From Sidney W. Mintz, _Sweetness and Power_, Chapter 3 "Consumption":
***** Tea's success was phenomenally rapid. Before the midpoint of the eighteenth century, even Scotland had become a land of tea addicts....
And the historian of Scotland David MacPherson, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, looked back to the lowering of the duties on tea in 1784, and the even sharper increase in use that followed upon it:
Tea has become an economical substitute to the middle and lower classes of society for malt liquor, the price of which renders it impossible for them to procure the quantity sufficient for them as their only drink....In short, we are so situated in our commercial and financial system, that tea brought from the eastern extremity of the world, and sugar brought from the West Indies and both loaded with the expense of freight and insurance...compose a drink cheaper than beer.
Cheapness was important, but it does not by itself explain the growing tendency toward tea consumption. The cleric David Davies, an important observer of rural life at the end of the eighteenth century, discerned the combined circumstances leading to a deepening preference for tea and sugar over other items of diet at the time. Davies insisted that the rural poor would produce and drink milk if they could afford to keep a cow, but that this was beyond the means of most, and his detailed budgetary records support his view. Then, because malt was a taxed item, it was too costly to enable the poor to make small beer:
Under these hard circumstances, the dearness of malt, and the difficulty of procuring milk, the only thing remaining of them to moisten their bread with, was _tea_. This was their last resource. Tea (with bread) furnishes one meal for a whole family every day, at no greater expense than about one shilling a week, at an average. If any body will point out an article that is cheaper and better, I will venture to answer for the poor in general, that they will be thankful for the discovery.
Davies was sensitive to the argument against tea:
Though the use of tea is more common than could be wished, it is not yet general among the labouring poor: and if we have regard to numbers, their share of the consumption is comparatively small; especially if we reckon the _value_ in money.
Still, you exclaim _tea is a luxury_. If you mean fine hyson tea, sweetened with refined sugar, and softened with cream, I readily admit it to be so. But _this_ is not the tea of the poor. Spring-water, just coloured with a few leaves of the lowest-priced tea, and sweetened with the brownest sugar, is the luxury for which you reproach them. To this they have recourse of necessity; and were they now to be deprived of this, they would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequences of the distresses of the poor.
After all, it appears a very strange thing, that the common people of any European nation should be obliged to use, as part of their daily diet, two articles imported from opposite sides of the earth. But if high taxes, in consequence of expensive wars, and the changes which time insensibly makes in the circumstance of countries, have debarred the poorer inhabitants of this kingdom the use of such things as are the natural products of the soil, and forced them to recur to those of foreign growth; surely this is not _their_ fault.
...Jonas Hanway, the eighteenth-century social reformer, was intensely hostile to the consumption of tea by the poor. The richness of his feelings can be conveyed by the following:
It is the curse of this nation that the labourer and mechanic will ape the lord....To what a height of folly must a nation be arrived, when the common people are not satisfied with wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest regions to please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane...where beggars are often seen...drinking their tea. You may see labourers mending the roads drinking their tea; it is even drank in cinder-carts; and what is not less absurd, sold out in cups to haymakers....Those will have tea who have not bread....Misery itself has no power to banish tea.
John Burnett, a painstaking modern student of the history of British nutrition, reproaches Hanway gently. "Contemporary writers," he tells us, "are unanimous in blaming the labourer for his extravagant diet, and tireless in demonstrating that by better management he might have more meat and more variety in his meals. None of them seemed...to recognize that white bread and tea were no longer luxuries, but the irreducible minimum below which was only starvation....Two ounces of tea a week, costing 8d. or 9d., made many a cold supper seem like a hot meal." A number of scholars note that the substitution of tea for beer was a definite nutritional loss; tea was bad not only because it was a stimulant and contained tannin, but also because it supplanted other, more nutritious foods: "The poor people found that they could enjoy a quite deceptive feeling of warmth after drinking hot tea, whereas, in fact, a glass of cold beer would have given them far more real food."
...The first half of the eighteenth century may have been a period of increased purchasing power for labouring people, even though the quality of nutrition probably declined at the same time....
[R.H.] Campbell asks the same questions as the Edinburgh investigators -- "Why did people fail to retain the more satisfactory yet cheap diet of the rural areas? When a choice of diet became available, why was it exercised unwisely?" But he came up with an answer different from theirs.
The [Edinburgh] investigators had concluded that "when...it comes to a question of using the ready cooked bread or the uncooked oatmeal, laziness decides which, and the family suffers." "But the investigation in Dundee," Campbell writes,
revealed conditions that more adequately explain the paradox of a decline in nutritional standards when cash income was rising. The organization of the jute industry provided opportunities for female labour, so that many housewives went out to work in Dundee. Nutritional standards declined still further and sharply when the wife went out to work. "When the mother is at work there is not time to prepare porridge or broth in the 'diet hour'...usually breakfast and dinner become bread and butter meals. As the school interval for dinner is not the same as the mill 'diet hour' the children have to unlock the house and get 'pieces' for themselves...."
Pressure on the housewife's time was in itself a sufficient explanation of the choice of an inferior diet. The need to save time rather than the need to economize or to maintain nutritional standards determined the choice....Most notable was the increased consumption of bread. In one case in Dundee 6s 5d of a total expenditure of 12s 11d went on bread; one family of a father, mother and five children consumed 56lbs a week....The cooking of vegetable broth was neglected in the cities. So long as vegetable broth was used extensively the Scottish custom of eating few vegetables in any other form was unimportant. Where the housewife had to go out to work, the preparation of broth was practically impossible. In Dundee the investigators found that the broth pot was "an almost invariable feature" only of houses where the mother was at home.
John Burnett's argument fits well not only with Campbell's assertions but also with the argument I am making about sugar.
White bread and tea passed, in the course of a hundred years, from the luxuries of the rich to become the hall-marks of a poverty-line diet. Social imitation was one reason, though not the most important....Whereas they were mere adjuncts to the tables of the wealthy, they became all too often the total diet of the poor, the irreducible minimum beyond which lay only starvation. Paradoxically, they had become almost the cheapest foods on which life could be supported. White bread, though it was better with meat, butter or cheese, needs none of these; a cup of tea converted a cold meal into something like a hot one, and gave comfort and cheer besides. At 6s or 8s a pound in the middle of the nineteenth century tea was still a luxury, though the average consumption of a working-class household -- 2ozs a week, often eked out with pieces of burnt toast to colour the water -- was scarcely extravagant. And in the circumstances of early industrialism this type of diet had an additional advantage that it could always be produced close at hand and required little or no preparation.
(endnotes omitted, Sidney W. Mintz, _Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History_, NY: Viking, 1985, pp. 114-129) ***** -- Yoshie
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