Vienna liked the coffee house so well that by 1839 there were eighty of them in the city proper and fifty more in the suburbs.
Chapter X
THE COFFEE HOUSES OF OLD LONDON
One of the most picturesque chapters in the history of coffee—The first coffee house in London—The first coffee handbill, and the first newspaper advertisement for coffee—Strange coffee mixtures—Fantastic coffee claims—Coffee prices and coffee licenses—Coffee club of the Rota—Early coffee-house manners and customs—Coffee-house keepers' tokens—Opposition to the coffee house—"Penny universities"—Weird coffee substitutes—The proposed coffee-house newspaper monopoly—Evolution of the club—Decline and fall of the coffee house—Pen pictures of coffee-house life—Famous coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Some Old World pleasure gardens—Locating the notable coffee houses
The two most picturesque chapters in the history of coffee have to do with the period of the old London and Paris coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much of the poetry and romance of coffee centers around this time.
"The history of coffee houses," says D'Israeli, "ere the invention of clubs, was that of the manners, the morals and the politics of a people." And so the history of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is indeed the history of the manners and customs of the English people of that period.
The First London Coffee House