John Macky, in the person of a foreign tourist, described a day in early eighteenth-century London. He rose at nine, and at once climbed into a sedan chair to be carried off for a series of social engagements with fashionable people in the city’s numerous coffee-houses, punctuated by a turn in the park or a game of cards.

Macky explained that these coffee-houses generally catered for a specific political or fashionable clientele, though some welcomed people of all tastes. Dinner rounded off the day’s busy round of chatter by six, and was followed in the evening by a trip to the theatre, and then cards and conversation until midnight.

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