by Addison and Steele’s daily essay, the boy in Boston who copied it to learn prose and what a night class made of the first blog
The Penny University: How a London Coffeehouse Paper Taught America to Write
Last class of the unit tonight, and I ran it in the cafeteria. The college shuts the coffee counter at five, so I brought two cardboard boxes of it from the gas station and a sleeve of cups, pushed four tables together and told twenty-two tired adults that for the next three hours they were in London in 1711, admission one penny, and the rule of the house was that anyone could talk to anyone. It was the best session of the semester. Somebody’s kid drew on the handouts. That is in period too.
The Coffeehouse
I set the scene first. Coffee reached England around 1650. Within fifty years London had hundreds of coffeehouses, some said two thousand. They were plain rooms with a long table, benches, a fire and a pot kept simmering. You paid a penny at the bar to come in. For that you got warmth, light, a seat and the right to stay all day. A dish of coffee was extra.
What you were really buying was news. The house took in the newspapers and newsletters, and they lay on the table for all. Ships’ captains came in with word from abroad. Somebody would read a pamphlet aloud and the rest would argue. Because any man with a penny and a clean coat was let in, a clerk might find himself beside a lord. People called them penny universities. You could get an education by sitting still.
Each had its crowd. One near the docks was where shipowners met the men who would insure their cargoes; it was kept by a man named Lloyd, and the insurance market that grew out of it still bears his name. Another, in the alley by the exchange, was where the stock traders gathered. Poets had theirs, clergy theirs, the two political parties each their own.
I should be honest with a class that is more than half women: they were for men. Women kept them and served in them and were not customers. A pamphlet of the day complained that coffee was keeping husbands from home.
The Paper
On the first of March 1711, a new sheet appeared on those tables. It was a single leaf, printed both sides, and it came out every day but Sunday. It was called the Spectator. It carried no news at all. It was one essay, about two thousand words, on whatever its authors chose.
The authors were two friends from school. Joseph Addison was shy, polished, a member of Parliament who could not make a speech. Richard Steele was Irish, warm, impulsive and always in debt. They had just finished a similar paper that ran three times a week. This one was daily, and it ran for five hundred and fifty-five numbers.
They wrote behind a mask. The essays are by Mr. Spectator, a quiet gentleman who has, he tells us, never opened his lips in public. He goes everywhere in London, to every coffeehouse, the theater, the exchange, and says nothing, and watches. He belongs to a club, whose members stand for the types of the age: a merchant, a soldier, a lawyer who prefers plays to law, an aging man about town, and an old country squire, kind, eccentric and a little behind the times, who became one of the best loved characters in English.
What It Was For
In the tenth number Addison said what he was up to, and it is a line I love. It had been said of an ancient philosopher that he brought philosophy down from heaven to live among men. He would be glad, he wrote, to have it said of him that he had brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses.
He wanted to make ordinary people better company. To teach a rising class of shopkeepers, clerks and their wives how to think, converse and laugh without cruelty. He was a gentle writer; he mocked follies, never persons, and said he would attack vice without hurting the vicious. Next to Swift, who was writing at the same time, he is a lamb.
And it worked, on a scale nobody had seen. The printed run was about three thousand a day. But each copy lay on a coffeehouse table. Addison reckoned twenty readers to every paper. He told the fair sex, as he called them, that he was writing for the tea table too, and women were among his keenest readers. For the first time, a large public was reading the same thing on the same morning and talking about it by noon.
A student who manages a phone store put down her cup and said: so it is a blog. It is one guy posting every day under a screen name, about whatever, and people comment, and half the comments are him. I said yes. It is the first one. She said, did he monetize it? A penny a copy, I said, until the government put a stamp tax on papers and doubled the price, and that is partly what killed it. She said, there is always a platform fee.
The Boy in Boston
Here is where it crosses the water, and why I end the unit with it. A few years later, an odd volume of the collected Spectator turned up in a printing house in Boston. The youngest apprentice got hold of it. He had never seen writing like it and wanted, he says, to imitate it.
He was about fourteen, and he gave himself a course. He would read an essay and make brief notes of the sense of each sentence. He put the notes away for a few days. Then, without looking at the book, he tried to write the essay out again in his own words. He compared his version with the original and corrected his faults. To build vocabulary he turned some essays into verse and back. To learn structure he jumbled his notes and tried to put them in order again.
Sometimes, he says, he had the pleasure of fancying that in certain small points he had improved on the original, and it encouraged him to think he might in time become a tolerable English writer.
That boy was Benjamin Franklin. Two years later he was slipping letters by a pretend widow under his brother’s door. The widow is Mr. Spectator in a bonnet. The whole plain, clear, good-humored American style, the prose of our almanacs, newspapers and founding papers, was learned by a teenager copying a London coffeehouse sheet. His account is in his autobiography, free at Project Gutenberg.
So We Tried It
For the last hour I had them do Franklin’s exercise. Each took one paragraph of Addison. Read it. Notes only. Then I collected the originals and they wrote it back, in their own English, for a reader of today.
The results were wonderful. The security guard turned the old squire at church into his own grandfather at a cookout. The billing clerk rewrote the essay on party rage as a family group text. The daycare owner did the one on scolding wives from the wife’s side, which Addison should have thought of. Then they compared, as Franklin did. Several said the same thing: his sentences knew where they were going and theirs wandered. That is the lesson. It cannot be taught. It can only be caught, by copying.
My Other Job
I write a piece a week for Bohiney and The London Prat. The London paper says it was founded in 1961. I have told my editor she is three hundred years out. A daily sheet, written under a mask, laughing at the town and read aloud where people gather: that is this paper. Her own guide, how to run a satirical website, could have been written by Steele, down to the part about never having enough money. And the house essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not draws the line where Addison drew it: the folly, not the person.
This week’s piece: a silent gentleman, it reports, who has attended every public meeting in the capital for a year without speaking, has published his observations and been found to have understood matters better than those who spoke. Authorities are concerned the practice may spread. Coffeehouses have been asked to report anyone listening.
It goes on the London satirical news page. The paper’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang reminds me that London has always had its own talk for those inside the room; the coffeehouse had a version three centuries back.
We stacked the chairs at nine. The gas station coffee was gone to the last drop. The phone store manager said she is starting something, one post a day, under a name. She would not tell me the name. Good. More of my work is over here.
