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“A Typically English Brew”

Victorian Histories of Tea and Representations of English National Identity

Individually and nationally we are deeply indebted to the tea-plant.

G. G. Sigmond, Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral

What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which were once counted as necessaries of life.

Samuel Day, Tea: Its Mystery and History

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WITNESSED THE DOMESTICATION of tea in Britain as tea was transformed from an exotic luxury consumed primarily by men in public coffeehouses to a necessity of everyday life enjoyed by both men and women in the private, domestic space of the home. In the nineteenth century, tea became an icon of English domesticity and was associated with privacy, intimacy, and the nuclear family. According to nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements, tea helped to define English identity, character, and class values. Tea united the English people, temporarily erasing the boundaries between individuals to unify the nation into a coherent whole.

As an icon of the domestic sphere, tea exemplifies domesticity’s primary goal of enclosing the English self, of protecting that self by ensconcing him or her behind a set of firm boundaries. The domestic sphere’s safety was ensured by enclosing it behind the walls of a house, within swathes of draperies, warmed by a fire that kept the bitter cold of the outdoors at bay. The layers of enclosure functioned as fail-safe mechanisms to separate the domestic from all that raged without—the storms, the rest of the world that did not live at a “high latitude,”¹ the problems that plagued classes other than the secure middle class. These boundaries were what defined and protected the domestic space within England.² And England itself, within the larger sphere of the world, was perceived as a domestic space within the empire and within the larger “public” sphere of the rest of the world. Tea helped to comfort those within their domestic spaces but simultaneously jeopardized the ideological safety of those spaces by bringing the public world of the marketplace and the empire into the private space of the parlor.

Resting national identity upon the consumption of tea as a domestic, English commodity raised fears about basing ideals of domesticity and national identity on a foreign product from China—a nation that, despite the best British attempts to penetrate its mysteries, had remained frustratingly unknown. Depending on an Asian commodity to evoke a sense of English domesticity threatened to break down the very boundaries necessary to constructing national identity. As Linda Colley has argued, “we usually decide who we are by reference to who and what we are not.”³ Simultaneously perceiving China as the “other” and depending on Asian tea to produce a sense of English national identity threatened to collapse the distinctions upon which that national identity was formulated. Nineteenth-century tea histories suggest the potential dangers of consuming the Orient—anxieties of ingestion, the threat of pollution, and frighteningly permeable cultural boundaries.

In response, histories of tea articulate three strategies for reaffirming English physical, political, and cultural boundaries to reconstitute English identity. Each strategy emphasizes the boundaries that were compromised by England’s reliance on global commodities to affirm its sense of national self. One strategy suggests replacing the apparently failed boundaries of nation with commercial boundaries—emotional and financial boundaries of brand loyalty to ensure “pure” tea and physical boundaries of newly invented individual paper packages to maintain tea’s purity from wholesaler to consumer. A second strategy suggests accepting and even reveling in the permeable boundaries created by globalism, taking pride in Britain’s position as a consumer of the world’s goods. This strategy proposes that English men and women reenvision themselves as global consumers consuming the world, adopting a new hybrid form of consumerism that encouraged porous boundaries between nations and allowed for a more cosmopolitan sense of identity within the world at large.

While these two strategies may have helped to alleviate some of the anxieties associated with consuming imported commodities, the search for more-secure sources of the national beverage—more secure in terms of pricing, availability, and purity—eventually led to a shift in the boundary between foreign commodity and English consumer. A third, more powerful strategy involved shifting the boundaries of nation—expanding the British Empire to include territories able to produce and manufacture tea, thus creating a safe, British source of the national beverage. Tea histories reveal that the British tea industry’s central strategy for procuring safe, secure sources of tea was to transform tea from a foreign commodity into a product of the British Empire.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all European imports of tea came from China. The early-nineteenth-century discovery and cultivation of tea in British-controlled regions of India resulted in a precipitous decline of China tea imported to Britain. British imports of tea continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, as they had from tea’s first introduction to Britain in the 1650s, but more and more tea imported to Britain came from the British colonies of Assam and Ceylon.⁴ Late-nineteenth-century publications sought to establish that tea was not only consumed by tea drinkers in the cultural center of British power but also was produced by British planters and therefore originated from an outpost of that cultural center. By encouraging tea drinkers to envision themselves as contributing to the growth of British naval, economic, and colonial power, the tea industry helped to construct the image of England as an imperial nation.

The unique position of tea as both a luxury and a necessity contributed to its role in building—both ideologically and financially—the British Empire. Historically, until the eighteenth century, luxuries had been viewed as detrimental to the success of empires; foreign imports were described as enervating, depleting the reproductive resources of an empire.⁵ Spending money and time consuming luxuries was considered to be a form of self-indulgent squandering of men and capital. But the ability of tea to exist simultaneously in the opposing realms of luxury and necessity, foreign and domestic, enabled tea to foster the growth and power of Britain as an imperial nation, just as it invigorated the individual bodies of English men and women.

The Body and the Nation: Creating Englishness by Drinking Tea

Tea histories explicitly attribute both individual and national well-being to tea drinking, connecting the physical body of individual English men and women with the collective body politic. G. G. Sigmond declares, “Amongst the endless variety of the vegetable productions which the bounteous hand of Nature has given to [man’s] use is that simple shrub, whose leaf supplies an agreeable beverage for his daily nourishment or for his solace; but little does he estimate its real importance: he scarcely knows how materially it influences his moral, his physical, and his social condition:—individually and nationally we are deeply indebted to the tea-plant” (1). According to Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (1839), tea is agreeable, pleasant, and comforting; it both nourishes the body and provides solace for the soul. Sigmond emphasizes that drinking tea enables an English man or woman to temporarily merge individual and national identity in the comforting pleasure of a hot cup of tea. Sigmond claims that tea influences all parts of an Englishman’s existence: moral, physical, and social; individual and national. The Englishman, for Sigmond, is “deeply indebted to the tea-plant”; thus, the English owe their existence, their identity, their sense of self and the boundaries that demarcate individual and national identities to their habit of drinking tea. English men and women depend on it to construct who they are in domestic rituals repeated every day in homes throughout England.

Sigmond suggests that tea fundamentally contributes to the values of moderation and temperance in English society: “[N]o beverage that has ever yet been introduced sits so agreeably on the stomach, so refreshes the system, soothes nervous irritation after fatigue, or forms a more grateful repast. It contributes to the sobriety of a nation; it imparts all the charms to society which spring from the enjoyment of conversation, without that excitement which follows upon a fermented drink” (95). Sigmond transitions seamlessly between the individual stomach of the tea drinker to the “sobriety of the nation,” forging a connection between the physical body of the individual English subject and the abstract political nation. The action of tea within the stomach of the tea drinker is broadcast in larger terms within the population of England as a whole, promoting sobriety and calm interactions among the English people. The physical responses of the body to the ingestion of tea, such as calming the nerves, soothing the stomach, and refreshing the system, directly engender the ideal English society, complete with social charm, personal grace, and lively but polite discourse. The body of the tea drinker thus becomes the body of the nation, and the consumption of tea enhances both bodies simultaneously.

