Why tax tea and coffee, which are the antidotes to spirits, and a free and cheap use of which would in all probability, supersede the use of spirits?
Edward Brodribb, speech on Taxation before the Financial Reform Association, Liverpool, 22 November 1849Footnote 1When arguing for lower taxes on tea and coffee, tea broker Edward Brodribb employed rhetoric common to both early nineteenth-century free traders and temperance activists, who were then eagerly promoting the consumption of what they regarded as sacred and useful pleasures. In Britain, the belief that tea and coffee were “antidotes to spirits” had been around since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when medical and religious authorities, politicians and journalists, retailers and consumers had first proclaimed that tea, for example, was “a delicious Nectar” that had “all the good Effects of wine without any of the ill.”Footnote 2 In 1785, evangelical poet William Cowper captured these sentiments well when he labeled tea as “the Cup that Cheers but does not inebriate.”Footnote 3 Nonetheless, into the nineteenth century an equal number of experts worried about the dire consequences that would result from the production, importation, and consumption of these foreign commodities.Footnote 4 This essay highlights the role of temperance in assuaging anxieties and promoting the consumption of tea in early Victorian Britain.Footnote 5
Victorian temperance was a religiously and politically inspired consumer movement that shaped more than drink habits. It created new material and gustatory cultures, generating social and leisure practices that endowed food and drink with moral and pleasurable meanings about the self and the sacred. As the other essays in this forum also make clear, food and drink came to define class, community, and nation in very intimate yet also public ways in Victorian Britain. Debates such as whether roast beef should be served in the workhouse or fears about the healthiness of German sausages show us how political and other public discourses created meanings and tastes.Footnote 6 Tastes and distastes were thus forged in the public sphere, in workhouses and temperance halls, as much as they were in the kitchen and dining room. As we will see here, through the creation of a public culture of consumption, temperance advocates and their followers bestowed tea and its accompaniments, especially sugar and cotton, with a great deal of power. They implied that by drinking tea instead of alcohol, consumers would achieve class and gender harmony, political citizenship, and a heavenly home.
Many a temperance reformer had long advocated the moderate drinking of beer, wine, and cider, and such beliefs were remarkably long-lived. However, in the first half of the nineteenth century, several temperate groups with quite different political views and social backgrounds began to promote tea and coffee as antidotes to intemperance. Owenite socialists, Chartists, liberals, evangelicals, and missionaries served tea and coffee at soirées, bazaars, and tea parties to draw women to their cause and to inculcate a culture of sobriety within and beyond their communities. Tea and coffee were especially endorsed by the total abstinence or teetotal societies that emerged in the industrial communities in the north of England and in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the early 1830s and 1840s. “Teetotal” signified those who pledged to abstain from selling or consuming all alcohol, not an appreciation for tea per se. This branch of the temperance movement drank tea at home, but they also consumed what they viewed as sacred and useful pleasures in new public settings. They opened coffee shops and temperance hotels, and hosted, attended, and wrote about mass meals that came to be known as the temperance tea parties. In political debates about taxation and free trade, in sermons and tracts, through businesses and everyday practices, and in tea parties, temperance distinguished between productive and unproductive, moral and immoral, consumer behaviors and commodities. Believing in the power of education, moral suasion, and substitution as the best means to fight alcohol and the public house, temperance built a sober consumer culture of halls and hotels, coffee shops, and tea parties.Footnote 7
The temperance tea parties that I focus on here were gustatory spectacles in which hundreds and at times thousands of working- and middle-class men and women gathered in a beautifully decorated setting to drink tea and coffee, feast on sugary foods, sing hymns, and listen to reformed drunkards and others preach the righteousness of sobriety. As Joseph Livesey, one of the leaders of the teetotal movement, explained, tea parties were “congenial and relatively inexpensive” mass affairs in which tea and the “companionship of females” softened and refined the manners of rough and rowdy workingmen.Footnote 8 Relying on such gendered narratives, scholars have often assumed that tea was a feminine pleasure primarily enjoyed within the private home.Footnote 9 However, although tea did have a feminine reputation, this gendering was not a social fact so much as an argument that advocates made when selling this commodity as a sobering or civilizing agent. Temperance advocates served tea to signify that women, as well as men, were welcome and desired. Tea's presence on the menu advertised an event as heterosocial, and this in turn implied that men and women would be expected to comport themselves in a respectable and “civilized” manner. Like the workhouse, the temperance movement created new class and gender identities, but unlike the workhouse, it did not separate the classes and sexes. Instead, the tea party disciplined consumers through satisfying the body and encouraging pleasurable cross-class and cross-gender interactions. The behaviors and values inculcated at the tea table would then, temperance advocates hoped, radiate to the home and the workplace.
Livesey and other like-minded temperance advocates believed that the mass consumption of tea could solve the central conundrum of an industrializing and expanding imperial economy: how to make modern efficient laborers and consumers. The temperance movement did not conceive of the consumer in precisely the same way that liberal theorists and activists would in the twentieth century, but it did address followers as consumers and believe that the reform of dietary, material, and other consumer practices would lead to spiritual and bodily health in addition to social—and for some even political—citizenship.Footnote 10 Temperance developed a moral narrative about the many rewards that would come with disciplining or channeling one's consumer desires. Advocates articulated and demonstrated these ideas through serving specific foods and drinks in particular settings decorated within meaningful décor. The commodities and consumers present at a temperance tea were then the mis-en-scène that constituted a spatial and material, visual and culinary performance. Ultimately, the temperance tea party functioned on several levels to promote, give meaning to, and manage the culture of consumption taking shape in the early nineteenth century.
Workers' enthusiasm for teetotalism and temperance tea parties does not indicate that they accepted the argument that tea was good for them. People joined the movement for a variety of reasons and did not always accept the values that leaders envisioned or promoted. It is helpful then to consider the movement as a site of struggle and a place in which notions of personhood and materiality were expressed and debated.Footnote 11 In his magisterial account of Victorian temperance, Brian Harrison argued that temperance contributed to changing material, culinary, and drinking cultures, particularly aiding the long-term shift from beer and spirits to more temperate drinks.Footnote 12 Of course, many just added new drinks to their diet, and the public house remained an epicenter of British working-class life throughout the nineteenth century, despite the growth of temperance. This essay, however, does not dispute Harrison's point, because I am not making a causal argument about temperance and shifting drink cultures and dietary habits here. Instead, I concentrate on the temperance tea party as a promotional occasion, something akin to an advertisement or any other mass cultural form that legitimated certain commodities while denigrating others as irrational, wasteful, and harmful.
