The World of Caffeine (64 page)

20
. Bramah,
Tea & Coffee,
p. 107

21
. Ellis,
Penny Universities,
p. 38.

22
. Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 55.

23
. Jacob,
Epic of a Commodity,
p. 95

24
.
Ibid.

25
. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones,
Atlas of World Population History,
p. 44.

26
. The population had expanded rapidly in the thirteenth century, until it reached about five million and roughly stabilized. Great landlords prospered, but the median size of peasant farms fell, with no compensating productivity increase.

27
. Nicol,
Treatise on Coffee,
p. 15.

28
. Moseley,
Effects of Coffee,
p.20.

29
. This year also marks the first mention of coffee in the statute books of England, for in 1660 a duty of fourpence a gallon was imposed on the prepared drink.

30
. Disraeli,
Curiosities of Literature,
pp. 379–80.

31
. In the introduction to his edition of
Curiosities of Literature,
Benjamin Disraeli, Isaac’s famous son, relates how his father liked come to town to “read the newspapers at the St. James’ Coffee-house,” finding their “columns filled with extracts from the fortunate effusion of the hour,” and that it was in this place that he first heard his own fame as a writer manifested in animated conversations.
Ibid.,
pp. xvi–xvii.

32
. Evelyn,
Works,
note, p. 11.

33
. Forrest,
Tea for the British,
p. 25.

34
. Agnes Strickland,
Lives of the Queens of England,
vol. 5, p. 521.

35
. Waller’s poetic celebration of taking tea continued through the eighteenth century, for example, in the works of John Cooper (1723–69), called “the Laureate of the tea-table.” Quoted in Walsh,
Tea,
p. 234.

36
. Forrest,
Tea for the British,
p. 28.

37
. Thomas Brown,
The Works of Thomas Brown,
vol. 3, p. 86.

38
.
Tatler,
no. 148, Tuesday, March 21, 1710.

39
. Certainly the dialogue was nothing new in the history of prose, for it had been a vital literary form from Plato’s
Symposium
(fourth century B.C.) to Galileo’s vernacular
Dialogue of Two World Systems
(1632), which, even though the scientist had obtained permission to write it, incurred his condemnation by the Inquisition.

40
. Of course not everyone welcomed the new style. John, Baron Hervey of Ickworth (1696–1743), in his masterpiece,
Memoirs of the
Reign of King George II,
depicts the life at court from George II’s accession in 1727 to Queen Caroline’s death in 1827. Written in a largely discursive and occasionally epigrammatical style, his prose conveys vivid, intimate images of royal lives. Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes that, as he entered the queen’s bedroom at breakfast, “Lord Hervey found her [the ailing queen] and Princess Caroline together, drinking chocolate, drowned in tears.”
Hervey’s style is brilliantly realistic, and its sustained reportorial restraint is moving in the manner of Stendhal, but as third-person narrative it is at the antipode from dialogue. Neither did Hervey find any use for dialogue in polemics, complaining that an argument posed in dialogue was “stiff, forced, and unfair.” Bonamy Dobrée,
English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century,
p. 352.

41
. As Socrates had said that the dialectic was an image of the activity of philosophy.

42
. Quoted in Jacob,
Epic of a Commodity,
p. 97.

43
. Dobrée in his outstanding
English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century
(1959), while acknowledging the social impact of the coffeehouse, asserts that, as literary forums, they hosted insular cliques that could have had little influence on the development of ideas or letters. Dobrée cites Swift’s quip, spoken of the clergy but which could have been applied with equal justice to other groups of coffeehouse attendees of the day, “They have their particular Clubs, and particular Coffee-Houses, where they generally appear in Clusters.” We reply that, even if only in regard of their having been the places where the first newspapers were written and published, it is difficult to entertain an image of coffeehouse insularity. Further, London was small, and the critical influence of the judgments rendered in coffeehouses, from the redoubtable Rota to the Literary Club a century later, were enough to make or break a new book throughout the city. And, after all, many of the literary stars of the coffeehouses took their place alternately in one coffeehouse constellation or another, as their fancies of an evening inclined them in their courses.

