Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the editor of ‘Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England’, available for the discounted price of £275 for 4 volumes (normal price £350) in our Canton Book Store.
Part 1: How and why this book was written
Despite the significance of tea to the British people, the history of tea in Britain, especially in its early years, has been clouded by imprecision and contradiction. Historians of the East India Company, making use of the company’s archival records at the British Library, have given a deeper understanding of the management of the tea-trade. But what of the English experience of tea? How can we find out more about what English consumers thought of tea in the infancy of the trade?
A Family of Three at Tea, Richard Collins 1727
Tea was an exotic and expensive commodity, with a strange and bitter taste, most odd for being served hot, and demanding to be served in specially designed utensils. It was a bizarre and novel beverage, and as such, it provoked many responses from writers, poets and satirists. Much of what they wrote professes no special knowledge of tea or its origins — it is not the writing of tea connoisseurs or experts. But it does, in a way, record the evolution of the English encounter with tea from an outlandish exotic medicinal interloper to a much-loved commodity at the centre of the British national identity: a luxury turned necessity. In Tea and the Tea-Table we hoped to find and edit a wide selection of the most important publications on tea in English in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, giving an insight on to what British people at the time thought of tea.
The Queen Mary Tea Project was conceived by a small group of researchers in eighteenth-century cultural history in the English Department at Queen Mary University of London. My own expertise was in the history of coffee and the coffee-house in the eighteenth century, a history which bore an important analogy to that of tea. The team included Richard Coulton, an expert in the history of botany and natural history in the early eighteenth century; Matthew Mauger, who works in law and literature; and Ben Dew (now at the University of Portsmouth) who researches the history of ideas in the eighteenth-century. With our different interests and expertise, we covered the main areas in which tea was examined and debated, whether as a commodity to be vended, an object of curiosity, a subject of taxation, or as a taste experience.
What we ended up with was four large volumes, published by Pickering and Chatto, which presents the edited texts of all the most important printed documents on tea in English in the eighteenth century, together with a series of introductory essays placing them in context. Very few of these texts have been reprinted since the eighteenth century. Together they give unparalleled access into the history of the British encounter with tea.
As researchers, we made use of the rare book collections of the British Library, rounded out by a few college libraries in Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the original texts are astonishingly rare, existing in one or two copies in research libraries in Britain and America. Why is this? For a start, many books and pamphlets in the eighteenth century were published in relatively small numbers. In unregarded areas of knowledge, there was no attempt to preserve copies in libraries until the nineteenth century, so many of the copies have been lost or destroyed. Working on this material gave us a unique opportunity to recover what eighteenth-century tea drinkers thought of tea, from gentlewomen to satirists and poets, as well as those engaged in the tea-trade, such as merchants and tax officials, and natural philosophers.
Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England is available at the discounted price of £275 for 4 volumes (normal price £350) in the Canton Book Store
Further blogs in the series by Markman Ellis explore:
Part 2 The Origins of Tea-drinking in England
Part 3: Teas of the eighteenth century English tea trade
Part 4: Making tea in the eighteenth century
Part 5: What was tea-drinking for in the eighteenth century?
Tags: Canton Book Store, Eighteenth Century, markmann ellis, tea history