The physical effects of tea on the body create social and moral characteristics within an individual tea drinker and contribute to the cultural characteristics of England as a whole. The phrase “sobriety of a nation” recalls the prominent position of tea within temperance reform in nineteenth-century England, and many tea histories devote considerable portions of their texts to the role of tea in the drying out of the nation. In Tea: Its Mystery and History (1878), Samuel Day attributes the civilizing of the population to tea drinking: “Since the introduction of Tea into England, but more especially since the British public has patronised it, a marked improvement characterises the tone and manners of Society” (60). Specifically, according to Day, tea represents a “pure” beverage, and the continued increase in tea drinking in England would benefit the country: “Intemperance is the bane of the nation. . . . And there can be no doubt that if the masses could be induced to substitute the pure beverages Tea and Coffee for the deleterious fluids they are wont to imbibe, the country would be vastly benefited by the salutary change” (69). Thus, Day elucidates, England would experience an improvement in health through the change in consumption practices of the individual physical bodies that compose the larger body politic. The purity of tea and coffee has explicitly moral connotations; as beverages, they are depicted as uncorrupted and uncorrupting, unlike the immoral fluids consumed by “the masses” at the time of Day’s writing. The chemical composition of the liquids acquires the qualities of the people who consume them and so, therefore, does the nation itself. Day implies that a change in the beverage consumed by “the masses,” by definition a large proportion of the population of England, would beneficially alter the character of those people and, by extension, the character of the entire nation.⁶

Day emphasizes the ideological connection between the health of individual tea drinkers and the health of the English nation by referring to the importance of tea to “the English constitution”: “It is not, possibly, too great an assumption to assert that there must exist something about Tea specially suitable to the English constitution and climate” (60). Day suggests that English character is partly a response to the English climate. According to Day, tea assists in nourishing individual, bodily, physical constitutions that are fitting for that particular climate. “Constitution” implies the extent to which physical bodies are constructed by the commodities they consume; according to Day, English bodies are literally “constituted” by environmental influences and consumption practices. By extension, the English nation is simultaneously “constituted” by the consumption habits of individual men and women throughout the country. The use of the word constitution resounds with political implications; by referring to “the English constitution” as an abstract collective, Day implies that just as individual physical bodies are nourished by tea drinking, so too does the political makeup of the nation depend on the shared cultural consumption of tea. Of course, tea does not originate within the English climate, as Day was patently aware. The physical organisms of individual English men and women, therefore, were constituted by and depended on the circulation of commodities throughout the British Empire in much the same way that the political nation of Great Britain depended on that circulation of goods, currency, and labor and drew vital revenues from the continued expansion of the tea trade.⁷

Charles Ashford, a tea dealer in Ipswich in the mid-nineteenth century, wrapped his tea in packages that advertised a similar connection between tea drinking and the English constitution, as both a physical body and a political conception (see fig. 1.1).⁸ Ashford’s package presents the following words in a circular pattern, requiring the reader to turn the paper around several times to read the entire statement: “Her Majesty is most particular in the selection of her teas & coffees but she can get no better articles than we are now offering to every family in this neighbourhood—one cup of our fine breakfast beverage immediately relieves langour [sic] or depression of spirits—a second cup gives tone to the stomach & vigour to the mind—a third cup completely exhilerates [sic] the whole frame leaving a pleasing glow of animation highly beneficial to the human constitution.”⁹ Suggesting that the common families of Ipswich had access to the same quality of tea as Queen Victoria attests to the democratizing influence of tea, creating a community of tea drinkers who shared the same tastes, choices, and values.¹⁰ The circular pattern of the package puts the most emphasis on the words “Her Majesty,” as the phrase that begins the pattern, and “constitution,” which appears upright in the center of the pattern. While the sentence conveys that “constitution” implies the physical body of the tea drinker, the pattern of the package emphasizes the royal tea drinker ruling the political body of the nation, adding political nuance to the central image of the “constitution.” The physical body of the queen is literally connected to the political body of the nation, linking her own individual constitution and, by extension, the constitutions of all the tea drinkers of Ipswich with the constitution of England as a political nation.

Figure 1.1. The English “constitution,” tea wrapper from Charles Ashford, Grocer and Tea Dealer. Tea and Grocery Papers 1 (50), John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

By merging the body of an individual tea drinker with the body of the nation, Sigmond’s and Day’s histories and Ashford’s tea wrapper all suggest that nationhood is constructed from within the physical limits of a single member of that nation. Rather than assuming that national identity is an overarching abstraction that contains the subjects within its borders, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements argue for a more organic model of building national identity from the level of individual men and women. Just as a single tea drinker’s body was nourished by the actions of a cup of tea within his or her digestive system, so too would the national body be similarly revitalized by the health and morality of the individuals within that larger political system. Thus, tea drinking becomes a vital ingredient in the process of building a shared national identity created from tea drinkers throughout England, of all classes and both genders. More important is the concept that every individual tea drinker participated in constructing that national identity every day, with every cup of tea—the nation was built and strengthened daily, with the simultaneous pouring of tea at thousands of family tea tables. An individual Englishman could experience firsthand the process of nourishing the nation, as he nourished his own body, drinking each cup of tea.

In the same way that the body of the tea drinker is aligned with the body politic in Victorian tea histories, the domestic sphere of the home becomes conflated with the domestic space of England within the world. Victorian discussions of tea often elide the traditional split between the private and public spheres to suggest that the nation was shaped by everyday domestic interactions within the home and among family members.¹¹ An anonymous article praising tea in an 1868 edition of All the Year Round, a journal edited by Charles Dickens, begins, “A cup of tea! Blessings on the words, for they convey a sense of English home comfort, of which the proud Gaul, with all his boulevards and battalions, is as ignorant as a turbot is of the use of the piano.”¹² While the French may be proud of very public accomplishments such as broad boulevards and military battalions, English national (and public) identity rests on the private, intimate pleasures supplied by a sense of “home comfort.” G. G. Sigmond explicitly attributes the accomplishments of English men and women, including “industry,” “health,” “national riches,” and “domestic happiness,” to tea drinking, linking these variously public and private, individual and collective goods through the consumption of tea. He locates the heart of Englishness within individual domestic households and metaphorically describes the nation as a collective home gathered around a single hearth: “The social tea-table is like the fireside of our country, a national delight; and [it is] the scene of domestic converse and of agreeable relaxation” (3). Within individual households, the abstract concept of the domestic sphere crystallizes around the tea table, invoking quintessentially English precepts of a moral family life. By focusing on family members drinking tea within their homes, tea histories participate in this wider Victorian tendency to publicly examine the details of private life and to draw conclusions about the English national community based on the patterns of the individual domestic household.¹³ Victorian tea histories, advertisements, and novels represent the importance of tea drinking within intimate family gatherings inside the domestic sphere, and they project this vision of intimacy and domesticity outward to form an imagined bond linking all English tea drinkers.

Anxieties of Adulteration: Establishing National Boundaries

Basing a national identity on a product manufactured thousands of miles away, however, caused anxiety within British texts on tea. The process of consuming—of physically taking tea into the English body—involved permeating the boundaries of that body and allowing potentially dangerous substances to invade it. Samuel Day, writing to advertise Horniman’s Pure Tea in 1878, argues that the greatest threat to the English tea drinker was the false coloration and adulteration of green tea by Chinese manufacturers, who intentionally deluded “English fools” with poisonous substances (47). According to Day, “The Green Teas sold in England are usually artificially coloured in order to enamour the eye of the unsuspecting purchaser. The principal medium employed in effecting this result is none other than Prussian blue, a deadly poison” (46–47). Several journal articles from the period discuss the well-known “Lie Tea,” a mixture of used tea leaves, dust from tea warehouses, crumpled leaves from other plants, soot, and, often, iron filings.¹⁴

Nineteenth-century concerns about the adulteration of food were not limited to tea, but the position of tea as a product imported from a country over which Britain had no economic or military control grants the fears of tea adulteration special consideration. According to Jack Goody’s study of the cultural significance of food consumption patterns in Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, “Adulteration is a feature of the growth of urban . . . or rural society that is divorced from primary production.”¹⁵ The problem of adulterated tea presented a more exaggerated case of the gap between production and consumption. Production was carried out thousands of miles away from consumers, and Chinese tea producers maintained strict secrecy about their methods of cultivation and manufacture, preventing the English from observing and ensuring the quality of tea exported from China.¹⁶ Politically, China had staved off European foreign powers and influence for as long as possible. Despite numerous military losses to the British and the increasing concessions granted after the Opium Wars, the Chinese remained in control of the manufacture and exportation of Chinese tea.¹⁷ Chinese officials continued to refuse British merchants access to the Chinese interior, where the tea plantations were located. According to nineteenth-century histories of tea, British tea consumers were vulnerable to the practices of Chinese tea manufacturers because the British could not monitor the production of tea.¹⁸

The anxieties over the adulteration and pollution of tea evident in these texts resonate on both individual and political levels. Anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the significance of pollution in relation to cultural taboos concerning food and eating and argues that “the processes of ingestion portray political absorption.”¹⁹ The act of consuming, according to this model, creates permeable boundaries between political entities. In Tea: Its Mystery and History, Samuel Day’s fears of adulterated China tea echo his fears of a world polluted by the breakdown of Chinese political and physical boundaries. As China became more and more accessible to foreign trade through trade negotiations and armed conflicts, those boundaries suddenly lost their ability to maintain cultural and racial distinctions: “Who could have thought that the Tea trade was destined to become one of the most important branches of our commerce, and not only so, but to occasion several wars, lead to the extension of our Eastern possessions, and precipitate the great Chinese exodus, which threatens such important results to the Pacific States of America, to Australia, the Polynesian Islands, and possibly to the world at large?” (49). According to Day, although Britain’s power to import tea from China symbolized one of the great achievements for British culture, the success of the tea trade threatened to dilute that power within the world. Not only would British consumers be polluted by adulterated, poisoned Chinese tea, but the world at large was in danger, according to Day, of being polluted by the disintegration of Chinese boundaries and the influx of previously isolated Chinese individuals into the rest of the world.

