The World of Caffeine (31 page)

As these instructions show, at least until the early nineteenth century the Turkish taste for boiled and reboiled coffee, a brew that must have been strong enough to rattle a person’s bones, was still current in England. As for the egg, it seems to have repeatedly made its way into English coffee and tea cups, as witness Waller’s Chinese recipe for tea.
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Tea also figured into the lives of the Romantic poets. Coleridge was familiar with at least several varieties of tea, and he took time to complain in verse of the increase in their cost.
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He valued “lean mutton and good Tea” at dinnertime. Tea was not entirely indispensable at breakfast—whiskey could be made a serviceable replacement. The egg seemed de rigueur:

Arrived at Letir Finlay, IX oclock

Lord Byron, a fellow Romantic poet, in his later years became a tea enthusiast, writing that he “Must have recourse to the black Bohea,” and calling green tea “the Chinese nymph of tears.”

The Tea Party,
cartoon drawing by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), in which the afternoon gathering is lampooned as an excuse for romantic disportment and the affectation of a blackamoor attendant. (Photo courtesy of Frick Art Reference Library)

Peter Kalm (1715–79), a Swedish traveler, commented that in England, unlike in his homeland, a breakfast consisting of tea and toast was enjoyed by everyone who could afford it. Toast was an English invention that continued to surprise foreigners into the early nineteenth century; one theory is that the English devised toast in order to help counteract the cold, damp climate. Chocolate was sometimes substituted for tea at breakfast, but coffee only rarely. In London, when the men left for the day, the women often had their servants bring tea or chocolate to their bedrooms. Meanwhile, in the countryside, the traditional breakfast of bread and cheese, still served with beer or cider, remained common until about 1800. Tea’s ascendancy was promoted by the powerful East India Company, which persuaded the government to lower the high duties on tea, a move that greatly helped to bring the beverage within the reach of the average Englishman.

From Coffeehouse to Clubhouse, Tea Garden, Tea Shop, and Tavern

By 1750, the traditional London coffeehouse was dead. No longer was it the favored men’s forum for transacting business, reading newspapers, exchanging ideas about art, science, and manners, and sharing the day’s gossip.
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In the hopes of increasing their profits, coffeehouse keepers increasingly promoted sales of alcoholic drinks, taking one of the first steps in the decline of the coffeehouse as a bastion of learned conversation and affable good manners. Already by the time of Hogarth (1697–1764), the coffeehouses were less centers of intellectual exchange than dens of the demimonde, where pimps not poets commanded the floor. An illustration of this transformation is found in Hogarth’s painting
Morning
(1738), depicting Tom King’s Coffee-House, which by then had become a bordello managed by King’s widow, Moll, before later becoming a fashionable club.
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Daniel Defoe, after visiting Shrewsbury in 1724, wrote:

These vanished coffeehouses, in their rough splendor, were frequently transformed into clubhouses, taverns, or, as tea increased in popularity, tea gardens and teahouses catering to women and serving all three caffeinated beverages accompanied
by crumpets and desserts. The tea gardens and teahouses entertained a large new patronage of caffeine, for England had been the only country in the West to deny women access to the coffeehouse.

Naturally, there was considerable overlap between the age of coffee and the age of tea and among the people who frequented the coffeehouses and those who frequented the teahouses. Addison and Steele, who, as we have seen, were noted hangers-out at several literary London coffeehouses, were also partial to the new fashion of a “dish of tea.” Apparently attempting to capitalize on its popularity, they wrote in the
Spectator
(1711) that “I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the teaequipage.”
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A few of the clubs are worth mentioning for our story. The most famous was a Whig club, the Kit-Cat Club, founded in the early eighteenth century by Steele, Addison, Congreve, and their associates. They convened in the house of Christopher Cat, or Kat, in Shire Lane. Cat, a pastry chef, was noted for his mutton pies, an English favorite. These pies, nicknamed “Kit-cats,” became eponymous for the club.

An early Tory club, which came into existence in 1711, while the coffeehouse still reigned supreme, was the Brothers’ Club, founded, on the suggestion of Swift, by Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a philosophical writer influenced by Locke. After the accession of George I, Bolingbroke had fled to France, where he remained until 1725, when he returned to practice political journalism alongside Swift and Pope, whose “Essay on Man” he is supposed to have influenced. The declared purpose of the Brothers’ Club was “to advance conversation and friendship” and support and encourage the work of men of letters.

The Cocoa-tree Club, on St. James’s Street, was converted from the early chocolate house of the same name. It first served as a den of Tory and then of Jacobite political discussion. As revealed in Horace Walpole’s correspondence, the Cocoa-tree Club had become a fashionable gambling house by the 1740s, where, as in increasing numbers of similar establishments, young aristocrats would exchange thousands of pounds nightly on a single throw of the dice or turn of a card.

Dr. Samuel Johnson is an excellent symbol of this transitional era, for, although he founded several coffeehouse circles, he was one of the earliest great English proponents of tea drinking. Jonas Hanway (1712–86), an English merchant, reformer, philanthropist, and traveler, crossed pens with Dr. Johnson in the matter of whether tea was injurious or wholesome. In Hanway’s book, especially entitled
Journal of an Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston-upon-Thames, to which is
added an Essay on Tea, considered as Pernicious to Health, obstructing Industry and Impoverishing the Nation
(London, 1756), he earnestly condemned tea on the grounds that it weakened the nerves, rotted the teeth, ruined women’s looks, diminished the stature of men, and caused other infirmities and, further, that the time wasted brewing and drinking it, according to his calculations, cost the nation £166,666 a year, an enormous amount of money in the eighteenth century.
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He had particular distaste for expensive frivolity, into which category he put both tea and the equipment required. It is no surprise that Hanway’s opinions did not sit well with Johnson, who, according to his biographer, Sir John Hawkins (1719–89), was “a lover of tea to an excess hardly credible.” Hawkins states, “Whenever it appeared, he was almost raving, and called for the ingredients which he employed to make the liquor palatable. This in a man whose appearance of bodily strength has been compared to Polyphemus.”
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In articles published in
The Literary Magazine
in 1756 and 1757,
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Johnson turned his caustic wit against the man who had dared impugn his favored beverage. Apparently following the prescription of Dr. Buntekuh, Johnson became famous for drinking thirty to forty cups of tea daily. He calls himself

With increasing numbers of fashionable people and social climbers of the era, Johnson also enjoyed taking tea in what became known as the “tea gardens.” Gardens, which were really city parks, had been popular recreational centers for Londoners at least since the dedication of New Spring Gardens in 1661 under the reign of Charles II. Their higher destiny, however, was not realized until 1732, when New Spring Gardens was renamed Vauxhall Gardens and was made over into London’s first tea garden. Vauxhall Gardens featured outdoor walks lit by thousands of lamps, band-stands, performers, dancing, fireworks, and food and drink, including, of course, coffee, tea, and chocolate. The success of Vauxhall Gardens was followed in 1742 by the opening of Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, which, though much smaller, featured a small lake, an Oriental-style house, and a Venetian-style villa. It also boasted a large circular room called the “Rotunda,” with an ornate colonnade and enormous fireplace which was used to keep things lively on cool evenings. Still a third famous tea garden was Marylebone, frequented by Horace Walpole (1717–97) and George Frideric Handel (1685–1759).

These gardens rapidly overtook the established coffeehouses in popularity, perhaps in large part because, unlike the coffeehouse, they were open to women as well as men. They became great favorites of the women, and their patronage
attracted the men. Perhaps also because of the preeminence of their female clientele, these gardens became more and more identified with “the elegant Regale,” or tea accompanied by bread and butter, which was sometimes included in the steep price of admission. Whether on their account, or as a result of a confluence of forces, including decreased duties, tea became the national beverage of England contemporaneously with the fashionableness of these gardens.

At the same time as the tea gardens were flourishing, the institution of the tea shop was also on the rise as a women’s favorite. In 1717, Thomas Twining converted Tom’s Coffee-House into a tea shop, which he called the Golden Lion. By the middle of the eighteenth century, such tea shops were separated by a widening social gulf from the increasingly disreputable coffeehouses. Later, these teahouses were to become among the fashionable sites for afternoon tea.

At least two Englishwomen did far more to promote the cause of tea than merely drinking it. The first was Mary Tuke, an early tea importer, and the second was Anna, wife of the seventh duke of Bedford, credited with creating the hallowed custom of afternoon tea.

In 1725, under the reign of George I, when Robert Walpole was prime minister and nearly fifty years before the advent of the industrial revolution in England, a thirty-year-old unmarried woman of York, her parents long dead, decided to go into business as a tea merchant. In those days, permission to trade in York depended on being a freeman of the city and member of the York Merchant Adventurers’ Company. The first qualification posed no difficulty for Tuke, whose father had been a freeman, and who thereby inherited the same status. She entered her name in the Roll of the Freemen of the City of York in 1725, “Maria Tewk, Spinster, Fil. Willelmi Tuke.” However, a woman who was neither the widow nor daughter of a member of the company was deemed ineligible for membership, and so she could not obtain a license to trade.

Undeterred by fears of consequences, she opened her business, ignoring threats and indictments from the company and fines for “Merchandising and following Trade without being free of this Fellowship.” Fortunately, imprisonment for failure to pay fines required a special act of Parliament, the passage of which would have incurred a bigger expense than the company was willing to spend on a renegade like Tuke. In any case, Mary Tuke prevailed. After seven years of conflict, the Merchant Adventurers’ Company imposed, and she agree to pay, a modest fine, after which she was permitted to pursue her business without further obstruction.