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Mediating Class Distinctions

The Middle-Class Englishness of Drinking Tea

No one who has lived for half a century can have failed to note the wonderful extension of tea-drinking habits in England, from the time when tea was a coveted and almost unattainable luxury to the laborer’s wife, to its use morning, noon, and night by all classes.

Arthur K. Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking

ACCORDING TO TEA HISTORIES, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND novels’ descriptions of everyday life, tea drinking had become instrumental as a consumer practice essential to the definition of English identity. The cross-class appeal of tea enabled Victorian authors to suggest that tea drinking conveyed meaning about all socioeconomic classes, creating a unifying symbol of English consumer culture. By drinking tea, English men and women participated in creating a national identity that depended on middle-class morality and moderation: an identity that revolved around both good taste and thrift and that included an appreciation for luxuries tempered by a keen sense of domestic economy and household efficiency. Adopting the practices of tea drinking as essential to middle-class identity, authors of tea histories emphasized the permanence and stability of the middle class, linking middle-class moral values with a long tradition of tea drinking in England and with the ideals of the nation. As historians have shown, and as the anxieties of many novels about middle-class characters reveal, the middle class continued to be a fluid category with porous boundaries, enabling prosperous tradesmen and artisans to rise into the middle classes from below and accepting poorer members of the aristocracy who descended into those ranks from above.¹ Appropriating tea drinking as a middle-class consumer habit helped to consolidate the image of the middle class as the defining population of England, co-opting the national beverage in the service of middle-class values and contributing a sense of inevitability to the process of representing England as a middle-class nation.

The details of the patterns of tea consumption during the nineteenth century reveal a change in the construction of social class in Britain. Historians have explored the singularly important place of tea within the everyday consumption habits of eighteenth-century English men and women, articulating tea’s association with the qualities of sociability, respectability, and domesticity. Woodruff Smith puzzles over the habit of adding sugar to tea in the eighteenth century, noting that the pattern does not adhere to Georg Simmel’s theory of social fashion; unpredictably, the upper classes continued to drink tea with sugar long after the practice was adopted by the middle and working classes (“Complications of the Commonplace,” 267).² Smith posits that the tenets of respectability suggested a new social hierarchy based on individual behavior rather than inherited rank.³ Tea simultaneously crossed class and gender boundaries, creating a shared habit among all economic groups, and constructed a new system of privilege based on adherence to the social and behavioral characteristics associated with tea drinking. As Smith’s analysis of the fashion of tea drinking suggests, this new hierarchy oriented itself within the middle classes, reversing earlier trends of imitation. No longer were the petite bourgeoisie mimicking, more cheaply and on a smaller scale, the fashions of the aristocracy. Instead, the habits of the upper and working classes began to be shaped to accord with the standards developed within the middle classes.

A Nation United by Tea

According to Victorian tea histories, the values of the domestic sphere were embraced by all tea drinkers, regardless of social status or economic position. Negotiating between the various class distinctions within the national community, the shared culture of tea drinking could temporarily suspend socioeconomic hierarchies and create a sense of what Victor Turner called communitas.⁴ Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History borrows the rhetoric of domestic ideology to describe a collective English affection for tea, an affection shared by both upper and lower classes, which connects his readers to this unified group of tea drinkers. Day contends that the eighteenth century’s high tea taxes could not prevent the English people from purchasing and drinking tea on a daily basis: “[N]othing that statesmen or financiers could effect seemed to check the growing fondness of English people of all social grades for their cherished beverage” (51). People of “all social grades” were included in this affection for tea, uniting them as English both in their habit and in the characterization of that habit as a “growing fondness,” an ever-increasing wave of tea drinking creating a unified nation. According to Day, the fact that all classes drank tea did not sufficiently unite them as English; the emotional state of the social body of England and their tendency to “cherish” their habitual beverage forged the crucial connections between individual tea drinkers. Day’s rhetoric relies on the domestic associations of words such as fondness and cherished, eliciting images of the middle-class home and the emotional attachments that structured the domestic setting and the English family. Even as the nation of England industrialized, commercialized, and atomized throughout the economic upheaval of the nineteenth century, the imagery of family affection and domesticity attempted to ameliorate the effects of industrialization on English culture. Samuel Day, however, does not replace English industrialization with images of family affection; instead, he places these two impulses of English culture side by side, softening the British thrust toward commercial activity but by no means repudiating it. Day’s text is replete with statistics concerning the price and quantities of tea imports; he was aware and proud of English industrialization and commercialization. Day’s portrait of Victorian culture is complex, allowing for both commercial industry and familial affection.

