Tea
by Charles Knight (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.1 #11 (08 Jun 1850).
The history of tea, from its first introduction to England, may be read in the history of taxation. It appears to have escaped the notice of nearly all writers on tea, that the first tax is a curious illustration of the original mode of its sale. By the act of the 22d and 23d Charles II., 1670-1, a duty of eighteenpence was imposed upon 'every gallon of chocolate, sherbet, and tea, made and sold, to be paid by the makers thereof.' It is manifest that such a tax was impossible to be collected without constant evasion; and so, after having remained on the Statute Book for seventeen years, it was discovered, in 1688, that 'the collecting of the duty by way of Excise upon the liquors of coffee, chocolate, and tea, is not only very troublesome and unequal upon the retailers of these liquors, but requireth such attendance of officers as makes the neat receipt very inconsiderable.' The excise upon the liquor was therefore repealed, and heavy Customs' duties imposed on the imported tea.
The annals of tea may be divided into epochs. The first is that in which the liquid only was taxed, which tax commenced about ten years after we have any distinct record of the public or private use of tea. In 1660, dear old Pepys writes, 'I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.' In 1667, the herb had found its way into his own house: 'Home, and there find my wife making of tea; a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.'
Mrs. Pepys making her first cup of tea is a subject to be painted. How carefully she metes out the grains of the precious drug, which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, has sold her at a most enormous price—a crown an ounce at the very least. She has tasted the liquor once before; but then there was sugar ha the infusion—a beverage only for the highest. If tea should become fashionable, it will cost in housekeeping as much as their claret. However, Pepys says, the price is coming down; and he produces the handbill of Thomas Garway, in Exchange Alley, which the lady peruses with great satisfaction; for the worthy merchant says, that although 'tea in England hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes for ten pounds the pound weight,' he 'by continued care and industry in obtaining the best tea,' now 'sells tea for 16s. to 50s. a pound.' Garway not only sells tea in the leaf, but 'many noblemen, physicians, merchants, &c., daily resort to his house to drink the drink thereof.' The coffee-houses soon ran away with the tea-merchant's liquid customers. They sprang up all over London; they became a fashion at the Universities. Coffee and tea came into England as twin-brothers. Like many other foreigners, they received a full share of abuse and persecution from the people and the state. Coffee was denounced as 'hell
broth,' and tea as 'poison.' But the coffee-houses became fashionable at once; and for a century were the exclusive resorts of wits and politicians. 'Here,' says a pamphleteer of 1673, 'haberdashers of political small wares meet, and mutually abuse each other and the public, with bottomless stories and headless notions.' Clarendon, in 1666, proposed, either to suppress them, or to employ spies to note down the conversation. In 1670 the liquids sold at the coffee-houses were to be taxed. We can scarcely imagine a state of society in which the excise officer was superintending the preparation of a gallon of tea, and charging his eightpence. The exciseman and the spy were probably united in the same person. During this period we may be quite certain that tea was unknown, as a general article of diet, in the private houses even of the wealthiest. But it was not taxation which then kept it out of use. The drinkers of tea were ridiculed by the wits, and frightened by the physicians. More than ail, a new habit had to be acquired. The praise of Boyle was nothing against the ancient influences of ale and claret. It was then a help to excess instead of a preventive. A writer in 1682 says,—' I know some that celebrate good Thee for preventing drunkenness, taking it before they go to the tavern, and use it very much also after a debauch.' One of the first attractions of 'the cup which cheers but not inebriates' was as a minister of evil.
The second epoch of tea was that of excessive taxation; which lasted from the five shillings Customs' duty of 1688 to 1745, more than half a century, in which fiscal folly and prohibition were almost convertible terms. Yet tea gradually forced its way into domestic use. In a Tatler of 1710 we read 'I am credibly informed, by an antiquary who has searched the registers in which the bills of fare of the court are recorded, that instead of tea and bread and butter, which have prevailed of late years, the maids of honour in Queen Elizabeth's time were allowed three rumps of beef for their break-fast.' Tea for breakfast must have been expensive in 1710. In the original edition of the Tatler, we have many advertisements about tea, one of which we copy:—
From the Tatler of October 10, 1710.
"MR. FARY'S 16s. Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee Tea, is sold by himself only at the Bell in Gracechurch Street. Note,—the best Foreign Bohee is worth 30s. a pound; so that what is sold at 20s. or 21s. must either be faulty Tea, or mixed with a proportionate quantity of damaged Green or Bohee, the worst of which will remain black after infusion."