Day particularizes the Chinese threat by focusing on Chinese tea dealers, and he describes their acts of adulteration as “nefarious” (91) and “reprehensible” (92). A similarly frightening portrait of an English nation threatened by malicious, unscrupulous Chinese brokers and policy makers can be found in Cannon Schmitt’s analysis of Thomas de Quincey’s works. As Schmitt recounts, much of the tea flowing into Great Britain was financed by the British cultivation and sale of opium to China. Officially, the Chinese government discouraged and even outlawed the importation of opium, but these efforts were effectively overruled by a combination of British commercial tactics and a population of addicted Chinese opium smokers. Analyzing De Quincey’s writings, including several bellicose essays on the Opium Wars, Schmitt argues that De Quincey (and other writers at the time) emphasized Britain’s vulnerability to justify and legitimate British commercial and military aggression against China.²⁰ According to Schmitt, creating a picture of a fragile, feminine nation helped to authorize the Opium Wars, which were intended to force China to open its trading policies and ensure both British access to Chinese goods and a continuing market for British exports.

Reversing the threat by imagining Chinese aggression against the rest of the world is a tactic that occurs in many texts of the period. Howard Mackey has analyzed essays on China and the Orient that appeared in the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review in the years leading up to the Opium Wars. Mackey quotes from an anonymous essay published in the Edinburgh Review in July 1821, two months prior to the publication of the first installment of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821): “China swallows up about one-tenth of the habitable globe; and contains, at the lowest estimation, one-fourth of the population of the whole earth.”²¹ In this essay, the monolithic presence of China “swallows up” a huge proportion of the world, signifying in a similar way that it could begin consuming larger and larger portions, eventually threatening England’s borders. This essay presages De Quincey’s anxieties concerning the vast and unpredictable nature of the Orient; for De Quincey, “Southern Asia is . . . the part of the earth most swarming with human life,” and thus its population could potentially swarm across its borders and toward Europe at any moment (Confessions, 108). The Orient is pictured, in these two descriptions, as incredibly unstable and active, through its swarming and swallowing: an unseen but palpably felt threat to the rest of the world. The image of “swallowing” calls to mind the literal act of swallowing the countless cups of Chinese tea—tea grown by Chinese planters, manufactured by Chinese tea producers, and sold to the British by Chinese brokers. Rhetoric reversing this image by picturing China swallowing the rest of the world can be seen as a political strategy intended to displace more-literal anxieties of drinking, swallowing, and polluting English bodies with Chinese tea.²²

Reestablishing National Boundaries with “Pure Tea”

To combat the problem of permeable political boundaries, Samuel Day proposes a strategy of reinstating boundaries that had become too dangerously porous—a strategy that emphasizes the opacity and tenacity of ideological boundaries of race and ethnicity. In his text, Day encourages his readers to rely on the trustworthiness of English merchants to protect the English public from the unscrupulous practices of Chinese tea manufacturers. Reinserting unalterable differences of race into what had become a largely political and commercial transaction refocuses the debate concerning Chinese tea. Reflecting the corporate sponsorship of his text, Day specifically recommends one particular English merchant to uphold the purity of English tea—Horniman’s Pure Tea.

Horniman’s Pure Tea prided itself upon the purity of its tea, and that depended on a new Victorian innovation in tea sales—prepackaged tea.²³ Previously, all tea had been sold in bulk form, blended and packaged by local grocers for individual customers. Horniman’s message, according to Denys Forrest, a twentieth-century tea historian, was that “the consumer buying a packet of Horniman’s tea in its foil-lined paper wrapping was getting a hygienically protected, uniformly weighed quantity of unadulterated leaf” (Forrest, Tea for the British, 132). Placing concerns about hygiene within an imperial context, Anne McClintock argues that late nineteenth-century packaging innovations encouraged brand recognition and, what was perhaps more important, signified Victorian interest in sanitizing products that had come from the “dirty” empire and had been handled by tradesmen.²⁴ The introduction of individually wrapped packages of Horniman’s Pure Tea functioned as a reaffirmation of a physical barrier between Chinese tea and English tea drinkers. Because the boundaries separating the Chinese and the British were beginning to falter, as more Chinese ports opened to foreign trade and Chinese exports of tea continued to increase, British tea merchants erected new boundaries closer to home—“sealed packets,” paper packaging, and certifications of purity.²⁵ Packaging inventions helped further the construction of tea as the English national beverage, increasing the distance between the dangerous, racially other Chinese producer and the innovative, certifiably hygienic English tea dealer.

Day’s position reflects his commitment to the free trade capitalism that followed the 1833 dissolution of the East India Company’s China monopoly. Prior to 1833, the East India Company held a monopoly on trade with China; after Parliament ended that monopoly, other companies entered the China trade and began importing tea to England. Day argues that the British government, including perhaps the East India Company, had failed to metaphorically maintain the borders between China and England, allowing adulterated tea to be sold to unsuspecting English tea drinkers:

Such an indispensable article as Tea has now become, ought to be trebly guarded against all adulteration. While the Government is unable to protect the public against the machinations of unscrupulous Chinese merchants, let the public at least endeavor to protect itself. And this it can readily accomplish. Let it but bestow its custom on a trader upon whose integrity and technical knowledge it can implicitly rely. Let it insist upon having both its black and green Teas of the natural hue, without the addition of “face,” “glaze,” or artificial colour, which but detract from its character and value. How such a discreet selection can be effected has already been pointed out. Houses of repute—such, for example, as that of Messrs. Horniman and Co.—do not conceal their names behind a retailer, but boldly give their own, coupled with a guarantee to every purchaser, however modest his purchase. (76–77)

Day argues that, since tea is an “indispensable article” of English daily life, the potential adulteration of tea is all the more threatening to the health and culture of the individual tea drinker and of the nation. Day describes the “public” as a unified body with power and discretion, whose role it was, since the government had failed to protect it, to take steps to keep its tea pure and unadulterated. Speaking on behalf of Horniman’s Pure Tea, Day advocates that English consumers should wield their buying power to protect themselves, choosing the purest, highest-quality tea from the most reputable tea merchants.²⁶

The use of packaging and technology to create distance between commodity and consumer existed alongside of nineteenth-century marketing techniques designed to simultaneously bring the exotic Orient closer. Advertisements and grocers’ bills offered illustrations of mountainous tea plantations, pigtailed Chinese laborers plucking and manufacturing the leaves, and Chinese merchants waiting beside the shoreline with crates of tea. Tea histories include descriptions of the careful hand labor performed by Chinese tea pluckers, and they offer engraved illustrations depicting Chinese workers engaged in the various stages of tea production. Once the tea was painstakingly plucked, processed, and shipped to England, it was finally consumed by English tea drinkers in Chinese porcelain cups decorated with the famous blue-and-white stylized Chinese landscapes. These two tendencies—to create distance between England and China, and to simultaneously bring the Orient closer—are not as contradictory as they may seem, since they share the same goal of ameliorating anxieties about the boundaries of English identity. As Laura Ciolkowski argues, commodities can function as agents of border management.²⁷ Thus, representations of Chinese landscapes on Chinese porcelain intended for the consumption of Chinese tea helped dissipate the threat of the foreign by evoking that threat in commodified form—in essence, evoking British powers of commercialism and imperialism to consume the East by transforming another culture into a pretty piece of china for British importation.²⁸

