Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (9 page)

The consumption of tea was very quickly limited only by the high levels of tax. In 1795, during the French wars, tax was raised to a rate of 20 per cent; in 1801 it was 50 per cent for tea costing more than 2
s.
6
d.
a pound, 20 per cent for cheaper leaves; two years later the expensive blends were taxed at 95 per cent, and the nominally cheaper ones at 60 per cent; finally, by 1820, the tax was an eye-watering 100 per cent of the price for all teas costing over 2
s.
per pound.
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Even this was not enough to slow the seemingly insatiable demand. Between 1785 and 1800 the population increased by 14 per cent, while tea consumption went up by 97.7 per cent. In 1800 the East India Company’s imports stood at 21 million pounds a year; by 1820, 30 million pounds of tea a year were consumed in the United Kingdom; in 1850 it was 44.5 million pounds, or 1.5 pounds of tea for every man, woman and child in the country each year. Still the numbers went on rising—to 3.42 pounds a head in 1866, and 6.3 pounds in 1909.
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*
Given the amount of smuggling that
went on to get around the enormous tax burden, this was one of the earliest indications that the market was not, as economists had thought, a fixed object, but was instead infinitely expandable. As desirable goods appeared, the demand—and the market—would increase.

In the early eighteenth century, for the most part tea was sold by grocers. (Grocers were then at the luxury end of the market.) Then other luxury traders began to carry this new luxury good: china dealers, haberdashers, milliners. Mr Rose, a bookseller in Norwich, sold tea in 1707; Frances Bennett, a Bath draper, did the same in 1744, as did Cornelius Goldberg, a Birmingham toyman, in 1751. But now specialist tea dealers were appearing in large towns. By 1784 there were 32,754 licensed tea dealers, or 1 tea dealer for every 234 customers. Less than a decade later the number had risen by 60 per cent which, with the rise in population, meant that every 150 people were served by a single tea dealer. Even now, though, many tea retailers were performing multiple tasks: as late as 1803 there was Jones’s Druggist and Tea Dealer in Birmingham, and Thirsk had Jo. Napier, Milliner and Tea Dealer, in 1804. But this was no longer because tea was a luxury, but because it was a necessity. Once the masses began to drink tea, it had become readily available in all kinds of shops, from the grandest of grocers in London to the back-street shops set up on £10 capital.
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Even the poorest areas of the East End of London had shops selling tea—the notorious Ratcliff Highway had one, as did Wapping Wall. Another, on the ‘foulsome Butcher Row’, was a testament to the product’s popularity: however impoverished its clientele, at one point the shop held 119 pounds of tea in stock.
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Part of the reason that the consumption of tea soared so dramatically was that it was inextricably interwoven with another commodity: sugar. Both had arrived at roughly the same time in Britain, one from India, one from the West Indies. The development of cane sugar in the West Indian plantations had made many British fortunes, through the possibility of sales at dramatically reduced prices.
*
In 1660, about 1,000
hogsheads of sugar were consumed in Britain; by 1730 that had risen a hundredfold, to 100,000 hogsheads. By the mid-1770s, sugar imports were valued at £3.3 million. Sugar and tea were now no longer luxuries: they were national characteristics. Consumption was running at 20 pounds of sugar per person per year; and up to 10 per cent of all money spent on food and drink went on sugar and tea.
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*

Tea had not conquered the market on its intrinsic worth alone. From the late eighteenth century it was heavily advertised, using a range of new methods to entice customers. Many advertisements centred on competitive pricing: one merchant was ‘determined to sell teas at such low prices…as the public have a right to expect’, another, heroically, aimed ‘at profits only sufficient to defray expenses, wholesale and retail’. Many claimed to be selling tea more cheaply than anywhere else; others advertised reduced prices for bulk purchases. Many supposedly nineteenthand even twentieth-century innovations were happily tried out by these eighteenth-century tradesmen: some used the ‘loss-leader’, selling sugar at below-cost prices with the purchase of full-price tea; others gave the chance of good fortune with a lottery ticket free on purchase of a pound of tea;
†
some offered customers ‘a new treatise on tea’, available, not by coincidence, with the purchase of tea; still others advertised money-back guarantees if customers were dissatisfied; some promised to match wholesale prices, or even undercut them
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—and none of these advertisements suggested that these were new ways of selling.