Like advertisements, the tea party was understood and misunderstood differently by the workers, shopkeepers, manufactures, and merchants who attended these affairs. Cotton operatives who were experiencing the shift to the factory and facing reduced wages and restricted leisure no doubt appreciated the abundant food and drink served up at a tea party. These communities, as Anna Clark has shown, were especially coming to believe that abstention from drink would bring domestic happiness, social improvement, and political citizenship.Footnote 13 Small shopkeepers who helped found and were eager followers of the teetotal movement wanted to mark their place in respectable society, but they also assumed they would accrue profits that were typically spent at the public house. Large manufacturers were religiously inspired, but as Brian Harrison proposed long ago, many believed that temperance would create a sober workforce and stable domestic and foreign markets. Mill owners imagined that by stimulating the widespread consumption of tea in Britain, which was still entirely sourced from China, they would produce a mass market in China for British manufactured goods.Footnote 14 Evangelicals frowned on worldly pleasures and avoided dancing, drinking, and other stimulating and ungodly pastimes, but they did promote acceptable material comforts and consumer habits.Footnote 15 Whatever their politics, religion, and social position, diverse interests came together as a community at tea parties. At such meals, and as members of temperance organizations, tens of thousands of middle-class and working-class men and women thus shaped the history of British consumer culture.Footnote 16 Discourses and movements that sought to restrain and manage the consumer thus also promoted desire and pleasure. In truth, restraint and pleasure were ever intertwined.Footnote 17
“There Is No Useful Strength in It”: Tea and the Working Class in Early Industrial Britain
Early modern attitudes toward tea and coffee lingered long into the nineteenth century. As Brian Cowan, Sidney Mintz, and others have explained, early modern Europeans had seen these exotic substances as foods and yet also as drugs that were part of similar medical, commercial, and consumer cultures.Footnote 18 The meanings surrounding these ingestible commodities were as dependent on cultural contexts as they were on any inherent quality.Footnote 19 Bodily feelings were never simply the stuff of physiology or even habit. A sweet cup of tea in 1830s Britain was flavored by shifting conditions of labor on sugar plantations in the West Indies, by deteriorating relations with China, and by yearnings for alternative sources of supply in India that had not yet materialized.Footnote 20 Industrialization, class and gender ideologies, political reform, and religious revival informed habits and tastes.
Although there was a great deal of diversity in its adoption, tea became a mass commodity—that is, something purchased on a regular basis by people at varying income levels—by the middle part of the eighteenth century.Footnote 21 Many elite and middle-rank households, along with some lower-class communities, took to tea between 1700 and 1725, but as Lorna Weatherill has put it, the “consumption hierarchy was not exactly the same as the social hierarchy.”Footnote 22 Plebian consumption dramatically expanded with the reduction in prices that followed the Commutation Act in 1784.Footnote 23 Yet during the first third of the nineteenth century, demand failed to keep pace with population growth. Decades of war had been paid for in part by raises in the tea duty from a low 12½ percent in 1784 to 95 percent ad valorem in 1804, eventually increasing to 100 percent of the tea's value by 1824.Footnote 24 Chinese fiscal policies and high transport costs within China, and between China and Britain, also contributed to especially high retail prices in Britain in the 1830s, a situation that contributed to widespread smuggling and adulteration.Footnote 25 These practices, as well as the end of the East India Company's monopoly of the tea trade in 1833, make it especially difficult to assess prices. We do know that the working classes were paying more for their tea in the 1830s than they had for decades, and consumption suffered as a result.Footnote 26 At the same time, beer consumption was on the decline owing to a shift away from home brewing coupled with high taxes. In the 1830s, the decline of both beer and tea were at times taken as a sign of growing impoverishment of the working classes.Footnote 27
In general, however, speaking in terms of national markets and averages makes very little sense in these years when regional tastes predominated. For example, as late as the 1840s, tea was very popular in Edinburgh and along the English border, yet it was almost unknown in the north of Scotland and in the Highlands.Footnote 28 The Irish middle and upper classes, domestic servants, and Ulster weavers incorporated the beverage into their diets in the eighteenth century, but the latter group abandoned the habit as they faced economic distress in the nineteenth century. Tea thus only became the staple drink for Ireland's urban poor at the very end of the century.Footnote 29 Dietary changes, then, did not occur in a sudden consumer revolution or follow a straight upward curve.
Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, tea's presence in so many shops and larders, and its centrality to foreign trade and to government finances, meant that it garnered a great deal of public attention, and various individuals and groups were compelled to weigh in on its place in British society, political economy, and diets. Attitudes, like markets, did not fall into clear social, political, or geographic groupings, and some radicals, liberals, and conservatives were alike in their belief that, especially for Britain's laborers, tea was a wasteful commodity that consumed time and money without providing true energy. Some pointed out the dangers of adulteration, while others argued that tea was an intoxicant and no different than other nefarious substances that depleted working-class resources and bodies.Footnote 30 A key articulation of the anti-tea argument came from radical journalist William Cobbett. In Cottage Economy (1822), Cobbett identified how tea wasted women's labor and men's time. Far from being a new “convenience” food that could be made with little effort, Cobbett demonstrated how brewing tea involved numerous repetitive acts that turned the rural housewife into a domestic slave. At the same time, men became idlers, wasting hours “hanging about waiting for the tea.” Cobbett quantified cost in terms of time, space, and the price of the whole cluster of commodities spent on the tea habit, including milk, sugar, fuel, and “tea-tackle.” “[A] destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age,” tea, Cobbett opined, was a dangerously wasteful commodity. Furthermore, he insisted that “[t]here is no useful strength in it—it does not contain anything nutritious—and, besides being good for nothing, it has badness in it. . . . [I]t communicates no strength to the body,” and therefore “does not in any degree assist in affording what labour demands.”Footnote 31 Tea was thus unhealthy, unproductive, effeminizing, and unsuited to the lifestyle of the farm laborer. Relying on an imagined past that privileged local goods, self-sufficiency, and low taxes, Cobbett's nostalgia was in part a means to gain support from estate owners who produced grain used to brew beer.Footnote 32
Cobbett's jeremiads were hardly unique, however. In the 1820s, liberal and radical temperance reformers made similar points when they argued that a free trade in beer would combat excessive spirit consumption.Footnote 33 Lord Brougham, the Whig statesman who favored political reform, abolition, and temperance, denounced tea because it did not lead to “the cultivation of one single acre of English land.” Brougham preferred beer, “a good sound, wholesome, constitutional beverage.”Footnote 34 Anglican cleric and temperance advocate Sidney Smith expressed the same idea when he asked, “What two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia!”Footnote 35 Many radicals and liberals toasted Britannia with a pint of ale and were as yet unconvinced about the merits of the Chinese brew.
Georgian and early Victorian evangelicals were also divided about the social and spiritual significance of tea drinking. John Wesley personally renounced the brew in the 1740s, but by 1761 he had not only returned to drinking tea, but he commissioned Josiah Wedgwood to make him a one-gallon teapot.Footnote 36 Other serious Christians, however, worried that tea was an unnecessary modern luxury that undermined working-class efforts to produce moral domestic spaces. Esther Copley, the daughter of a Huguenot silk manufacturer, wife of a Baptist minister, and prolific writer, made this argument in Cottage Comforts (1825), a book that was designed to instruct the “labouring classes” on how “to provide themselves with decent habitation, wholesome food, and suitable raiment.”Footnote 37 Appropriating much from Cobbett, Copley was really of two minds about tea. Though she recommended “a good copper tea-kettle” as the most durable type for the working-class larder, she nevertheless insisted that “tea is a luxury and the less of it there is used in a cottager's family, the better it will be for their pockets, and certainly not worse for their health.” She also bemoaned the decline of the older breakfast of bread and cheese, beer, and porridge. Like Cobbett, Copley longed for a time of rural and domestic self-sufficiency, represented by home-brewed beer and warm “infusions of mint, roasted grain,” and other “British herbs,” which were “just as good and pleasant as the foreign tea.”Footnote 38 Cobbett and Copley were primarily concerned with the shifting dietary and consumer habits of farm laborers in commercializing southern England, which consisted of formerly prosperous communities known to enjoy prodigious amounts of beef and beer.Footnote 39 Tea consumption seemed to grow with the impoverishment of these communities, leading many a social observer to write of tea as the symbol and even the cause of economic decline.
