A Necessary Luxury. Julie E. Fromer

with many interior rooms, hallways, and decorated walls. A black cat, a witch’s familiar, adds overtones to these women’s unpleasantness. Their teapot is small and cracked, and it is missing the Chinese ornamentation of the first drawing. In the ultimate statement of classed behavior, the woman on the left seems to be about to drink her tea from her saucer. Pouring steaming tea from the teacup into the saucer, to allow it to cool, was a common practice, but it was eschewed by middle-class tea drinkers as vulgar and unfitting to the rituals of the drawing room tea table.²⁰ The caption to this second illustration reads, “They don’t Drink LIPTON’S TEAS.” But while this caption could indicate that they cannot afford Lipton’s Teas and therefore their poverty is the cause, not the result, of their tea-drinking practices, the tablecloth claims otherwise: “WE MUST USE LIPTON’S TEA AFTER THIS.” According to this illustration, drinking tea other than Lipton’s creates a poor, unhappy household. The ad suggests that these women have doubly bankrupted themselves by continuing to buy tea from grocers and middlemen, rather than from Lipton’s; they have derived no comfort from their expensive tea, and they have actually impoverished themselves by drinking their previous brand. Drinking Lipton’s Tea, the ad implies, would produce the middle-class domestic bliss represented by the first illustration.

      Figure 2.2. Advertisement for Lipton, Tea, Coffee and Provision Dealer. Tea and Coffee Box 1, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

      Utilizing middle-class consumer wisdom, purchasing tea direct from the grower (“Tea first hand,” according to the United Kingdom Tea Company) rather than paying the “extortionate prices” of middlemen and retail grocers would transform these lower-class women into much more efficient household managers. The ad indicates that they would thereby gain all the accoutrements of middle-class life, replacing their current setting of poverty and vulgar habits. The two illustrations from this ad for Lipton’s Teas encapsulate the transformative power of tea on the physical embodiment of social class.²¹ The poor women on the right of the Lipton’s Tea ad have exhibited unwise consumer choices in their purchase of tea, and these choices have physically shaped, or mis-shaped, their bodies and their behaviors (drinking tea from the saucer rather than from the cup). The causal relationship of the right-hand illustration suggests a similar logical relationship in the illustration on the left; if poor consumer choices create misshapen, lower-class bodies, then wise choices, discrimination, and good taste similarly result in the smiling, rounded forms of the middle-class women who have chosen to drink Lipton’s Teas.

      Leitch Ritchie similarly attributes socially transformative power to tea drinking in “The Social Influence of Tea,” an article appearing in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1848. Ritchie boldly claims that “the moral reform and social improvement for which the present age is remarkable have had their basis in—tea. . . . I therefore propound that tea and the discontinuance of barbarism are connected in the way of cause and effect. . . . Tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of society” (65). According to Ritchie, nineteenth-century England’s penchant for tea drinking created an atmosphere of moral reform and social improvement, and he suggests that drinking tea causes a society to give up its previous barbaric, uncivilized tendencies. In this passage, Ritchie establishes a new binary of necessity and luxury, turning the traditional arguments about imported luxury goods on their heads. For Ritchie, drinking tea actually produced new needs—needs such as “the invention of a cup worthy of such a beverage” (65). Such needs gave rise to innovation, elegance, and beauty and “employ forty hands,” thus offering work and sustenance to the artisans who fulfilled those needs for the society at large, at least in China, which was the “original country” to benefit from the “civilising juice” of tea (65). From needing a new vessel to hold this socially powerful beverage, the tea drinker soon moved on to enjoying the luxury of a beautifully decorated porcelain cup—and in the process grew more sophisticated and civilized, as well as providing the necessary impetus and wealth to similarly civilize the “forty hands” thus employed.

      Nineteenth-century advertisements and tea treatises present the concept of a national English character unified, and uniformly ameliorated or rehabilitated, by the consumer habits of purchasing and preparing tea. Regardless of one’s economic status, these texts suggest, consuming tea allowed all Englishmen and Englishwomen access to the essentially middle-class values that construct English identity. While Sigmond and Day acknowledge the economic divisions between social classes in Victorian England, they claim that tea drinking reduced the moral distinctions between those classes. Tea drinking, according to nineteenth-century ads and histories of tea, replaced the vices that were typically found among the “humbler classes,” including alcoholism, violence, and a lack of attention to domestic arrangements, with the values of domestic economy, respectability, good taste, thrift, and an appreciation for high-quality consumer luxuries associated with more-fortunate, middle-class economic circumstances.

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“Tea First Hand”

      Gender and Middle-Class Domesticity at the Tea Table

      [N]ow that the good old custom of tea-making is considered unladylike, and the manufacture has been handed over to the servants, the great charm of that beverage has virtually departed.

      Arthur K. Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking

      IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH CULTURE, TEA REPRESENTED a nexus of cultural values, offering fluidity across boundaries and, at the same time, a reaffirmation of those boundaries. Tea operated as a marker of national identity, as the domestication of tea helped to mediate the exotic elements of the empire and enabled individual men and women to participate in the construction of Englishness in their own domestic parlors. The link between empire and England was forged and continually renewed at English tea tables throughout the nation. While the Eastern origins of tea caused anxiety about the porousness of the boundaries of national identity, representations of tea in English culture offered multiple strategies to strengthen those boundaries and to redefine the British Empire in ways that mitigated the potential threat of consuming the world. Similarly, tea offered the possibility of creating a unified vision of Englishness that merged different socioeconomic categories yet identified that vision as embodying recognizably middle-class values.

      Within this vision of middle-class Englishness, the rituals of preparing and serving tea emphasized the specific gender roles of the family unit. Beginning in the eighteenth century, representations of tea often carried associations of femininity, especially as the domestic tea table was opposed to the more masculine world of the coffeehouse. In nineteenth-century England, the rituals of the tea table increasingly focused attention on the role of the middle-class woman. A woman’s position at the tea table became a locus of traditional moral values and the emotional center of the middle-class household and thus was crucial to the construction of both feminine and masculine identity in English culture. Tea highlighted gender categories and marked the boundaries of men’s and women’s roles within the home. At the same time, however, this focus on the feminine did not exclude men from the everyday rehearsal of the domestic. Tea allowed for more-fluid interactions between men and women at the tea table, and the crucial work of performing middle-class domesticity required the cooperation of both men and women. As tea advertisements and histories suggest, the middle-class woman was central to the performance of domesticity at the tea table, but men played an equally essential role in guiding women’s hands at the tea table.

      Within nineteenth-century middle-class capitalist patterns of production and consumption, the home usually represents a refuge from the public workplace and therefore becomes a place of pure consumption and leisure. Higher incomes, the labor of servants, and the ideological ideal of a private sphere shielded from the world of work gradually reduced middle-class women’s workloads within English households over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as scholars have argued, creating a space of leisure consumption requires labor, by women and servants,