The World of Caffeine (29 page)

One of the earliest links between tea and the London coffeehouse occurs in connection with Garraway’s in Exchange Alley, one of the first coffeehouses in the city. In 1660 Thomas Garraway, or “Garway,” issued the first broadside advertisement of tea in England, an excellent original copy of which survives in the British Museum: “An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA.” Writing of the “regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes and grandees,” Garroway sought to capitalize on the beverage’s prestige.
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Tea was consumed
in his coffeehouse and others alongside coffee and chocolate but had not yet attained the popularity of its fellow temperance drinks.

It was not until after the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza in 1662 that tea became an English pastime, preoccupation, and emblem of national life, displacing the ales, wines, and spirits that in England, no less than on the Continent, “habitually heated or stupefied” the brains of both ladies and gentlemen, “morning, noon, and night.”
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The infanta of Portugal, twenty-two at the time of her wedding, brought with her the richest dowry in Europe, almost double what any king had ever received before. Lisbon had replaced Venice as the European mart for silks, fine cottons, indigo, myrrh, spices, such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves, and Oriental gems and pearls, and the Portuguese aristocrats, the most sophisticated on the Continent, had become accustomed to such exotic luxuries. Although tea had not been among the prizes with which the Portuguese traders had returned in their heyday, by the time of this marriage it had nevertheless become known and popular there among the upper classes.

Among the array of treasures included in Catherine’s dowry were a large chest filled with tea and the title to the colony of Bombay. In consequence of the first gift, green tea, served without milk and sipped from handleless Chinese bowls of blue-andwhite porcelain, instantly became a fad at court. It was prepared by pouring hot water directly onto the leaves. In consequence of the second, the British East India Company acquired a natural harbor that offered access to all the riches of India, a resource it had long coveted and had unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Cromwell to purchase. With this gift, Portugal’s access to the Eastern trade, which her explorers had been the first to chart, was functionally ended, and the Dutch finally became what they had proclaimed themselves to be, the “Lords of the Southern Seas.” This Dutch supremacy did not sit well with Charles II. He instigated a series of wars between the Dutch and English, in pursuit of which the English king created in his East India Company a kind of shadow government, with the authority to make war and coin money.

Catherine’s seminal role in bringing tea to England is celebrated in the famous poem by Edmund Waller (1606–87), written for the queen’s twenty-third birthday in 1663, “On Tea commended by Her Majesty,” in which he pays a tribute not only to Catherine and tea, and to the first for introducing the second, but offers an unknowing tribute to caffeine as “the Muse’s friend.”
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Catherine also brought sugar into general use in England, where honey had been the most common sweetener. Sugar, used as ballast in her ship when she sailed from Portugal, became increasingly available as the Eastern markets now opened to the English. Along with tea, sugar was destined to become a major source of profit for the British East India Company.

With tea’s growing popularity outside the court, new methods of preparing it appeared. In the
Book of Receipts
(London, 1669), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), an English naval commander and eccentric intellectual, wrote that Philip Couplet (1623– 92), a Flemish Jesuit missionary, returned in 1659 from a journey to China and provided Waller with a recipe for tea calling for a couple of raw egg yolks. According to Digby, the priest, who promulgated the knowledge of tea throughout London in the 1660s, had advised that this brew was perfect for those occasions on which you “come home very hungry after attending business abroad, and do not feel like eating a competent meal.”
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Supposedly the eggs helped the tea to settle the stomach and the tea helped the eggs to diffuse throughout the bloodstream.

In fashion, Catherine’s court was ever at the vanguard. Soon all of London found reason to acquire tea services, fabricated of porcelain, silver, or pewter, depending on the purchaser’s resources. In the coffeehouses tea had been brewed and stored in kegs like beer and served exclusively to men without ceremony. After Catherine’s arrival and tea’s entry into the life of the aristocracy, the expensive tea leaves were stored by variety in compartmentalized caddies made of wood, tortoiseshell, brass, or silver, which featured a lock to secure them from pilferage by servants. Other appurtenances included thimble-sized china cups and a crystal bowl for blending varieties of tea.

This passion for tea and porcelain took on a life of its own in England and grew even greater after Charles II died and Catherine returned to her homeland. It grew greater still when William and Mary took the throne; Mary brought from Holland an enthusiasm for both that reinforced what Catherine had begun. By the time Anne (r. 1702–14), Mary’s sister, succeeded her as queen, the practice of taking tea was a necessary element of a fashionable life. Anne held court at a circular tea table adorned with a silver tea service, and, in imitation of her, women all over England began buying similar tables at which they too could sip Chinese tea from small porcelain bowls. Aristocratic ladies paid calls upon one another, embarking on little adventures that were enlivened by gossip to become more interesting than merely formal ceremonial occasions: “a sip of Tea, then for a draught or two of Scandal to digest it,…till the half hour’s past and [callers] have disburthen’d themselves of their Secrets, and take Coach for some other place to collect new matter for Defamation.”
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Samuel Johnson, a celebrated tea maniac, who comments elsewhere that sugar tongs were among the “common decencies” of the tea service, describes his encounter with and triumph over the rigors of this social event:

The Honeymoon,
a print by British artist John Collett, c. 1760. The tea table and its furnishings are carefully depicted, complete with a fashionable tea urn, symbolically topped with a pair of lovebirds, as the newlyweds enjoy their morning tea. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

The standing social ritual of taking afternoon tea at about 5 o’clock, often including invited guests, did not begin until the 1840s.