Day’s strategies of emphasizing new ideological, technological, and commercial boundaries do, however, suggest a continual sense of uncertainty within English tea drinkers. The illustrations that accompany advertisements and other tea-related papers focus the gaze on the borders and boundaries of China—both culturally and geographically (see fig. 1.2). Images of Chinese merchants standing on beaches, piers, and shorelines, waiting to deliver their tea to ships visible in the harbor, recall McClintock’s discussion of similar scenes in advertisements for soap, often depicted with the shores of Africa.²⁹ Advertisements for tea reverse the trajectory traced by McClintock; instead of depicting a commodity transforming and civilizing primitive cultures, tea advertisements celebrate the power of British traders to bring mysterious, exotic products back to the domestic center of Britain from the farthest reaches of the globe. An undercurrent of anxiety regarding the Chinese traders remained; for British tea merchants, the shoreline of China marked the limits of their knowledge of that country and thus of the origins of the English national beverage.

Hybrid Consumerism: Consuming the World through Tea

Despite the lingering sense of anxiety present in Day’s treatise and numerous Victorian advertisements, however, tea had in many ways become comfortably English by as early as the 1820s. Despite De Quincey’s aggressive insecurities regarding the Chinese, a passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater attests to the universality of tea in English culture: “Surely every body is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. . . . All these are items in the description of a winter evening, which must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude” (93–94). In drawing the boundaries of the tea table, De Quincey effectively outlines the limits of Englishness; recognizing the quintessential elements of the domestic tea table becomes a necessary part of belonging to the English nation—“everybody born in a high latitude.” De Quincey creates a portrait of an English nation united by its shared participation in the rituals of the tea table. While De Quincey highlights the privacy of the domestic sphere through images of enclosure, explicitly contrasting the intimate setting of the tea table with the public space outside, his description ultimately links the private realm of the tea table with the public arena of national identity.

Figure 1.2. Boundaries of nation and culture, bill heading from William Wright, Grocer, Tea and Provision Dealer. Bill Headings 13 (25), John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Throughout his Confessions, De Quincey employs a strategy of opposition, explicitly contrasting his potentially dangerous, destructive, foreign habit of consuming opium with the quintessentially domestic English ritual of drinking tea. Schmitt, analyzing De Quincey’s nightmares of the Orient in the Confessions, suggests that British consumption of tea extends De Quincey’s own personal sense of vulnerability to the nation at large. According to Schmitt, De Quincey ends the Confessions with a “polluted, compromised self.” He adds, “In the context of the Opium Wars, an identical pollution threatens the English nation. The agent of this national contamination, though, is not opium but tea—without which, De Quincey writes in ‘The English in China,’ ‘the social life of England would receive a deadly wound’” (Schmitt, “Narrating National Addictions,” 83). Ultimately, Schmitt argues, De Quincey’s Confessions suggest that England, just like De Quincey, is threatened by pollution through consumption. Thus, Schmitt draws a parallel between De Quincey’s opium and the nation’s tea addiction. But I would contend that, despite the compromised self with which De Quincey ends his text, within the Confessions, opium is continually opposed to tea. De Quincey associates opium with the threatening, swarming, horrifying Orient, while he employs tea to represent comfortable English, domestic interior spaces—warm, safe, enclosed places in which to relax and consume the products of English commercial power. In each tea-table scene, De Quincey depicts tea as inherently domestic and familiar, exemplifying all of the aspects of Englishness that he, at various points in his narrative, earnestly desires and blissfully enjoys. By opposing tea to opium, De Quincey splits the threat of the Orient between these two Asian commodities; he effectively transfers all of the potential dangers of ingesting Oriental goods onto his increasingly uncontrollable opium habit, leaving his consumption of tea pure, safe, domestic, and very English.³⁰

Reconstructing his identity as a middle-class English gentleman, De Quincey creates a new, hybrid form of consumerism to absorb and contain the pleasures and the anxieties of Oriental commodities within a stable English identity. Arthur K. Reade’s history of tea in England, Tea and Tea Drinking, offers an explicit illustration of a strategy similar to De Quincey’s Anglicization and domestication of tea—a strategy of redefining Englishness to incorporate the products and the experiences of Britain’s global commerce and imperial expansion. The original front cover illustration of Tea and Tea Drinking exemplifies this focus (see fig. 1.3). Framed by Asian lettering and cherry blossoms, a recognizably English teacup occupies the center of the page and the reader’s gaze. The Oriental ornamentation on the cup suggests its status as a Chinese import, just like the tea it contains, but the cup itself emphasizes the power of English consumption to transform the products imported to England and consumed by English men and women. Chinese porcelain teacups in the nineteenth century—and today—have a much simpler shape and design; like the teacups found in Chinese restaurants, they are usually small, simple, convex cups with no handle and no saucer. The teacup handle and saucer were added purely for European export, marking the power of English tastes to exert changes on global commodities.³¹ The teaspoon provides further evidence of the Englishness of this image at the beginning of Reade’s tea history. Unlike Chinese tea drinkers, who consumed their tea as a straight infusion of tea leaves and boiling water, the English sweetened their tea with milk and sugar. Chinese tea drinkers had no need for teaspoons; the presence of a spoon resting on the saucer in this illustration highlights the national flavor of this cup of tea. Reade’s teacup—with handle, saucer, and teaspoon—serves as a microcosm of England’s conglomerative approach to commodity culture. The English taste for drinking tea with milk and sugar united products from around the empire and its commercial sphere of influence: Chinese porcelain, Chinese or Indian tea, English milk, and sugar from colonies in the West Indies.³² Combining the products of the empire and England within everyday rituals of consumption became common practice.³³ As tea drinking exemplifies, there were no boundaries to English consumption; the world became the marketplace for English consumers, and to be truly English was to consume the world.³⁴

Figure 1.3. The hybrid English teacup, cover illustration from Arthur Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884).

“Indebted to the Tea-Plant”: The Discovery of Tea in India

Despite the bravado of writers such as De Quincey and Arthur Reade, the stance of hybrid global consumerism remained a relatively tenuous position, leaving the British at the mercy of foreign powers—culturally, financially, and politically. Almost fifty years before the publication of Reade’s text, at the outbreak of the First Opium War, G. G. Sigmond explains in Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral, “The necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China for tea, has long struck some of our most intelligent statesmen” (63). Citing politicians’ concerns regarding the source of tea imports, Sigmond signals that the tea trade affected national interests, creating a situation in which individual tea drinkers and the financial health of the nation depended on a commodity produced by a foreign power. In his tea treatise, Sigmond suggests an alternative to dependence on Chinese tea merchants for supplies of the national beverage: he offers tea drinkers the possibility of consuming tea cultivated and produced within British-controlled regions of India and thus symbolically within the conceptual boundaries of Great Britain. Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published at a pivotal period of the global tea trade; Sigmond’s treatise marks the beginning of a gradual transition of tea from a commodity imported to Britain from a foreign nation to a colonial resource cultivated and consumed within its imperial territories. Sigmond’s emphasis on the revelation that tea grew indigenously on the Indian subcontinent simultaneously justifies British imperial expansion and reaffirms the place of tea in English everyday life.

