Public and Private

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Public and Private

• Sarah Richardson

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Published in German in 1962 and in English in
1989.
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Habermas Public Sphere

• casting itself loose as a forum in which the
  private people, come together to form a public,
  readied themselves to compel public authority to
  legitimate itself before public opinion
• The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived
  above all as the sphere of private people come
  together as a public
• they soon claimed the public sphere regulated
  from above against the public authorities
  themselves. The medium of this political
  confrontation was peculiar and without historical
  precedent

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When does the public sphere emerge?

• Habermas asserts that a public sphere that
  functioned in the political realm arose first in
  Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth
  century
• Three events in 1694-5 were crucial the founding
  of the Bank of England the end of the licensing
  system and the introduction of cabinet
  government. 
• Habermas arguments have been challenged. Alan
  Downie argues that one can quibble about the
  accuracy of almost every sentence he writes about
  seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain,
  including his assertions about art and
  architecture, literature, music and the theatre.
• Much of what he writes about Britain also
  occurred in France and Germany
• Peter Lake and Steve Pincus have argued the
  public sphere emerged after 1530

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Public sphere institutions

• Coffee Houses
• Print Culture
• Salons
• Debating Societies

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Coffee Houses

• Richard Sennett in The Fall of the Public Man
• anyone sitting in the coffeehouse had a right to
  talk to anyone else, to enter into any
  conversation whether he knew the other people or
  not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. It
  was bad form even to touch on the social origins
  of other persons when talking to them in the
  coffeehouse, because the free flow of talk might
  then be impeded.
• Thus coffeehouse conversation produced an ideal
  of liberty without governance.

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Different opinions, and a measurable liberty of
declaring them, is necessary to enliven
conversation and to improve it but men must
develop the talent of contradicting without
displeasing.
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Evolution of the coffee house

• In late Stuart London, coffee houses were seen as
  the breeding grounds of sedition and treason.
• By the first decade of the eighteenth century,
  they became places where men could freely
  exchange their views without giving or taking
  offence
• By the second quarter of the century, coffee
  house politicians had become objects of satire
• By the third quarter of the century the coffee
  house declined in numbers and importance in
  favour of salons and clubs

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How democratic were coffee houses?

• the vast majority must have been little local
  caffs, often in basement rooms and open only
  for a few hours a day, and patronized by
  tradesmen on their way to work, who no more
  expected to be drawn into a discussion of
  Shakespeares neglect of the unities than to be
  offered a latte when they ordered a milky
  coffee. John Barrell, Journal of British
  Studies, 2004

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The use of space Public or Private? Layout of
Coffee houses the open table
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Layout of Coffee houses the open table
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Layout of Coffee houses the box-pews
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Layout of Coffee houses boxes made of facing
settles
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Layout of Coffee houses boxes divided by curtains
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Print Culture

• In the 1730s Montesquieu had been struck by the
  number and licentiousness of the London
  newspapers (the dailies and weeklies together
  numbered about 20). He was also impressed by the
  ease with which their information reached working
  men, writing that the slaters had newspapers
  brought onto the roofs of the houses that they
  were working on so they could read them.
• Viscount Bolingbroke acknowledged the power of
  verses, ballads etc writing in the Craftsman,
  when the people find themselves generally
  aggrieved, they are apt to manifest their
  resentments in political ballads, allegories,
  by-sayings, and ironical points of low wit.

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Chevy Chase
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Salons

• Most famous literary salons in England were those
  of the so-called blue stockings circle Hester
  Chapone, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot,
  Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and Frances
  Boscawen.
• In 1760s and 1770s bluestocking assemblies were
  valued because they seemed to exclude the
  factionalisms of politics.
• Harriet Guest has argued that it was the literary
  gatherings in the 1760s by the blue stocking
  women that led to the development of a feminine
  public voice and paved the way for more
  explicitly political writers such as Catherine
  Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft to engage with
  the public sphere in a more directly political
  way.

