Tea and Tea Drinking

by Arthur Reade

A New York magazine, the Herald of Health, is equally unsparing in its attacks on tea-drinking:—"The habit of tea-drinking among women is one of the worst with which the hygienic physician has to contend. Very few women, comparatively, among civilized peoples are free from this vice—for vice it is—and as pronounced in its effects as either whisky or tobacco.... It is a common custom among women who do hard manual labour to depend upon their cup of tea, when they are tired, to rest them, as they say, and thus the wearied nerves are lulled to sleep and the warning voice of nature hushed, that the work may be done and the system taxed to the utmost that it is able to bear without complete exhaustion. Is it any wonder that women once broken down are so hard to restore to health again?

"On women and children its worst consequences fall. To the use of tea may be traced directly most of the prostrating nervous headaches with which so many women are afflicted; also most of the neuralgic and nervous affections. Of course children inherit the tendency to these and similar conditions, and many a puny, emaciated nervous little one is so because its mother was a tea-drunkard, and its whole system has been narcotized from the time its being began."

In England the opposition against tea has never taken an organized form, but a good deal has been said and written on the question. In 1863 or 1864 an Anti-Teapot Society was formed, but not against tea-drinking. It published a quarterly magazine called the Anti-Teapot Review. A correspondent of Notes and Queries stated that it was no enthusiastic wish to convert tea-topers into anything else that called this body into existence; it was rather a desire to oppose and to cast scorn on the narrowness of mind that seems to be encouraged in circles which, by no very violent figure of speech, may be described around a teapot. In other words, he says, the A. T. S. was a combination against modern Pharisaism, and he quotes the following extract from No. 1 of the Review, May, 1864, as proving his point:—

"Many persons either do not, or pretend not to, know what teapotism is. In consequence of this ignorance or affectation we shall, in a few words, try to describe the leading features of the male and female teapot. Teapotism is a magnificent profession, but a very sorry practice! It professes a large-hearted liberality, unbounded piety, and the enunciation of true principles; but its practice is that of a narrow-minded clique, who condemn all who go not with them. Its piety consists in hero-worship and the circulation of illiterate tracts, calculated to attract the strong and to confound the weak; it is bounded on the north by the platform and meeting-house, and on the south by scandal, hassocks and tea, whence the name of teapots, &c."

The article ends with the assurance that "The society will go on as it began: it will remain strictly private, enforce the same rules, and show that it is the enemy, not of tea, but of teapots." The Review professed to be edited by members of the universities, and written only by members of the Anti-Teapot Society of Europe. The qualifications for membership were, to read the rules, to fill up the form of admission to be had in English, French, German, Dutch, and other languages; to be nominated and seconded by any two officers; "the latter (sic) wholesome rule was introduced so that inquisitive people might be prevented from joining the society out of sheer curiosity." The society appears to have made no converts, and had but a very short existence.

Tea-parties have always been popular institutions among Dissenting bodies, and it is therefore not surprising to find ministers taking part in meetings advocating a reduction of the tea duties. In 1848 the Rev. Dr. Hume, attending a meeting in Liverpool for this purpose, warmly defended tea, on the ground of health, and quoted with great satisfaction the evidence of Dr. Sigmond, given before the Committee of the House of Commons. Asked what had been the result of the medical inquiries into the effect of tea upon the human frame, Doctor Sigmond replied, "I think it is of great importance in the prevention of skin disease, in comparison with any fluid we have been in the habit of drinking in former years, and also in removing glandular affections. I think scrofula has very much diminished in this country since tea has been so largely used. To those classes of society who are not of labouring habits, but who are of sedentary habits, and exercise the mind a good deal, tea is of great importance."

On the other hand, a famous physician of our time takes an entirely opposite view of the question. At the Sanitary Congress last year Dr. Richardson delivered an address on "Felicity as a Sanitary Research," and charged tea with being a promoter of infelicity. "As a rule," he says, "all agents which stimulate—that is to say, relax—the arterial tension, and so allow the blood a freer course through the organs, promote for a time felicity, but in the reaction leave depression. The alkaloid in tea, theine, has this effect. It causes a short and slight felicity. It causes in a large number of persons a long and severe and even painful sadness. There are many who never knew a day of felicity, owing to this one destroying cause. In our poorer districts, amongst the poor women of our industrial populations, our spinning, our stocking-weaving women, the misery incident to their lot is often doubled by this one agent."

The Dean of Bangor is the latest clerical opponent of tea-drinking. Speaking at a meeting held to further the establishment of courses of instruction in practical cookery in the elementary schools, he said that if he had his own way there would be much less tea-drinking among people of all classes. Oatmeal and milk produced strong, hearty, good-tempered men and women; whereas excessive tea-drinking created a generation of nervous, discontented people, who were for ever complaining of the existing order of the universe, scolding their neighbours, and sighing after the impossible. Good cooking would, he firmly believed, enable them to take far higher and more correct views of existence. In fact, he suspected that too much tea-drinking, by destroying the calmness of the nerves, was acting as a dangerous revolutionary force among us. Tea-drinking, renewed three or four times a day, made men and women feel weak, and the result was that the tea-kettle went before the gin-bottle, and the physical and nervous weakness, that had its origin in the bad cookery of an ignorant wife, ended in ruin, intemperance, and disease.