“I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffeehouse,” wrote Thomas Chatterton to his mother in May 1770, “and know all the geniuses there.” The haunt of booksellers and aspiring writers, the Chapter was situated on the corner of Paternoster Row, opposite Ivy Lane, and was characteristic of its class with small-paned windows, wainscoted walls and low ceilings with heavy beams, making it dark even at noon. When Chatterton wrote of the geniuses he may have been referring to a small club of publishers and writers who always sat in the box in the north-east corner of the house and called themselves the “Wet Paper Club.” When they chose to recommend “a good book,” it was of course one that had sold extensively and rapidly. In this context, and company, it is perhaps worth recalling that Chatterton’s apparent suicide was considered to be the direct result of his inability to profit from the commercial practices of the London publishing world.
The Chapter was also known for its custom among the clergy, since according to “Aleph” “it was a house of call for poor parsons who were in hire to perform Sunday duty” and who also wrote sermons on request. The discourses varied in price from 2s 6d to 10s 6d-“A buyer had only to name his subject and doctrine” and the appropriate pious lesson would be delivered. If there was “a glut of the commodity” of charity sermons, “a moving appeal,” for example, “for a parish school” could be obtained at a very cheap rate.
Prices at the Chapter were on a par with other such establishments. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a cup of coffee was fivepence while four ham sandwiches with a glass of sherry cost twopence; a pot of tea, serving three cups, together with six slices of bread and butter, a muffin and two crumpets, cost tenpence-or, rather, a shilling since twopence extra went to the head waiter, William, one of those London types who seem forever fixed in the establishment where they work, a figure entirely made out of the quintessence of London. Of average height, somewhat stout, William was rumoured to have money “in funds.” He was imperturbable, always civil and, as the ever observant “Aleph” put it, “carefully dressed in a better black cloth suit than many of the visitors, wearing knee breeches, black silk hose and a spotless white cravat.” Of few words, he was always attentive; “his eyes were in every corner of the room.” He expected his “tip” of a penny or twopence but had moments of unexpected generosity; when “he suspected a customer was very needy, he would bring him two muffins and only charge for one.” He was on easy terms with regulars, who always called him simply “William,” but he inspected strangers “with inquisitive looks.” Those whom he deemed not suitable for admission were dismissed by suggesting that they “must have mistaken the house-the Blue Boar was in Warwick Lane.”
To this coffee house of hacks or “pen-drivers,” seventy years after Chatterton, came Charlotte and Emily Brontë en route to Belgium. Charlotte recalled a head waiter, a “grey-haired, elderly man.” It is likely to have been William. He led them to a room upstairs which looked out upon Paternoster Row. Here they sat by the window, but “could see nothing of motion, or of change, in the grim dark houses opposite.” The street itself was so quiet that every footfall could be distinctly heard. One of Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853), spends her first night in London in the very same coffee house. She looks out of her window on the following morning and “Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim-THE DOME. While I looked my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who have never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.” So, in the shadow of St. Paul’s, the London coffee house could produce revelations.
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The coffee houses lingered well into nineteenth-century London. When some became specialised exchanges, others turned into clubs or private hotels, while others again became dining-houses complete with polished mahogany tables, oil-lamps and boxes with green curtains dividing them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century another kind of coffee house altogether emerged which catered for the breakfasts of labourers or porters on their way to work. It served chops and kidneys, bread and pickles; one familiar order was “tea and an egg.” In many of them different “rooms” charged different prices for coffee. At four o’clock in the morning the poor customer would have a cup of coffee, and a thin slice of bread and butter, for one penny halfpenny; at eight o’clock breakfast for the less impoverished would include a penny loaf, a pennyworth of butter and a coffee for threepence. Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago (1896) describes a coffee house with “shrivelled bloaters … doubtful cake … pallid scones … and stale pickles.” Yet it was still a more respectable establishment than the neighbouring cook-shop, filled with steam, and may have given rise to that Cockney expression in the depths of poverty or despair-“I wish I was dead; an’ kep’ a cawfy shop.” In one of his visitations to the East End Charles Booth entered a “rough coffeehouse,” and found a long counter “on which were piled, in rude plenty, many loaves of bread, flitches of bacon, a quantity of butter, two tea-urns … three beer pumps for Kop’s ale … and a glass jar filled with pickled onions.” Note the ubiquity of the pickle; Londoners love sharpness. Thirty years later George Orwell entered a coffee house on Tower Hill, and found himself in a “little stuffy room” with “high-backed pews” that had been fashionable in the 1840s. When he asked for tea and bread and butter-the staple of the working-class breakfast since the beginning of the nineteenth century-he was told “No butter, only marg.” There was also a notice upon the wall, to the effect that “Pocketing the sugar is not allowed.”
There were other places for a meagre breakfast. “Early breakfast houses” were essentially coffee shops by another name, “stiflingly hot,” with the flavour of coffee mingling with the “odours of fried rashers of bacon, and others not by any means so agreeable.” Ever since the eighteenth century there had also been “early breakfast stalls,” which were essentially kitchen tables set up at the corner of a street or the foot of a bridge, purveying halfpenny slabs of bread and butter together with large pots of tea or coffee heated over charcoal fires. These in turn were succeeded by more elaborate coffee stalls, which were constructed on the pattern of a medieval London shop with a wooden interior and shutters. They were generally painted red, ran on wheels, and were led by a horse to familiar locations at Charing Cross, at the foot of Savoy Street, on Westminster Bridge, below Waterloo Bridge, by Hyde Park Corner, and by West India Dock gates. They sold everything from saveloys to hard-boiled eggs, as well as coffee and “woods” (Woodbine cigarettes).