According to Fortune, the ability to grow, transport, and sell tea would transform the Indian peasant into a middle-class British subject. As the British tea drinker would attest, the ability to purchase necessary luxuries such as tea was crucial to the definition of that subject position. As the Indian subjects rose in financial and moral health, they too would begin purchasing the “necessary and simple luxuries of life,” bringing them fully into the circulation of goods between colony and metropole and providing a market both for Indian tea and potentially for British goods as well.55 Tea thus literally and figuratively expanded the boundaries of the empire—adding territory to the British-controlled regions of India for the cultivation of tea while simultaneously creating more British subjects who would conform to the characteristic requirements of the middle-class national identity. Ensuring the successful cultivation and production of tea into India thus became a moral imperative for the British, so that they could help bring the Indians into the middle class—a privileged position poised on the boundaries of economic, social, and linguistic categories.
The British reader, sitting comfortably in his or her parlor, could vicariously experience the thrill of Fortune’s forays into forbidden Chinese sanctuaries and the hope of successfully cultivating tea in India by reading Fortune’s Journey to the Tea Countries. But as Fortune emphasizes, the reader’s participation continues well past the end of Fortune’s narrative. While Fortune suggests that the British cultivation of tea in India would transform Indian peasants into middle-class citizens of the British Empire, he also implies that British readers in England could physically participate in the process of building the empire by purchasing and consuming Indian-grown tea. Fortune’s text offers a tangible way to experience the full cycle of colonized and colonizer, of colony and metropole. By drinking tea produced in India, the British tea drinker simultaneously enriched his or her own body (and thus his or her small physical piece of the British Empire) and contributed to the physical, moral, and financial health of the expanding empire in India. The British cultivation and production of tea in India would enable the poor Indian peasant to become part of the capitalist system of exchange and to rise economically to a position of middle-class comfort. The cycle was completed by the journey of Indian-grown tea back to England, where the British tea drinker would purchase it and consume it, thus contributing simultaneously to the expansion of the empire, the increasing wealth and comfort of the inhabitants of British India, and his or her own sense of English national identity.
By emphasizing the status of tea as a luxury and a daily necessity within English culture, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements suggest that the tea trade held a critically important position within the English national economy, just as the wise purchase of tea was central to an individual English household’s domestic economy. An advertisement for the United Kingdom Tea Company offers visual evidence of the role of luxury in the continued strength and success of the British government and its empire (see fig. 1.4). The ad depicts the female figure of Britannia, complete in flowing Roman robes and plumed military headdress, reclining at a small table and pouring herself a cup of tea. Drawing upon the glory and military strength of the Roman Empire to assert similar praise for the empire of Great Britain, this ad suggests that, far from enervating and destroying the imperial power of England, commercial trade in luxury goods supported and strengthened the nation. In the background, figures representing China, India, Ceylon, and Assam—the major regions of tea production—bring chests of tea to Britannia. In the foreground, she calmly focuses her gaze on her tiny teacup, into which she is pouring tea from a small, round teapot labeled, in case there was any doubt, “United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas.” Thus, Britain consumes and enjoys teas imported from around the world, supported by the labor and the service of numerous foreign nations and colonies, represented by various forms of cultural dress and racial appearance in the ad.
Each chest of tea within the ad, including those carried by the figures of China and India as well as the one on which Britannia reclines, portrays the trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company: three young women in three distinct national costumes. Although this image is indistinct and obscured by the folds of Britannia’s robes in this ad, the same image appears, larger and more clearly, in other ads for the United Kingdom Tea Company. The woman in the center wears the dress of early nineteenth-century England; her gown is slim and high waisted, she carries a small purse with a long ribbon as a strap, and her hair falls in curls around her face. The woman on the left wears Scottish highlander dress, including a long plaid skirt, a tam on her head, and a traditional sporran—a leather pouch with three tassels—on her belt. On the right, an Indian woman wears a flowing sari, ornamented on the edges and wrapped around her waist and her arms. The trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company visually represents the main peoples who make up the United Kingdom (minus Ireland, the West Indies, and other minorities within the population of the British Empire). Each of the three women holds a teacup emblazoned with the initials “UKTC,” and they stand with their arms linked together, physically united. The image of Britannia sitting on the crate of tea metaphorically portrays the foundation of foreign trade and domestic female tea consumption by all the races and cultures of the British Empire. Far from posing a threat to the stability of the country and the empire, the trade in tea, “One of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day,” as the ad proclaims, here appears to serve, support, and strengthen both the company and the United Kingdom.
Figure 1.4. “Tea First Hand,” advertisement for United Kingdom Tea Company. Tea and Coffee Box 2, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
two
Mediating Class Distinctions
The Middle-Class Englishness of Drinking Tea
No one who has lived for half a century can have failed to note the wonderful extension of tea-drinking habits in England, from the time when tea was a coveted and almost unattainable luxury to the laborer’s wife, to its use morning, noon, and night by all classes.
Arthur K. Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking
ACCORDING TO TEA HISTORIES, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND novels’ descriptions of everyday life, tea drinking had become instrumental as a consumer practice essential to the definition of English identity. The cross-class appeal of tea enabled Victorian authors to suggest that tea drinking conveyed meaning about all socioeconomic classes, creating a unifying symbol of English consumer culture. By drinking tea, English men and women participated in creating a national identity that depended on middle-class morality and moderation: an identity that revolved around both good taste and thrift and that included an appreciation for luxuries tempered by a keen sense of domestic economy and household efficiency. Adopting the practices of tea drinking as essential to middle-class identity, authors of tea histories emphasized the permanence and stability of the middle class, linking middle-class moral values with a long tradition of tea drinking in England and with the ideals of the nation. As historians have shown, and as the anxieties of many novels about middle-class characters reveal, the middle class continued to be a fluid category with porous boundaries, enabling prosperous tradesmen and artisans to rise into the middle classes from below and accepting poorer members of the aristocracy who descended into those ranks from above.1 Appropriating tea drinking as a middle-class consumer habit helped to consolidate the image of the middle class as the defining population of England, co-opting the national beverage in the service of middle-class values and contributing a sense of inevitability to the process of representing England as a middle-class nation.
The details of the patterns of tea consumption during the nineteenth century reveal a change in the construction of social class in Britain. Historians have explored the singularly important place of tea within the everyday consumption habits of eighteenth-century English men and women,