Tea and alcohol were not entirely distinct in the public mind, in politics, or in daily practices. During and after the wars with France, tea, coffee, and alcohol were all heavily taxed items, and many a radical urged abstention from buying, selling, or drinking these commodities as a way to protest corruption in an unreformed government.Footnote 40 The Bath Union Society for Parliamentary Reform spelled this out when it “earnestly recommended” that its members not spend “Money at public houses, because half of the said Money goes to Taxes, to feed the Maggots of Corruption.”Footnote 41 In Glasgow, reformers abstained from whiskey, ale, tobacco, and tea. A Scottish radical association even produced a “sinecure teapot . . . with the gudwife's compliments to be smashed by the leader.” Women activists carried “inverted gill stoups [whiskey glasses] and teapots at demonstrations along with placards proclaiming ‘No luxuries.’”Footnote 42 Scotland had a history of rowdy anti-tea politics dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, when a popular campaign had passed resolutions “to stamp out the tea menace.” This movement characterized tea as a “foreign” luxury, which, according to one group of tenant farmers, was inappropriate for “the more robust and manly parts of our business.” Foreign luxuries, the farmers proposed, should be left to the wealthy or “those who can afford to be weak, indolent and useless.”Footnote 43 As is well known, sugar also came in for a particularly harsh critique when abolitionists boycotted slave-produced West Indian sugar. While this movement drove home the point that even the poorest consumer shared in the enslavement of the African, it also highlighted the political potential of organizing such consumers.Footnote 44
In the postemancipation era, social observers carried on and extended this critique to suggest that, through their consumption, sugar and tea contributed to the enslavement of the British working classes living in northern industrial cities. Seeing food as a barometer of social and economic change, liberals and radicals pointed to the prevalence of bread, sugar, tea, and coffee in working-class diets as symptoms and causes of social, moral, and physiological decline. Noting how tea and alcohol consumption were similar rather than distinct consumer practices, liberal William Rathbone Greg argued that poor-quality weak tea was especially “fatal to the constitution of all working men.” Tea, he argued, was but a temporary means to relieve “internal languor and depression.” Even worse, drinking tea often “calls for another and stronger stimulus; and it is generally the case, that those among the work people who have been long habituated to the use of tea as a frequent meal, are at length reduced to mix a large proportion of spirits in every cup they take. This pernicious practice prevails to an inconceivable extent among our manufacturing population, at every age, and in both sexes.”Footnote 45 Dr. James Phillips Kay, Peter Gaskell, and Friedrich Engels also insisted that weak tea mixed with spirits and other stimulants signified poverty rather than prosperity.”Footnote 46 Dr. William Alcott, a temperance enthusiast, similarly called tea a “narcotic” that provided only a “fictitious strength.” As he put it: “The female who restores her strength by tea and the laboring man by a glass of spirits, and the Turk by his pill of opium are in precisely the same condition; so far, we mean, as the matter of stimulation is concerned.”Footnote 47 Along the same lines, another temperance activist warned, “Tea-drinking visits open the floodgates of various temptations.”Footnote 48
All these writers associated tea with the decline of the working classes. So too did E. P. Thompson, who famously quipped that the working man's “share in the ‘benefits of economic progress’ consisted of more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review.”Footnote 49 Tea, Thompson insisted, did not make up for the long and tedious hours of factory life, the loss of traditional forms of leisure, and intense political and social repression. In his seminal study of sugar, Sidney Mintz made a similar argument, though he widened the implications of this debate to show how cheap tea and sugar reproduced the British and the colonial working classes. Mintz acknowledged the long and varied ways that tea and sugar became absorbed into British culture and diets, but he replicated the rhetoric of temperance advocates when he proposed that factory workers took to tea because it was a cheap and convenient fuel for machinelike industrial bodies.Footnote 50 If we can believe Cobbett, tea may not have been as cheap or as convenient as Mintz assumed. As Cobbett pointed out, calculating cost should include the collective price of fuel, sugar, milk, and tea. He also factored in time and household labor, still significant in this era. When factory workers drank tea, they were not just reacting to cost, nor were they simply responding to new economic, social, and physiological needs and time pressures. They certainly were not being forced by their employers to drink tea, and they were not being bought off or seduced by mass culture. Rather, they participated in its creation.Footnote 51 One place in which we can see working- and middle-class reformers inventing consumer culture is at the temperance tea parties that grew and spread during the 1830s. These events were not solely responsible for the spread of the tea habit, but they do suggest that consumer practices associated with the afternoon tea did not simply trickle down the social ladder.
Standard histories of the ritual of afternoon tea assert that Anna Maria, the wife of the 7th Duke of Bedford, invented this meal in the 1840s in order to offset hunger and fatigue in the long afternoon hours between luncheon—also a new meal—and dinner, which was moving later.Footnote 52 The reality is far more complicated. At least a decade before the duchess turned the evening tea party into an afternoon affair, workers, shopkeepers, merchants, and manufacturers began to drink tea and eat sugary foods in the evening and the afternoon in schoolrooms, factories, and temperance and other meeting halls across Britain and its empire.Footnote 53 The duchess was an evangelical Christian, and it is quite likely that she knew about, attended, or even hosted temperance teas. Much more work is needed on the specific social networks that made such habits fashionable among different segments of British and imperial society. In particular, we still need to study the significance of religion in shaping Victorian foodways. However, by looking at the temperance tea party in early industrial Britain, we can see how local communities endowed the hot brew with specific religious, political, class, gender, and racial connotations.