Day offers an exhaustive list of the classes that composed English culture, emphasizing the cross-class nature of tea drinking in England and the universal benefits that tea brought to the whole spectrum of English society:

That all classes of the community in this country have derived much benefit from the persistent use of Tea, is placed beyond dispute. It has proved, and still proves, a highly prized boon to millions. The artist at his easel, the author at his desk, the statesman fresh from an exhaustive oration, the actor from the stage after fulfilling an arduous róle, the orator from the platform, the preacher from the pulpit, the toiling mechanic, the wearied labourer, the poor governess, the tired laundress, the humble cottage housewife, the votary of pleasure even, on escaping from the scene of revelry, nay, the Queen on her throne have, one and all, to acknowledge and express gratitude for the grateful and invigorating infusion. (63)

Day’s list of the occupations strengthened by tea drinking ranges from the crucial English work of writing novels and political speeches to the drudgery of laundry and housekeeping, from artistic to manual labor, bridging the gap between the “humble cottage housewife” and the final occupation that caps his list, “the Queen on her throne.”⁵ The gendered nature of these categories adds to the universal appeal of tea; masculine creative artists and writers and feminine teachers and housewives all participated in the shared refreshment of a cup of tea. According to Day, tea offers mental and physical refreshment to people from all of these social categories, and he suggests that the classes of English society were united both by their shared taste for tea and by their combined contributions to the economy of the nation. Tea’s cross-class popularity was not exaggerated in Victorian tea histories; nineteenth-century statistics and anecdotal evidence of tea drinking support the idea that its consumption did indeed cross class boundaries.⁶ The importance of tea’s ability to sustain and nourish English men and women from all socioeconomic classes, however, reaches legendary proportions within Victorian tea histories, highlighting the strategic role that tea played in creating a consolidated representation of the English nation.

By emphasizing the popularity of tea throughout the socioeconomic spectrum of England, nineteenth-century histories of tea construct a tea-drinking audience unified by their habits of everyday life and their consumer choices. Affirming a coherent English national identity through time and across space, Victorian tea histories present an English nation united through tea drinking.⁷ Not only did tea produce a tradition of English literary, royal, and commercial history, in which Victorian tea drinkers could participate by drinking their daily cups of tea, but tea also symbolically erased the diversities that divided English society. By the early nineteenth century, tea had taken on the title of the national beverage, and by definition, it encompassed all the classes that composed that society. But as the authors of tea histories assert, the cross-class rapprochement engendered by a shared taste for tea was ultimately based upon middle-class values.

Reinscribing Class Boundaries: The Middle-Class Values of the Tea Table

Despite their protestations of the universal appeal of tea, Victorian tea histories’ representations of the social tea table and the domestic fireside reflect specifically middle-class values and economic privileges. Thus, while proposing that tea unified the diverse socioeconomic classes of English culture, authors of nineteenth-century tea histories simultaneously reveal that the image of tea drinking worked to reinscribe class boundaries by asserting the superiority of specifically middle-class values. Suggesting that middle-class cultural practices comprised English national identity, representations of tea drinking reaffirmed Victorian moral distinctions between economic classes. Victorian tea histories emphasize the values of good taste and discrimination, tempered by thrift and domestic economy. These values reveal that Victorian middle-class identity rested on negotiating the complex world of consumer commodities with respectability and morality, while still maintaining an appreciation for consumption and consumer goods. Middle-class thrift was tempered by good taste and the recognition of quality products, and the domestic economy that dictated the necessities of everyday life was sweetened with an appreciation of the new material wealth enjoyed by the rising middle class.⁸

