An advertisement from Sidney and Company, with a handwritten archivist’s date of October 1838, expresses consumers’ growing concern for obtaining the best tea for the cheapest prices: “The importance which the Tea Trade has of late years assumed, the enormous increase in the consumption, and the necessity there exists for purchasing so important an article of the best quality and at the cheapest rate, are ample reasons why a concern of first rate magnitude should be established” (fig. 2.1). By 1838, five years after the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on importing tea from China, many new tea companies had been created, and competition and brand loyalty were beginning to affect tea prices and advertising.11 Sidney and Company, working on establishing a “concern of first rate magnitude,” describes the rapid growth in tea consumption in the early part of the nineteenth century and claims that purchasing tea “of the best quality and at the cheapest rate” was necessary, clearly establishing tea’s position among everyday commodities. The ad continues by asserting the principles upon which Sidney and Company based their business: “Excellence in quality, combined with extreme moderation in price.” The apparent oxymoron of “extreme moderation” epitomizes the middle ground occupied by middle-class consumerism. Between one extreme of extravagant, wasteful spending and indulgence and the opposite extreme of penny-pinching restraint, tea advertisements propose a third, more acceptable extreme of moderation. The rhetoric of “extreme moderation” creates the possibility of a balance, allowing consumers to maintain restraint and thrift but also encouraging them to appreciate consumer goods, luxuries, and indulgences—at the best price. While middle-class families, according to tea advertisements, had limited incomes and therefore were concerned with price, they were not willing to sacrifice their taste for quality tea.
Figure 2.1. “Immense Saving in the Purchase of Tea,” advertisement for Sidney and Company. Tea and Coffee Box 3, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Explicitly placing tea within the category of a luxury, the text of the United Kingdom Tea Company advertisement asks, in capital letters, “why drink inferior tea?” and asserts, “If you are satisfied . . . to continue drinking indifferent and common Tea, well and good—in that case there is nothing more to be said; but if you wish to enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea, and if you study economy in Household Expenditure, you can, by writing to the united kingdom tea company, . . . obtain the best tea in the world, of simply delicious Quality” (see fig. 1.4). This ad’s discussion of quality evokes aristocratic concepts of a tea hierarchy reminiscent of social classes in England; “common” and “inferior” teas are opposed to “the best tea in the world.” The goal of tea drinking, the ad claims, is to “enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea,” gaining access to the luxury of spending money to indulge one’s taste. But this luxury, to become truly desirable within a middle-class system of beliefs, must be affordable, within a consumer’s “economy in Household Expenditure.” Tea ads insist that consumers can, even while restricted by a household budget, obtain “the best tea in the world.” A line at the bottom of the United Kingdom Tea Company’s advertisement claims, “If you are not drinking [United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas], you are depriving yourself of one of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day.” Tea advertisements hurry to assure consumers that, even within the financial limitations of household economy, English tea drinkers did not need to deprive themselves of luxuries. While middle-class values placed an emphasis on moderation and economy, they included an appreciation for luxury. As this ad suggests, consumers could join the larger community of tea drinkers enjoying “one of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day” by spending their money wisely, at “Immense Saving!” on the United Kingdom Tea Company’s Teas.
In his description of the position of tea within English consumption patterns, Samuel Day similarly embraces the possibility of a “luxury” that was affordable to everyone universally, of all classes. Day describes the voluble economic history of tea taxes in England, concluding, “The wisdom of successive financiers, and the enterprise of generations of merchants, have combined to deliver Tea in this country at a price which brings it within the reach of every individual, making it, perhaps, the only real luxury which is common to rich and poor alike” (70–71). According to Day, English men and women could be poor but still have access to the “luxury” of tea. Ideally, in these texts, tea drinking had a leveling affect, raising the social and moral status of the lower classes by asserting their good taste in drinking tea.
While many tea advertisements, with their dual emphasis on “the best and the cheapest,” appear to be aimed at the economically middle-class consumer, tea histories also assert the power of tea drinking to introduce middle-class values and attitudes into the working classes. Drinking tea, according to G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral, reveals the inherent middle-class values of good taste and thrift within the working class. Sigmond describes in detail the inferior quality of Bohea tea, which he claims was often crushed and broken, mixed with stalks, and yielded a bitter mahogany liquor.12 But the lower classes of English tea drinkers had the good sense to avoid this inferior tea: “This tea has not now a very great consumption in this country; for even the humbler classes, if their means at all admit of it, will not purchase it: generally speaking, they are excellent judges of tea. . . . [A tea dealer, Mr. Thorpe of Leeds, testified to a committee of the House of Commons] that the working and middling classes always buy the finest tea” (Sigmond, 37). Sigmond appears to be proud of the taste that the English lower classes exhibited in their tea purchases. Consumer choice was a matter of national interest that required a committee to investigate the tea-drinking practices of the English people; the character of the nation thus rested on the consumer judgment of the “humbler classes.” Despite their limited budgets, the poor maintained the ability to make choices among available commodities, and they consistently chose “the finest tea.” The moral, upright character of the English public as a whole was affirmed by good taste and good consumer judgment in purchasing tea.
Displaying good judgment and discrimination, the poor thus revealed their respectability, morally allying themselves with the middle classes. Sigmond quotes a Dublin merchant, who declares that “the poor are excellent judges of tea, and have a great nicety of discrimination, preferring good Congou; and that they will walk very considerable distances to purchase at a shop at which they can rely” (38).13 Sigmond endorses the merchant’s claim, praising qualities of character that stem from making distinctions, choosing among available products, and asserting preferences. Preferring more-expensive, better-quality tea redeemed the character of the poorer classes, making them not only English but also respectable. Purchasing tea, even in a poor household, evoked middle-class English values of respectable discriminating taste and an appreciation for high-quality tea, duly tempered by thrift and economizing to make the most of limited financial resources. The poor household, therefore, represented a scaled-down version of the middle-class home, suggesting that nineteenth-century histories of tea portray class as a matter of degree rather than kind. Working-class families aspired to the same values as the middle classes, responding to their smaller incomes by taking further measures of economy but not by sacrificing the consumer commodities that had become necessary to English everyday life. Sigmond praises the economy of poorer tea drinkers who carefully measured their preferred tea leaves: “The great mass of the