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