ABSTRACT
When the hoax Moses his Tombe was published in late 1656, coffee-houses were a very recent arrival in England, with only a handful of establishments in the country. Just six years later the threefold attraction of a novel beverage, intriguing discussion and the latest reading material ensured that there were 82 coffee-houses in the City of London alone, with others opening in provincial towns before the end of the decade.1 As places where current affairs were debated by all comers and clubs met to talk politics, coffee-houses became a source of anxiety to the government and some loyalists as ‘Seminaries of Sedition, and Offices for the Dispatch of Lying’.2 In an abortive attempt to close the coffee-houses in 1675, Charles II famously attacked them as the ‘great resort of Idle and disaffected persons’ in which ‘divers False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad’.3 The false reports that the king had in mind were those which defamed his government, but by this time coffee-houses were also associated with the creation of mendacious, playful fictions. This aspect of coffee-house sociability was in some respects a development of the role played by taverns in the literary culture of the early seventeenth century. In these elite venues gentlemen had fostered a shared identity through the creation of facetious and fantastical prose and verse.4 In the later seventeenth century, taverns retained their literary associations and were often cited as venues for the exercise of deceptive wit – as, for example, with the report that Moses his Tombe had been composed in a tavern. However, it was the coffee-houses in particular which contemporaries identified with the Restoration vogue for shamming fictions.5 We have seen some of the challenges facing readers in detecting fiction represented as fact, yet detection was just one component of
1 Ellis, The Coffee House, pp. 172-73. 2 North, Examen, p. 139. For the government’s suspicion of coffee-house politics, see
Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, Chapter 7; and Ellis, The Coffee House, Chapter 7. 3 A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses, 29 December 1675. 4 For the activities of earlier groups, see Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary
Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1994); and O’Callaghan, The English Wits, Chapter 7 and pp. 54-56.
