I have also focused on a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise—the booklength tea history. Appearing throughout the nineteenth century and often explicitly funded by various portions of the changing tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial), tea histories formed an ongoing, intertextual record of the role of tea in English culture. Although some tea histories focus on the technological or the financial impact of the burgeoning tea industry, I have primarily relied on three particular tea histories that emphasize the cultural significance of tea in England: G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (1839), Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History (1878), and Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking (1884). When Sigmond’s text was published, the East India Company had recently lost its China monopoly. Sigmond’s text honors the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii) and celebrates British ingenuity in securing sources of tea for the British population. Samuel Phillips Day, writing forty years later, suggests that more-recent technological innovations provided similar assurances of quality and safety for tea imported from China.39 Day’s history emphasizes changes in tea manufacturing, as well as the shifts in the balance of power between the East India Company and smaller private tea-importing firms. Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking, published almost half a century after Sigmond’s text, builds on Sigmond’s earlier national pride, and Reade quotes extensively from Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral. Reade’s text celebrates Indian tea production and the British Indian Empire, reflecting the political and agricultural advances that Britain had accomplished in India in the intervening forty-five years. Reade’s emphasis on the salutary power of tea draws from the previous decades of temperance reform and the importance of tea as a proposed alternative to alcohol, allegedly forming the basis of the word teetotaler or, as it occasionally appears, teatotaler.
I also include several articles from periodicals such as the Westminster Review; Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts; All the Year Round; and Temple Bar. These articles range from paeans to the “social influence of tea” to analyses of the financial impact of tea on the empire, and from romantic details of the manufacture of tea in China to exhortations to support British efforts to produce tea in India. Together, these sources provide a cultural overview of tea drinking in nineteenth-century England and the technological and cultural changes occurring during this period.
Structurally, the image of concentric rings informs my approach to the different arenas of identity impinged upon by tea. I begin with the concept of national identity, specifically a national identity forged with and against the increasingly global world of the nineteenth century. This category encompasses the broadest group of people, of all classes, both men and women, who identify themselves as English. From there, I move down a level to the category of class, exploring the ways in which tea drinking is inflected by class in advertisements, articles, tea histories, and novels and focusing on the defining middle-class characteristics of the idealized English tea table. Within this portrait of middle-class Englishness, however, there remains a third level of identity, which neatly bifurcates those participating into two parties: men and women. Thus, I then move on to discuss the interplay between gender identity and the rituals of the tea table. Finally, I turn to the ways in which the role of tea in mediating domestic identity shifted toward the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting broader questions of class and gender that were emerging in fin-de-siècle England.
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“A Typically English Brew”
Victorian Histories of Tea and Representations of English National Identity
Individually and nationally we are deeply indebted to the tea-plant.
G. G. Sigmond, Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral
What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which were once counted as necessaries of life.
Samuel Day, Tea: Its Mystery and History
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WITNESSED THE DOMESTICATION of tea in Britain as tea was transformed from an exotic luxury consumed primarily by men in public coffeehouses to a necessity of everyday life enjoyed by both men and women in the private, domestic space of the home. In the nineteenth century, tea became an icon of English domesticity and was associated with privacy, intimacy, and the nuclear family. According to nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements, tea helped to define English identity, character, and class values. Tea united the English people, temporarily erasing the boundaries between individuals to unify the nation into a coherent whole.
As an icon of the domestic sphere, tea exemplifies domesticity’s primary goal of enclosing the English self, of protecting that self by ensconcing him or her behind a set of firm boundaries. The domestic sphere’s safety was ensured by enclosing it behind the walls of a house, within swathes of draperies, warmed by a fire that kept the bitter cold of the outdoors at bay. The layers of enclosure functioned as fail-safe mechanisms to separate the domestic from all that raged without—the storms, the rest of the world that did not live at a “high latitude,”1 the problems that plagued classes other than the secure middle class. These boundaries were what defined and protected the domestic space within England.2 And England itself, within the larger sphere of the world, was perceived as a domestic space within the empire and within the larger “public” sphere of the rest of the world. Tea helped to comfort those within their domestic spaces but simultaneously jeopardized the ideological safety of those spaces by bringing the public world of the marketplace and the empire into the private space of the parlor.
Resting national identity upon the consumption of tea as a domestic, English commodity raised fears about basing ideals of domesticity and national identity on a foreign product from China—a nation that, despite the best British attempts to penetrate its mysteries, had remained frustratingly unknown. Depending on an Asian commodity to evoke a sense of English domesticity threatened to break down the very boundaries necessary to constructing national identity. As Linda Colley has argued, “we usually decide who we are by reference to who and what we are not.”3 Simultaneously perceiving China as the “other” and depending on Asian tea to produce a sense of English national identity threatened to collapse the distinctions upon which that national identity was formulated. Nineteenth-century tea histories suggest the potential dangers of consuming the Orient—anxieties of ingestion, the threat of pollution, and frighteningly permeable cultural boundaries.
In response, histories of tea articulate three strategies for reaffirming English physical, political, and cultural boundaries to reconstitute English identity. Each strategy emphasizes the boundaries that were compromised by England’s reliance on global commodities to affirm its sense of national self. One strategy suggests replacing the apparently failed boundaries of nation with commercial boundaries—emotional and financial boundaries of brand loyalty to ensure “pure” tea and physical boundaries of newly invented individual paper packages to maintain tea’s purity from wholesaler to consumer. A second strategy suggests accepting and even reveling in the permeable boundaries created by globalism, taking pride in Britain’s position as a consumer of the world’s goods. This strategy proposes that English men and women reenvision themselves as global consumers consuming the world, adopting a new hybrid form of consumerism that encouraged porous boundaries between nations and allowed for a more cosmopolitan sense of identity within the world at large.
While these two strategies may have helped to alleviate some of the anxieties associated with consuming