in similar circumstances would otherwise naturally take place. It makes the ordinary food consumed along with it, go farther, therefore, or, more correctly, lessens the quantity of food necessary to be eaten in a given time” (Day, 72–75). According to the article in the Edinburgh Review, a poor person who drank tea needed less food than she would if she did not have access to tea. Therefore, spending money on tea was not a waste of food money, as some had argued, but instead made scanty food resources even more valuable and more efficiently digested—a small amount of food goes further and is more nourishing when consumed with tea. As Sumner explains in his Popular Treatise on Tea, “Tea therefore saves food—stands to a certain extent in the place of food—while at the same time it soothes the body and enlivens the mind” (30). The Edinburgh Review elaborates, quoted by Day: “[It is not surprising] that the aged female whose earnings are barely sufficient to buy what are called the common necessaries of life, should yet spare a portion of her small gains in procuring this grateful indulgence. She can sustain her strength with less common food when she takes her Tea along with it; while she, at the same time, feels lighter in spirits, more cheerful, and fitter for this dull work of life, because of this little indulgence” (Day, 75–76).17 The Edinburgh Review suggests that tea drinking allowed a poor “aged female” access to the consumer choices that defined the middle-class English character. Like more affluent English families, she had access to both the necessaries of life and luxuries or indulgences. Even though, in this case, the Edinburgh Review cites evidence as to the extreme necessity of tea in allowing the body to more efficiently digest small amounts of food, the author maintains the distinction between necessaries and indulgences. The poor “aged female” thus still participated in middle-class consumer culture, enjoying “grateful indulgence[s]” as well as necessities of life and making smart domestic choices among available commodities. As the article in the Edinburgh Review continues, she also gained access to more middle-class character traits, including good cheer and light spirits, that were essential for all women within domestic settings and even more important for a woman in dire economic circumstances. Tea affected her demeanor, her manner, and her cheer, enabling her to accept her burden and work harder, being “fitter” for the dull work of life.
An advertisement for Lipton visually portrays the transformative power of tea, depicting the difference between the smart, happy women who drink Lipton’s Teas and those unfortunate ones who do not (see fig. 2.2).18 The ad encourages consumers to purchase Lipton’s Teas “direct from the Grower,” thus eliminating the “Middleman”: the retailer or grocer who might blend his own teas and increase the price. On the left, an illustration depicts two women smiling as they drink their tea. Their features are smooth and regular, their cheeks are pleasingly plump, and they wear bonnets over their fashionably curled hair. Their dresses indicate their middle-class wealth and fashion sense; they wear modest, high-necked gowns without excess frills or ornaments, yet the designs of their dresses reveal up-to-date fashion, with curving bodices, bustles, and narrow waists. The scene reflects all the commercial accoutrements of English middle-class life, including a large framed mirror and a Japanese fan on the wall, chair molding or wallpaper trim running across the middle of the wall, a Japanned tea tray and what looks like a Chinese porcelain teapot, round and in perfect condition, as is everything in this illustration. A houseplant that resembles an aspidistra, George Orwell’s archetypal sign of middle-class English culture, sits behind the tea table.19 The caption to this drawing proudly asserts, referring to these two plump, smiling, well-dressed women, “They Drink LIPTON’S TEAS.” The tablecloth on the tea table offers insight into their smiles: “LIPTON’S TEAS. HOW DELIGHTFUL!”
On the right is the companion illustration, depicting a similar scene of two women drinking tea together, and they sit at the table in the same positions as in the previous picture. Yet the scene is strikingly different, containing elements of a much poorer household and, as the women’s faces attest, a much unhappier one. The women in this drawing are thin, almost scrawny, and their dresses are extremely plain. They lack the fashionably cut dresses with bustles and corset-enhanced bodices. Rather than curled hair and bonnets, they wear their hair severely pulled back, and one woman wears a widow’s cap. With large noses, pronounced chins, and beady eyes, they frown at each other with wide mouths. The background mirror has been replaced by a window, perhaps indicating a smaller dwelling than a larger middle-class house with many interior rooms, hallways, and decorated walls. A black cat, a witch’s familiar, adds overtones to these women’s unpleasantness. Their teapot is small and cracked, and it is missing the Chinese ornamentation of the first drawing. In the ultimate statement of classed behavior, the woman on the left seems to be about to drink her tea from her saucer. Pouring steaming tea from the teacup into the saucer, to allow it to cool, was a common practice, but it was eschewed by middle-class tea drinkers as vulgar and unfitting to the rituals of the drawing room tea table.20 The caption to this second illustration reads, “They don’t Drink LIPTON’S TEAS.” But while this caption could indicate that they cannot afford Lipton’s Teas and therefore their poverty is the cause, not the result, of their tea-drinking practices, the tablecloth claims otherwise: “WE MUST USE LIPTON’S TEA AFTER THIS.” According to this illustration, drinking tea other than Lipton’s creates a poor, unhappy household. The ad suggests that these women have doubly bankrupted themselves by continuing to buy tea from grocers and middlemen, rather than from Lipton’s; they have derived no comfort from their expensive tea, and they have actually impoverished themselves by drinking their previous brand. Drinking Lipton’s Tea, the ad implies, would produce the middle-class domestic bliss represented by the first illustration.
Figure 2.2. Advertisement for Lipton, Tea, Coffee and Provision Dealer. Tea and Coffee Box 1, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Utilizing middle-class consumer wisdom, purchasing tea direct from the grower (“Tea first hand,” according to the United Kingdom Tea Company) rather than paying the “extortionate prices” of middlemen and retail grocers would transform these lower-class women into much more efficient household managers. The ad indicates that they would thereby gain all the accoutrements of middle-class life, replacing their current setting of poverty and vulgar habits. The two illustrations from this ad for Lipton’s Teas encapsulate the transformative power of tea on the physical embodiment of social class.21 The poor women on the right of the Lipton’s Tea ad have exhibited unwise consumer choices in their purchase of tea, and these choices have physically shaped, or mis-shaped, their bodies and their behaviors (drinking tea from the saucer rather than from the cup). The causal relationship of the right-hand illustration suggests a similar logical relationship in the illustration on the left; if poor consumer choices create misshapen, lower-class bodies, then wise choices, discrimination, and good taste similarly result in the smiling, rounded forms of the middle-class women who have chosen to drink Lipton’s Teas.
Leitch Ritchie similarly attributes socially transformative power to tea drinking in “The Social Influence of Tea,” an article appearing in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1848. Ritchie boldly claims that “the moral reform and social improvement for which the present age is remarkable have had their basis in—tea. . . . I therefore propound that tea and the discontinuance of barbarism are connected in the way of cause and effect. . . . Tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of society” (65). According to Ritchie, nineteenth-century England’s penchant for tea drinking created an atmosphere of moral reform and social improvement, and he suggests that drinking tea causes a society to give up its previous barbaric, uncivilized tendencies. In this passage, Ritchie establishes a new binary of necessity and luxury, turning the traditional arguments about imported luxury goods on their heads. For Ritchie, drinking tea actually produced new needs—needs such as “the invention of a cup worthy of such a beverage” (65). Such needs gave rise to innovation, elegance, and beauty and “employ forty hands,” thus offering work and sustenance to the artisans who fulfilled those needs for the society at large,