Representations of middle-class Englishness in tea advertisements and histories reveal that an appetite for and the consumption of consumer goods was just as important as thrift within images of middle-class Englishness. While many Marxist and Weberian definitions of capitalism emphasize the productive qualities of restraint, thrift, and a disciplined work ethic, the larger system of capitalism demands the opposing qualities of a consumer: the desire for consumer goods, the leisure time to enjoy those goods, and the surplus income to afford them.⁹ The image of tea drinking offers the possibility of merging the contradictions of middle-class capitalism into a third category, inserting a liminal space between the binary positions of producer versus consumer. The concept of moderation—implying a middle ground between the excessive spending of the aristocracy and the wasteful neglect of household management of the lower classes, as well as avoiding the extremes of asceticism and self-denial—allows for a more complex portrait of middle-class English values, a portrait that recognizes the importance of consumer desires for high-quality goods and the indulgences of eating, drinking, smoking, purchasing, and consuming. Practices of thrift and economic restraint permeate nineteenth-century histories of tea, countered by exhortations to buy good-quality tea. Many tea advertisements claim that a particular merchant offered “the best and the cheapest” teas, encapsulating middle-class appreciation and desire for the highest quality at the lowest price.¹⁰ Nineteenth-century ads assert that the highest-quality teas were no longer reserved for those people or classes with the most money. Like the assertion by Charles Ashford that the families of Ipswich enjoyed the same quality of tea as Her Majesty, the phrase “the best and the cheapest” emphasizes the potential for tea drinking to democratize England, ensuring that even households with budgeted resources still had access to the “best” teas available to English tea drinkers.

An advertisement from Sidney and Company, with a handwritten archivist’s date of October 1838, expresses consumers’ growing concern for obtaining the best tea for the cheapest prices: “The importance which the Tea Trade has of late years assumed, the enormous increase in the consumption, and the necessity there exists for purchasing so important an article of the best quality and at the cheapest rate, are ample reasons why a concern of first rate magnitude should be established” (fig. 2.1). By 1838, five years after the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on importing tea from China, many new tea companies had been created, and competition and brand loyalty were beginning to affect tea prices and advertising.¹¹ Sidney and Company, working on establishing a “concern of first rate magnitude,” describes the rapid growth in tea consumption in the early part of the nineteenth century and claims that purchasing tea “of the best quality and at the cheapest rate” was necessary, clearly establishing tea’s position among everyday commodities. The ad continues by asserting the principles upon which Sidney and Company based their business: “Excellence in quality, combined with extreme moderation in price.” The apparent oxymoron of “extreme moderation” epitomizes the middle ground occupied by middle-class consumerism. Between one extreme of extravagant, wasteful spending and indulgence and the opposite extreme of penny-pinching restraint, tea advertisements propose a third, more acceptable extreme of moderation. The rhetoric of “extreme moderation” creates the possibility of a balance, allowing consumers to maintain restraint and thrift but also encouraging them to appreciate consumer goods, luxuries, and indulgences—at the best price. While middle-class families, according to tea advertisements, had limited incomes and therefore were concerned with price, they were not willing to sacrifice their taste for quality tea.

Figure 2.1. “Immense Saving in the Purchase of Tea,” advertisement for Sidney and Company. Tea and Coffee Box 3, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Explicitly placing tea within the category of a luxury, the text of the United Kingdom Tea Company advertisement asks, in capital letters, “why drink inferior tea?” and asserts, “If you are satisfied . . . to continue drinking indifferent and common Tea, well and good—in that case there is nothing more to be said; but if you wish to enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea, and if you study economy in Household Expenditure, you can, by writing to the united kingdom tea company, . . . obtain the best tea in the world, of simply delicious Quality” (see fig. 1.4). This ad’s discussion of quality evokes aristocratic concepts of a tea hierarchy reminiscent of social classes in England; “common” and “inferior” teas are opposed to “the best tea in the world.” The goal of tea drinking, the ad claims, is to “enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea,” gaining access to the luxury of spending money to indulge one’s taste. But this luxury, to become truly desirable within a middle-class system of beliefs, must be affordable, within a consumer’s “economy in Household Expenditure.” Tea ads insist that consumers can, even while restricted by a household budget, obtain “the best tea in the world.” A line at the bottom of the United Kingdom Tea Company’s advertisement claims, “If you are not drinking [United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas], you are depriving yourself of one of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day.” Tea advertisements hurry to assure consumers that, even within the financial limitations of household economy, English tea drinkers did not need to deprive themselves of luxuries. While middle-class values placed an emphasis on moderation and economy, they included an appreciation for luxury. As this ad suggests, consumers could join the larger community of tea drinkers enjoying “one of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day” by spending their money wisely, at “Immense Saving!” on the United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas.

