A Necessary Luxury. Julie E. Fromer

writers, however, insisted that tea did not fit traditional definitions of a luxury. Tea elided the boundary between luxury and necessity by simultaneously existing in both categories at once. Tea thus became both a daily fixture of English culture and an exotic imported consumable, playing a crucial role in domestic and imperial affairs. Rather than enervating the empire, tea served as a reason for extending British territory in India and as a cash crop for British planters. By spending money and time consuming a foreign luxury, English tea drinkers were ultimately participating in the continued success of the British Empire.

      In his work on the history of luxuries, sociologist and philosopher Christopher J. Berry argues that commodities have a transient, dynamic status on a continuum that ranges from luxuries at one end to necessities at the opposite end.⁴⁹ Many luxury goods, according to Berry, have historically moved out of their luxury status into the position of a social necessity, part of everyday life for most people in a given culture (18). Berry argues that in the process of moving from luxury to necessity, a good that becomes socially necessary effects physical changes within the person who needs that good; new needs “actually affect the constitution of those who need them” (179). Berry’s use of the word constitution recalls Samuel Day’s and Charles Ashford’s representation of the role of tea in the English constitution and suggests that the shift of tea from a luxury to an English necessity produced physiological changes in the English people.⁵⁰

      A few passages from nineteenth-century texts appear to agree with the concept of a continuum of goods, suggesting that tea definitively moved out of the category of a luxury as it became increasingly necessary to daily English life. The anonymous Tsiology: A Discourse on Tea (1827) asserts that “[f]rom a fashionable and expensive luxury, [tea] has been converted into an essential comfort, if not an absolute necessary of life” (19). Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History outlines this gradual shift in the location of tea within daily life from a luxury to a necessity—from a product that was expensive and unneeded, an extra expense for an item purely for pleasure (whether appetitive or social), to a commodity so important within the daily diet that its absence would be felt as “deprivation.” Day quotes “an eminent statesman” who declared, “What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our accustomed daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which once were counted as necessaries of life” (Day, 70). In this passage, Day maintains a binary between luxury and necessity, basing these definitions on the importance of tea to daily life. According to Day’s quotable statesman, tea had not merely traversed the divide between luxury and necessity but had worked its way so far into the fabric of everyday life that it had become even more important than other things that had once been considered necessary. Tea had replaced older, existing necessities of life such as beer and ale, reflecting a new hierarchy of priorities within daily life.

      In these passages, Day and the author of Tsiology appear to uphold the distinction between luxuries and necessities, but both texts eventually collapse that binary by insisting that tea can occupy positions as a luxury and as a necessity simultaneously. According to Berry’s analysis, a luxury good can be universally desired and widely consumed, but it cannot, by definition, be a social necessity; once it has moved on the continuum toward the position of being socially required to satisfy the needs of individuals within a certain culture, it can no longer be defined as a luxury. But tea histories maintain the status of tea as a luxury—as an exotic, pleasurable indulgence—even as they celebrate tea as a daily necessity within English life. By retaining the nuances of luxury in their assessment of tea, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements signal their position within a historical debate over the social effects of consuming luxury commodities. Cultures throughout the Western world have contributed to a growing literature dedicated to illustrating the pernicious nature of luxury consumption.⁵¹ But shifts in national economies sparked a radical reassessment of the effect of luxury consumption on the welfare of nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The consumption of luxury goods imported from foreign locations became increasingly important to European economies, and foreign trade became associated with the wealth and prosperity of the English nation.⁵² Tsiology counters the claim that tea is an “enervating luxury” draining the nation of needed resources and energy, by arguing that “no article of extensive commerce can possibly exist—whether a mere luxury or a positive necessary—without enriching a nation in proportion to its extent” (105). The author of Tsiology dismantles the association between luxury and the fall of empires by asserting that whether luxury or necessity, tea as a commodity has in fact enriched the nation.⁵³

      Tea thus occupied the binary-straddling position of being physically and morally necessary as an article of daily ingestion and of simultaneously retaining the characteristics of a pleasurable indulgence to be savored and enjoyed. Robert Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries of China (1852) explains in greater detail exactly how this dual nature of tea helped to enrich the English nation and the British Empire. Fortune, a Scottish botanist, was hired by the East India Company to infiltrate Chinese tea plantations to gain knowledge about cultivating and manufacturing tea and to acquire thousands of tea seedlings to transport to fledgling tea plantations in India.⁵⁴ At first, Fortune maintains a rhetorical divide between the concepts of “luxury” and “necessity,” and he suggests that tea has “almost” traversed the divide between luxury and necessity: “In these days, when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her wide-spreading colonies, its production upon a large and cheap scale is an object of no ordinary importance” (394). Tea, originally an expensive luxury, had become an item of everyday consumption. But as Fortune explains the importance of tea to England, India, and the British Empire, he emphasizes the qualities of tea that continued to define that commodity as a luxury—Fortune describes tea as an item that was essential to English notions of comfort and pleasure.

      Fortune carefully delineates a twofold rationale for how growing tea in India would benefit both England and India. Production of tea within the confines of England’s “wide-spreading colonies” would, of course, offer tea produced on a “large and cheap scale” from a territory much more accessible and economically beneficial for export to England. But Fortune’s justification suggests that while growing tea in India would increase English access to tea, Indian cultivation of tea would also serve to benefit and civilize the natives of India by giving them access to some of the luxuries currently available to the English middle classes. Fortune provides a detailed vignette of Indian peasant life and suggests precisely how the introduction of tea plantations would materially enhance the culture and comfort of Indian men and women:

      [T]o the natives of India themselves the production of [tea] would be of the greatest value. The poor paharie, or hill peasant, at present has scarcely the common necessaries of life, and certainly none of its luxuries. The common sorts of grain which his lands produce will scarcely pay the carriage to the nearest market-town, far less yield such a profit as will enable him to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life. A common blanket has to serve him for his covering by day and for his bed at night, while his dwelling-house is a mere mud-hut, capable of affording but little shelter from the inclemency of the weather. If part of these lands produced tea, he would then have a healthy beverage to drink, besides a commodity which would be of great value in the market. Being of small bulk compared with its value, the expense of carriage would be trifling, and he would have the means of making himself and his family more comfortable and more happy. (394–95)

      According to Fortune, the Indian hill peasants’ poor living conditions were linked to their inability to elide the distinction between necessity and luxury. Fortune initially employs this distinction to judge the Indian hill peasant’s incapacity to provide for himself and his family. The peasant before the cultivation of tea can scarcely buy necessaries, and certainly no luxuries. Fortune does not specify what necessities and luxuries are in this context, but he seems to assume that there is a clear distinction between these two categories. The introduction of tea plantations, however, would blur the boundary between these two categories by raising the peasant’s standard of living enough to enable him “to purchase . . . the necessary and simple luxuries of life.” In this sentence, luxuries have suddenly become necessary—there are no longer