One shopkeeper who embraced these methods enthusiastically was Edward Eagleton, of the Tea Warehouse in Cheapside. In the
Leeds Mercury
in 1786 he advertised reduced prices, fixed prices for cash, mail-order sales, and money-back guarantees; he offered to post samples, or customers could come into his Tea Warehouse to taste the goods. In other advertisements he promoted his prices, which were, he claimed, 1
s.
per pound lower than anyone else’s. He sold entire chests of East India Company tea to small shopowners with only a 1 per cent mark-up. His
most innovative move, however, was an arrangement with ‘outlets’ (it is unclear whether he meant shops or simply agents) in twenty-seven towns: he supplied them with packets of tea marked with his own sign, the Grasshopper, and advertised in local newspapers ‘fresh…teas…from Eagleton and Company…London…wholesale and retail…selling from ten to twenty per cent cheaper than [are now] sold…and carriage saved…[The tea is] packed and marked with the sign of the Grasshopper’, with a money-back guarantee and the motto ‘Taste, try, compare and judge’.
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All of these sales techniques had been tried before, but Eagleton was one of the first to bring them together. The next to take up the retail challenge was a man who had originally been a printer in a firm that produced lottery tickets. When Frederick Gye himself won £30,000 in a lottery, he set himself up as a tea dealer and quickly became one of the most important in the trade, mostly by dint of advertisements. Instead of advertising his tea, he advertised himself as an indissoluble part of his product. First and foremost, he promoted the sale of his packaged tea, which, he promised, would save the ‘Tea Trade from the opprobrium attached to it by the late disclosures of adulteration’, promising not to ‘buy nor sell Bohea tea
*
…so commonly used to adulterate better sorts’. (With this he was in fact blurring the line between blending tea—a legitimate job, and a highly skilled one—and adulterating it, and so attacking other dealers. Attack ads were one of his specialities.) The brand was now all-important: he promised that every order over a quarter of a pound would be sent in a sealed package with a wrapper carrying an engraving of his shop; the quality of the tea, its price and a seal were stamped on it. He used some of Eagleton’s other methods as well: free carriage within ten miles of London for cash sales, and agents ‘in every principal town in England’—by 1819, four months after his shop opened, he advertised that he had 100 agents; seven months after that he claimed to have 500. Other dealers resented this newcomer, and advertised in return, using his methods, and thus by the early nineteenth century advertisements in local papers, country agents, and prepacked, branded, pre-priced tea were commonplaces.
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When tea became fashionable, in the early eighteenth century, it
naturally became necessary to have the right accoutrements to brew it in and from which to drink it. We have seen that as late as the 1690s hot-drink utensils were rarely to be found domestically, while by 1725 most prosperous households had some.
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In the early part of the century porcelain had been imported from China, before local production stepped in to capture the market with equipment better suited to British rather than Chinese tea-drinking habits. In China, tea was brewed in a kettle, then cooled before drinking; in Britain, it was brewed in a teapot and poured out while still hot. Therefore the British teapot shape was adapted not from a Chinese tea kettle, but from a wine flask, with a handle added so that the tea could be poured before it was cooled; equally, handles on cups were useful for hot tea.
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Further, the British drank their tea sweetened, and with milk, so both a sugar bowl and a milk jug needed to be designed, along with a new size of spoon—the teaspoon—and a saucer on which to place the wet spoon, creating by the eighteenth century a British tea set that was considerably different from its Chinese ancestor.

Many manufacturers rushed to fill the void. In 1757 James Watt, soon to be known as the inventor of the steam engine, was working as ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University’ in Glasgow. Despite living a fairly straitened life, he wrote to his father asking him to send ‘
¹
/
₂
Doz afternoon China tea cups a stone teapot not too small a sugar Box & Slop Bowl as soon as possible’.
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The use of such precise terms is fascinating—a relatively poor man, Watt still specified ‘afternoon’ cups, as distinct, one assumes, from breakfast china, and a stoneware teapot, not an earthenware or porcelain one; also, the sugar and slop bowls
*
were not to be omitted. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Josiah Wedgwood had such an immediate success when he produced his Queensware in 1765.
†

It is almost impossible for us to realize today what a sensation china was when it first appeared. Before the eighteenth century, the rich in