In his description of the position of tea within English consumption patterns, Samuel Day similarly embraces the possibility of a “luxury” that was affordable to everyone universally, of all classes. Day describes the voluble economic history of tea taxes in England, concluding, “The wisdom of successive financiers, and the enterprise of generations of merchants, have combined to deliver Tea in this country at a price which brings it within the reach of every individual, making it, perhaps, the only real luxury which is common to rich and poor alike” (70–71). According to Day, English men and women could be poor but still have access to the “luxury” of tea. Ideally, in these texts, tea drinking had a leveling affect, raising the social and moral status of the lower classes by asserting their good taste in drinking tea.

While many tea advertisements, with their dual emphasis on “the best and the cheapest,” appear to be aimed at the economically middle-class consumer, tea histories also assert the power of tea drinking to introduce middle-class values and attitudes into the working classes. Drinking tea, according to G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral, reveals the inherent middle-class values of good taste and thrift within the working class. Sigmond describes in detail the inferior quality of Bohea tea, which he claims was often crushed and broken, mixed with stalks, and yielded a bitter mahogany liquor.¹² But the lower classes of English tea drinkers had the good sense to avoid this inferior tea: “This tea has not now a very great consumption in this country; for even the humbler classes, if their means at all admit of it, will not purchase it: generally speaking, they are excellent judges of tea. . . . [A tea dealer, Mr. Thorpe of Leeds, testified to a committee of the House of Commons] that the working and middling classes always buy the finest tea” (Sigmond, 37). Sigmond appears to be proud of the taste that the English lower classes exhibited in their tea purchases. Consumer choice was a matter of national interest that required a committee to investigate the tea-drinking practices of the English people; the character of the nation thus rested on the consumer judgment of the “humbler classes.” Despite their limited budgets, the poor maintained the ability to make choices among available commodities, and they consistently chose “the finest tea.” The moral, upright character of the English public as a whole was affirmed by good taste and good consumer judgment in purchasing tea.

Displaying good judgment and discrimination, the poor thus revealed their respectability, morally allying themselves with the middle classes. Sigmond quotes a Dublin merchant, who declares that “the poor are excellent judges of tea, and have a great nicety of discrimination, preferring good Congou; and that they will walk very considerable distances to purchase at a shop at which they can rely” (38).¹³ Sigmond endorses the merchant’s claim, praising qualities of character that stem from making distinctions, choosing among available products, and asserting preferences. Preferring more-expensive, better-quality tea redeemed the character of the poorer classes, making them not only English but also respectable. Purchasing tea, even in a poor household, evoked middle-class English values of respectable discriminating taste and an appreciation for high-quality tea, duly tempered by thrift and economizing to make the most of limited financial resources. The poor household, therefore, represented a scaled-down version of the middle-class home, suggesting that nineteenth-century histories of tea portray class as a matter of degree rather than kind. Working-class families aspired to the same values as the middle classes, responding to their smaller incomes by taking further measures of economy but not by sacrificing the consumer commodities that had become necessary to English everyday life. Sigmond praises the economy of poorer tea drinkers who carefully measured their preferred tea leaves: “The great mass of the inhabitants of London like a good strongflavoured Congou; and they think very justly, that two spoonsful of Congou will go further than three of an inferior class of tea” (40). Although their socioeconomic class is revealed by their location within the “great mass of the inhabitants of London,” poorer English tea drinkers are described as smart household managers. They showed excellent economy in insisting on higher-quality tea, since its more concentrated, mellow flavor could be extended to multiple infusions and thus more cups of tea than the leaves of a weaker, cheaper kind. A unified English character depended not only on a taste for tea but also on discrimination and domestic economy.