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Elizabeth Montagu from a painting by Reynolds
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Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the
Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great
Britain), Richard Samuel, 1778In the left hand
group Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Carter,
Angelica KauffmannIn the middle Elizabeth Ann
Sheridan In the right hand group Elizabeth
Griffith, Charlotte Lennox, Catherine
MacaulayElizabeth Montagu, Hannah More
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Debating Societies

• In 1780 418 different debates were advertised.
• Societies probably started to emerge in the early
  eighteenth century. They began as convivial clubs
  of 50 or more men, meeting once a week in pubs
  largely discussing affairs of state and religious
  issues. Also mooting clubs and spouting societies
  for trainee actors.
• By 1770s many were leaving pubs and
  re-establishing themselves in genteel rooms.
• Were clubs opened where only women could speak
  La Belle Assemblee, the Female Parliament, the
  Carlisle House Debates for Ladies only, and the
  Female Congress.
• Debating societies an important element in
  spreading enlightenment ideas but also raised
  opposition for the nature of their debates, their
  participants and the role of women.

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London Debating Societies in the 1790s (source
Mary Thale, Historical Journal, 1989)

• Ciceronian School. 1797. No. 28 Haymarket.
  Thursday.
• Ciceronian School of Eloquence. 1795. Globe
  Tavern, Fleet St. Monday.
• City Debates. 1791. Capel Court, Bartholomew
  Lane, opposite the Bank. Monday.
• Coachmakers' Hall. 1790-1792. Foster Lane,
  Cheapside. Thursday.
• Free Debates on a Superior Plan. 1790-1791. 21
  Maiden Lane. Wednesday.
• London Forum. 1794-1797. Capel Court. Thursday.
• School of Eloquence. 1799. No. 45 Strand,
  opposite Villiers St. Monday and Thursday.
• School of Genius for Free Debate. 1797. No. 28
  Haymarket. Wednesday.
• Select Association for Free Debate. 1793. Globe
  Tavern. Saturday.
• Society for Free Debate. 1792. No. 28 Cornhill.
  Monday.
• Temple of Reason and Humanity. 1795. 18 Wych St.
  Wednesday and Monday.
• Westminster Forum. 1790-1799. Panton St.,
  Haymarket. Wednesday.
• An unidentified society. 1793. Capel Court.
  Thursday.

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The Private Sphere

• There are ambiguities in Habermass use of the
  term.
• Sometimes he refers to the bourgeois public
  sphere that opposes itself to the representative
  publicness of state authority. At other times the
  sphere of the market is referred to as private
  The sphere of the market we call private the
  sphere of the family, as the core of the private
  sphere, we call the intimate sphere.
• Habermas uses the example of the single family
  house with its own public and private spaces as a
  metaphor for the whole the line between the
  public and the public sphere extended right
  through the home.

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Domestic space

• Isaac Ware, the clerk to the Board of Works
  published his Complete Body of Architecture in
  1756
• the parlour, in a small private house, is a very
  convenient room but, as it is not the apartment
  of most shew, there is no necessity it should
  reduce the passage to an alley and in larger
  houses, inhabited by persons of distinction,
  there must be anti-chambers, and rooms where
  people of business may attend the owners
  leisure.
• Space was also becoming increasingly gendered as
  can be illustrated by Henry Fieldings novel Tom
  Jones 
• Mrs Western was reading a lecture on prudence,
  and matrimonial politics to her niece, when her
  brother and Blifil broke in with less ceremony
  than the laws of visiting require Brother,
  said she, I am astonished at your behaviour,
  will you never learn any regard to decorum? Will
  you still look upon every apartment as your own,
  or as belonging to one of your country tenants?
  Do you think yourself at liberty to invade the
  privacies of women of condition, without the
  least decency or notice?

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Coach House
Stable
Grooms room
Hay Loft
Kitchen
Laundry
Ground floor and first floor of Derby House,
Grosvenor Square, London. From Robert Adams
designs of 1773.
Closet
Closet
Lord Derbys dressing room
Bedroom
Lady Derbys dressing room
Library
Great Eating Room
3rd Drawing Room
Parlour
2nd Drawing Room
1st Drawing Room
Hall
Anteroom
Anteroom
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Public sphere to separate spheres

• Habermas public sphere was entirely masculine
  with women participating in what he called the
  literary public sphere of reading novels, and
  attending salons and debating societies.
• Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere argued
  Habermas did not see how gender was central to
  the construction of the public sphere.
• But bourgeois public sphere was of no benefit to
  women
• Threat to patriarchy was neutralised by sharper
  polarisation of gender and a more emphatic
  gendering of separate spheres