'Mr. Fary's 16s. Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee Tea' was, upon the face of it, an indigenous manufacture. 'The best Foreign Bohee is worth 30s. a pound.' With such Queen Anne refreshed herself at Hampton Court:
'Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'
When the best tea was at 30s. a pound, the home consumption of tea was about a hundred and forty thousand pounds per annum. A quarter of a century later, in the early tea-drinking days of Dr. Johnson, the consumption had quadrupled. And yet tea was then so dear, that Garrick was cross even with his favourite actress for using it too freely. 'I remember,' says Johnson, 'drinking tea with him long ago, when Peg Woffington made it, and he grumbled at her for making it too strong. He had then begun to feel money in his purse, and did not know when he should have enough of it.' In 1745, the last year of the second tea epoch, the consumption was only seven hundred and thirty thousand pounds per annum. Yet even at this period tea was forcing itself into common use. Duncan Forbes, in his Correspondence, which ranges from 1715 to 1748, is bitter against 'the excessive use of tea; which is now become so common, that the meanest families, even of labouring people, particularly in boroughs, make their morning's meal of it, and thereby wholly disuse the ale, which heretofore was their accustomed drink; and the same drug supplies all the labouring women with their afternoon's entertainments, to the exclusion of the twopenny.' The excellent President of the Court of Session had his prejudices; and he was frightened at the notion that tea was driving out beer; and thus, diminishing the use of malt, was to be the ruin of agriculture. Some one gave the Government of the day wiser counsel than that of prohibitory duties, which he desired.
In 1745, the quantity of tea retained for home consumption was 730,729 Ibs. In 1746, it amounted to 2,358,589 lbs. The consumption was trebled. The duty had been reduced, in 1745, from 4s. per lb. to 1s. per lb., and 25 per cent, on the gross price. For forty years afterwards, the Legislature contrived to keep the consumption pretty equal with the increase of the population, putting on a little more duty when the demand seemed a little increasing. These were the palmy days of Dr. Johnson's tea triumphs—the days in which he describes himself as 'a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evenings; with tea solaces the midnights; and with tea welcomes the morning.' This was the third epoch—that of considerable taxation, enhancing the monopoly price of an article, sold to the people at exorbitant profits.
In 1785, the Government boldly repealed the Excise duty; and imposed only a Customs' duty of 12½ per cent. The consumption of tea was doubled in the first year after the change, and quadrupled in the third. The system was too good to last. The concession of three years in which the public might freely use an article of comfort was quite enough for official liberality and wisdom. New duties were imposed in 1787; the consumption was again driven back, and by additional duty upon duty, was kept far behind the increase of the population for another thirty years. In 1784, the annual consumption was only 4,948,983 lbs.; in 1787, with a reduced duty, it was 17,047,054 lbs.; in 1807, when we had almost reached the climax of high duties, it was only 19,239.212 lbs. This state of things, with very slight alteration, continued till the peace. The consumption had been nearly stationary for thirty years, with a duty raised from 12½ per cent. to 96 per cent. Those were the days, which some of us may remember, when we paid 12s. a pound for our green tea, and 8s. for our black; the days when convictions for the sale of spurious tea were of constant occurrence; and yet the days when Cobbett was alarmed lest tea should become a common beverage, and calculated that between eleven and twelve pounds a year were consumed by a cottager's family in tea-chinking. During this fourth epoch of excessive taxation, the habit of tea-drinking had become so rooted in the people, that no efforts of the Government could destroy it. The teas under 2s. 6d. a pound (the Company's warehouse prices without duty), were the teas of the working classes—the teas of the cottage and the kitchen. In 1801, such teas paid only an excise of 15 per cent.; in 1803, they paid 60 per cent.; in 1806, 90 per cent. And yet the washerwoman looked to her afternoon 'dish of tea,' as something that might make her comfortable after her twelve hours' labour; and balancing her saucer on a tripod of three fingers, breathed a joy beyond utterance as she cooled the draught. The factory workman then looked forward to the singing of the kettle, as some compensation for the din of the spindle. Tea had found its way even to the hearth of the agricultural labourer. He 'had lost his rye teeth'—to use his own expression for his preference of wheaten bread—and he would have his ounce of tea as well as the best of his neighbours. Sad stuff the chandler's shop furnished him: no commodity brought hundreds of miles from the interior of China, chiefly by human labour; shipped according to the most expensive arrangements; sold under a limited competition at the dearest rate; and taxed as highly as its wholesale cost. The small tea-dealers had their manufactured tea. But they had also their smuggled tea. The pound of tea which sold for eight shillings in England, was selling at Hamburg for fourteenpence. It was hard indeed if the artisan did not occasionally obtain a cup of good tea at a somewhat lower price than the King and John Company had willed. No dealer could send out six pounds of tea without a permit. Excisemen were issuing permits and examining permits all over the kingdom. But six hundred per cent. profit was too much for the weakness of human nature and the power of the exciseman.