The potential benefits of tea drinking for the physical health of the nation as a whole occupied the minds of many authors of tea histories, who illustrated that the chemical properties of tea could actually lessen the problem of having multiple economic strata in English society and simultaneously reduce middle-class concern for the extreme poverty of the lower classes. John Sumner’s 1863 A Popular Treatise on Tea, Samuel Day’s 1878 Tea: Its Mystery and History, and Samuel Baildon’s 1882 The Tea Industry of India all quote from an article written by a Dr. Johnston and published in the Edinburgh Review in 1855.¹⁴ Dr. Johnston’s article addresses social concerns about the consumption practices of the poor, who had very little money for food but nevertheless saved part of their weekly wages for tea. According to the article, drinking a hot cup of tea helps to mitigate the suffering of the poor, and the author illustrates his claim with a poignant vignette:

By her fireside, in her humble cottage, the lonely widow sits; the kettle simmers over the ruddy embers, and the blackened tea-pot on the hot brick prepares her evening drink. Her crust of bread is scanty, yet as she sips the warm beverage—little sweetened, it may be, with the produce of the sugar-cane—genial thoughts awaken in her mind; her cottage grows less dark and lonely, and comfort seems to enliven the illfurnished cabin. . . . Whence this great solace to the weary and worn? Why out of scanty earnings does the ill-fed and lone one cheerfully pay for the seemingly un-nourishing weekly allowance of Tea? From what ever-open fountain does the daily comfort flow which the tea-cup gently brings to the care-worn and the weak? (Day, 71; Baildon, 230–31)

This quotation from the Edinburgh Review article paints a rustic portrait of a working-class tea table, complete with a sooty teapot warmed by a brick near the fire. Despite the hardships suffered by the widow in this picture, a sip from her teacup cheers her thoughts, brightens her cottage, and comforts her. Defending the poor’s choice to purchase tea with their scanty resources, the article claims that tea succors those in need, providing both physical and mental solace.

Focusing on the ability of the lower classes to elect to drink tea, spending part of their limited incomes on an apparent “luxury,” suggests that they wielded the power to choose among their consumer purchases. Insisting on the ability of the poorer classes to discriminate between commodities is a method of displaying their relative well-being.¹⁵ Thus, by proposing that the poorer classes in England maintained the capacity to choose to spend their limited incomes on tea rather than on apparently more-nutritious substances, nineteenth-century tea histories imply that the poor enjoyed many of the same freedoms as the wealthier classes in England.¹⁶ Tea histories’ emphasis on the working classes’ taste for tea, their ability to discriminate wisely between various grades of tea, and their choice to include tea, a luxury, within their daily diet provided evidence that the poorer classes in English society were not suffering unduly and that the system of political economy and free market trade, in general, allowed workers to retain their dignity and the power to exercise their consumer freedoms.

