Search my many thousands of pubs and London history
London18 is a historical site about early London coffee houses and taverns and will also link to my current pub history site and also the London street directory
WILL'S COFFEE-HOUSE, Russell street.
Will's, the predecessor of Button's, and even more celebrated than that
Coffee-house, was kept by William Urwin, and was the house on the north side of
Russell street at the end of Bow-street — the corner house — now occupied
as a ham and beef shop, and numbered twenty-three. " It was Dryden who made
Will's Coffee-house the great resort of the wits of his time." (Pope and Spence)
. The room in which the poet was accustomed to sit was on the first floor
; and his place was the place of honour by fire-side in the winter ; and at the
corner of the balcony, looking over the street, in fine weather; he called the
two places his winter and his summer seat. This was called the dining-room floor
in the last century. The company did not sit in boxes, as subsequently, but at
various tables which were dispersed through the room. Smoking was permitted in
the public room : it was then so much in vogue that it does not seem to have
been considered a nuisance. Here, as in other similar places of meeting, the
visitors divided themselves into parties ; and we are told by Ward, that the
young beaux and wits, who seldom approached the principal table, thought it a
great honour to have a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box.
* Will's Coffee-house first had the title of the Red Cow, then of the Rose, and,
we believe, is the same house alluded to in the pleasant story in the second
number of the Tatler : —
" Supper and friends expect we at the Rose."
The Rose, however, was a common sign for houses of public entertainment.
Dean Lockier has left this life-like picture of his interview with the presiding
genius at Will's : — " I was about seventeen when I first came up to town/' says
the Dean, " an odd-looking boy, with short rough hair, and that sort of
awkwardness which one always brings up at first out of the country with one.
However, in spite of my bashfulness and appearance, I used, now and then, to
thrust myself into Will's, to have the pleasure of seeing the most celebrated
wits of that time, who then resorted thither. The second time that ever I was
there, Mr. Drydenwas speaking of his own things, as he frequently did,
especially of such as had been lately published. ' If anything of mine is good,
says he, ' 'tis Mac-Flecno ; and I value myself the more upon it, because it is
the first piece of ridicule written in heroics.' On hearing this I plucked up my
spirit so far as to say, in a voice but just loud enough to be heard, ' that
Mac-Flecno was a very fine poem, but that I had not imagined it to be the first
that was ever writ that way.' On this, Dryden turned short upon me, as surprised
at my interposing ; asked me how long I had been a dealer in poetry ; '
and added, with a smile, ' Pray, Sir, what is it that you did imagine to have
been writ so before ? ' — I named Boileau's Lutrin, and Tassoni's Secchia Rapita,
which I had read, and knew Dryden had borrowed some strokes from each. * 'Tis
true, said Dryden, ' I had forgot them.' A little after, Dryden went out, and in
going, spoke to me again, and desired me to come and see him the next day. I was
highly delighted with the invitation ; went to see him accordingly ; and was
well acquainted with him after, as long as he lived"
Will's Coffee-house was the open market for libels and lampoons, the latter
named from the established burden formerly sung to them : —
"Lampone, lampone, camerada lampone."
There was a drunken fellow, named Julian, who was a characterless frequenter of
Will's, and Sir Walter Scott has given this account of him and his vocation : —
" Upon the general practice of writing lampoons, and the necessity of finding
some mode of dispersing them, which should diffuse the scandal widely while the
authors remained concealed, was founded the self-erected office of Julian,
Secretary, as he calls himself, to the Muses. This person attended Will's, the
Wits' Coffee-house, as it was called ; and dispersed among the crowds who
frequented that place of gay resort copies of the lampoons which had been
privately communicated to him by their authors. He is described,' says Mr.
Malone, ' as a very drunken fellow, and at one time was confined for a liable.'
Several satires were written, in the form of addresses to him as well as the
following.
There is one among the State Poems beginning —
" ' Julian, in verse, to ease thy wants I write,
Not moved by envy, malice, or by spite,
Or pleased with the empty names of wit and sense,
But merely to supply thy want of pence :
This did inspire my muse, when out at heel,
She saw her needy secretary reel ;
Grieved that a man, so useful to the age,
Should foot it in so mean an equipage ;
A crying scandal that the fees of sense
Should not be able to support the expense
Of a poor scribe, who never thought of wants,
When able to procure a cup of Nantz.'
