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