From the peace, to the opening of the China tea-trade in 1833, and the repeal of the excise duty in 1834, there was a considerable increase in the consumption of tea, but not an increase at all comparable to the increase since 1834. We consumed ten million pounds more tea in 1833 than in 1816, a period of sixteen years; we consumed in 1848, a period of fifteen years, seventeen million pounds more than in 1833. In 1848 we retained for home consumption, 48,735,791 pounds. It is this present period of large consumption which forms the fifth epoch.
The present duty on tea is 2s. 2¼d. a pound. The experienced housewife knows where to buy excellent tea at 4s. a pound. But there are shops in London where tea may be bought at 3s., and 3s. 4d. a pound. Such low priced teas are used more freely than ever by the hard-working poor. The duty is now unvarying, but enormously high. It is unnecessary to assume that the cheap teas are now adulterated teas. In the London Price Currents of the present May, there are several sorts of tea as low as 8d. per pound, wholesale without duty. The finer teas vary from 1s. to 2s. In 1833, previous to the opening of the China trade, the price of Congou tea in the Company's warehouses ranged from 2s. to 3s. per pound; in 1850 the lowest current price was 9d, the highest 1s. 4d. In 1833, the Company's price of Hyson tea varied from 3s. to 5s. Gd; in 1850, the lowest current price was 1s. 2d., the highest 3s. 4d.
With the amount of duty on tea twice as high in 1850 as in 1833, how is it that tea may be universally bought at one half of the price of 1833! How is it that an article which yields five millions of revenue has become so cheap that it is now scarcely a luxury? Before we answer this, let us explain why we say that the duty is twice as high now as in 1833. Before the opening of the China trade tea was taxed under the Excise at an ad-valorem duty of ninety-six per cent on one sort, and one hundred per cent on another, which gave an average of about half-a-crown a pound. Those who resisted the destruction of the Company's monopoly predicted that the supply would fall off under the open trade; that the Chinese would not deal with private merchants; that the market for tea in China was a limited one; that tea would become scarcer and dearer. The Government knew better than this. It repealed the Excise duty with all its cumbrous machinery of permits; and it imposed a Customs' duty at per pound, which exists now, as it did in 1836, with the addition of five per cent. Had the duty of 1833 been continued,—the hundred per cent duty—the great bulk of tea, which is sold at an average of a shilling a pound would have been only taxed a shilling a pound; it is now taxed 2s. 2¼d. By a side-wind, the Government, with what some persons may call financial foresight, doubled the tax upon the humbler consumers. But it may be fairly questioned whether, if the tax of 1833 had continued, the Government would not have secured as much revenue by the poor doubling their consumption of tea. The demand for no article of general use is so fluctuating as that for tea. In seasons of prosperity, the consumption rises several millions of pounds above the average; in times of depression it falls as much below. Tea is the barometer of the poor man's command of something more than bread. With a tax of 2s. 2¼d. a pound, it is clear that if sound commercial principles, improved navigation, wholesale competition, and moderate retail profits, had not found their way into the tea-trade, since the abolition of the monopoly in 1833, the revenue upon tea would have been stationary, instead of having increased a million and a half. All the manifold causes that produce commercial cheapness in general—science, careful employment of capital in profitable exchange, certainty and rapidity of communication, extension of the market—have been especially working to make tea cheap. Tea is more and more becoming a necessary of life to all classes. Tea was denounced first as a poison, and then as an extravagance. Cobbett was furious against it. An Edinburgh Reviewer of 1823, keeps no terms with its use by the poor: 'We venture to assert, that when a labourer fancies himself refreshed with a mess of this stuff, sweetened by the coarsest black sugar, and with azure blue milk, it is only the warmth of the water that soothes him for the moment; unless, perhaps, the sweetness may be palatable also.' It is dangerous even for great reviewers to 'venture to assert.' In a few years after comes Liebig, with his chemical discoveries; and demonstrates that coffee and tea have become necessaries of life to whole nations, by the presence of one and the same substance in both vegetables, which has a peculiar effect upon the animal system; that they were both originally met with amongst nations whose diet is chiefly vegetable; and, by contributing to the formation of bile, their peculiar function, have become a substitute for animal food to a large class of the population whose consumption of meat is very limited, and to another large class who are unable to take regular exercise.
Tea and coffee, then, are more especially essential to the poor. They supply a void which the pinched labourer cannot so readily fill up with weak and sour ale; they are substitutes for the country walk to the factory girl, or the seamstress in a garret. They are ministers to temperance; they are home comforts. Mrs. Piozzi making tea for Dr. Johnson till four o'clock in the morning, and listening contentedly to his wondrous talk, is a pleasant anecdote of the first century of tea; the artisan's wife, lingering over the last evening cup, while her husband reads his newspaper or his book, is something higher, which belongs to our own times.