A Nation United by Tea
According to Victorian tea histories, the values of the domestic sphere were embraced by all tea drinkers, regardless of social status or economic position. Negotiating between the various class distinctions within the national community, the shared culture of tea drinking could temporarily suspend socioeconomic hierarchies and create a sense of what Victor Turner called communitas.4 Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History borrows the rhetoric of domestic ideology to describe a collective English affection for tea, an affection shared by both upper and lower classes, which connects his readers to this unified group of tea drinkers. Day contends that the eighteenth century’s high tea taxes could not prevent the English people from purchasing and drinking tea on a daily basis: “[N]othing that statesmen or financiers could effect seemed to check the growing fondness of English people of all social grades for their cherished beverage” (51). People of “all social grades” were included in this affection for tea, uniting them as English both in their habit and in the characterization of that habit as a “growing fondness,” an ever-increasing wave of tea drinking creating a unified nation. According to Day, the fact that all classes drank tea did not sufficiently unite them as English; the emotional state of the social body of England and their tendency to “cherish” their habitual beverage forged the crucial connections between individual tea drinkers. Day’s rhetoric relies on the domestic associations of words such as fondness and cherished, eliciting images of the middle-class home and the emotional attachments that structured the domestic setting and the English family. Even as the nation of England industrialized, commercialized, and atomized throughout the economic upheaval of the nineteenth century, the imagery of family affection and domesticity attempted to ameliorate the effects of industrialization on English culture. Samuel Day, however, does not replace English industrialization with images of family affection; instead, he places these two impulses of English culture side by side, softening the British thrust toward commercial activity but by no means repudiating it. Day’s text is replete with statistics concerning the price and quantities of tea imports; he was aware and proud of English industrialization and commercialization. Day’s portrait of Victorian culture is complex, allowing for both commercial industry and familial affection.
Day offers an exhaustive list of the classes that composed English culture, emphasizing the cross-class nature of tea drinking in England and the universal benefits that tea brought to the whole spectrum of English society:
That all classes of the community in this country have derived much benefit from the persistent use of Tea, is placed beyond dispute. It has proved, and still proves, a highly prized boon to millions. The artist at his easel, the author at his desk, the statesman fresh from an exhaustive oration, the actor from the stage after fulfilling an arduous róle, the orator from the platform, the preacher from the pulpit, the toiling mechanic, the wearied labourer, the poor governess, the tired laundress, the humble cottage housewife, the votary of pleasure even, on escaping from the scene of revelry, nay, the Queen on her throne have, one and all, to acknowledge and express gratitude for the grateful and invigorating infusion. (63)
Day’s list of the occupations strengthened by tea drinking ranges from the crucial English work of writing novels and political speeches to the drudgery of laundry and housekeeping, from artistic to manual labor, bridging the gap between the “humble cottage housewife” and the final occupation that caps his list, “the Queen on her throne.”5 The gendered nature of these categories adds to the universal appeal of tea; masculine creative artists and writers and feminine teachers and housewives all participated in the shared refreshment of a cup of tea. According to Day, tea offers mental and physical refreshment to people from all of these social categories, and he suggests that the classes of English society were united both by their shared taste for tea and by their combined contributions to the economy of the nation. Tea’s cross-class popularity was not exaggerated in Victorian tea histories; nineteenth-century statistics and anecdotal evidence of tea drinking support the idea that its consumption did indeed cross class boundaries.6 The importance of tea’s ability to sustain and nourish English men and women from all socioeconomic classes, however, reaches legendary proportions within Victorian tea histories, highlighting the strategic role that tea played in creating a consolidated representation of the English nation.
By emphasizing the popularity of tea throughout the socioeconomic spectrum of England, nineteenth-century histories of tea construct a tea-drinking audience unified by their habits of everyday life and their consumer choices. Affirming a coherent English national identity through time and across space, Victorian tea histories present an English nation united through tea drinking.7 Not only did tea produce a tradition of English literary, royal, and commercial history, in which Victorian tea drinkers could participate by drinking their daily cups of tea, but tea also symbolically erased the diversities that divided English society. By the early nineteenth century, tea had taken on the title of the national beverage, and by definition, it encompassed all the classes that composed that society. But as the authors of tea histories assert, the cross-class rapprochement engendered by a shared taste for tea was ultimately based upon middle-class values.
Reinscribing Class Boundaries: The Middle-Class Values of the Tea Table
Despite their protestations of the universal appeal of tea, Victorian tea histories’ representations of the social tea table and the domestic fireside reflect specifically middle-class values and economic privileges. Thus, while proposing that tea unified the diverse socioeconomic classes of English culture, authors of nineteenth-century tea histories simultaneously reveal that the image of tea drinking worked to reinscribe class boundaries by asserting the superiority of specifically middle-class values. Suggesting that middle-class cultural practices comprised English national identity, representations of tea drinking reaffirmed Victorian moral distinctions between economic classes. Victorian tea histories emphasize the values of good taste and discrimination, tempered by thrift and domestic economy. These values reveal that Victorian middle-class identity rested on negotiating the complex world of consumer commodities with respectability and morality, while still maintaining an appreciation for consumption and consumer goods. Middle-class thrift was tempered by good taste and the recognition of quality products, and the domestic economy that dictated the necessities of everyday life was sweetened with an appreciation of the new material wealth enjoyed by the rising middle class.8
Representations of middle-class Englishness in tea advertisements and histories reveal that an appetite for and the consumption of consumer goods was just as important as thrift within images of middle-class Englishness. While many Marxist and Weberian definitions of capitalism emphasize the productive qualities of restraint, thrift, and a disciplined work ethic, the larger system of capitalism demands the opposing qualities of a consumer: the desire for consumer goods, the leisure time to enjoy those goods, and the surplus income to afford them.9 The image of tea drinking offers the possibility of merging the contradictions of middle-class capitalism into a third category, inserting a liminal space between the binary positions of producer versus consumer. The concept of moderation—implying a middle ground between the excessive spending of the aristocracy and the wasteful neglect of household management of the lower classes, as well as avoiding the extremes of asceticism and self-denial—allows