explicitly moral connotations; as beverages, they are depicted as uncorrupted and uncorrupting, unlike the immoral fluids consumed by “the masses” at the time of Day’s writing. The chemical composition of the liquids acquires the qualities of the people who consume them and so, therefore, does the nation itself. Day implies that a change in the beverage consumed by “the masses,” by definition a large proportion of the population of England, would beneficially alter the character of those people and, by extension, the character of the entire nation.6
Day emphasizes the ideological connection between the health of individual tea drinkers and the health of the English nation by referring to the importance of tea to “the English constitution”: “It is not, possibly, too great an assumption to assert that there must exist something about Tea specially suitable to the English constitution and climate” (60). Day suggests that English character is partly a response to the English climate. According to Day, tea assists in nourishing individual, bodily, physical constitutions that are fitting for that particular climate. “Constitution” implies the extent to which physical bodies are constructed by the commodities they consume; according to Day, English bodies are literally “constituted” by environmental influences and consumption practices. By extension, the English nation is simultaneously “constituted” by the consumption habits of individual men and women throughout the country. The use of the word constitution resounds with political implications; by referring to “the English constitution” as an abstract collective, Day implies that just as individual physical bodies are nourished by tea drinking, so too does the political makeup of the nation depend on the shared cultural consumption of tea. Of course, tea does not originate within the English climate, as Day was patently aware. The physical organisms of individual English men and women, therefore, were constituted by and depended on the circulation of commodities throughout the British Empire in much the same way that the political nation of Great Britain depended on that circulation of goods, currency, and labor and drew vital revenues from the continued expansion of the tea trade.7
Charles Ashford, a tea dealer in Ipswich in the mid-nineteenth century, wrapped his tea in packages that advertised a similar connection between tea drinking and the English constitution, as both a physical body and a political conception (see fig. 1.1).8 Ashford’s package presents the following words in a circular pattern, requiring the reader to turn the paper around several times to read the entire statement: “Her Majesty is most particular in the selection of her teas & coffees but she can get no better articles than we are now offering to every family in this neighbourhood—one cup of our fine breakfast beverage immediately relieves langour [sic] or depression of spirits—a second cup gives tone to the stomach & vigour to the mind—a third cup completely exhilerates [sic] the whole frame leaving a pleasing glow of animation highly beneficial to the human constitution.”9 Suggesting that the common families of Ipswich had access to the same quality of tea as Queen Victoria attests to the democratizing influence of tea, creating a community of tea drinkers who shared the same tastes, choices, and values.10 The circular pattern of the package puts the most emphasis on the words “Her Majesty,” as the phrase that begins the pattern, and “constitution,” which appears upright in the center of the pattern. While the sentence conveys that “constitution” implies the physical body of the tea drinker, the pattern of the package emphasizes the royal tea drinker ruling the political body of the nation, adding political nuance to the central image of the “constitution.” The physical body of the queen is literally connected to the political body of the nation, linking her own individual constitution and, by extension, the constitutions of all the tea drinkers of Ipswich with the constitution of England as a political nation.
Figure 1.1. The English “constitution,” tea wrapper from Charles Ashford, Grocer and Tea Dealer. Tea and Grocery Papers 1 (50), John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
By merging the body of an individual tea drinker with the body of the nation, Sigmond’s and Day’s histories and Ashford’s tea wrapper all suggest that nationhood is constructed from within the physical limits of a single member of that nation. Rather than assuming that national identity is an overarching abstraction that contains the subjects within its borders, nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements argue for a more organic model of building national identity from the level of individual men and women. Just as a single tea drinker’s body was nourished by the actions of a cup of tea within his or her digestive system, so too would the national body be similarly revitalized by the health and morality of the individuals within that larger political system. Thus, tea drinking becomes a vital ingredient in the process of building a shared national identity created from tea drinkers throughout England, of all classes and both genders. More important is the concept that every individual tea drinker participated in constructing that national identity every day, with every cup of tea—the nation was built and strengthened daily, with the simultaneous pouring of tea at thousands of family tea tables. An individual Englishman could experience firsthand the process of nourishing the nation, as he nourished his own body, drinking each cup of tea.
In the same way that the body of the tea drinker is aligned with the body politic in Victorian tea histories, the domestic sphere of the home becomes conflated with the domestic space of England within the world. Victorian discussions of tea often elide the traditional split between the private and public spheres to suggest that the nation was shaped by everyday domestic interactions within the home and among family members.11 An anonymous article praising tea in an 1868 edition of All the Year Round, a journal edited by Charles Dickens, begins, “A cup of tea! Blessings on the words, for they convey a sense of English home comfort, of which the proud Gaul, with all his boulevards and battalions, is as ignorant as a turbot is of the use of the piano.”12 While the French may be proud of very public accomplishments such as broad boulevards and military battalions, English national (and public) identity rests on the private, intimate pleasures supplied by a sense of “home comfort.” G. G. Sigmond explicitly attributes the accomplishments of English men and women, including “industry,” “health,” “national riches,” and “domestic happiness,” to tea drinking, linking these variously public and private, individual and collective goods through the consumption of tea. He locates the heart of Englishness within individual domestic households and metaphorically describes the nation as a collective home gathered around a single hearth: “The social tea-table is like the fireside of our country, a national delight; and [it is] the scene of domestic converse and of agreeable relaxation” (3). Within individual households, the abstract concept of the domestic sphere crystallizes around the tea table, invoking quintessentially English precepts of a moral family life. By focusing on family members drinking tea within their homes, tea histories participate in this wider Victorian tendency to publicly examine the details of private life and to draw conclusions about the English national community based on the patterns of the individual domestic household.13 Victorian tea histories, advertisements, and novels represent the importance of tea drinking within intimate family gatherings inside the domestic sphere, and they project this vision of intimacy and domesticity outward to form an imagined bond linking all English tea drinkers.
Anxieties of Adulteration: Establishing National Boundaries
Basing a national identity on a product manufactured thousands of miles away, however, caused anxiety within British texts on tea. The process of consuming—of physically taking tea into the English body—involved permeating the boundaries of that body and allowing potentially dangerous substances to invade it. Samuel Day, writing to advertise Horniman’s Pure Tea in 1878, argues that the greatest threat to the English tea drinker was the false coloration and adulteration of green tea by Chinese manufacturers, who intentionally deluded “English fools” with poisonous substances (47). According to Day, “The Green Teas sold in England are usually artificially coloured in order to enamour the eye of the unsuspecting purchaser. The principal medium