Food and Feasting in a Sober Society
On 11 July 1832, 540 working men and women from the northern industrial town of Preston attended a new type of public banquet that became known as the Temperance Tea Party.Footnote 54 This meal was held in the Cloth Hall of the Corn Exchange in the middle of race day, traditionally a time of excessive drinking. The location, timing, menu, decorations, and table equipage set out, along with the speeches and songs performed, brought to mind the promises of sobriety and free trade. Tea was the star of the show, but the piles of bread and butter, cakes and fruit, and cotton decorations also lent much flavor to the affair. A reporter for the temperance journal the Moral Reformer described Preston's Tea Party as a feast for the eyes and stomach, and proof of the civilizing effects of cross-class and heterosocial forms of leisure. The walls, this sympathetic observer pointed out, were “entirely covered with bleached calico, tastefully arrayed, and decorated with various emblems.” The food and drink were “good” and the tea “served up with so much order and regularity as to astonish the visitors.” Men who “had never been absent from the races, usually intoxicated, [were] now seated at the table with their wives and friends!” After tea was served, various speakers addressed the audience, and the next day the speeches continued at a field meeting on Preston Moor. This had surely been, the journalist concluded, a “feast of reason.”Footnote 55
Incorporating the public nature of radical and reform politics with Methodist-style tent meetings and the use of personal testimony in the conversion experience, the temperance tea party can be seen as a material and culinary expression of popular liberalism and evangelical revival.Footnote 56 Inspired by the founding of the American Temperance Society in 1826, British anti-spirit societies formed independently of one another in the summer of 1829. By 1830, most major cities had such a society, including Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Dublin, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Bradford, and London.Footnote 57 Like earlier movements, none of these new societies initially required total abstinence. They campaigned against spirits and worried that the reduction of taxes on spirits in 1825 had increased drunkenness.Footnote 58 The passage of the Beer Act of 1830, which no longer required beer sellers to obtain licenses from magistrates, had also appeared to increase this sin. Whether true or not, philanthropists and politicians proclaimed alcohol abuse as the social problem of the day. Only twelve days after the passage of the Beer Act, Sidney Smith wrote, “Everybody is drunk.”Footnote 59 Temperance enthusiast, radical, and oriental traveler James Silk Buckingham made a similar point before the House of Commons in 1834. Using evidence from police reports, coroners' inquests, and hospital and public records in England, Scotland, and Ireland, Buckingham argued that there was the “most irresistible proof . . . that Intemperance, like a mighty and destroying flood, is fast overwhelming the land.”Footnote 60
The teetotal movement, or turn to total abstinence, emerged in part as a reaction to the successes and disappointments of radical politics. The passage of the Beer Act and the failure to achieve universal suffrage with the passage of the Reform Act in 1832 turned many moderates into total abstainers and activists. As James Vernon has explained, some radicals came to believe that it was “their mobbish unrespectability,” among other things, that had led to “the great middle-class betrayal.”Footnote 61 Even before this disillusionment, Robert Owen and his followers took up temperance to bring about gender and social equality within radical families, politics, and society at large.Footnote 62 At least a year before Preston's first tea party, socialists and feminists began hosting teas to raise money and further their cause.Footnote 63 On such occasions, several hundred men and women (and sometimes children) ate and drank temperate beverages, listened to and made speeches, and danced into the late hours. In early spring of 1831, for example, a Belfast co-operative society hosted a tea party of about a hundred persons, many of whom were described as “respectable well dressed females.” “No spirituous liquors” were served, so speakers toasted their radical heroes and heroines over cups of coffee. They honored “Working people, the source of all wealth” and looked forward to the “the withering blight of competition” giving way to the “rising sun of Co-operation.” “Miss Frances Wright, Mrs. Wheeler, and the Rights of Women,” Dr. Birkbeck and the movement for mechanics institutes, Robert Owen, and Lord Brougham were all similarly honored before the room was cleared for dancing.Footnote 64 There were many similar demonstrations of radical tea drinking, such as an all-female tea party held in Brighton in 1836 to protest the New Poor Law, often termed the “Starvation Act.”Footnote 65 Radical communities thus invested tea and the sober consumer culture of temperance with the power to bring about political as well as social citizenship for men and women. Evangelical teetotalers drew upon this rich radical ceremonial tradition. However, as Barbara Taylor has pointed out, while socialist temperance advocates “urged the money saved through abstinence from alcohol should be invested in communities,” evangelical advocates assumed that abstinence would “lead working people into sober, industrious behavior within the existing system.”Footnote 66 Taylor noted, moreover, that teetotalers sometimes clashed with their more radical colleagues, even banning them from their meetings.
Teetotalers nevertheless vigorously worked to create cross-class and mixed-gender societies. They tried to appeal to middle-class industrial elites, large merchants, small shopkeepers, and factory operatives—groups that often clashed but were also drawn together by nonconformity, family and business connections, and by some political issues as well.Footnote 67 This community was profoundly strained, but it did not entirely break after the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832 and the class tensions that grew thereafter. Indeed, it was in the cotton town of Preston in 1832 that Joseph Livesey, a self-educated-handloom-weaver-turned-cheese-factor, and several other Lancashire merchants and working men founded the teetotal movement.Footnote 68 Like Livesey, many but not all of the movement's leadership had been involved in political reform and would later become active in the Anti-Corn Law League, the fight to lower the tea duties in the 1830s and 1840s, and other similar causes. The movement flourished among nonconformist textile manufacturing communities in Ireland, Scotland, and England. It gained support from Whig newspapers such as the Preston Chronicle, and cotton manufacturers and their wives and daughters joined societies, and hosted and spoke at meetings.Footnote 69 Temperance was part of a broader middle-class social practice of self-improvement and benevolence that sought to inculcate thrift and good behavior among workers. It was a means through which a new middle class sought to affirm its own “social aspirations and identity.”Footnote 70 It was also an expression of religious affiliation and beliefs.
Organizers of temperance tea parties nearly always proclaimed that they were promoting “sobriety, industry and religion.”Footnote 71 Teetotalism was, as one historian put it, permeated with “popular evangelicalism.” The movement used propaganda techniques and methods of organization learned in both American and British revivalism.Footnote 72 The first meeting of Preston's society was presided over by a Wesleyan minister and held in a Wesleyan chapel. Livesey was a Scotch Baptist who sought to model his conduct on the “charitable and forgiving spirit of Jesus.”Footnote 73 Anglicans and many Wesleyans were ambivalent or even hostile to total abstinence, but the Congregationalists, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians in the West of England, and Calvinistic Methodists in Wales were quite enthusiastic. Long before teetotal societies formed in the 1830s, the working-class Salford Bible Christian Church developed a Christian diet that abstained from “the use of animal food and intoxicating liquors.”Footnote 74 Quakers were more lenient. They banned believers from making, selling, or drinking hard alcohol, but they saw nothing wrong with beer, and notable Quaker families like the Cadburys built business empires selling temperance brews.Footnote 75 Evangelical organizations that were not solely dedicated to temperance also became committed to tea and tea parties. In his diary in 1846, the Earl of Shaftesbury recorded that he had chaired a tea party at the new evangelical organization the YMCA. His description replicated the language of temperance literature when he noted how it had been “a very striking scene” to see four hundred “shopmen, with their mothers and sisters, attending really in a religious spirit.”Footnote 76 Nonconformist ministers, who were gaining professional status and becoming spiritual and cultural leaders in industrial cities, frequently preached at tea parties. Former drunkards also stood before the crowds and confessed how religion had helped them give up the “love of the glass,” as one pensioner put it during a Bolton tea party in October 1833. Since joining the New Temperance Society, this pensioner explained how it had been fourteen weeks since he had tasted anything stronger than “tea or coffee.” He now believed he would “be able to live more consistently as a professor of our holy religion.”Footnote 77 Such confessions sanctified tea and other temperance drinks as the symbol of, and the path to, a holy life.