Another, called a 'Consoling Epistle to Julian' is said to have been written by
the Duke of Buckingham.
" From a passage in one of the Letters from the Dead to the Living, we learn,
that after Julian's death, and the madness of his successor, called Summerton,
lampoon felt a sensible decay ; and there was no more that brisk spirit of
verse, that used to watch the follies and vices of the men and women of figure,
that they could not start new ones faster than lampoons exposed them."
How these lampoons were concocted we gather from Bays, in the Hind and the
Panther transversed : — "'Tis a trifle hardly worth owning; I was Mother day at
Will's, throwing out something of that nature ; and, i' gad, the hint was taken,
and out came that picture; indeed, the poor fellow was so civil as to present me
with a dozen of 'em for my friends ; I think I have here one in my pocket. . . .
Ay, ay, I can do it if I list, tho' you must not think I have been so dull as to
mind these things myself; but 'tis the advantage of our Coffee-house, that from
their talk, one may write a very good polemical discourse, without ever
troubling one's head with the books of controversy."
Tom Brown describes " a Wit and a Beau set up with little or no expense. A pair
of red stockings and a sword-knot set up one, and peeping once a day in at
Will's, and two or three second-hand sayings, the other."
Pepys, one night, going to fetch home his wife, stopped in Covent Garden, at the
Great Coffee-house there, as he called Will's, where he never was before : "
Where," he adds, " Dryden, the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the Wits of
the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had
time then, or could at other times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I
perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse. But I could not tarry ; and, as
it was late, they were all ready to go away."
Addison passed each day alike, and much in the manner that Dryden did. Dry den
employed his mornings in writing, dined en familk, and then went to Will's, "
only he came home earlier o' nights."
Pope, when very young, was impressed with such veneration for Dryden, that he
persuaded some friends to take him to Will's Coffee-house, and was delighted
that he could say that he had seen Dryden. Sir Charles Wogan, too, brought up
Pope from the Forest of Windsor, to dress a la mode, and introduce at Will's
Coffee-house. Pope afterwards described Dryden as " a plump man with a down
look, and not very conversible ; " and Cibber could tell no more " but that he
remembered him a decent old man, arbitor of critical disputes at Will's."
Prior sings of —
" the younger Stiles,
Whom Dryden pedagogues at Will's !"
Most of the hostile criticisms on his Plays, which Dryden has noticed in his
various Prefaces, appear to have been made at his favourite haunt, Will's
Coffee-house.
Dryden is generally said to have been returning from Will's to his house in
Gerard street, when he was cudgelled in Rose-street by three persons hired for
the purpose by Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in the winter of 1679. The assault, or
" the Rose-alley Ambuscade," certainly took place ; but it is not so certain
that Dryden was on his way from Will's, and he then lived in Long Acre, not
Gerard street.
It is worthy of remark that Swift was accustomed to speak disparagingly of
Will's, as in his Rhapsody on Poetry : —
" Be sure at Will's the following day
Lie snug, and hear what critics say ;
And if you find the general vogue
Pronounces you a stupid rogue,
Damns all your thoughts as low and little ;
Sit still, and swallow down your spittle."
Swift thought little of the frequenters of Will's : he used to say, " the worst
conversation he ever heard in his life was at Will's Coffee-house, where the
wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble ; that is to say, five or
six men, who had writ plays or at least prologues, or had a share in a
miscellany, came thither, and entertained one another with their trifling
composures, in so important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of
human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them."
In the first number of the Tatler, Poetry is promised under the article of
Will's Coffee-house. The place, however, changed after Dryden's time : " you
used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every man you met ; you
have now only a pack of cards ; and instead of the cavils about the turn of the
expression, the elegance of the style, and the like, the learned now dispute
only about the truth of the game." " In old times, we used to sit upon a play
here, after it was acted, but now the entertainment's turned another way."
