Samuel Johnson: The Major Works

"I’m so glad you asked me that. He has the following to say: ‘I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely had time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.’ He was addicted to tea, it was a genuine addiction, he used to drink tea all day long. He wasn’t into coffee or chocolate, he had long periods of abstinence from alcohol, but boy did he love tea. Dr Johnson was an ardent defender of tea, because what you get in the 18th century is a lot of people attacking this creeping influence of luxury, we talked about that a bit with chocolate earlier on. Jonas Hanway wrote an essay on tea, he had the audacity — in Dr Johnson’s eyes — to claim that tea was not only pernicious to the health, it was obstructive to industry and it was impoverishing the nation. Quite how it could be impoverishing the nation, since there was an excise duty on it and it massively bolstered the wealth of the East India Company, I don’t know. But Dr Johnson, who was a scathing reviewer of other people’s books, took to print to lambast him and that quote was part of it. Hanway was conclusively shut down. It arrived in the 1660s, that’s when it was first sold publicly, in Garraway’s coffee house. But strangely it was very heavily taxed, almost for a hundred years. Which meant that, whereas lots of people were going out to drink their brandy and their gin, their coffee and their chocolate, the only people who were really associated with tea were aristocratic women at home. It became seen as a feminine drink. It became gendered. The tea table in the drawing room was a mirror image of the male-dominated coffee house. Obviously, men satirised this in quite a jejune, nasty way and said it’s not a coffee house as they’re just tattling away and babbling about gossip. But there’s quite a lot of evidence from diaries to suggest that élite women were discussing politics, philosophy and religion: all the kinds of things people were talking about in coffee houses. From the 1730s the government begins to reduce the taxes on tea, then the domestic market is bombarded with this new herb, or plant, and gradually it eclipses coffee. What does it tell us about society? Obviously tea comes from the East, from China, whereas coffee was initially imported by way of Turkey, from Arabia. So tea speaks to a strong trading link with China, which became an intrinsic part of middle class identity — people having china tea cups — and the ascendancy of tea coincides with Britain’s ascendancy as the world’s predominant global power. Tea has now become the national beverage. Coffee was for a hundred years before tea took over. People’s associations with tea now are similar to Dr Johnson’s, that it’s soothing, it’s not like it’s going to be a fibrillator upon your mind like coffee. It’s something to help you unwind. Whether it latently still has these imperial connotations, I don’t know. Not really. The time he was drinking it, 1740/1750, was after it had become more widely consumed. It was that period from the 1660s up until the 1730s when it was seen as more feminine. I suspect people in the earlier period did have a problem with that. Men were criticised for drinking too much coffee on the grounds that it was this agent of effeminisation. There’s a women’s petition against coffee that says it saps your virility and makes you babble and gossip. If people are saying that it’s coffee that’s effeminising, I think they would have said the same thing about tea. But then again, from a woman’s perspective, you don’t have the same complaint they had about coffee, which was that men were wasting their time, idling, being distracted — a bit like Facebook today — and it was up to them to take on the reigns of the shop, or whatever it was that they ran. Whereas tea, women were drinking it."