Broadly speaking, the temperance movement was divided about how or whether the government should regulate drink. Though some proponents were committed to government intervention, in a more general way tea parties constructed a liberal and Christian notion of the self. In particular, speeches, hymns, and tracts appealed to both liberal and Christian beliefs in the power of the individual to overcome his or her past. As in the United States, such narratives could be said to have transformed “an ancient virtue of moderation into a distinctively liberal practice of freedom.”Footnote 78 The décor, banners, and food at the temperance tea party also illustrated a liberal story, one that showed how calicos, plentiful food, and tea were legitimate and desirable forms of working-class consumption. The material and gastronomic culture of the temperance tea party thus fashioned a mixed-class crowd into a market. Abstinence did not imply renunciation of the sensual or the material. Rather, temperance advocates addressed their followers as consumers whose desires could become moral and profitable.
Frequently held during the Christmas season, tea parties celebrated the holiday as a time of feasting and family togetherness rather than drunken revelry, transforming this once raucous holiday into a consumer-oriented family affair.Footnote 79 Whenever they were held, tea parties provided a brief taste of the sweet life and showed how the rejection of certain material pleasures would bring an ever-lasting world of copious food, moral drinks, and domestic happiness. Temperance journals described such affairs in delicious detail. For example, we know that 1,200 men and women attended a Temperance Tea on Christmas Day in 1834. As they had at previous events, the organizers draped the walls and windows of Preston's Cloth Hall with white cambric decorated with colored rosettes and evergreen garlands. The same material covered 630 feet of tables and the 40 former drunkards who served tea dressed in white aprons printed with the word “temperance” on the front. The Preston Temperance Advocate explained that “the tables were loaded with provisions, and plenty seemed to smile upon the guests.” “Plenty” was certainly part of the party's official message, because it was printed on the festooned walls, along with the words “Temperance,” “Sobriety,” “Peace,” and “Happiness.” Instead of the dancing that ended a socialist tea party, this event ended quietly with the singing of temperance hymns, accompanied by a small band that played softly.Footnote 80
In Preston and other locales, tea parties were repeated approximately twice a year, and with repetition they began to tell very similar stories. In 1836, Preston's Cloth Hall was once again “elegantly decorated with evergreens, rosettes, artificial flowers, fruit trees, etc.” Fifty-six windows were also “tastefully festooned,” and “900 yards of white cotton shirting” covered the tables and walls, which again were printed with the words, “‘temperance,’ ‘sobriety,’ ‘peace,’ ‘happiness,’ and ‘plenty’”—the last word appearing directly above tables loaded with mountains of bread and butter. The themes of plenty, regularity, cheerfulness, and social harmony were conveyed in the descriptions of such events as well. The writer who described this affair made sure to note, for example, how “75 sets of beautiful tea and coffee services” and “34 tea kettles holding about 250 gallons of water” served between 1,200 and 1,300 at precisely “half-past four o'clock.” He also noted that Preston's mayor, “his lady, and son” were especially “gratified with the splendid scene, and the cheerful and happy countenances of those who were partaking a liquor which cheers but does not inebriate.”Footnote 81 Sympathetic observers such as this one virtually always wrote about public tea parties as rational, cheerful, and disciplined occasions. This interpretation was not only a statement of fact but also a political and economic argument.
In 1836, when this tea party took place, Preston's operatives were out on strike, protesting declining wages.Footnote 82 Livesey explained to the striking operatives that sobriety could help them in their struggle to preserve their jobs. “Masters are continually inventing new machinery in order to dispense with manual labour,” he explained, because they are not “able to depend on their men, in consequence of their drinking.”Footnote 83 Livesey argued that tea was not so much a cheap fuel for an industrial labor force. Rather he believed that sober workers were so productive that they made machinery unnecessary. Tea thus was a useful commodity because it prevented the waste of labor itself. Livesey was engaging in what James Vernon and Peter Gurney have described as a politics of hunger and consumption.Footnote 84 He was telling a specific narrative about how workers could improve their material conditions regardless of whether managers raised or lowered wages. He was suggesting, moreover, that religion, personal reform, and social and gender harmony, rather than violence, would lead to plenty, peace, and happiness. In Preston and surrounding regions, labor activism thus flavored the taste of tea and food served up at temperance meals.
Preston was certainly an epicenter of both temperance and labor activity, but the movement spread as temperance agents, conferences, letters, and periodicals published the tea party's recipe. Livesey and his colleagues embarked on what they called “temperance missionary” tours. On one such tour in the summer of 1833, they traveled through the streets of Blackburn, Heywood, Rochdale, Oldham, Stockport, Manchester, and Bolton ringing a bell, announcing meetings, and waving a small white silk flag exhorting others to “touch not, taste not, handle not, drink not, buy not, sell not, brew not, distil not intoxicating liquors.”Footnote 85 Teetotal organizations had just formed in these communities and they had already hosted a number of tea parties. For example, on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1832, 300 sat down to tea in Oldham's Methodist School Room.Footnote 86 On December 22, about 100 persons held a party at the Brown Street Sabbath schoolroom in Chester.Footnote 87 A few weeks later, on January 12, 450 took tea in “the large room of a mill belonging to Mrs. Scholfield” at Heywood. The village clergyman, a Baptist minister, a Wesleyan minister, the schoolmaster, and John Bright all drank tea with the workers that day.Footnote 88 At a Liverpool tea party, 2,500 with “wealth, beauty and intelligence” listened to “an Englishman, a Welshman, and a Scotchman” address the crowd, and 500 then signed the pledge of total abstinence.Footnote 89
Typically held on holidays and as a means to raise funds, tea parties took place in towns and villages where teetotalism was gaining ground. They were especially popular in Wales and in manufacturing districts in the midlands, the north of England, and in Scotland, places such as Sunderland, Stockport, Middleborough, Bradford, in and around Gloucester, Birmingham, and Nottingham.Footnote 90 As in the case in Wilsden in the West Riding region of Yorkshire in April 1835, the tea party was part of several days of activities and often began with a procession through the town's streets. On this occasion, at precisely “twelve o'clock the doors of the church were opened and the multitude entered and arranged themselves in the pews.” The teetotalers said prayers, sang hymns, and listened to speakers. After this, they celebrated with a feast served in “a splendid tent” that had been erected outside the church. Writing thirty years after the affair, temperance historian Samuel Couling repeated the themes laid out in earlier accounts. Couling commented on the fact that so many could be fed without disarray or confusion. He noted how the tent, which measured “135 feet in length by 54 feet in width,” was “supported by three rows of pillars, eight in each row, and adorned with flags, evergreens, and artificial flowers.” This party, he noted,
[b]egan at exactly five o'clock, with the greatest of order, each seat was occupied, and 1,400 partook of tea and its accompaniment. No sooner had the company received sufficient then “with an orderly and simultaneous movement,” they made way for 1,100 others, who had been patiently waiting without. At the departure of this second company, the conductors, officers, and others, to the number of 200, regaled themselves. Thus, 2,700 persons sat down to tea on this grand occasion.Footnote 91
Not all parties were as large as those in Wilsden and Preston because Lancashire and Yorkshire had the largest communities of teetotalers.Footnote 92 Nevertheless, the food and drink, the decorations, and the moral messages were quite similar whether copper miners in Kendall hosted a tea festival in a barn and farmhouse or Londoners “partook of the exhilarating but not inebriating beverage” in a large room in Theobald Road.Footnote 93 In the empire, tea parties followed a similar pattern. For example, an army colonel began hosting tea parties for his and other regiments after he opened a temperance coffee room in Kurnaul (Karnal), India, in 1837. He claimed that he had been inspired to do so after reading American and British temperance literature.Footnote 94 When American journals reported on Preston's activities, they emphasized the same story of the beautiful halls and cheerful behavior.Footnote 95Livesey's Moral Reformer thus noted in 1838 that Preston's Christmas Day tea party “has been regarded as the PATTERN,” followed year after year in Preston and across England.Footnote 96 These reports established tea parties as social rituals with a relatively stable set of meanings.