British explorers first reported the existence of wild tracts of tea plants in Assam, in northeastern India, in 1823, but cultivation and production of tea in India did not begin until the late 1830s. According to historian Denys Forrest, author of Tea for the British, the delay in tea cultivation can be attributed to the East India Company, which at that time held a government-sanctioned monopoly on all tea imported to Britain from China, effectively making the East India Company the sole source of tea for European consumption (Forrest, 107). Rather than encouraging internal competition among its branches, the company, according to Forrest, temporarily ignored the potential for Indian-grown sources of tea, relying instead on its network of trade relations with Chinese tea merchants. Parliament dissolved the East India Company’s China monopoly in 1833, opening up the China tea trade to independent British interests. A decade after the discovery of tea in Assam, the East India Company turned its attention to the possibility of producing Indian tea.³⁵ The first shipment of Indian-grown tea was auctioned on the London tea market in 1839.³⁶

In September 1839, Charles Bruce, credited with first discovering tea growing in India, issued a report detailing his experiences and encouraging the cultivation and production of tea by British planters in India.³⁷ Bruce, whose byline includes his title as “Superintendent of Tea-Culture,” ends his report with a resounding paragraph emphasizing his role in the discovery of tea in India and intimating the great possibilities stemming from it:

In looking forward to the unbounded benefit the discovery of this plant will produce to England, to India,—to millions, I cannot but thank God for so great a blessing to our country. When I first discovered it, some 14 years ago, I little thought that I should have been spared long enough to see it become likely eventually to rival that of China, and that I should have to take a prominent part in bringing it to so successful an issue. Should what I have written on this new and interesting subject be of any benefit to the country and the community at large, and help a little to impel the tea forward to enrich our own dominions, and pull down the haughty pride of China, I shall feel myself richly repaid for all the perils, and dangers, and fatigues, that I have undergone in the cause of British-Indian tea. (160–61)

Bruce conveys his thanks to God for conferring such a blessing upon England, and he also suggests that his countrymen owe him a debt of gratitude as well. Part of the “successful . . . issue” brought about by the discovery of tea in India comes from its effect on England’s trade with China; Bruce is proud that Indian tea will one day “rival that of China,” and his goal, he admits, is to “pull down the haughty pride of China.” Published in 1839, the year the First Opium War broke out, Bruce’s piece echoes the jingoism of, for example, Thomas de Quincey’s essays on China.³⁸

G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published in London that same year, and he celebrates Bruce’s discovery of the tea plant growing wild in the jungles of Assam.³⁹ Connecting botany and medicine with commerce and politics, along with a generous interest in the social habits of England, Sigmond’s text appeals to a broader audience than Bruce’s details regarding the exact expenditures needed to establish a successful tea plantation in Assam. Sigmond describes the momentous discovery of the Indian tea plant: “At the present moment every circumstance which relates to the tea-plant carries with it a deeper interest. A discovery has been made of no less importance than that the hand of Nature has planted the shrub within the bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain: a discovery which must materially influence the destinies of nations; it must change the employment of a vast number of individuals; it must divert the tide of commerce, and awaken to agricultural industry the dormant energies of a mighty country, whose wellbeing must be the great aim of a paternal government” (3). The simple tea shrub, Sigmond declares, affects the destinies of individuals, societies, and nations, shaking economic and political systems across the globe. Sigmond carefully delineates the “bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain” in this passage, asserting firmly that the tea plant was discovered growing within those borders and thus within British territory. By placing the well-being of the dormant but mighty resources of India within the hands of “a paternal government,” Sigmond articulates the connection between the budding Indian tea industry and British imperial goals. Cultivating tea in India would contribute to a new agricultural industry for British colonial planters and simultaneously participate in an enlargement of imperial territory and power. The investment of British industry and energy into the slumbering resources of its colony would, according to Sigmond, fulfill the agricultural potential of the wild jungles of Assam.

Sigmond emphasizes that Indian-grown tea was not a poor substitute for the more exotic teas of China that had previously filled English tea caddies. He quotes the Agricultural Society of Calcutta, which declared that a discovery had taken place and pronounced it to be “one of a most interesting and important nature, as connected with the commercial and agricultural interests of this empire. We allude to the existence of the real and genuine tea-plant of China, indigenous within the Honourable Company’s dominions in Upper Assam. This shrub is no longer to be looked upon as a plant of doubtful introduction. It exists, already planted by the hand of Nature, through a vast extent of territory in Upper Assam” (68–69). As this passage reveals, previous attempts had been made to introduce Chinese tea seeds and seedlings into the East India Company’s territories in northern India. The discovery of the “real and genuine tea-plant of China” growing natively in Indian soil, according to the society and to Sigmond, would revolutionize the embryonic tea industry of British India. Rather than attempting to artificially create substitutes for the more desirable Chinese tea, British tea planters could cultivate the native resources of India to produce an imperial source of the national beverage. According to Sigmond, Assam tea “has a delicate and agreeable smell; it makes a very pleasant infusion, of a deeper colour than ordinary Souchong; it has every quality that belongs to a good, sound, unadulterated tea. There cannot be the slightest doubt of its being the genuine produce of the real tea-plant” (78). The identity of Indian tea plants as “genuine” would resonate with tea drinkers who had relied on tea imported from China for comfort, nourishment, and a foundation for social relationships for two centuries.⁴⁰

In celebrating the potential for British-controlled, Indian-grown, genuine tea, Sigmond employs a rhetoric of discovery. He focuses on the fact that the tea found growing in India was planted “by the hand of Nature” rather than by the hands of British planters.⁴¹ According to this rhetoric, the tea plant grew wild in the jungles of Assam before the arrival of British colonists, awaiting the moment when East India Company explorers uncovered its existence as an imperial source for tea. The definition of “discovery” assumes the prior existence of the item, as it is dis-covered, uncovered, and revealed to the gaze of the discoverer, who plays a relatively passive role in the process. “Discovery” implies that the one doing the discovering did not actively create, produce, or manufacture the discovery; instead, he or she makes something visible that had been hidden, removing the intervening obstruction to reveal that the item being discovered had actually existed all along. Discovering tea, the national beverage of Great Britain, growing natively on Indian soil suggests that Nature authorized British expansion into that region, affirming the natural right and responsibility of a “paternal government,” as Sigmond puts it, to rule Indian territories and to reap the benefits of Indian resources. The tea industry had already proved profitable to the British government through the monopoly of the East India Company; finding tea growing wild in the company’s territories in India just when its China monopoly was dissolved appeared to be divine intervention, providing both the company and the nation with a new source of tea.

Even more fundamentally, the discovery of tea, a beverage that had become part of the fabric of daily life in England, growing wild within the jungles of India proved that India was indeed destined to become a great asset to the British Empire. Finding tea, planted by the hand of Nature and thus approved of by cosmological forces, within the territories of India suggested that India had, in some sense, always been British. The expansion of British rule and agriculture merely actualized the latent Britishness of India, symbolized by the presence of the authentic tea plant, planted by the hand of Nature and hidden by the dense jungle until the British were ready to nurture it into commercial profitability. The historical preexistence of the tea plant in India, which predated British exploration and colonization, suggests a logical syllogism that helped to naturalize the process of imperial expansion and provided explicit justification, for Sigmond, of British rule in India. If to be British included the choice of tea as a beverage and as an item of commerce, and if India revealed itself as a natural source of indigenous, genuine tea, then India must have been predestined to become part of the British Empire, an empire that depended on the circulation and the consumption of tea.

At the same time, discovering authentic Chinese tea growing wild within the bounds of the British Empire removed any lingering anxieties of basing national identity on a product imported from foreign sources—essentially domesticating the particularly troubling exotic origins of the national beverage. Finding tea in India affirmed the connection between drinking tea and English national identity, while also ensuring a secure, domestic source for the beverage that had become crucial to nineteenth-century culture and society. Sigmond suggests that tea really was fundamentally English; the fact that tea had been cultivated and produced beyond national borders could only be viewed as a temporary aberrance in the history of tea drinking in England. The discovery of “real” tea growing within the East India Company’s territory in India manifestly corrected this mistake, restoring tea, from bud to leaf to teapot, to British hands. With British supervision of all stages of the cultivation, production, and shipment of Indian-grown tea, English consumers could rest assured that the beverage filling their teacups was authentic, genuine, and pure.

