ABSTRACT
A weekly satirical newspaper in which each issue is a four-page prose dialogue between small groups of men who meet in Bohee’s coffee-house, a fictional location in London (bohea is a quality of China tea). Each man represents an interest or profession. Ward uses this format as an opportunity to stage discussions between these various characters about affairs of state and other matters of public concern, such as the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe, the stock-market, astrology, charitable fund-raising and quack remedies - and especially how these diverse discourses are mutually informative. As Ward remarks: ‘All men own News and Coffee-House Conversation is the very Life of London’ (p. 283). The purpose of the paper is not to impart news of events, which were covered with much greater accuracy and detail by others, nor to criticise the conduct of the war, although many critical remarks are voiced. Rather, the coffee-house comedy is exploited to show how the same events are understood, discussed, and reflected upon by different kinds of people. In Ward’s world, each man reacts to events according to how they impact upon his own interest. Unlike The Tatler and Spectator of Steele and Addison, which borrowed the coffee-house conceit from publications like Ward’s, there is no figure like Mr Spectator who expresses a middle way and a reformative project. In Ward’s coffee-house satire, man is ineluctably selfish, ready to sacrifice everything - nation, religion, monarchy - to his own personal prosperity.