These descriptions advocated the new gender and domestic ideologies particularly associated with evangelicalism. Wealthy women, who donated so much money, food, space, and time to temperance, spread these new domestic ideals, redefined their own consuming habits as legitimate, and carved out a space for themselves in the public sphere by reforming the consumerism of others. Eighteenth-century critics had often labeled wealthy women's tea parties as frivolous gossipy affairs that were but an idle waste of time.Footnote 97 By linking tea to religion and social reform, wealthy women changed this private pastime into a public good.Footnote 98 Elizabeth Kowalksi-Wallace has written that the tea table disciplined bourgeois women, but this self-discipline also allowed women to participate in a public sphere where they disciplined others.Footnote 99 Philanthropic and reforming ladies particularly liked to argue, however, that a well-behaved cross-class shared culture of consumption could bring social understanding rather than class conflict. An observer of the factory system in the early 1840s, Mrs. William Cooke Taylor described tea parties as evidence of “good feeling between masters and men” and “cordiality and good fellowship between the operatives and their employers.” She especially pointed out that the event took place in a “large room crowded with persons of both sexes, all from the mills . . . [yet] everything went most orderly . . . [and] the whole affair went off with as little breach of propriety, or even etiquette, as if it had been a fashionable dining room; no noise or confusion of any kind.”Footnote 100 Catherine Marsh, a well-known evangelical philanthropist and writer, organized mass tea parties for navies, factory workers, villagers, and Sunday school children on numerous occasions.Footnote 101 Marsh believed that sharing food and drink, particularly tea and cakes, created cross-class friendships and common Christian behaviors that would obviate the deep class divisions that plagued Victorian society.Footnote 102 Women such as Marsh believed that sharing food was a deeply Christian act, and in this sense they challenged political economists' use of food as discipline or punishment to achieve good behavior.
At the same time, temperance ideology did ask workers to accept bourgeois forms of bodily discipline and gendered behaviors. It emphasized middle- and upper-class tea table etiquette and the respectable and proper way to drink tea and eat food. In this sense, it underscored the disciplinary aspects of the factory, workhouse, plantation, exhibition, and similar Victorian institutions.Footnote 103 Workers came to the tea table, however, because it spoke to their own concerns and fantasies. As John Styles has recently pointed out, eighteenth-century workers were already invested in looking good and eating well; thus, consumerism was not necessarily a middle-class value foisted upon plebian communities.Footnote 104 Nevertheless, temperance advocates were in the process of working out a moral stance on various cultures of consumption. In 1843, Livesey, for example, reproached working women for engaging in the idle practice of shopping, which he wrote brought only “disputes, litigation, and immorality.” Indeed, he surmised “drinking and idleness” were “too often accompaniments of shopping.”Footnote 105 The Victorian middle classes often expressed concerns about women's love of shopping, and as a retailer Livesey knew quite well that unpaid debts ruined retailers and led to a flurry of disputes, litigation, and charges of immorality.Footnote 106 He was much less concerned with eating sugary foods and sipping tea than he was with drinking and shopping, however.
In truth, tea parties invited participants to look at, smell, and experience the gustatory pleasures of tea, sugar, bread, butter, and cake. Livesey claimed that such feasts drew on historical and biblical examples, and he especially pointed to the marriage supper in the New Testament as a moral yet public feast. Ignoring the fact that Jesus was said to have turned water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana, Livesey's biblical interpretations were selective. The tea party, Livesey opined, was a form of rational feasting that usefully superseded “the sumptuous and riotous eating and drinking much too prevalent in this country.”Footnote 107 These events consumed vast quantities of bread and cake, butter and cream, fruits, sugar, tea, and coffee. At one such festival, 1,400 persons consumed “700 pounds of current bread, 364 pounds of common bread, 130 pounds of lump sugar, 60 pounds of brown sugar, 81 quarts of cream, 30 pounds of coffee, 10 pounds of tea, 50 pounds of butter, 84 dozen oranges, [and] 800 pounds of apples, &c.”Footnote 108 Food was spectacle at the tea party and in the street. Temperance processions carted oversized foods through urban streets as signifiers of the “fruits of teetotalism.” In Manchester, for example, a temperance cart was loaded with a sack of flour, a 65-pound ham, 85-pound cheese, and a loaf of bread weighing in at 60 pounds.Footnote 109 This was a sober yet bountiful version of the mythical Land of Cockayne, that place where peasants stuffed themselves and lived a life of ease. Making a spectacle of food was at the same time also a modern practice that replicated the technologies of Victorian advertising. Retailers often paraded around oversized commodities through city streets on carts throughout the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote 110 We cannot say whether advertisers or reformers first developed the idea, but this was a long-lived practice. Thomas Lipton was famous for parading giant hams and cheeses in late Victorian Scotland and England, and even the most average of grocers delighted in capturing a sense of abundance by piling mounds of food and provisions in their windows.Footnote 111
Feasting and fantasizing about food were very old traditions, but tea parties were also modern banquets serving up new foods that were purchased in shops and public eateries, rather than baked or brewed at home.Footnote 112 The movement certainly approved of the broader dietary shift from alcohol and grains such as oats to caffeine, sugar, and wheat. Sugar appeared in multiple forms, baked in cakes and sweet breads, added to hot drinks and cold drinks, and in its natural state in the many fruits that graced the temperance table. Temperance tracts recommended chocolate, aerated and spiced waters such as ginger beer, and “lemonade and similar compounds.”Footnote 113 While declining prices and other factors abetted the spectacular increases in sugar consumption during these years, temperance was also a significant factor in stimulating the British sweet tooth.Footnote 114 Coffee was always a favored drink, and by 1847 London already had between 1,500 and 1,800 temperance coffee rooms that served tea and coffee at affordable prices and provided space for meetings and organizing.Footnote 115 The temperance coffee shop and the tea party were both new forms of mass catering that encouraged the creation of sober workers and rational consumers.
