From this small base, consumption rose at astonishing rates. In 1741 Britain imported less than 800,000 pounds a year; by 1746—50 annual home consumption had reached more than 2.5 million pounds. Very swiftly, tea had become a drink that even the working class could afford, at least sometimes. By mid-century the lowest grades cost between 8 and 10s. a pound (the highest grades reached £1 16s.). There were advertisements recommending a certain leaf because it was ‘strong, and will endure the Change of Water three or four times’—that is, the thrifty housewife could reuse the leaves and still get—brown liquid? By 1748 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw so many of his flock spending money on tea that he wrote the minatory A Letter to a Friend Concerning TEA, while the philanthropist Jonas Hanway warned of the perils of tea and gin in an almost interchangeable vocabulary.39
The consumption of tea was very quickly limited only by the high levels of tax. In 1795, during the French wars, tax was raised to a rate of 20 per cent; in 1801 it was 50 per cent for tea costing more than 2s. 6d. a pound, 20 per cent for cheaper leaves; two years later the expensive blends were taxed at 95 per cent, and the nominally cheaper ones at 60 per cent; finally, by 1820, the tax was an eye-watering 100 per cent of the price for all teas costing over 2s. per pound.40 Even this was not enough to slow the seemingly insatiable demand. Between 1785 and 1800 the population increased by 14 per cent, while tea consumption went up by 97.7 per cent. In 1800 the East India Company’s imports stood at 21 million pounds a year; by 1820, 30 million pounds of tea a year were consumed in the United Kingdom; in 1850 it was 44.5 million pounds, or 1.5 pounds of tea for every man, woman and child in the country each year. Still the numbers went on rising—to 3.42 pounds a head in 1866, and 6.3 pounds in 1909.41* Given the amount of smuggling that went on to get around the enormous tax burden, this was one of the earliest indications that the market was not, as economists had thought, a fixed object, but was instead infinitely expandable. As desirable goods appeared, the demand—and the market—would increase.
In the early eighteenth century, for the most part tea was sold by grocers. (Grocers were then at the luxury end of the market.) Then other luxury traders began to carry this new luxury good: china dealers, haberdashers, milliners. Mr Rose, a bookseller in Norwich, sold tea in 1707; Frances Bennett, a Bath draper, did the same in 1744, as did Cornelius Goldberg, a Birmingham toyman, in 1751. But now specialist tea dealers were appearing in large towns. By 1784 there were 32,754 licensed tea dealers, or 1 tea dealer for every 234 customers. Less than a decade later the number had risen by 60 per cent which, with the rise in population, meant that every 150 people were served by a single tea dealer. Even now, though, many tea retailers were performing multiple tasks: as late as 1803 there was Jones’s Druggist and Tea Dealer in Birmingham, and Thirsk had Jo. Napier, Milliner and Tea Dealer, in 1804. But this was no longer because tea was a luxury, but because it was a necessity. Once the masses began to drink tea, it had become readily available in all kinds of shops, from the grandest of grocers in London to the back-street shops set up on £10 capital.42 Even the poorest areas of the East End of London had shops selling tea—the notorious Ratcliff Highway had one, as did Wapping Wall. Another, on the ‘foulsome Butcher Row’, was a testament to the product’s popularity: however impoverished its clientele, at one point the shop held 119 pounds of tea in stock.43
Part of the reason that the consumption of tea soared so dramatically was that it was inextricably interwoven with another commodity: sugar. Both had arrived at roughly the same time in Britain, one from India, one from the West Indies. The development of cane sugar in the West Indian plantations had made many British fortunes, through the possibility of sales at dramatically reduced prices.* In 1660, about 1,000 hogsheads of sugar were consumed in Britain; by 1730 that had risen a hundredfold, to 100,000 hogsheads. By the mid-1770s, sugar imports were valued at £3.3 million. Sugar and tea were now no longer luxuries: they were national characteristics. Consumption was running at 20 pounds of sugar per person per year; and up to 10 per cent of all money spent on food and drink went on sugar and tea.45*
Tea had not conquered the market on its intrinsic worth alone. From the late eighteenth century it was heavily advertised, using a range of new methods to entice customers. Many advertisements centred on competitive pricing: one merchant was ‘determined to sell teas at such low prices…as the public have a right to expect’, another, heroically, aimed ‘at profits only sufficient to defray expenses, wholesale and retail’. Many claimed to be selling tea more cheaply than anywhere else; others advertised reduced prices for bulk purchases. Many supposedly nineteenthand even twentieth-century innovations were happily tried out by these eighteenth-century tradesmen: some used the ‘loss-leader’, selling sugar at below-cost prices with the purchase of full-price tea; others gave the chance of good fortune with a lottery ticket free on purchase of a pound of tea;† some offered customers ‘a new treatise on tea’, available, not by coincidence, with the purchase of tea; still others advertised money-back guarantees if customers were dissatisfied; some promised to match wholesale prices, or even undercut them47—and none of these advertisements suggested that these were new ways of selling.
One shopkeeper who embraced these methods enthusiastically was Edward Eagleton, of the Tea Warehouse in Cheapside. In the Leeds Mercury in 1786 he advertised reduced prices, fixed prices for cash, mail-order sales, and money-back guarantees; he offered to post samples, or customers could come into his Tea Warehouse to taste the goods. In other advertisements he promoted his prices, which were, he claimed, 1s. per pound lower than anyone else’s. He sold entire chests of East India Company tea to small shopowners with only a 1 per cent mark-up. His most innovative move, however, was an arrangement with ‘outlets’ (it is unclear whether he meant shops or simply agents) in twenty-seven towns: he supplied them with packets of tea marked with his own sign, the Grasshopper, and advertised in local newspapers ‘fresh…teas…from Eagleton and Company…London…wholesale and retail…selling from ten to twenty per cent cheaper than [are now] sold…and carriage saved…[The tea is] packed and marked with the sign of the Grasshopper’, with a money-back guarantee and the motto ‘Taste, try, compare and judge’.48
All of these sales techniques had been tried before, but Eagleton was one of the first to bring them together. The next to take up the retail challenge was a man who had originally been a printer in a firm that produced lottery tickets. When Frederick Gye himself won £30,000 in a lottery, he set himself up as a tea dealer and quickly became one of the most important in the trade, mostly by dint of advertisements. Instead of advertising his tea, he advertised himself as an indissoluble part of his product. First and foremost, he promoted the sale of his packaged tea, which, he promised, would save the ‘Tea Trade from the opprobrium attached to it by the late disclosures of adulteration’, promising not to ‘buy nor sell Bohea tea*…so commonly used to adulterate better sorts’. (With this he was in fact blurring the line between blending tea—a legitimate job, and a highly skilled one—and adulterating it, and so attacking other dealers. Attack ads were one of his specialities.) The brand was now all-important: he promised that every order over a quarter of a pound would be sent in a sealed package with a wrapper carrying an engraving of his shop; the quality of the tea, its price and a seal were stamped on it. He used some of Eagleton’s other methods as well: free carriage within ten miles of London for cash sales, and agents ‘in every principal town in England’—by