In addition to emphasizing the mental solace that could be derived from a hot cup of tea, Dr. Johnston’s article offers a scientific argument for the physiological benefits of tea within a working-class diet. His article praises the chemical components of tea, especially “theine,” which has “tonic or strengthening qualities” (Day, 72). Day quotes from the Edinburgh Review: “Now, the introduction of a certain quantity of theine into the stomach lessens the amount of waste which in similar circumstances would otherwise naturally take place. It makes the ordinary food consumed along with it, go farther, therefore, or, more correctly, lessens the quantity of food necessary to be eaten in a given time” (Day, 72–75). According to the article in the Edinburgh Review, a poor person who drank tea needed less food than she would if she did not have access to tea. Therefore, spending money on tea was not a waste of food money, as some had argued, but instead made scanty food resources even more valuable and more efficiently digested—a small amount of food goes further and is more nourishing when consumed with tea. As Sumner explains in his Popular Treatise on Tea, “Tea therefore saves food—stands to a certain extent in the place of food—while at the same time it soothes the body and enlivens the mind” (30). The Edinburgh Review elaborates, quoted by Day: “[It is not surprising] that the aged female whose earnings are barely sufficient to buy what are called the common necessaries of life, should yet spare a portion of her small gains in procuring this grateful indulgence. She can sustain her strength with less common food when she takes her Tea along with it; while she, at the same time, feels lighter in spirits, more cheerful, and fitter for this dull work of life, because of this little indulgence” (Day, 75–76).¹⁷ The Edinburgh Review suggests that tea drinking allowed a poor “aged female” access to the consumer choices that defined the middle-class English character. Like more affluent English families, she had access to both the necessaries of life and luxuries or indulgences. Even though, in this case, the Edinburgh Review cites evidence as to the extreme necessity of tea in allowing the body to more efficiently digest small amounts of food, the author maintains the distinction between necessaries and indulgences. The poor “aged female” thus still participated in middle-class consumer culture, enjoying “grateful indulgence[s]” as well as necessities of life and making smart domestic choices among available commodities. As the article in the Edinburgh Review continues, she also gained access to more middle-class character traits, including good cheer and light spirits, that were essential for all women within domestic settings and even more important for a woman in dire economic circumstances. Tea affected her demeanor, her manner, and her cheer, enabling her to accept her burden and work harder, being “fitter” for the dull work of life.

An advertisement for Lipton visually portrays the transformative power of tea, depicting the difference between the smart, happy women who drink Lipton’s Teas and those unfortunate ones who do not (see fig. 2.2).¹⁸ The ad encourages consumers to purchase Lipton’s Teas “direct from the Grower,” thus eliminating the “Middleman”: the retailer or grocer who might blend his own teas and increase the price. On the left, an illustration depicts two women smiling as they drink their tea. Their features are smooth and regular, their cheeks are pleasingly plump, and they wear bonnets over their fashionably curled hair. Their dresses indicate their middle-class wealth and fashion sense; they wear modest, high-necked gowns without excess frills or ornaments, yet the designs of their dresses reveal up-to-date fashion, with curving bodices, bustles, and narrow waists. The scene reflects all the commercial accoutrements of English middle-class life, including a large framed mirror and a Japanese fan on the wall, chair molding or wallpaper trim running across the middle of the wall, a Japanned tea tray and what looks like a Chinese porcelain teapot, round and in perfect condition, as is everything in this illustration. A houseplant that resembles an aspidistra, George Orwell’s archetypal sign of middle-class English culture, sits behind the tea table.¹⁹ The caption to this drawing proudly asserts, referring to these two plump, smiling, well-dressed women, “They Drink LIPTON’S TEAS.” The tablecloth on the tea table offers insight into their smiles: “LIPTON’S TEAS. HOW DELIGHTFUL!”

On the right is the companion illustration, depicting a similar scene of two women drinking tea together, and they sit at the table in the same positions as in the previous picture. Yet the scene is strikingly different, containing elements of a much poorer household and, as the women’s faces attest, a much unhappier one. The women in this drawing are thin, almost scrawny, and their dresses are extremely plain. They lack the fashionably cut dresses with bustles and corset-enhanced bodices. Rather than curled hair and bonnets, they wear their hair severely pulled back, and one woman wears a widow’s cap. With large noses, pronounced chins, and beady eyes, they frown at each other with wide mouths. The background mirror has been replaced by a window, perhaps indicating a smaller dwelling than a larger middle-class house with many interior rooms, hallways, and decorated walls. A black cat, a witch’s familiar, adds overtones to these women’s unpleasantness. Their teapot is small and cracked, and it is missing the Chinese ornamentation of the first drawing. In the ultimate statement of classed behavior, the woman on the left seems to be about to drink her tea from her saucer. Pouring steaming tea from the teacup into the saucer, to allow it to cool, was a common practice, but it was eschewed by middle-class tea drinkers as vulgar and unfitting to the rituals of the drawing room tea table.²⁰ The caption to this second illustration reads, “They don’t Drink LIPTON’S TEAS.” But while this caption could indicate that they cannot afford Lipton’s Teas and therefore their poverty is the cause, not the result, of their tea-drinking practices, the tablecloth claims otherwise: “WE MUST USE LIPTON’S TEA AFTER THIS.” According to this illustration, drinking tea other than Lipton’s creates a poor, unhappy household. The ad suggests that these women have doubly bankrupted themselves by continuing to buy tea from grocers and middlemen, rather than from Lipton’s; they have derived no comfort from their expensive tea, and they have actually impoverished themselves by drinking their previous brand. Drinking Lipton’s Tea, the ad implies, would produce the middle-class domestic bliss represented by the first illustration.

