China; after Parliament ended that monopoly, other companies entered the China trade and began importing tea to England. Day argues that the British government, including perhaps the East India Company, had failed to metaphorically maintain the borders between China and England, allowing adulterated tea to be sold to unsuspecting English tea drinkers:
Such an indispensable article as Tea has now become, ought to be trebly guarded against all adulteration. While the Government is unable to protect the public against the machinations of unscrupulous Chinese merchants, let the public at least endeavor to protect itself. And this it can readily accomplish. Let it but bestow its custom on a trader upon whose integrity and technical knowledge it can implicitly rely. Let it insist upon having both its black and green Teas of the natural hue, without the addition of “face,” “glaze,” or artificial colour, which but detract from its character and value. How such a discreet selection can be effected has already been pointed out. Houses of repute—such, for example, as that of Messrs. Horniman and Co.—do not conceal their names behind a retailer, but boldly give their own, coupled with a guarantee to every purchaser, however modest his purchase. (76–77)
Day argues that, since tea is an “indispensable article” of English daily life, the potential adulteration of tea is all the more threatening to the health and culture of the individual tea drinker and of the nation. Day describes the “public” as a unified body with power and discretion, whose role it was, since the government had failed to protect it, to take steps to keep its tea pure and unadulterated. Speaking on behalf of Horniman’s Pure Tea, Day advocates that English consumers should wield their buying power to protect themselves, choosing the purest, highest-quality tea from the most reputable tea merchants.26
The use of packaging and technology to create distance between commodity and consumer existed alongside of nineteenth-century marketing techniques designed to simultaneously bring the exotic Orient closer. Advertisements and grocers’ bills offered illustrations of mountainous tea plantations, pigtailed Chinese laborers plucking and manufacturing the leaves, and Chinese merchants waiting beside the shoreline with crates of tea. Tea histories include descriptions of the careful hand labor performed by Chinese tea pluckers, and they offer engraved illustrations depicting Chinese workers engaged in the various stages of tea production. Once the tea was painstakingly plucked, processed, and shipped to England, it was finally consumed by English tea drinkers in Chinese porcelain cups decorated with the famous blue-and-white stylized Chinese landscapes. These two tendencies—to create distance between England and China, and to simultaneously bring the Orient closer—are not as contradictory as they may seem, since they share the same goal of ameliorating anxieties about the boundaries of English identity. As Laura Ciolkowski argues, commodities can function as agents of border management.27 Thus, representations of Chinese landscapes on Chinese porcelain intended for the consumption of Chinese tea helped dissipate the threat of the foreign by evoking that threat in commodified form—in essence, evoking British powers of commercialism and imperialism to consume the East by transforming another culture into a pretty piece of china for British importation.28
Day’s strategies of emphasizing new ideological, technological, and commercial boundaries do, however, suggest a continual sense of uncertainty within English tea drinkers. The illustrations that accompany advertisements and other tea-related papers focus the gaze on the borders and boundaries of China—both culturally and geographically (see fig. 1.2). Images of Chinese merchants standing on beaches, piers, and shorelines, waiting to deliver their tea to ships visible in the harbor, recall McClintock’s discussion of similar scenes in advertisements for soap, often depicted with the shores of Africa.29 Advertisements for tea reverse the trajectory traced by McClintock; instead of depicting a commodity transforming and civilizing primitive cultures, tea advertisements celebrate the power of British traders to bring mysterious, exotic products back to the domestic center of Britain from the farthest reaches of the globe. An undercurrent of anxiety regarding the Chinese traders remained; for British tea merchants, the shoreline of China marked the limits of their knowledge of that country and thus of the origins of the English national beverage.
Hybrid Consumerism: Consuming the World through Tea
Despite the lingering sense of anxiety present in Day’s treatise and numerous Victorian advertisements, however, tea had in many ways become comfortably English by as early as the 1820s. Despite De Quincey’s aggressive insecurities regarding the Chinese, a passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater attests to the universality of tea in English culture: “Surely every body is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. . . . All these are items in the description of a winter evening, which must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude” (93–94). In drawing the boundaries of the tea table, De Quincey effectively outlines the limits of Englishness; recognizing the quintessential elements of the domestic tea table becomes a necessary part of belonging to the English nation—“everybody born in a high latitude.” De Quincey creates a portrait of an English nation united by its shared participation in the rituals of the tea table. While De Quincey highlights the privacy of the domestic sphere through images of enclosure, explicitly contrasting the intimate setting of the tea table with the public space outside, his description ultimately links the private realm of the tea table with the public arena of national identity.
Figure 1.2. Boundaries of nation and culture, bill heading from William Wright, Grocer, Tea and Provision Dealer. Bill Headings 13 (25), John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Throughout his Confessions, De Quincey employs a strategy of opposition, explicitly contrasting his potentially dangerous, destructive, foreign habit of consuming opium with the quintessentially domestic English ritual of drinking tea. Schmitt, analyzing De Quincey’s nightmares of the Orient in the Confessions, suggests that British consumption of tea extends De Quincey’s own personal sense of vulnerability to the nation at large. According to Schmitt, De Quincey ends the Confessions with a “polluted, compromised self.” He adds, “In the context of the Opium Wars, an identical pollution threatens the English nation. The agent of this national contamination, though, is not opium but tea—without which, De Quincey writes in ‘The English in China,’ ‘the social life of England would receive a deadly wound’” (Schmitt, “Narrating National Addictions,” 83). Ultimately, Schmitt argues, De Quincey’s Confessions suggest that England, just like De Quincey, is threatened by pollution through consumption. Thus, Schmitt draws a parallel between De Quincey’s opium and the nation’s tea addiction. But I would contend that, despite the compromised self with which De Quincey ends his text, within the Confessions, opium is continually opposed to tea. De Quincey associates opium with the threatening, swarming, horrifying Orient, while he employs tea to represent comfortable English, domestic interior spaces—warm, safe, enclosed places in which to relax and consume the products of English commercial power. In each tea-table scene, De Quincey depicts tea as inherently domestic and familiar, exemplifying all of the aspects of Englishness that he, at various points in his narrative, earnestly desires and blissfully enjoys. By opposing tea to opium, De Quincey splits the threat of the Orient between these two Asian commodities; he effectively transfers all of the potential dangers of ingesting Oriental goods onto his increasingly uncontrollable opium habit, leaving his consumption of tea pure, safe, domestic, and very English.30
Reconstructing his identity as a middle-class English gentleman, De Quincey creates a new, hybrid form of consumerism to absorb and contain the pleasures and the anxieties of Oriental commodities within a stable English identity. Arthur K. Reade’s history of tea in England, Tea and Tea Drinking, offers an explicit illustration of a strategy similar to De Quincey’s Anglicization
