“DEEPLY INDEBTED TO THE TEA-PLANT”: REPRESENTATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN HISTORIES OF TEA

Abstract

These words were pennedby a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.

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