The Spectator is sometimes seen " thrusting his head into a round of politicians
at Will's, and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in
these little circular audiences." Then, we have as an instance of no one member
of human society but that would have some little pretension for some degree in
it, " like him who came to Will's Coffee-house upon the merit of having writ a
posie of a ring." And, " Robin, the porter who waits at Will's, is the best man
in town for carrying a billet : the fellow has a thin body, swift step, demure
looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town."
After Dryden's death in 1701, Will's continued for about ten years to be still
the Wits' Coffee-house, as we see by Ned Ward's account, and by that in the
Journey through England in 1722.
Pope entered with keen relish into society, and courted the correspondence of
the town wits and coffee-house critics. Among his early friends was Mr. Henry
Cromwell, one of the cousinry of the Protector's family; he was a bachelor, and
spent most of his time in London ; he had some pretensions to scholarship and
literature, having translated several of Ovid's Elegies, for Tonson's
Miscellany. With Wycherley, Gay, Dennis, the popular actors and actresses of the
day, and with all the frequenters of Will's, Cromwell was familiar. He had done
more than take a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box, which was a point of high
ambition and honour at Will's, he had quarrelled with him about a frail poetess,
Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, whom Dryden had christened Corinna, and who was also
known as Sappho. Gay characterized this literary and eccentric beau as
" Honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches ;" it being his custom to carry
his hat in his hand when walking with ladies. What with ladies and literature,
rehearsals and reviews, and critical attention to the quality of his coffee and
Brazil snuff, Henry Cromwell's time was fully occupied in town. Cromwell was a
dangerous acquaintance for Pope at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but he was a
very agreeable one. Most of Pope's letters to his friend are addressed to him at
the Blue Ball, in Great Wild-street, near Drury-lane; and others to " Widow
Hambledon's Coffee-house at the end of Princes-street, near Drury-lane, London."
Cromwell made one visit to Binfield ; on his return to London, Pope wrote to
him, " referring to the ladies in particular," and to his favourite coffee :
* The Spectator, No. 398.
" As long as Mocha's happy tree shall grow,
While berries crackle, or while mills shall go ;
While smoking streams from silver spouts shall glide
Or China's earth receive the sable tide,
While Coffee shall to British nymphs be dear,
While fragrant steams the bended head shall cheer,
Or grateful bitters shall delight the taste,
So long her honours, name, and praise shall last."
Even at this early period Pope seems to have relied for relief from headache to
the steam of coffee, which he inhaled for this purpose throughout the whole of
his life.*
The Taverns and Coffee-houses supplied the place of the Clubs we have since seen
established. Although no exclusive subscription belonged to any of these, we
find by the account which Colley Gibber gives of his first visit to Will's, in
Covent Garden, that it required an introduction to this Society not to be
considered as an impertinent intruder. There the veteran Dryden had long
presided over all the acknowledged wits and poets of the day, and those who had
the pretension to be reckoned among them. The politicians assembled at the St.
James's Coffee-house, from whence all the articles of political news in the
first Tatlers are dated. The learned frequented the Grecian Coffee-house in
Devereux-court. Locket's, in Gerard-street, Soho, and Pontac's, were the
fashionable taverns where the young and gay met to dine : and White's and other
chocolate houses seem to have been the resort of the same company in the
morning. Three o'clock, or at latest four, was the dining-hour of the most
fashionable persons in London, for in the country no such late hours had been
adopted. In London, therefore, soon after six, the men began to assemble at the
coffee-house they frequented if they were not setting in for hard drinking,
which seems to have been much less indulged in private houses than in taverns.
The ladies made visits to one another, which it must be owned was a much less
waste of time when considered as an amusement for the evening, than now, as
being a morning occupation.
* Carruthers : Life of Pope.
Will's was the great resort for the wits of Dryden's time, after whose death it
was transferred to Button's. Pope describes the houses as (C opposite each
other, in Russell-street, Covent Garden," where Addison established Daniel
Button, in a new house, about 1712; and his fame, after the production of Cato,
drew many of the Whigs thither. Button had been servant to the Countess of
Warwick. The house is more correctly described as " over against Tom's, near the
middle of the south side of the street."
References :
Lots of references are made to two sources on the
internet archive
:
Edward Callows, Old London Taverns &
John Timbs, Club life of London Volume 2
Trying to avoid privacy and cookie settings overwriting content