44
.
Ibid.,
p. 566.

45
. Drabble,
The Oxford Companion to English Literature,
p. 227.

46
. Quoted in Stella Margetson,
Leisure and Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century,
p. 39.

47
. Although most of what we know of this illustrious society appears in Boswell’s work, Macaulay tells us that the maligned follower of Johnson “was regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them.” Thomas Macaulay,
Life of Johnson,
pp. 43–44.

48
.
Ibid.,
p. 45.

49
.
Ibid.,
pp. 44–45.

50
. For example,
Great Britain‘s Postmaster,
a political and commercial publication, devoted an entire issue in 1707 to a dreadful poem called “The British Court,” about the sublimities of the entourage of Queen Ann. As Dobrée, who describes Addison as “the first Victorian,” explains in
English Literature in the Eighteenth Century:
“It was possibly in this way that a mass of new readers, intent in the first instance upon the actual, practical, the useful, came to regard verse as natural medium, would read at first, perhaps, Defoe’s ‘True Born Englishman,’…and finally [progress] to better things…even Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’ (Dobrée, p. 8)

51
. Dobrée,
English Literature,
p. 8.

52
. Timbs,
Clubs and Club Life in London,
p. 323.

53
. Macaulay,
Life of Johnson,
p. 51.

54
. Kathleen Coburn, ed.,
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
1300, 8.49.

55
. Tea also figured into the lives of the Romantic poets, as this snippet from 1802, written after a cross-country walk of many miles during the years Coleridge and Wordsworth were still collaborating on the
Lyrical Ballads,
demonstrates:
The Rocks, by which we passed, under the brow of one of which I sate, beside an old blasted Tree, seemed the very link by which Nature connected Wood & Stone...
Here too I heard with a deep feeling the swelling unequal noise of mountain Water from the streams in the Ravines
We now found that our Expedition to the Trossacks was rashly undertaken we were at least 9 miles from the Trossacks, no Public House there or here it was almost too late to return, and if we did, the Loch Lomond Ferry Boat uncertain. We proceeded to the first House in the first Reach, & threw ourselves upon the Hospitality of the Gentleman, who after some Demur with Wordsworth did offer us a Bed & his Wife, a sweet and matronly Woman, made Tea for us most hospitably. Best possible Butter, white Cheese, Tea, & Barley Bannocks.

56
. Walsh,
Tea,
p. 234.

57
. Coburn,
Coleridge,
1490, 7.40.

58
. The gentrification of the once socially catholic coffeehouse is evident in an account by an Italian traveler, written in the same year (1724), of the pastimes available to the café society.
Ibid.,
p. 74.

59
. Derek Jarrett,
England in the Age of Hogarth,
p. 202.

60
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 74.

61
. Quoted in Okakura,
The Book of Tea,
p. 7.

62
. Ukers,
All About Tea,
vol. II, p. 494.

63
.
Ibid.,
vol. I, p. 48, quoting Sir John Hawkins,
The Life of Samuel Johnson,
LL.D., London, 1787.

64
.
The Literary Magazine,
no. 7, October 15-November 15, 1756; and no. 13, April 15-May 15, 1757.

65
. R.O.Mennell,
Tea: An Historical Sketch,
p. 29.

66
.
Ibid.

67
.
Ibid.
Even worse than the practices noticed in the statute, tea traders blended tea with ash leaves boiled in iron sulphate and sheep dung. See Helen Simpson,
The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea,
p. 13.

68
. Simpson,
London Ritz,
p. 15.

69
. The author is anonymous.

70
. A contemporary doctor who was known for investigating adulterations.

71
. Pepper dust.

72
.
Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse,
no. 288, “London Adulterations,” p. 335.

