Drink - Victoria Moore on the cup that cheers (but does not inebriate)
My days billow like a hammock slung between the twin supports of my morning tea and evening wine, and the ends of the century appear tied to those same two pillars. I can barely resurrect myself from slumber without clamping a mug of hot, weak tea to my lips. As tiny, thin sips of it dribble down my throat I am slowly restored. But I often think what a revolting drink it actually is: brewed so hastily the leaves barely infuse; a dash of milk added sloppily to something that is little more than a beakerful of scalding water. Yet how strangely consoling it is, fuelling me with the grit and determination that will send me out into civilisation and to work.
At the end of the day it is wine I crave. The release, the escape, the illusion of being elevated from the drudgery of real life. But while one drink is feted by poets, the other has been ignored. According to the 19th-century author Thomas Love Peacock, wine is both "a hierarchical and episcopal fluid" and "the elixir of life". "O for a draught of vintage!" cries Keats longingly in "Ode to a Nightingale".
What of tea? Where are the heroic stanzas and epics celebrating a fine Assam or a fragrant Darjeeling? Yet without tea we might still be drinking beer for breakfast.
In a letter to John Hessey, Keats damns tea as the choice of the unbrave and the uninspired. "In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice."
In our culture, tea has always been framed as a domestic refreshment: never fashionable, never a drink for the party butterfly and never even, like coffee, acquiring the blessing of the achingly cool intelligentsia.
If your choice of liquor affiliates you to a certain class (at various times, beer for the labourer, port for the wealthy, gin for the Hogarthian vagrants) then our national consumption of tea plots our social and economic history across the past century in much the same way as rising and falling hemlines. Go back earlier than that and the drink was still taking root. One of the earliest recipes for tea in Europe comes in the mid-16th century, and when tea came to Britain a few decades later it was, like wine, primarily a drink for the genteel upper classes. Before long, though, it was firmly established as a domestic drink right across society: it was one of the few luxuries the working classes could afford.
Tea was not universally welcomed. In the 1820s William Cobbett ranted that it was "a weaker kind of laudanum - an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness". Still, through much of the Victorian era tea was highly lauded - principally because of what it was not. And it was not alcohol.
Victoria herself effected changes in drinking habits. Gentlemen who had been accustomed to loitering at the dinner table with supplies of port found their leisure curtailed by a queen who refused to sit in the drawing-room until the gentlemen joined her later. As the sense of duty embodied by Victorianism pervaded society, there was a growth in temperance. Throughout the second half of the 19th century tea consumption rose.
One hundred years ago, average annual tea consumption was 5.7lb per head. As far as alcohol went, we drank beer, spirits and wine (in that order). Wine was the preserve of the upper and middle classes. About this time, alcohol consumption began to drop while sales of tea continued to rise, reaching an all-time high in the depressed years between the wars when people turned to it for solace. After the 1950s we began to drink less of it again.
Now, at the close of the century, sales of wine have, for the first time, exceeded those of beer. Our drinking habits are the negative of what they were, which tells us, perhaps, that these are prosperous times. We have less need of tea, the lifeblood of hard times and misery. We all drink wine: we are all middle class now.
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