Britain used silver and pewter; moderately prosperous households used pewter or, sometimes, early forms of earthenware; the poor used wood. European porcelain factories were set up under royal patronage after the secret of hard-paste porcelain was discovered by Meissen in 1709. The hard-paste porcelain from China, however, remained highly prized. The Dutch, who at that time held the monopoly on trade with the Chinese, sent drawings of their pewter and stoneware utensils for the Chinese to copy in porcelain: in this way the goods that arrived in Europe were at once startlingly new in material and reassuringly familiar in shape. A few factories began to produce soft-paste porcelain in Britain—Bow, Derby, Pomona, and Longton Hall in Staffordshire—but the cost of production was staggering: before any work could be carried out, for example, the clay had to be weathered for nearly three years. Without a beneficent monarch to pay the bills, these works had little chance of survival: Longton Hall was bankrupt by 1760, Bow in 1763.
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While this was bad news for porcelain manufacturers, it opened up the earthenware market to the manufacturer with an eye to the market. No one would have picked Josiah Wedgwood as that man of destiny at his birth: the twelfth child of a cadet branch of a family of potters in
Burslem,
*
he started in the general trade, as one of dozens of earthenware potters selling to the local retailers at the cheap end of the market. Earthenware was porous, and chipped and broke easily; stoneware, fired at higher temperatures, was a slightly better product, having a shiny, non-porous surface, but it was still fragile. By the 1760s, however, Wedgwood had produced his first technical breakthrough, which moved him from a local to a national market: creamware, an earthenware that could withstand sudden temperature changes without shattering, had a richly glazed surface, and was still relatively inexpensive. It also had a purer colour than had ever been achieved except with porcelain, and its worth was quickly recognized: in 1765 Queen Charlotte ordered a creamware tea set from him. The technical breakthrough was essential, and through his life Wedgwood continued to work at new methods and processes. Even when he was not the inventor himself, he always recognized important advances and quickly made use of them. In 1750 a mezzotint engraver had developed a way of using transfer printing on earthenware, to decorate it to look like hand-painted porcelain. Wedgwood swooped, and soon creamware was carrying black, rust or purple images of flowers, birds, garlands, genre scenes, classical groups, even Masonic emblems and designs to commemorate people and events—the King and Queen, Frederick the Great, Pitt, Wesley and John Wilkes were all immortalized in earthenware.

These advances would have occurred sooner or later, with or without Wedgwood; it was how he parlayed his successes into an empire that marked out Wedgwood—and his unfairly overlooked partner Thomas Bentley—as unique. Wedgwood saw the route ahead the minute the royal tea set had been ordered. He immediately renamed his creamware Queensware, and asked for the right to call himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’. He wrote to Bentley:

The demand for this said
Creamcolour
, Alias
Queen’s Ware
, Alias
Ivory
, still increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread allmost
†
over the whole Globe, how universally it is liked. How much of this general use, & estimation, is owing
to the mode of its introduction—& how much to its real utility and beauty? are questions in which we may be a good deal interested for the government of our future Conduct…For instance, if a Royal, or Noble introduction be as necessary for the sale of an Article of
Luxury
, as real Elegance & beauty, then the Manufacturer, if he consults his own interest will bestow as much pains, & expence too, if necessary, in gaining the former of these advantages, as he would in bestowing the latter.
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In 1770 Wedgwood wrote, as always, to Bentley:

Wo
^d
you
advertise
the next season as the silk mercers in Pell mell do,—Or
deliver cards
at the houses of the Nobility & Gentry, & in the City,—Get leave to
make a shew
of his Majesty’s Service for a month, & ornament the Dessert with Ornamental Ewers, flower baskets & Vases—Or have an
Auction
at Cobbs room of Statues, Bassreliefs, Pictures, Tripods, Candelabrias, Lamps, Potpouris, Superb Ewers, Cisterns, Tablets Etruscan, Porphirys & other Articles not yet expos’d to sale.
Make a great route of advertising this Auction
, & at the same time mention our rooms in Newport St—& have another Auction in the full season at Bath of such things as we now have on hand, just sprinkled over with a few new articles
to give them an air of novelty
to any of our customers who may see them there,—Or will you trust to a
new disposition of the Rooms
with the new articles we shall have to put into them & a few modest
puffs in the Papers
from some of our friends such as I am told there has been one lately in Lloyd’s Chronicle.
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