Will's Coffee House was one of the foremost coffeehouses in England in the decades after the Restoration. It was situated in Russell Street, at the northwest corner of Bow Street, between London and Westminster. According to the Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre, it was also known as the Rose Tavern, the Russell Street Coffee House, and the Wits' Coffee House. It was founded by Will Urwin.
Patrons Will's Coffee House was the home of the Wits,A. Ellis, The Penny Universities: A history of the coffee-houses, 1956; Steve Pincus, "'Coffee Politicians Does Create': Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture" The Journal of Modern History, 67 (December 1995:807-34); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: the emergence of the British coffeehouse, 2005; centring on the figure of John Dryden.'Bow Street and Russell Street Area: Bow Street', Survey of London: volume 36: Covent Garden (1970), pp. 185–192. Date accessed: 8 July 2009; this gives the history of the site. With the departure of John Dennis, William Wycherley complained in a well-known letter, "nor is Wills the Wits Coffee-House any more, since you left it, whose Society for want of yours is grown as Melancholly, that is as dull as when you left 'em a Nights, to their own Mother-Wit, their Puns, Couplets, or Quibbles...."Wycherley to Dennis, Letter lxxix in A select Collection of Original Letters, written by the Most Eminent Persons... (London, 1760) vol. ii:118f. "This place is much altered since Mr Dryden frequented it," recalled Richard Steele in The Tatler afterwards; "where you used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every man you met, you have now only a pack of cards."Steele, The Tatler, no. 1, 12 April 1709 from "Will's Coffee-house",
Will's is mentioned repeatedly in the diary of Samuel Pepys, who first dropped in on the evening of 3 February 1663/4:
Jonathan Swift, for his part, did not recall it so positively: "And indeed the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Will's coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble."Quoted in Raymond F. Howes, "Jonathan Swift and the conversation of the coffee-house", Quarterly Journal of Speech, 17.1 (February 1931:14-24).
From their first appearance in London,Pasqua Rosée, a native of Ragusa, opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652 coffeehouses were centres of sociability, each one frequented by certain professions, a centre of communication for news and information. At Will's gathered those gentlemen of no profession at all and circulated their scurrilous epigrams and satires, and criticized the latest productions on stage or in print.
Decline After Dryden's death (May 1700), the reputation of Will's declined rapidly, though it is noted in Daniel Defoe's Journey Through England. Though in the first number of The Tatler, poetry was promised under the heading Will's Coffee-house,"All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment shall be under the Article of White's Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; Learning, under the title of Graecian; Foreign and Domestick News, you will have from St. James' Coffee-house." it was severely reviewed by Richard Steele in The Tatler, 8 April 1709, and fashion soon passed to Button's Coffee House across the way, where Joseph Addison established Daniel Button in business, about 1712.William Harrison Ukers, All about Coffee, 1922:574–76.
References
Further reading Waes Hael Poetry & Tobacco Club, "The English Coffee Houses"
Urwin, William (d. 1695), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography