… periodical essay While seventeenth-century English newspapers and the political press were largely associated with male coffeehouse sociability – customers could read the papers for the price of a cup of coffee – the leisure press which … (1718-1721), or yet triweeklies like The Tatler (1709-1711) or The Lover (1714) were not only available in coffeehouses but also through private subscriptions. Women, who were barred access to coffeehouses, could therefore read them at home. Their literacy and purchasing power were improving fast. The …
… of the everyday; and where beggars cried for attention. The street was the club that admitted everyone. While the coffeehouse and the salon have exercised modern historians as the all-important sites of sociability, eighteenth-century … perspectives. In the work of Jürgen Habermas, the streets are largely absent. They sit beyond the walls of the coffeehouses and salons, where the newspapers were read and discussed by groups of self-selecting and socially uniform … and Genteel Behaviour ... (1740), p. 1-5. The streets did not provide a locale for the easy social interaction of the coffeehouse or drawing room. The streets did not allow for a sociability of sameness – though the royal parks and gay …
… perceived as feminine vices (‘envy’, ‘malice’, ‘cruel back-biting’, ‘spiteful detraction’) to the masculine sphere – the coffeehouse – and masculine talk while lauding the virtue, ‘better sense’ and ‘better natur[e]’ of a female audience who …
… wrote in 1786, ‘we have only the theatre as a public meeting point.’ 15 Despite the opening of some bookstores, coffeehouses and dance halls after the 1770s, the celebrated observer of colonial life, Moreau de Saint-Méry, believed …
France | Marronage | North America | Slavery | Theatre | Women