Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ Necessary luxuries: surely a new concept.*

      The president of the Royal Academy and a bourgeois housewife were agreed: necessities were no longer only basic food and shelter, those essentials that kept a person alive and able to function. And a couple of decades later, during the French Revolution, the sans-culottes of Paris showed that this attitude was not solely a middle-class development. In the desperate winter of 1792—3 the starving French workers rioted, demanding what they referred to as ‘goods of prime necessity’. These they carefully listed: soap, candles, sugar and coffee—goods their grandparents would have considered unimaginable luxuries. The more prosperous murmured disapprovingly that the rioters had not attacked bakeries, where they would have found bread, for centuries the staple food of Europe. Instead they attacked groceries.³⁵ What subsistence was, what was ‘necessary’, had altered for ever.

Part of this elision from luxury to necessity came from the rapid increase in the quantity of goods taxed in the eighteenth century. Numerous wars and the expansion of government saw duties quadruple. A partial list of goods that were taxed in the 1770s includes paper, newspapers, windows, horses, dogs, wagons, leather, printed silk and linen, starch, soap and candles (even soap and candles made from fat from one’s own animals), salt, hops, barley for beer, cider, perry, wine, spirits, tea,* coffee, sugar, molasses, spices and chocolate.³⁶ These were all, therefore, to a degree seen as luxuries, at least by the government. The people who were consuming these items, not unnaturally, felt differently. Luxuries such as soap, candles, salt and tea were in reality by this time clearly necessities to many. It is therefore easy to see how other taxed goods quickly took on a similar aura, and also became assimilated as necessities.

      The first advertisement for tea that has survived appeared in the 23—30 September 1658 issue of Mercurius Politicus, the official, governmentapproved political periodical. It notified readers that ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink, called by the Chineaus [Chinese], Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultanesshead, a Cophee-house in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exchange, London.’ That same year, Garraway’s coffee house in Exchange Alley also advertised tea, which it promised would cure, among other things, headache, stone, gravel, dropsy, ‘liptitude distillations’, scurvy, sleepiness, loss of memory, looseness of the guts, ‘heavy dreams’ and colic. Moreover, when ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar, tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, and with Milk and water it prevents Consumption.’³⁷

      It may be that this tea was being sold as a dry leaf, to take away and brew up at home, as medicine—the claims made for it resemble the advertisements for patent medicines over the next two centuries. But from 1660, when the commodity was first taken notice of by the Excise, the tax was levied on the brewed item: the initial tax was 8d. per gallon—the seller had to make the tea in bulk, have the excisemen check it, and then sell it. From 1689, however, the government moved to a tax on the dry leaf, which kept prices high, but did not require an exciseman in every coffee house.³⁸ From 1664 the East India Company began to import the commodity, but in such small quantities—only 100 pounds to begin with—that it is probable that it was being shipped in for those East India Company employees who had acquired a taste for the drink abroad.

      From this small base, consumption rose at astonishing rates. In 1741 Britain imported less than 800,000 pounds a year; by 1746—50 annual home consumption had reached more than 2.5 million pounds. Very swiftly, tea had become a drink that even the working class could afford, at least sometimes. By mid-century the lowest grades cost between 8 and 10s. a pound (the highest grades reached £1 16s.). There were advertisements recommending a certain leaf because it was ‘strong, and will endure the Change of Water three or four times’—that is, the thrifty housewife could reuse the leaves and still get—brown liquid? By 1748 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw so many of his flock spending money on tea that he wrote the minatory A Letter to a Friend Concerning TEA, while the philanthropist Jonas Hanway warned of the perils of tea and gin in an almost interchangeable vocabulary.³⁹

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 2s. 6d. 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 2s. per pound.⁴⁰ 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 1909.⁴¹* 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.⁴² 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.⁴³

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.⁴⁵СКАЧАТЬ