The coffee shop targeted male workers in urban settings, while the tea party was designed to “prevent young persons of both sexes from going to public houses and beer shops.”Footnote 116 Organizers believed that both “honest lads and bonnie lasses” would enjoy the company of the opposite sex and perhaps even meet a future spouse who shared their values if they came to a tea party.Footnote 117 As Anna Clark has shown, heavy drinking was associated with the more violent aspects of masculine artisanal culture. It ate up paychecks, instigated domestic violence, and crystallized competition over scarce resources within the working-class family.Footnote 118 Working women would have been especially interested in attending tea parties then, so they might find sober, responsible, and peaceful husbands. Men would have similarly been looking for sober wives. These affairs demonstrated and allowed working men and women to enact a vision of “moral” heterosexuality and comfortable domesticity, the presumed consequences of signing the pledge and following a Christian path.
At a party held in Wigan's Commercial Hall on Christmas Day in 1838, however, we begin to see an articulation of how the temperance version of heterosexuality also began to objectifiy femininity. Like other forms of mass culture in the nineteenth century, temperance affairs commodified female audiences and organizers to gain male followers. The writer who described Wigan's party stated that looking at the women who were serving the tea was a pleasure, akin to ingesting food and admiring lovely décor: “The Ladies who had undertaken tea services on the occasion, amounted to thirty in number, arranging themselves, forming a decoration not less beautiful, and infinitely more interesting than the perishing productions behind them.”Footnote 119 Such descriptions and the parties themselves promoted a commercialized heterosexuality that was moral because the consequence of looking and flirting was stable families and marital happiness.
While trying to win over workers to Christianity, sobriety, and domesticity, temperance was also teaching the middle and upper classes to evaluate the significance of sober workers quietly and seemingly happily ingesting mountains of provisions. Temperance propaganda, tea parties, and their descriptions relentlessly portrayed the working classes as a contented and well-behaved mass market. This fact was demonstrated not only by the food that was ingested but also by the yards of cotton that decorated every tea party, a pleasing sight to northern mill owners facing mounting surpluses and declining profits. Temperance in effect created a positive image of the working-class crowd as audience and market rather than as strikers and rioters. The temperance tea party made visible and knowable a working-class market in much the same way that Mary Poovey and others have argued that new scientific, exhibitionary, and other technologies were forging the Victorian public into a social body.Footnote 120 Attending or reading about a tea party taught retailers and manufacturers to fantasize about crowds of plebian consumers quietly consuming reams of cotton and pounds of sugar, butter, wheat, and tea.
Temperance turned workers into consumers and shared some of advertising's technologies. Advocates also often used liberal arguments to appeal to shopkeepers, merchants, and manufacturers by explaining that sobriety would redirect wasteful consumption on drink to productive alternatives. As one Irish campaigner explained it in 1840, “Ale houses, spirit shops, &c. will be substituted by the . . . baker, the soup shop, the coffee house.” Abstinence provided funds for “clothing, good food, all the comforts of life, in a word, shall well reward the grower and manufacturer.”Footnote 121 “Nearly all the money spent at public houses ought to be,” Livesey told retailers, “spent at YOUR SHOPS.”Footnote 122 Free traders who were pushing for low tea duties and the abolition of the East India Company's (EIC) monopoly of the China trade were also making explicit this connection between home and foreign markets. They were revealing the connection between the buying and selling of tea and cotton.
Even before the tea parties became popular, tea, cotton, and Manchester goods became ideologically linked as free traders struggled to end the EIC's monopoly of the eastern trade. Glasgow and Liverpool merchants and Manchester manufacturers had already sanctified tea, temperance, and overseas trade when they attacked the company for being an unscientific, inefficient, and archaic institution that had stymied legitimate and moral “temperate” desires, particular a free trade in tea.Footnote 123 Entering into the debate on the renewal of the company's charter, a correspondent who wrote to the Glasgow Chronicle in 1812 compared the Company to a restrictive dealer who had unfairly inhibited the supply of tea to “a retired valley of Scotland.” The EIC was, this writer proposed, engaging in immoral economics that kept tea, that “enemy to strong drink,” from the people.Footnote 124 When the Company's charter was again debated in the early 1830s, merchants and manufacturers in Manchester and Liverpool passed resolutions and printed numerous pamphlets and articles spelling out how monopoly restricted home and foreign markets for tea and cotton.Footnote 125 We now know that this trade was more open and more efficient than these critics suggested.Footnote 126 By the 1820s, “private English” trade had gained a place within the Canton system, and at the time the Company lost its charter in 1833, more than half of the trade was already in private hands.Footnote 127 Moreover, as Robert Gardella has shown, Qing policy recognized the legitimacy of foreign trade, and both Chinese and British merchants were able to bend the rules to fit their needs.Footnote 128 Nevertheless, activists such as James Silk Buckingham, who led the struggle against the Company and drunkenness in the early 1830s, did not see it this way. For Buckingham and fellow liberals, the EIC immorally prevented a free trade in tea and cotton, temperate and legitimate commodities. Regulation of commerce itself, then, could be said to be sinful. The struggle against the Company had brought temperance and free trade together, a fact well recognized at the time. For example, at a temperance meeting in Liverpool in October 1834, a leading teetotaler professed that “[i]n opening the China trade Mr. Buckingham had rendered greater service to the country than any other man or body of men in England. The reform of drunkenness was of far greater importance than the reform of parliament.”Footnote 129 Free trade, this advocate imagined, would create a temperate nation not simply because commerce was civilizing but because tea was now free.
After the Company lost its monopoly, however, foreign markets did not materialize, in part because tea became momentarily more expensive. Fearing the loss of approximately £3,300,000 in revenue derived from tea, the British government introduced a new three-tiered duty that increased prices for the lowest-quality tea largely drunk by the working classes.Footnote 130 Teetotalers, large importers, and radicals came together to fight these new duties. “If government were really alive to the true interests of the labouring classes,” the Preston Temperance Advocate opined in 1836, it “would, from considerations of a moral character, reduce the duty on tea, coffee, and sugar.”Footnote 131 In a somewhat dramatic gesture, radical grocer and Chartist teetotaler J. J. Faulkner protested these duties by dressing in a Chinese costume while selling tea and other groceries in his Oxford shop. He later stopped selling all taxed groceries with the explanation that he would not become the government's tax collector.Footnote 132 Radical stuff weavers sent a letter to the Leeds Times in 1835 complaining that “[t]heir labour has been taken from them by the power-loom; their bread is taxed; their malt is taxed; their sugar, their tea, their soap, and almost every other thing they use or consume, is taxed. But the power-loom is not taxed.”Footnote 133 Tea's temperate nature had become central to arguments about the morality of free trade, fiscal policy, and a government that still denied working men and women a political voice.
