The first national festival of the humanities, ‘Being Human’, ran from Saturday 15th to Sunday 23rd November 2014, with the aim of connecting the public to academic research in the humanities, thus illustrating the ways in which this research, far from being closeted away in university seminar rooms, can prove itself relevant to wider society. Academics and postgraduates from Northumbria University’s Long Eighteenth-Century research group participated in the festival, bringing ‘18th-century legacies’ – a series of free eighteenth-century-themed events – to a range of venues across Newcastle city centre. These included film screenings, debates, a guided tour of Newcastle’s eighteenth-century landmarks, and a coffee house reconstruction, complete with live music, games, and, of course, mugs of coffee, prepared to an authentic eighteenth-century recipe.

After the festival kicked off with Dr. Claudine van Hensbergen’s talk to a sold-out auditorium at the Theatre Royal on ‘Early Actresses and Celebrity Culture’, it was time for the launch event: ‘An Evening at the Coffee House’, which saw local café ‘Blake’s’ transformed for an evening into ‘Akenside & Spence’s’, a lively eighteenth-century coffee house. The excitement was palpable as visitors to the transformed venue queued outside and passers-by – dressed to the nines for a Saturday evening on Newcastle’s busy Grey Street – peered in curiously at a candle-lit Blake’s, its walls papered with advertisements, including one for Byron’s latest poem, and title-pages from a wide range of publications, such as the ‘Women’s Petition Against Coffee’. On arrival, visitors were presented with a voucher entitling them to a free drink, whilst Blake’s had kindly provided a luxurious table of pastries and sweets fit for any eighteenth-century madame or monsieur to gorge upon. Also handed to those coming through the doors were score cards for ‘Vulgarity Bingo’ – a game visitors were encouraged to play with one another in order to spark off conversation with strangers, thus invoking the coffee house’s spirit of sociability. Players were given a vulgarism – ‘Jackanapes’ (a small, ugly fellow), for example – and then had to use their vulgarism in conversation, all while simultaneously listening out for the vulgarisms on their scorecard, in order to win the much coveted bottle of port at the end of the evening. Tables around the room were scattered with eighteenth-century newspapers, including the Tatler and the Public Advertiser. Coffee house patrons lounged, a mulled cider in hand, and caught up on the ‘latest’ news. Reputations were made and lost at the gambling table, where card sharps could pit their wits against one another in a game of Whist, and visiting dandies or damsels could pose for a photograph with one of two costumed mannequins, complete with periwigs. The festival was officially opened with a reading of the ‘Coffee House Rules’ by the organising committee and, as the fiddle player began, the passers-by outside on Grey Street grew increasingly curious.

Underpinning the more light-hearted aspects of the evening – and indeed the festival more widely – was Northumbria’s strength in eighteenth-century studies, and the academic merit of the event should not be downplayed. From those with only a general interest in eighteenth-century culture, to enthusiasts of the period, all the clients of Akenside & Spence’s learnt about the predecessors of today’s coffee shops and cafés from several stalls set up throughout the building. These were manned by academics and postgraduates, keen to engage the public with their discoveries. Information sheets laid out on these themed stalls provided visitors with an overview of each area of the coffee house: be it on the coffee, commerce, periodicals, and fashion, or on ‘Mr Fallon’s Bookshop’, a section laden with original books of the period for browsing at leisure. Just as important, however, was the atmosphere of conviviality and vigour that the organisers successfully captured. This, I felt, was the lasting impression of a coffee house that visitors would leave with. For a few hours on a November evening, the eighteenth century, in all of its raucous, vivid humanity (to reference the evocative title of the larger festival), was brought to Newcastle in an event which proved to be both fun and informative, both academic and accessible.

After a successful start, the remainder of the festival carried this momentum forward, and visitors to the coffee house returned to it throughout the week. Day two saw another fully-booked event, this time a guided eighteenth-century tour around Newcastle city centre, whilst day three had the first of three film screenings at Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema, with Dr Helen Williams and Patrick Wildgust, curator of Shandy Hall, introducing A Cock and Bull Story. Each film was followed by a lively Q&A session, with Wildgust offering his unique insight into running the famous home of Laurence Sterne. The remaining two screenings of the week were comprised of Jane Campion’s heart-wrenching portrayal of the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, introduced by Dr David Stewart, and The Madness of King George, Nicholas Hytner’s film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play, which portrays the decline into derangement of George III, hosted by Dr. Leigh Wetherall-Dickson.

Tuesday’s ‘Fashionable Diseases’ event, a Leverhulme-funded project between Northumbria and Newcastle Universities, and Saturday’s ‘Defining Liberty in the eighteenth century: Institutions, Power and Control’, led by Dr Tawny Paul, took a more traditional approach to the presentation of research. Academics and postgraduates each presented a twenty-minute paper to a public audience, against the splendid backdrop of the Newcastle Mining Institute’s round Edwardian lecture theatre and the domed James Knott reading room of the Literary and Philosophical Society. All these papers were followed by open discussion, with a central focus on the relationship between medicine and politics in the eighteenth century and today. The remaining two events of the festival were Professor Richard Terry’s ‘Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Britain’s First Erotic Novel’ (complete with guest appearance from the gloriously titled ‘Madam Slurp’), and ‘Byron Banned? Restaging a Regency Debate’, which saw Dr David Stewart work with local sixth-form students to restage the early nineteenth-century debate over the banning of Byron’s Don Juan at the Newcastle Literary Philosophical Society in 1820. These events, like the coffee house reconstruction, also revealed how academic research can be both meticulous and innovative, yet also light-hearted and entertaining.

The importance of academic participation in public festivals such as ‘Being Human’ cannot be overstated, and, although the twenty-first-century coffee house cabal proved rather more sophisticated than their eighteenth-century counterparts – with the winner’s bottle of port eventually awarded to the ‘best-dressed’ visitor, rather than the most vulgar – the festival was, overall, a success. This week-long series of events vividly illustrated the enduring links between the eighteenth century and present day. At the close of the Coffee House event, visitors were encouraged to leave their musings and poetry on a slip of paper headed ‘My Dear Mr Lion’, and to post them through the ‘Lion’s Mouth’ – a tribute to the lion’s head which Joseph Addison had installed in Button’s Coffee House in 1713, and, of course, to John Scott’s London Magazine, established in 1820, which carried an editorial column called ‘The Lion’s Head’. Northumbria’s own Lion’s Head made an appearance at each of the events, encouraging the public to enter into a dialogue with researchers. Comments were then posted to the research group’s blog at www.theaffablelion.wordpress.com, along with responses from the ‘Lion’ himself. Although the festival itself may be over, the legacy of the event continues in the blog, and in the opening of a dialogue between academics and the public – an ideal based in a very eighteenth-century sense of sociability and discussion, of which, I feel, Addison himself would approve.