It was during Anne’s reign that beer was finally superseded as breakfast fare, in England at least, by tea and toast. In 1710 the
Tatler
reports that in place of a breakfast of “three rumps of beef,…tea and bread and butter…have prevailed of late years.”
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Tavern and court represented and promoted the excessively exclusionary proclivities of the early Restoration. But, by the early eighteenth century, a time that might be called the age of converging sensibilities, leaders in taste were progressively withdrawing from the extremes of both vulgarity and courtliness pursued by the previous generation. The common became more refined, by the dissemination of letters and the ideal of gentlemanly conduct and restraint; and the elite became more ordinary, as they mixed increasingly in the culture of their common countrymen. The coffee-house, where every sort of person might assemble, and where use of the newly popular drug caffeine stimulated conversation, was ideally suited to foster the inclusionary predilections of the day. It is not extravagant to claim that it was in these gathering spots that the art of conversation became the basis of a new literary style and that a new ideal of general education in letters was born.

The writers who frequented the coffeehouses entered a forum in which those from different social classes had occasion to mingle and exchange opinions, and their enthusiasm for the rough energy and extemporaneous disclosure typical of caffeine-animated coffeehouse conversation engendered new conventions in English prose. Before the coffeehouse, English expository and narrative prose was predominantly laconical and monolectical; that is, most of what was said was said briefly and in one voice.
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With the rise of the coffeehouse, expansive prose dialogue enjoyed a remarkable vogue. Diverse writers, from hack pamphleteers to sophisticated essayists, churned out the prose dialogues that became by their better efforts highly esteemed. Many writers of the time celebrated the formal beauty of the dialogue, in which the interplay of opposing elements is artfully represented. Philip Stubbs (1665–1738), F.R.A.S., for example, a divine and author of the Platonic-style
Dialogue on Beauty
(1731), argued that harmony was the essence of beauty and spoke for many of his generation when he asserted that the dialogue, which is founded on harmony, “enlivens Philosophy with the Charms of Poetry.”
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The engaging style of the prose dialogue, new in English, a literary image of living conversation
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and an expository technique that aimed at persuading instead of mandating, was only one aspect of a broader cultural upheaval. Changes in beliefs about the social good, resulting in part from an ebullient, unprecedented, and vigorous mixing of classes and peoples, were under way in England. The encounters among strangers, newly possible in the coffeehouses, and the drug that provoked and animated their exchanges helped initiate the development of new ideals of humanism and popular education. The critic Harold Routh comments about the way in which the coffeehouse discussions began to advance these ideals:

This part played by the coffeehouse is also acknowledged by Dobrée, who portrays it as the matrix out of which a new literature and a movement to disseminate learning arose:

As the prose dialogue became a favorite literary form, the new manner of down-to-earth, middle-class directness also became fashionable. As this happened, poetry lost all trace of its seventeenth-century courtliness, often becoming, as in Pope’s works, philosophically and morally didactic, and so more practical, engaging, and less remote. Prose for the first time replaced poetry as the common medium of drama; in place of blank verse or couplets, theatergoers now heard prose exchanges judged to represent genuine conversation more faithfully than metered language could.

The simpler, freer style had many sources. Among them were the scientific writings of the members of the Royal Society. Another were the publications of Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704), a journalist and pamphleteer who in his magazine,
The
Observator
(1681–87), frequently couched his political attacks in a dialogue of questions and answers. His prose has been well described as “colloquial, forceful, and conversational.”
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If innumerable works exemplify the literary movement that used conversation as the model for the forms of entertainment and instruction, Swift’s book
A complete Collection of polite and ingenuous Conversation
(London, 1738), written under the pseudo nym Simon Wagstaff, Esq., is the movement’s epitome. In this book Swift satirizes the “stupidity, coarseness, and attempted wit of the conversation of fashionable people.”
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In three dialogues, characters such as Lord Sparkish, Miss Notable, Lady Smart, Tom Neverout, and others provide an animated, good-natured sampling of truisms, catch phrases, repartees, and other conversational commonplaces that “to adorn every kind of discourse that an assembly of English ladies and gentlemen, met together for their mutual entertainment, can possibly want.”