Figure 2.2. Advertisement for Lipton, Tea, Coffee and Provision Dealer. Tea and Coffee Box 1, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Utilizing middle-class consumer wisdom, purchasing tea direct from the grower (“Tea first hand,” according to the United Kingdom Tea Company) rather than paying the “extortionate prices” of middlemen and retail grocers would transform these lower-class women into much more efficient household managers. The ad indicates that they would thereby gain all the accoutrements of middle-class life, replacing their current setting of poverty and vulgar habits. The two illustrations from this ad for Lipton’s Teas encapsulate the transformative power of tea on the physical embodiment of social class.²¹ The poor women on the right of the Lipton’s Tea ad have exhibited unwise consumer choices in their purchase of tea, and these choices have physically shaped, or mis-shaped, their bodies and their behaviors (drinking tea from the saucer rather than from the cup). The causal relationship of the right-hand illustration suggests a similar logical relationship in the illustration on the left; if poor consumer choices create misshapen, lower-class bodies, then wise choices, discrimination, and good taste similarly result in the smiling, rounded forms of the middle-class women who have chosen to drink Lipton’s Teas.

Leitch Ritchie similarly attributes socially transformative power to tea drinking in “The Social Influence of Tea,” an article appearing in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1848. Ritchie boldly claims that “the moral reform and social improvement for which the present age is remarkable have had their basis in—tea. . . . I therefore propound that tea and the discontinuance of barbarism are connected in the way of cause and effect. . . . Tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of society” (65). According to Ritchie, nineteenth-century England’s penchant for tea drinking created an atmosphere of moral reform and social improvement, and he suggests that drinking tea causes a society to give up its previous barbaric, uncivilized tendencies. In this passage, Ritchie establishes a new binary of necessity and luxury, turning the traditional arguments about imported luxury goods on their heads. For Ritchie, drinking tea actually produced new needs—needs such as “the invention of a cup worthy of such a beverage” (65). Such needs gave rise to innovation, elegance, and beauty and “employ forty hands,” thus offering work and sustenance to the artisans who fulfilled those needs for the society at large, at least in China, which was the “original country” to benefit from the “civilising juice” of tea (65). From needing a new vessel to hold this socially powerful beverage, the tea drinker soon moved on to enjoying the luxury of a beautifully decorated porcelain cup—and in the process grew more sophisticated and civilized, as well as providing the necessary impetus and wealth to similarly civilize the “forty hands” thus employed.

Nineteenth-century advertisements and tea treatises present the concept of a national English character unified, and uniformly ameliorated or rehabilitated, by the consumer habits of purchasing and preparing tea. Regardless of one’s economic status, these texts suggest, consuming tea allowed all Englishmen and Englishwomen access to the essentially middle-class values that construct English identity. While Sigmond and Day acknowledge the economic divisions between social classes in Victorian England, they claim that tea drinking reduced the moral distinctions between those classes. Tea drinking, according to nineteenth-century ads and histories of tea, replaced the vices that were typically found among the “humbler classes,” including alcoholism, violence, and a lack of attention to domestic arrangements, with the values of domestic economy, respectability, good taste, thrift, and an appreciation for high-quality consumer luxuries associated with more-fortunate, middle-class economic circumstances.