According to Sigmond, the discovery of the tea plant in India accomplished dual goals. First, the new tea industry in India provided the British government with a profitable addition to its financial and territorial empire. Sigmond quotes from “the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal,” which avers, “Assam may yet be found to be one of the most valuable acquisitions to the British Empire” (80). The discovery of the tea plant in Assam led to the annexation of that region as part of the Indian territories under British rule, significantly expanding the British Empire. At the same time, the revelation that the tea plant grew natively within India ensured that the English taste for tea could be satisfied domestically, from within that empire. Sigmond proudly proclaims that the nation could rely on Assam tea production to replace the China tea trade: “[T]here can be no doubt that an ample supply for European consumption can be obtained [in Upper Assam]” (81). Charles Bruce, whose report includes his firsthand account of surveying the tea tracts of Assam, reports areas of wild tea so large that he “did not see the end of it,” suggesting the vast, unending profits available in those unexplored jungles (127), and he confidently asserts, “I feel convinced the whole of the country is full of tea” (128). Far from relying on the uncertainties of foreign merchants and the mysteries of Chinese tea manufacture, as Sigmond and Bruce suggest, England—through imperial expansion—could at last take on the responsibility of supplying its own citizens with the national beverage. Rather than remaining dependent upon China, England became indebted to the tea plant, a commodity crucial to English culture and identity, and, henceforward, to the expansion of the British Empire.

Arthur Reade’s 1884 treatise also embraces the benefits of bringing the tea industry into the British sphere of influence. While his rhetoric encourages tea drinkers to consume the commodities of the world as a global endeavor, Reade nevertheless agrees that the cultivation of Indian tea would permanently solve the threat to English identity posed by Chinese tea:

The tea plant, although cultivated in various parts of the East, is probably indigenous to China; but is now grown extensively in India. In consequence of the poorness of the quality of the tea imported by the East India Company, and the necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China, the Bengal Government appointed in 1834 a committee for the purpose of submitting a plan for the introduction and cultivation of the tea-plant; and a visit to the frontier station of Upper Assam ended in a determination on the part of Government to cultivate tea in that region. In 1840 the “Assam Company” was formed, and it is claimed for them that they possess the largest tea plantation in the world. . . . Every year thousands of acres are being brought under cultivation, and in a short time it seems likely that we shall be independent of China for our supplies of tea. (19–20)

According to Reade, British consumption of Chinese tea formed the basis of commercial and political dependency, a relationship that weakened Britain’s international position. He emphasizes the need to avoid “an entire dependence upon China” and enthusiastically champions the goal of finally becoming “independent of China for our supplies of tea.” For Reade, tea had become an essential part of the colonizing process; his history of the British colonization of Assam is integrally linked to the need for British sources of tea.

The cultivation of tea in India, on British-ruled soil, allowed the British to maintain control over the entire process of tea production, from the initial planting through the plucking and drying of leaves to the final exportation to Britain. As tea imports from the colonies in India and Ceylon increased, British cultural reliance on tea as part of national identity acquired imperialistic overtones: “A large quantity of tea is now imported from this island [Ceylon], and new plantations, it is reported, are being made every month; day by day more of the primeval forest goes down before the axe of the pioneer, and before another quarter of a century has passed it is anticipated that the teas of our Indian empire will become the most valuable of its products” (21). Tea was no longer an exotic commodity imported to Britain from uncertain, malevolent, foreign sources; instead, tea had become a product exported from within the British Empire. Reade asserts possession over Indian teas, the teas of “our Indian empire,” and he equates tea production with Victorian pride in national and technological progress. Tea, for Reade, has become an essential product of English imperialism; at the same time, he also illustrates that English imperialism was clearly a product of the growing British taste for tea.

The English tea-drinking public had to be convinced, however, to switch to drinking Indian tea. Even as late as 1861, more than twenty years after Sigmond’s ringing endorsement of British tea in India, an article in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts asserts, “Reader, if you wish some little information on the subjects of tea-growing, gathering, curing, and shipping, you must come with us to China.”⁴² China was still considered the primary tea-producing region of the world. However, the rhetoric of periodical articles, as well as Sigmond’s and Reade’s treatises, suggests that drinking Indian tea was patriotic. An 1868 article in Charles Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, delineates all the ways in which the Chinese were known to adulterate tea intended for English consumption and then prays, “If tea can only be grown in Assam, there may be soon found a remedy for all this cheating.”⁴³ Even at the end of the century, in 1894, Mrs. A. H. Green attributed the increasing Indian tea imports in England to “our national—and often personal—interest in India” rather than to a taste preference for Indian tea. Mrs. Green personally favored the “softness of flavour” found in Chinese teas and asserts that they have more “romance” than Indian teas.⁴⁴ But tea drinkers had to give up more than pleasantly exotic notions of Chinese pagodas and priests making tea by hand; whereas China imported both black and green teas to Britain, Chinese teas tended to be mild in flavor. Indian tea plantations produced black tea almost exclusively, and Indian teas offered bolder, more-assertive flavors. Once Britain began importing predominantly Indian tea, the nation’s beverage came to be brewed with black tea. By the late 1880s, English imports of Indian tea had outpaced England’s consumption of tea from China.⁴⁵

The years surrounding the shift from a predominantly Chinese to a predominantly Indian supply of tea for English consumers produced a flurry of tea-related texts asserting the superiority of Indian tea. Samuel Baildon’s Tea Industry in India: A Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants (1882) emphasizes that India—not China—ought to be regarded as the true “home” of tea. Whereas Sigmond, writing in 1839 and working second- or thirdhand from others’ accounts of exploration of Assam, attested that the “hand of Nature” had planted the genuine tea plant of China within the bounds of India, Baildon goes a step further by asserting that the tea plant originated in India, not in China. Thus, Baildon attempts to undermine any grounds for the supremacy of Chinese tea based on authenticity or primacy: “[I]f India can be proved—as I hope I have proved it—to be the home of the tea-plant, Indian planters will have a strong base-point on which to reasonably establish their assertion as to the superiority of their produce” (5). According to Baildon, proving that tea began in India and later moved to China would necessarily help establish its “superiority”; reinforcing the link between tea and domesticity, Baildon bases his measure of the superiority of tea on concepts of “home” and origination.

Baildon’s argument initially rests on the vague and shadowy legends that surround the beginning of the history of tea. According to one popular legend circulating in China (and reported in nearly every nineteenth-century article and treatise on tea), an Indian Buddhist prince named Dharma was traveling through China during a self-imposed penance of forgoing sleep for some years. At one point, Dharma grew too tired to resist sleep any longer. When he awoke, frustrated and saddened by his failure to remain awake, he tore off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. Later, he found that an unknown shrub had grown upon the spot, and Dharma found that eating the leaves helped him to stay awake. Baildon seizes upon Dharma’s nationality: “The Chinese and Japanese versions of the first phases of tea in their respective countries are thus attributed to a native of India.” Moreover, he supposes that Dharma, rather than discovering tea growing in China, actually introduced the tea plant into those countries from India (9).

Baildon’s rhetoric draws heavily from Darwinian theories of evolution and the arguments about degeneration and devolution that followed Darwin’s work. Baildon admits that the tea industry in India was still in its infancy and in need of the boost his proof would provide, but he claims that this fact does not detract from his argument: “[The Indian tea industry] is as yet only a child, striving against the Chinese giant; but, fortunately, the natural order of things is for the giants to die before the vigorous children” (5). Baildon focuses on the “natural order of things,” casting a political and commercial battle in terms of agricultural and evolutionary cycles. He argues that the tea plant was most likely “indigenous to India, and extended its growth to China, deteriorating as it did so” (11). According to Baildon, the tea plant traveled from its indigenous India to China and, over the miles and centuries, gradually assumed an inferior appearance and form in its new Chinese guise. Baildon offers an analogy that depicts this degeneration in disturbingly human terms:

We will put this degenerated Indian tea-plant of China, in its origin, in the position of a traveller; and, remembering that plant-life is more easily influenced by climate than human life, suppose that an European was cast upon the world, and travelling gradually farther and farther from his native land, eventually settled down in a climate altogether unsuitable for his successful development. After the lapse of a great number of years, he would nominally remain an European, but virtually be an established member of another community, and affected by habits of life, climatic influences, and intimate associations with things and people around him. His nationality would have been abandoned for the adoption of that of an inferior country, and have resulted in his decline. In the course of time we see him—or his progeny—stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated; in fact, changed physically from his original state.

