she carries a small purse with a long ribbon as a strap, and her hair falls in curls around her face. The woman on the left wears Scottish highlander dress, including a long plaid skirt, a tam on her head, and a traditional sporran—a leather pouch with three tassels—on her belt. On the right, an Indian woman wears a flowing sari, ornamented on the edges and wrapped around her waist and her arms. The trademark image of the United Kingdom Tea Company visually represents the main peoples who make up the United Kingdom (minus Ireland, the West Indies, and other minorities within the population of the British Empire). Each of the three women holds a teacup emblazoned with the initials “UKTC,” and they stand with their arms linked together, physically united. The image of Britannia sitting on the crate of tea metaphorically portrays the foundation of foreign trade and domestic female tea consumption by all the races and cultures of the British Empire. Far from posing a threat to the stability of the country and the empire, the trade in tea, “One of the Greatest Luxuries of the Day,” as the ad proclaims, here appears to serve, support, and strengthen both the company and the United Kingdom.
Figure 1.4. “Tea First Hand,” advertisement for United Kingdom Tea Company. Tea and Coffee Box 2, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
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Mediating Class Distinctions
The Middle-Class Englishness of Drinking Tea
No one who has lived for half a century can have failed to note the wonderful extension of tea-drinking habits in England, from the time when tea was a coveted and almost unattainable luxury to the laborer’s wife, to its use morning, noon, and night by all classes.
Arthur K. Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking
ACCORDING TO TEA HISTORIES, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND novels’ descriptions of everyday life, tea drinking had become instrumental as a consumer practice essential to the definition of English identity. The cross-class appeal of tea enabled Victorian authors to suggest that tea drinking conveyed meaning about all socioeconomic classes, creating a unifying symbol of English consumer culture. By drinking tea, English men and women participated in creating a national identity that depended on middle-class morality and moderation: an identity that revolved around both good taste and thrift and that included an appreciation for luxuries tempered by a keen sense of domestic economy and household efficiency. Adopting the practices of tea drinking as essential to middle-class identity, authors of tea histories emphasized the permanence and stability of the middle class, linking middle-class moral values with a long tradition of tea drinking in England and with the ideals of the nation. As historians have shown, and as the anxieties of many novels about middle-class characters reveal, the middle class continued to be a fluid category with porous boundaries, enabling prosperous tradesmen and artisans to rise into the middle classes from below and accepting poorer members of the aristocracy who descended into those ranks from above.1 Appropriating tea drinking as a middle-class consumer habit helped to consolidate the image of the middle class as the defining population of England, co-opting the national beverage in the service of middle-class values and contributing a sense of inevitability to the process of representing England as a middle-class nation.
The details of the patterns of tea consumption during the nineteenth century reveal a change in the construction of social class in Britain. Historians have explored the singularly important place of tea within the everyday consumption habits of eighteenth-century English men and women, articulating tea’s association with the qualities of sociability, respectability, and domesticity. Woodruff Smith puzzles over the habit of adding sugar to tea in the eighteenth century, noting that the pattern does not adhere to Georg Simmel’s theory of social fashion; unpredictably, the upper classes continued to drink tea with sugar long after the practice was adopted by the middle and working classes (“Complications of the Commonplace,” 267).2 Smith posits that the tenets of respectability suggested a new social hierarchy based on individual behavior rather than inherited rank.3 Tea simultaneously crossed class and gender boundaries, creating a shared habit among all economic groups, and constructed a new system of privilege based on adherence to the social and behavioral characteristics associated with tea drinking. As Smith’s analysis of the fashion of tea drinking suggests, this new hierarchy oriented itself within the middle classes, reversing earlier trends of imitation. No longer were the petite bourgeoisie mimicking, more cheaply and on a smaller scale, the fashions of the aristocracy. Instead, the habits of the upper and working classes began to be shaped to accord with the standards developed within the middle classes.
A Nation United by Tea
According to Victorian tea histories, the values of the domestic sphere were embraced by all tea drinkers, regardless of social status or economic position. Negotiating between the various class distinctions within the national community, the shared culture of tea drinking could temporarily suspend socioeconomic hierarchies and create a sense of what Victor Turner called communitas.4 Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History borrows the rhetoric of domestic ideology to describe a collective English affection for tea, an affection shared by both upper and lower classes, which connects his readers to this unified group of tea drinkers. Day contends that the eighteenth century’s high tea taxes could not prevent the English people from purchasing and drinking tea on a daily basis: “[N]othing that statesmen or financiers could effect seemed to check the growing fondness of English people of all social grades for their cherished beverage” (51). People of “all social grades” were included in this affection for tea, uniting them as English both in their habit and in the characterization of that habit as a “growing fondness,” an ever-increasing wave of tea drinking creating a unified nation. According to Day, the fact that all classes drank tea did not sufficiently unite them as English; the emotional state of the social body of England and their tendency to “cherish” their habitual beverage forged the crucial connections between individual tea drinkers. Day’s rhetoric relies on the domestic associations of words such as fondness and cherished, eliciting images of the middle-class home and the emotional attachments that structured the domestic setting and the English family. Even as the nation of England industrialized, commercialized, and atomized throughout the economic upheaval of the nineteenth century, the imagery of family affection and domesticity attempted to ameliorate the effects of industrialization on English culture. Samuel Day, however, does not replace English industrialization with images of family affection; instead, he places these two impulses of English culture side by side, softening the British thrust toward commercial activity but by no means repudiating it. Day’s text is replete with statistics concerning the price and quantities of tea imports; he was aware and proud of English industrialization and commercialization. Day’s portrait of Victorian culture is complex, allowing for both commercial industry and familial affection.
Day offers an exhaustive list of the classes that composed English culture, emphasizing the cross-class nature of tea drinking in England and the universal benefits that tea brought to the whole spectrum of English society:
That all classes of the community in this country have derived much benefit from the persistent use of Tea, is placed beyond dispute. It has proved, and still proves, a highly prized boon to millions. The artist at his easel, the author at his desk, the statesman fresh from an exhaustive oration, the actor from the stage after fulfilling an arduous róle, the orator from the platform, the preacher from the pulpit, the toiling mechanic, the wearied labourer, the poor governess, the tired laundress, the humble cottage housewife, the votary of pleasure even, on escaping from the scene of revelry, nay, the Queen on her throne have, one and all, to acknowledge and express gratitude for the grateful and invigorating infusion. (63)
Day’s list of the
