24 Oct 2014
Yesterday evening, we celebrated 18th century coffeehouse culture in our event The Virtue of Coffee. In attendance was Piers Alexander, author of The Bitter Trade, a novel set in 18th century coffeehouses. Below he reflects on what it is about coffeehouses that inspired his work: Reading Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason was my first inspiration for writing a novel set in the coffeehouses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Porter conveys the richness and excitement of philosophers, scientists, noblemen and merchants meeting, sharing ideas and competing with each other in smoke-filled, noisy, bubbling rooms: I wanted to throw my illiterate, ambitious protagonist into that environment, and see if he could make his way in that exciting world. Last night, Dr Matthew Green speaks eloquently of the intimate connection between the coffeehouse boom and the maritime world: "What news, sir?" was the greeting flung at visitors, who were expected to carry word from the latest ship to have docked in London. When I first heard of the NMM's Ships, Clocks and Stars exhibition, I wondered about the connections between the maritime world and the bawdy, violent racketeering and conspiracy that I wrote about in The Bitter Trade. I hadn't consciously written about ships, but they appear in the story as places of crime, fear and violent death. Perhaps this come from my own fascination with, and fear of, the sea (my father's from a naval family but I grew up in a landlocked country). Calumny Spinks, my anti-hero, gets involved with a fictional coffee racketeering gang, and with a violent syndicate of dock-men. The plot was partly inspired by the maritime exploits of Mathieu Gabriel de Clieu, a French officer who stole a cutting from Louis XIV's Jardin des Plantes and tended it carefully on a voyage to Martinique, fighting off pirates and weathering a storm along the way. Many sea voyages had a much darker purpose, most famously the Middle Passage slaver route. Calumny's Huguenot uncle is killed on board a moored ship by French troops, who regularly fumigated outbound vessels to prevent Protestants fleeing; and another character is involved in a mutiny on board an overloaded slave-ship. Cal himself is transported to the New World as an indentured servant in my second novel: the closest an Englishman would come to the experience of being a slave. I first read Dava Sobel's excellent Longitude nearly twenty years ago, and am looking forward to seeing Harrison's clocks at long last: works of mechanical precision, improved in patient iterations over long decades. Ironically, I have ended up writing about an illiterate, unscientific landlubber for whom the sea is full of imagined horrors. Perhaps that's the point of Ships, Clocks and Stars: to remind us of our debt to the mariners and scientists who made crossing the oceans safer for the fearful masses. Piers Alexander is the author of The Bitter Trade, a novel of the Glorious Revolution. www.piersalexander.com