In her best-selling Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, Isabella Beeton offers an insight into the comforts of Victorian domesticity with the statement: "The beverage called tea has now become almost a necessary of life." The British love affair with tea drinking has a long history, evolving from an exotic luxury to a nationally indulged custom, fuelling many a sociable gossip and boosting morale during times of war. Introduced into England in the mid-1600s, it was immediately hailed for its medicinal qualities and bore the hallmark "by all physicians approv'd" in 1658. Royal patronage and a flurry of newly-established coffee-houses later, an array of delightful new range of hot beverages (including tea, coffee and chocolate) were causing quite a stir.
Quickly establishing a reputation as a consolation for melancholy and an inspiration for literary creativity, it is perhaps unsurprising that Samuel Johnson – a man famed for both – became one of tea's most vocal devotees. Calling himself a "hardened and shameless tea drinker... whose kettle has scarcely time to cool", he seems to have paid duty to no other beverage. A self-confessed addict, "who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the evening", it's a marvel that his Dictionary took less than a decade.
However, this enthusiasm for "the infusion of this fascinating plant" was not universally shared in the eighteenth century, and debate raged in print about whether it was proving a delight or a detriment to the country. Professing a concern for the health of the nation, theologian John Wesley condemned tea as harmful for the body and soul, claiming that his own sufferings of a 'Paralytic disorder' were brought about by tea drinking (I wonder if anyone enquired exactly how much he was drinking). Philanthropist Jonas Hanway went further to decry the physical effects of tea drinking: "Men seem to have lost their stature, and comliness; and women their beauty. Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose by sipping tea."
But perhaps the most vehement opposition comes in Cottage Economy (1821), penned by William Cobbett, a radical pamphleteer and social reformer (who I had previously considered to be fairly sensible). Having discussed at great length how a labouring family might best brew and enjoy their own liquor at home, he embarks upon a fantastic, fevered rant about the evil consequences of tea beginning to supplant beer as the nation's favourite drink (the modern mind boggles). He begins by outlining the time wasted by women in preparing, drinking, and clearing up after a morning's cuppa when they should be more usefully employed. Insisting that this amounted to around two hours a day, he concludes that a woman could easily spend a whole month of her year faffing around with a teapot (I paraphrase, of course), "besides the waste of the man's time in hanging about waiting for the tea!". This adult preoccupation with hot beverages is the top of a slippery slope to idleness, lost wages and child neglect. He continues to brand tea drinking as "a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age", which fitted an Englishman for nothing but "a seeking for the fireside" and "a lurking in the bed." If the pernicious habit continues, it will guarantee you an early death and turn your daughters into harlots:
It must be evident to every one, that the practice of tea drinking must render the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel... the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea kettle, and assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her.
But, is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life, without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England? Where is there such a man, who cannot trace to this cause, a very considerable part of all the mortifications and sufferings of his life? When was he ever too late at his labour; when did he ever meet with a frown, with a turning off and pauperism on that account, without being able to trace it to the tea kettle? When reproached with lagging in the morning, the poor wretch tells you, that he will make up for it by working during his breakfast time! I have heard this a hundred and a hundred times over. He was up time enough; but the tea kettle kept him lolling and lounging at home; and now instead of sitting down to a breakfast upon bread, bacon and beer... he has to force his limbs under the sweat of feebleness... To the wretched tea kettle he has to return at night with legs hardly sufficient to maintain him; and thus he makes his miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it had he made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
Fortunately, Cobbett's tirade seems to have fallen on deaf ears and tea became the favourite weapon of the Temperance movement in its efforts to rid Victorian Britain of the vices brought on by drunkenness. As the ritual of taking afternoon tea became a fashionable pursuit of polite society, the chink of cups and saucers continued to be a familiar and comforting sound in the grand country manor, the rented apartments of the town house, and even the beach-hut during a moment's repose on the family holiday (see image below).
Sitting here as I do, cuppa in hand (stereotype? moi?), I find the simple sentiments of Cobbett's contemporary Reverend Sydney Smith much more favourable:
"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea."
[Images: I. A family take afternoon tea in a beach hut in Felixstowe; II. Front page of an American edition of Cobbett's Cottage Economy; III. Portrait of William Cobbett]
Inspired by Tea and Tea Drinking by Claire Masset, Shire Library (2010)
