide range of literary attacks against London coffeehouses during the Restoration period, I argue that, far from embracing the democratizing elements of the coffeehouse, this literature reveals the ways that writers pushed back against the popularity of these new public spaces. My argument demonstrates the complex modes of gatekeeping revealed by the many attacks on these emerging publics that were being used to police the boundaries of traditional privileges and uphold dominant ideologies around status and, in the process, to empty the early coffeehouses of participants. These attacks were based in ideologies of gender, race, and status and were intimately tied to cultural anxieties about the free flow of certain types of information, often but not always political in nature. While critical and historical discussions of the early coffeehouses in England tend to focus on their links to the rising public sphere and the growth of participatory politics and public opinion in England, I argue that focusing on the literary attacks against the early coffeehouses demonstrates the complex resistances to and attempts at gatekeeping against these political changes that characterized the coffeehouses' early introduction into Restoration London.