So with China tea: originally part of the one Indian family, now a distinct and separate member. (12–13)

Remarkably, tea mutates, in this analogy, from an Indian native to a European, suggesting that tea is a British citizen—part of an “Indian family,” which necessarily belongs to the British Empire. This European traveler makes his way to China, where he gradually assimilates to the climate and culture and, in the process, loses his identity—he “abandoned” his nationality and adopted that of an “inferior country.” This process of assimilation is reported by Baildon to be a process of “decline” that presents itself in essentialized, racialized, extraordinarily physical terms that translate to his offspring and therefore taint his descendants, who appear “stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated.” Describing Indian tea, Baildon offers the counterpoint to the stunted, coarsened Chinese tea plants; Indian tea, in contrast, is “[t]all, vigorous, of increased stature, with larger leaves, and full of sap; giving a greater return, and of a richer kind” (14). Employing noble rhetoric, Baildon describes Indian tea plants—nurtured by British tea planters—as standing up straight and tall next to their stunted, miniature, dried-up Chinese neighbors.

An 1889 article in Chambers’s Journal echoes Baildon’s emphasis on the superiority of Indian tea. The author reports that “[b]etween 1866 and 1886 the exports of China tea doubled; but in the same period the exports of Indian tea increased fourteen fold,” and he entitles this historical moment “The Revolution in Tea.”⁴⁶ Suggesting rebellion through this title, the author hints that Britain has successfully thrown off the yoke of Chinese oppression by cultivating its own, British-owned and -controlled source of tea. The author of this article goes on to detail the exact ways in which the Indian tea industry has managed to achieve this “revolution,” specifically by replacing small familygrown plots of Chinese tea, which passed through multiple hands of processors, transporters, and brokers, with mechanized plantation systems in India, in which every step of the process from seeding to the final auction was under the supervision of a single British planter. Baildon similarly praises this innovation of the Indian tea industry: “In India, from first to last, producing the crop and hearing of its sale is the care and anxiety of one man” (33). The author of “The Revolution in Tea” sums up his article with a rousing moral, “illustrating how a great nation may lose a great industry by carelessness and dishonesty, and how a few energetic and honest traders may build up in a short time an enormous traffic. It is natural and proper that our sympathies should be with the triumph of our Indian industry” (504). Echoing Baildon’s Darwinian rhetoric, this author returns to the concept of “natural” to justify and encourage individual tea drinkers’ participation in the British Empire through drinking Indian tea.

According to Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s anthropological investigation of the correlation between eating habits and identity, “Food tells not only how people live but also how they think of themselves in relation to others.”⁴⁷ By the early nineteenth century, tea had penetrated the inner workings of British daily life, becoming a central part of physical existence and social interaction. Victorian tea histories exhibit anxiety over the extent to which tea drinkers had become immured to tea’s foreign origins and to the distinction between self and other that had become blurred by the adoption of tea as a daily necessity. Although tea had become known as the “national beverage” during the eighteenth century, due to the fact that English consumption of tea far outstripped that of other European nations, tea nevertheless remained a foreign import and contained potentially dangerous implications of dependency and pollution. But during the course of the nineteenth century, as Britain began producing tea for its own consumption within its “Indian empire,” the significance of tea’s label as “the national beverage” acquired new meaning. Consuming tea became a method of absorbing British imperialism, of literally and physically participating in the vital circulation of goods maintained by the British Empire. According to nineteenth-century tea histories, tea constituted British national identity both metaphorically and bodily, contributing to the continued strength of Britain and its people.

The Necessary Luxury of Tea: Defining a Nation and an Empire

The crucial role of tea in the process of creating and strengthening the British Empire stemmed in part from its status as a commodity that crossed ideological boundaries. On the one hand, tea was an exotic luxury imported over vast distances from a culture that was very different from Britain. On the other hand, tea had become an irreplaceable necessity of English everyday life. The position of tea, straddling the boundaries between the ontological categories of luxury and necessity, was critical in the ideological development of an imperial nation. Historically, luxuries have been viewed as potentially dangerous for the continued success of empires. According to Roman writers toward the end of the Roman Empire, the importation of foreign luxuries drained resources—both financial resources of monetary funds and human resources of virility and power—from the imperial homeland.⁴⁸ Nineteenth-century writers, however, insisted that tea did not fit traditional definitions of a luxury. Tea elided the boundary between luxury and necessity by simultaneously existing in both categories at once. Tea thus became both a daily fixture of English culture and an exotic imported consumable, playing a crucial role in domestic and imperial affairs. Rather than enervating the empire, tea served as a reason for extending British territory in India and as a cash crop for British planters. By spending money and time consuming a foreign luxury, English tea drinkers were ultimately participating in the continued success of the British Empire.

In his work on the history of luxuries, sociologist and philosopher Christopher J. Berry argues that commodities have a transient, dynamic status on a continuum that ranges from luxuries at one end to necessities at the opposite end.⁴⁹ Many luxury goods, according to Berry, have historically moved out of their luxury status into the position of a social necessity, part of everyday life for most people in a given culture (18). Berry argues that in the process of moving from luxury to necessity, a good that becomes socially necessary effects physical changes within the person who needs that good; new needs “actually affect the constitution of those who need them” (179). Berry’s use of the word constitution recalls Samuel Day’s and Charles Ashford’s representation of the role of tea in the English constitution and suggests that the shift of tea from a luxury to an English necessity produced physiological changes in the English people.⁵⁰

A few passages from nineteenth-century texts appear to agree with the concept of a continuum of goods, suggesting that tea definitively moved out of the category of a luxury as it became increasingly necessary to daily English life. The anonymous Tsiology: A Discourse on Tea (1827) asserts that “[f]rom a fashionable and expensive luxury, [tea] has been converted into an essential comfort, if not an absolute necessary of life” (19). Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History outlines this gradual shift in the location of tea within daily life from a luxury to a necessity—from a product that was expensive and unneeded, an extra expense for an item purely for pleasure (whether appetitive or social), to a commodity so important within the daily diet that its absence would be felt as “deprivation.” Day quotes “an eminent statesman” who declared, “What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our accustomed daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which once were counted as necessaries of life” (Day, 70). In this passage, Day maintains a binary between luxury and necessity, basing these definitions on the importance of tea to daily life. According to Day’s quotable statesman, tea had not merely traversed the divide between luxury and necessity but had worked its way so far into the fabric of everyday life that it had become even more important than other things that had once been considered necessary. Tea had replaced older, existing necessities of life such as beer and ale, reflecting a new hierarchy of priorities within daily life.