In the 1840s, after the resolution of the Opium War, manufactures and merchants were even more committed to the fantasy that “now, China, with her almost countless millions, is ready to receive from us our manufactures. . . . [S]he is also ready to give us in return her Tea.”Footnote 134 At a meeting of the Liverpool Committee to Reduce the Tea Duties in 1846, Lord Sandon proposed that low taxes would increase the British working man's “consumption of a wholesome, agreeable, and unintoxicating beverage” and also “extend commercial intercourse with China.” Making a similar argument, William Brown, the member of Parliament for South Lancashire, professed: “I am interested in promoting the social comfort and domestic happiness of the people,” and this means “substitut[ing] the moral teapot in the place of the demoralizing ale-jug.”Footnote 135 Manufactures and their representatives thus assumed that the mass consumption of tea in Britain was the key to the ever-elusive Chinese market. Liberals such as Edward Brodribb, who was quoted at the outset of this article, were part of this political and moral conversation that claimed tea was an “antidote to spirits.”Footnote 136 The moral teapot had thus become central to a broader discussion about the morality of global commerce in early and mid-Victorian Britain.
The Travels of the Tea Party
Tea parties thus could have multiple possible meanings even within industrial Lancashire. Local class and gender politics, national and imperial politics (such as the debate about the EIC and the tea duties), and free trade together informed the history of the tea party. By way of conclusion, I want to point out that Preston was just one site in a broader global history. Brian Harrison wrote long ago that temperance was an Anglo-American movement whose border was at the “Appalachian Mountains rather than in the Atlantic Ocean.”Footnote 137 One of the most thorough Victorian temperance historians, P. T. Winskill believed the global reach of early temperance proved that the temperance “seed had been divinely spread.”Footnote 138 In other words, the fact that temperance societies had formed in Asia, Europe, and North America revealed the work of God not man. On a more mundane level, I would like to suggest that it was in fact missionaries, soldiers, businessmen, merchants, and philanthropic “ladies” who spread temperance through personal networks that linked communities throughout a broader British World that encompassed North America and the empire.Footnote 139
We do know that it was several American ship captains who were docked in Liverpool in the autumn of 1829 who first distributed American tracts and inspired the founding of the movement in the port city. A Liverpool iron merchant with business dealings in Preston then personally “reformed” his drunken business associate, Thomas Swindlehurst, who would become one of the original founders of Preston's teetotal society. At virtually the same time, “two ladies” known as Miss Allan and Miss Graham of Glasgow heard of the movement in America and founded a society for women near Glasgow.Footnote 140 Glasgow, like Liverpool, became a conduit for American ideas that then spread with temperance activists to British and imperial locales. For example, Mr. James McNair, who in 1819 was president of the Greenock Radical Association, a group that abstained from all intoxicating liquors and tea, coffee, and tobacco, founded a total abstinence society in Scotland before moving to New Zealand to promote teetotalism among the Maoris and English colonists in the early 1830s.Footnote 141 In these years before the telegraph and other modern systems of communications, temperance, much like abolitionism and evangelicalism, traveled with missionaries, soldiers, sailors, business people, and reformers. These mobile populations created a shared set of ideas and habits over huge geographic distances. Similar practices nevertheless were shaped by diverse ideologies, politics, and contexts.
In the United States tea parties were not unlike those held in Britain, but at times they reached truly spectacular proportions and became popular among quite elite American women. In 1843, for example, the ladies of Cincinnati hosted former president John Quincy Adams at a temperance tea, which was attended by over five thousand persons. The executive committee of the American Temperance Union found the whole proceeding had reached a “scale of great magnificence.”Footnote 142 John Adams renounced tea during the revolution, but by the 1840s, American business was heavily involved in the tea trade and the beverage no longer carried any threat to American independence.Footnote 143 It is true that the American temperance movement was especially fond of coffee and the coffee shop as a substitute for the saloon.Footnote 144 At the same time, tea's temperate nature also signified the political, economic, and cultural exchanges that stretched across the Atlantic.
Context was everything. Missionaries served tea at some of the earliest colonial encounters.Footnote 145 Mass tea meetings became very popular in South Africa, and tea had long been part of the conversion process.Footnote 146 In 1823, for example, Samuel Broadbent first approached the Tswana with the offer of a cup of tea. He later recalled that when “[t]wo women came into my hut. . . . I let them taste my tea and presented each of them with a needle, thread and thimble.”Footnote 147 John and Jean Comaroff cited this incident as an example of how missionaries tried to inculcate new gender and domestic practices. They emphasized the needle and thread as symbolic of European domesticity and the evangelical passion to clothe Africans in Western attire. Tea was critical to the presentation of Western Christianity. The story of two women entering a missionary's hut and encountering tea for the first time, however, seems to have been apocryphal. Describing his experiences in the Cape in the spring of 1820, the Reverend John Campbell wrote of a king who brought “his two wives into the tent and introduced them; but they appeared chiefly to have come to see our tea-pot, the fame of which had reached them. They viewed it with great attention, and expressed their astonishment with uplifted hands.”Footnote 148 Such stories tell us nothing about African engagement with material culture, but they do reveal that missionaries invested tea and tea things with sacred significance, especially for women.Footnote 149 At home and in the empire, missionaries, businessmen, and colonial authorities had a shared faith in the civilizing potential of certain forms of consumerism.
Tea parties moved across political as well as geographic borders. Like any public event, they could be adopted for other uses and even oppositional messages. The Chartists and Rochdale Co-operators returned to radical expressions of tea drinking, but they also maintained teetotalers' vision of rational working-class consumerism.Footnote 150 The Anti-Corn Law League was also fond of the tea party, making explicit the liberal message inherent in earlier teetotal affairs.Footnote 151 Conservative organizations, such as the Birmingham Loyal and Constitutional Association, even followed the same ceremonial calendar as radicals. So, for example, this group held a mass tea party to commemorate its second anniversary on 26 December 1836.Footnote 152 Christmas became a holiday dedicated to Christian commercialism, but in the 1830s it was also a popular moment for conservatives and radicals to gather together in mass settings to drink tea. These groups disagreed about many things, but they all used food and especially tea as a means to sell their vision of moral consumer practices.
By the second half of the century, the tea party was such a routine and popular practice that refreshment contractors sold their expertise at putting on temperance teas, and a few enterprising retailers even used the movement as a brand name.Footnote 153 Especially after the drink trade was regulated in the 1870s, publicans, brewers, and distillers looked to the Tories to defend their interests. Still, liberals and conservatives now agreed that tea achieved goodwill between the classes and the sexes, advanced international commerce, and created jobs and profits for workers and manufactures alike. Tea had moved beyond class and beyond party, and had become the nation's drink.Footnote 154 It is well to remember, however, that in the 1830s this was not yet the case. Many were still dubious about the foreign import, and it took a lot of work to convince consumers that tea was a sacred taste and a useful pleasure.
The temperance tea party was a global and local practice. It was a public meal that ascribed tea and its accompaniments with variety of meanings. It was one key site in which tea was transformed into what Daniel Miller has labeled a “meta-symbol.”Footnote 155 Like Coca-Cola in the twentieth century, tea was more than highly meaningful. It became a commodity that raised larger issues about the materiality and morality of culture and its consumption. When working- and middle-class men and women drank tea together in the early nineteenth century, they participated in wider debates about the personal, social, physiological, and spiritual consequences of industrialization, long-distance trade, and consumer society. Tea acquired such significance when, as Arjun Appadurai has theorized, it was “absorbed into local political and cultural economies.”Footnote 156
