Too Many Callers

The words

1. In the 1640s almost nobody in England had tasted coffee.
2. Daniel Edwards, a merchant
3. Then Daniel Edwards, a merchant, came home from Smyrna with the habit.
4. London, around 1652
5. London, around 1652. He brought a servant to make it: Pasqua Rosée.
6. His friends came round to try it.
7. Then they came round again.
8. St Michael’s, Cornhill
9. So Edwards set Pasqua up in a shed in St Michael’s churchyard, Cornhill.
10. Pasqua Rosée’s handbill · c. 1652
11. England’s first coffee advert:
12. “First publiquely made and sold in England, by Pasqua Rosee.”
13. Our opinion
14. So the London coffee-house began as a way to get visitors out of the house.
15. Our opinion
16. Talk that once needed an invitation now cost a penny.
17. It led all the way to the Stock Exchange.
18. Within twenty years
19. Pasqua did not. Within twenty years London had more or less forgotten him.
20. Too Many Callers
21. How a merchant’s problem with visitors taught London to talk to strangers.