In these passages, Day and the author of Tsiology appear to uphold the distinction between luxuries and necessities, but both texts eventually collapse that binary by insisting that tea can occupy positions as a luxury and as a necessity simultaneously. According to Berry’s analysis, a luxury good can be universally desired and widely consumed, but it cannot, by definition, be a social necessity; once it has moved on the continuum toward the position of being socially required to satisfy the needs of individuals within a certain culture, it can no longer be defined as a luxury. But tea histories maintain the status of tea as a luxury—as an exotic, pleasurable indulgence—even as they celebrate tea as a daily necessity within English life. By retaining the nuances of luxury in their assessment of tea, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements signal their position within a historical debate over the social effects of consuming luxury commodities. Cultures throughout the Western world have contributed to a growing literature dedicated to illustrating the pernicious nature of luxury consumption.⁵¹ But shifts in national economies sparked a radical reassessment of the effect of luxury consumption on the welfare of nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The consumption of luxury goods imported from foreign locations became increasingly important to European economies, and foreign trade became associated with the wealth and prosperity of the English nation.⁵² Tsiology counters the claim that tea is an “enervating luxury” draining the nation of needed resources and energy, by arguing that “no article of extensive commerce can possibly exist—whether a mere luxury or a positive necessary—without enriching a nation in proportion to its extent” (105). The author of Tsiology dismantles the association between luxury and the fall of empires by asserting that whether luxury or necessity, tea as a commodity has in fact enriched the nation.⁵³

Tea thus occupied the binary-straddling position of being physically and morally necessary as an article of daily ingestion and of simultaneously retaining the characteristics of a pleasurable indulgence to be savored and enjoyed. Robert Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries of China (1852) explains in greater detail exactly how this dual nature of tea helped to enrich the English nation and the British Empire. Fortune, a Scottish botanist, was hired by the East India Company to infiltrate Chinese tea plantations to gain knowledge about cultivating and manufacturing tea and to acquire thousands of tea seedlings to transport to fledgling tea plantations in India.⁵⁴ At first, Fortune maintains a rhetorical divide between the concepts of “luxury” and “necessity,” and he suggests that tea has “almost” traversed the divide between luxury and necessity: “In these days, when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her wide-spreading colonies, its production upon a large and cheap scale is an object of no ordinary importance” (394). Tea, originally an expensive luxury, had become an item of everyday consumption. But as Fortune explains the importance of tea to England, India, and the British Empire, he emphasizes the qualities of tea that continued to define that commodity as a luxury—Fortune describes tea as an item that was essential to English notions of comfort and pleasure.

Fortune carefully delineates a twofold rationale for how growing tea in India would benefit both England and India. Production of tea within the confines of England’s “wide-spreading colonies” would, of course, offer tea produced on a “large and cheap scale” from a territory much more accessible and economically beneficial for export to England. But Fortune’s justification suggests that while growing tea in India would increase English access to tea, Indian cultivation of tea would also serve to benefit and civilize the natives of India by giving them access to some of the luxuries currently available to the English middle classes. Fortune provides a detailed vignette of Indian peasant life and suggests precisely how the introduction of tea plantations would materially enhance the culture and comfort of Indian men and women:

[T]o the natives of India themselves the production of [tea] would be of the greatest value. The poor paharie, or hill peasant, at present has scarcely the common necessaries of life, and certainly none of its luxuries. The common sorts of grain which his lands produce will scarcely pay the carriage to the nearest market-town, far less yield such a profit as will enable him to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life. A common blanket has to serve him for his covering by day and for his bed at night, while his dwelling-house is a mere mud-hut, capable of affording but little shelter from the inclemency of the weather. If part of these lands produced tea, he would then have a healthy beverage to drink, besides a commodity which would be of great value in the market. Being of small bulk compared with its value, the expense of carriage would be trifling, and he would have the means of making himself and his family more comfortable and more happy. (394–95)

According to Fortune, the Indian hill peasants’ poor living conditions were linked to their inability to elide the distinction between necessity and luxury. Fortune initially employs this distinction to judge the Indian hill peasant’s incapacity to provide for himself and his family. The peasant before the cultivation of tea can scarcely buy necessaries, and certainly no luxuries. Fortune does not specify what necessities and luxuries are in this context, but he seems to assume that there is a clear distinction between these two categories. The introduction of tea plantations, however, would blur the boundary between these two categories by raising the peasant’s standard of living enough to enable him “to purchase . . . the necessary and simple luxuries of life.” In this sentence, luxuries have suddenly become necessary—there are no longer two categories, of essential and nonessential-but-pleasant. With the introduction of tea cultivation to India, goods previously considered nonessential could become “necessary luxuries.”

According to Fortune, the ability to grow, transport, and sell tea would transform the Indian peasant into a middle-class British subject. As the British tea drinker would attest, the ability to purchase necessary luxuries such as tea was crucial to the definition of that subject position. As the Indian subjects rose in financial and moral health, they too would begin purchasing the “necessary and simple luxuries of life,” bringing them fully into the circulation of goods between colony and metropole and providing a market both for Indian tea and potentially for British goods as well.⁵⁵ Tea thus literally and figuratively expanded the boundaries of the empire—adding territory to the British-controlled regions of India for the cultivation of tea while simultaneously creating more British subjects who would conform to the characteristic requirements of the middle-class national identity. Ensuring the successful cultivation and production of tea into India thus became a moral imperative for the British, so that they could help bring the Indians into the middle class—a privileged position poised on the boundaries of economic, social, and linguistic categories.

The British reader, sitting comfortably in his or her parlor, could vicariously experience the thrill of Fortune’s forays into forbidden Chinese sanctuaries and the hope of successfully cultivating tea in India by reading Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries. But as Fortune emphasizes, the reader’s participation continues well past the end of Fortune’s narrative. While Fortune suggests that the British cultivation of tea in India would transform Indian peasants into middle-class citizens of the British Empire, he also implies that British readers in England could physically participate in the process of building the empire by purchasing and consuming Indian-grown tea. Fortune’s text offers a tangible way to experience the full cycle of colonized and colonizer, of colony and metropole. By drinking tea produced in India, the British tea drinker simultaneously enriched his or her own body (and thus his or her small physical piece of the British Empire) and contributed to the physical, moral, and financial health of the expanding empire in India. The British cultivation and production of tea in India would enable the poor Indian peasant to become part of the capitalist system of exchange and to rise economically to a position of middle-class comfort. The cycle was completed by the journey of Indian-grown tea back to England, where the British tea drinker would purchase it and consume it, thus contributing simultaneously to the expansion of the empire, the increasing wealth and comfort of the inhabitants of British India, and his or her own sense of English national identity.

By emphasizing the status of tea as a luxury and a daily necessity within English culture, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements suggest that the tea trade held a critically important position within the English national economy, just as the wise purchase of tea was central to an individual English household’s domestic economy. An advertisement for the United Kingdom Tea Company offers visual evidence of the role of luxury in the continued strength and success of the British government and its empire (see fig. 1.4). The ad depicts the female figure of Britannia, complete in flowing Roman robes and plumed military headdress, reclining at a small table and pouring herself a cup of tea. Drawing upon the glory and military strength of the Roman Empire to assert similar praise for the empire of Great Britain, this ad suggests that, far from enervating and destroying the imperial power of England, commercial trade in luxury goods supported and strengthened the nation. In the background, figures representing China, India, Ceylon, and Assam—the major regions of tea production—bring chests of tea to Britannia. In the foreground, she calmly focuses her gaze on her tiny teacup, into which she is pouring tea from a small, round teapot labeled, in case there was any doubt, “United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas.” Thus, Britain consumes and enjoys teas imported from around the world, supported by the labor and the service of numerous foreign nations and colonies, represented by various forms of cultural dress and racial appearance in the ad.

Each chest of tea within the ad, including those carried by the figures of China and India as well as the one on which Britannia reclines, portrays the trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company: three young women in three distinct national costumes. Although this image is indistinct and obscured by the folds of Britannia’s robes in this ad, the same image appears, larger and more clearly, in other ads for the United Kingdom Tea Company. The woman in the center wears the dress of early nineteenth-century England; her gown is slim and high waisted, she carries a small purse with a long ribbon as a strap, and her hair falls in curls around her face. The woman on the left wears Scottish highlander dress, including a long plaid skirt, a tam on her head, and a traditional sporran—a leather pouch with three tassels—on her belt. On the right, an Indian woman wears a flowing sari, ornamented on the edges and wrapped around her waist and her arms. The trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company visually represents the main peoples who make up the United Kingdom (minus Ireland, the West Indies, and other minorities within the population of the British Empire). Each of the three women holds a teacup emblazoned with the initials “UKTC,” and they stand with their arms linked together, physically united. The image of Britannia sitting on the crate of tea metaphorically portrays the foundation of foreign trade and domestic female tea consumption by all the races and cultures of the British Empire. Far from posing a threat to the stability of the country and the empire, the trade in tea, “One of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day,” as the ad proclaims, here appears to serve, support, and strengthen both the company and the United Kingdom.

Figure 1.4. “Tea First Hand,” advertisement for United Kingdom Tea Company. Tea and Coffee Box 2, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.