73
. Daniel Pool,
What Jane Austen Ate, What Charles Dickens Knew,
p. 209.

74
.
Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse,
no. 289, “How Five and Twenty Shillings Were Expended in a Week,” p. 337.

75
. Adapted from M.A. Spiller,
The Methylxanthine Beverages and Foods,
p. 204.

1
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 122.

2
.
Ibid.,
p. 106.

3
. Mark Twain,
Autobiography,
1924, reprinted in Helen Morrison,
The Golden Age of Travel

4
. Timbs,
Club Life in London,
p. 286.

5
. Wiley’s story is told in elaborate detail in Mark Pendergrast’s book
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
(1993).

6
. Quoted in Pendergrast,
ibid.,
p. 112.

7
.
Ibid.,
pp. 119–20.

8
. Harry Hollingworth and L. Hollingworth, “The Influence of Caffeine on Mental and Motor Efficiency,”
Archives of Psychology
20 (1912): 1–166.

9
. Pendergrast,
For God,
p. 121.

10
. “Beverage Marketing,”
Dow Jones News,
February 6, 1996.

11
. Another high-caffeine soft drink advertisment, which was withdrawn from at least one Akron suburb in response to public displeasure, read, “Gotta problem with the taste of Kick soda? Call 1–800-BITE-ME." Billboards with that piquant message on behalf of Kick were posted in three Ohio communities. A spokesman for the company explained that its intent had been to be tasteless and tacky to attract the soda’s targets market of high school and college men. The telephone number, by the way, isn’t real: It lacks the requisite eleventh digit.

12
. David Ramsey, “Caffeine Can Be Your Friend,”
MacWEEK,
7.16 (April 19): 62.

1
. Laboratory studies to date, in which subjects are challenged with larger single doses, shed little light on the ways in which most people actually use caffeine, that is, ingesting it in small amounts throughout the day and taking relatively little after dinner.

2
. M.J. Shirlow, “Patterns of Caffeine Consumption,”
Human Nutrition: Applied Nutrition
37a (1983): 307–13.

3
. David Musto, "Alcohol in American History,"
Scientific American,
April 1996, p. 78.

4
. In terms of dollars, coffee, cacao, and tea are each important agricultural products. In terms of dollar value, coffee is the largest agricultural commodity in the world, and it is second only to oil among all commodities. In 1985 the world value of trade in coffee every year was more than $15 trillion, that of cacao exceeded $7 trillion, and that of tea topped $2.5 trillion, with a total world value of these three caffeine crops of near $25 trillion annually.

5
. Mark Schogol, “Personal Briefing,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
January 10, 1996.

6
. Krapf,
Travels, Researches,
p. 47. Krapf, who wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, reports that already by his time, African coffee from the Kaffa region was being exported to Arabia and sold as genuine Mocha. This practice persists today.

7
. Heise,
Coffee and Coffee-Houses,
pp. 20–21.

8
. Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 275.

9
. Frederick L. Wellman,
Coffee Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization.

10
. More information about these studies of drinking water is available from Ed Swibas, USGS Colorado District, Box 25046, MS 415, Denver, CO 80225.

11
. His poem “The Caffeine” is widely posted in newsgroups and found in several web pages.

12
.
Working Woman,
November 1995, p. 100.

13
. International trade in caffeine has become a contentious issue at least in India, where in 1995 the Chemicals and Fertilizers Ministry officials in New Delhi, responding to petitions from Indian pharmaceutical firms, announced duties on imports of both caffeine and theophylline.

14
. The Cathead homepage is
http://www.efn.org/~garl_p_s/Cathead/CatheadPage.html
.

1
. Johannes Fabricius,
Alchemy,
p. 11.

2
. Before Boyle, the Greek philosopher Empedocles had taught that four underived and indestructible substances, fire, water, earth, and air, were the constituents from which all other things are compounded, and this theory had reigned unchallenged since ancient times.