A Necessary Luxury. Julie E. Fromer
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By emphasizing the popularity of tea throughout the socioeconomic spectrum of England, nineteenth-century histories of tea construct a tea-drinking audience unified by their habits of everyday life and their consumer choices. Affirming a coherent English national identity through time and across space, Victorian tea histories present an English nation united through tea drinking.7 Not only did tea produce a tradition of English literary, royal, and commercial history, in which Victorian tea drinkers could participate by drinking their daily cups of tea, but tea also symbolically erased the diversities that divided English society. By the early nineteenth century, tea had taken on the title of the national beverage, and by definition, it encompassed all the classes that composed that society. But as the authors of tea histories assert, the cross-class rapprochement engendered by a shared taste for tea was ultimately based upon middle-class values.
Reinscribing Class Boundaries: The Middle-Class Values of the Tea Table
Despite their protestations of the universal appeal of tea, Victorian tea histories’ representations of the social tea table and the domestic fireside reflect specifically middle-class values and economic privileges. Thus, while proposing that tea unified the diverse socioeconomic classes of English culture, authors of nineteenth-century tea histories simultaneously reveal that the image of tea drinking worked to reinscribe class boundaries by asserting the superiority of specifically middle-class values. Suggesting that middle-class cultural practices comprised English national identity, representations of tea drinking reaffirmed Victorian moral distinctions between economic classes. Victorian tea histories emphasize the values of good taste and discrimination, tempered by thrift and domestic economy. These values reveal that Victorian middle-class identity rested on negotiating the complex world of consumer commodities with respectability and morality, while still maintaining an appreciation for consumption and consumer goods. Middle-class thrift was tempered by good taste and the recognition of quality products, and the domestic economy that dictated the necessities of everyday life was sweetened with an appreciation of the new material wealth enjoyed by the rising middle class.8
Representations of middle-class Englishness in tea advertisements and histories reveal that an appetite for and the consumption of consumer goods was just as important as thrift within images of middle-class Englishness. While many Marxist and Weberian definitions of capitalism emphasize the productive qualities of restraint, thrift, and a disciplined work ethic, the larger system of capitalism demands the opposing qualities of a consumer: the desire for consumer goods, the leisure time to enjoy those goods, and the surplus income to afford them.9 The image of tea drinking offers the possibility of merging the contradictions of middle-class capitalism into a third category, inserting a liminal space between the binary positions of producer versus consumer. The concept of moderation—implying a middle ground between the excessive spending of the aristocracy and the wasteful neglect of household management of the lower classes, as well as avoiding the extremes of asceticism and self-denial—allows for a more complex portrait of middle-class English values, a portrait that recognizes the importance of consumer desires for high-quality goods and the indulgences of eating, drinking, smoking, purchasing, and consuming. Practices of thrift and economic restraint permeate nineteenth-century histories of tea, countered by exhortations to buy good-quality tea. Many tea advertisements claim that a particular merchant offered “the best and the cheapest” teas, encapsulating middle-class appreciation and desire for the highest quality at the lowest price.10 Nineteenth-century ads assert that the highest-quality teas were no longer reserved for those people or classes with the most money. Like the assertion by Charles Ashford that the families of Ipswich enjoyed the same quality of tea as Her Majesty, the phrase “the best and the cheapest” emphasizes the potential for tea drinking to democratize England, ensuring that even households with budgeted resources still had access to the “best” teas available to English tea drinkers.
An advertisement from Sidney and Company, with a handwritten archivist’s date of October 1838, expresses consumers’ growing concern for obtaining the best tea for the cheapest prices: “The importance which the Tea Trade has of late years assumed, the enormous increase in the consumption, and the necessity there exists for purchasing so important an article of the best quality and at the cheapest rate, are ample reasons why a concern of first rate magnitude should be established” (fig. 2.1). By 1838, five years after the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on importing tea from China, many new tea companies had been created, and competition and brand loyalty were beginning to affect tea prices and advertising.11 Sidney and Company, working on establishing a “concern of first rate magnitude,” describes the rapid growth in tea consumption in the early part of the nineteenth century and claims that purchasing tea “of the best quality and at the cheapest rate” was necessary, clearly establishing tea’s position among everyday commodities. The ad continues by asserting the principles upon which Sidney and Company based their business: “Excellence in quality, combined with extreme moderation in price.” The apparent oxymoron of “extreme moderation” epitomizes the middle ground occupied by middle-class consumerism. Between one extreme of extravagant, wasteful spending and indulgence and the opposite extreme of penny-pinching restraint, tea advertisements propose a third, more acceptable extreme of moderation. The rhetoric of “extreme moderation” creates the possibility of a balance, allowing consumers to maintain restraint and thrift but also encouraging them to appreciate consumer goods, luxuries, and indulgences—at the best price. While middle-class families, according to tea advertisements, had limited incomes and therefore were concerned with price, they were not willing to sacrifice their taste for quality tea.
Figure 2.1. “Immense Saving in the Purchase of Tea,” advertisement for Sidney and Company. Tea and Coffee Box 3, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Explicitly placing tea within the category of a luxury, the text of the United Kingdom Tea Company advertisement asks, in capital letters, “why drink inferior tea?” and asserts, “If you are satisfied . . . to continue drinking indifferent and common Tea, well and good—in that case there is nothing more to be said; but if you wish to enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea, and if you study economy in Household Expenditure, you can, by writing to the united kingdom tea company, . . . obtain the best tea in the world, of simply delicious Quality” (see fig. 1.4). This ad’s discussion of quality evokes aristocratic concepts of a tea hierarchy reminiscent of social classes in England; “common” and “inferior” teas are opposed to “the best tea in the world.” The goal of tea drinking, the ad claims, is to “enjoy the Luxury of a really Delicious Cup of Tea,” gaining access to the luxury of spending money to indulge one’s taste. But this luxury, to become truly desirable within a middle-class system of beliefs, must be affordable, within a consumer’s “economy in Household Expenditure.” Tea ads insist that consumers can, even while restricted by a household