Garway's Circular embodies the redundancy of a modern legal document with the pretentious ignorance and hifaluting language of the so-called medical treatises of his day. There are many ear-marks of both lawyer and doctor in this curious composition, and we can imagine the ostentatious pride with which Garway circulated the learned sense and nonsense among patrons no wiser than himself.
CHAPTER III.
HISTORICAL — Continued.
The same year that Pepys so intrepidly drank his first cup of tea in London, a tax was imposed by the English Parliament of 8 pence (16 cents) upon every gallon of tea made and sold as a beverage in England. A like tax was levied on liquid chocolate and sherbet as articles of sale. Officers visited the Coffee Houses daily to measure the quantities and secure the revenue.
In 1710 the best Bohea tea sold in London for 30 shillings or $7.00 a pound, inclusive of a government tax of $1.25 on each pound, and the consumption in England was then estimated at 140,000 lbs. per annum.
There being no authentic record or official computation of the population of Great Britain or of England previous to 1801, no comparison can be made of English tea consumption per capta with those early days.
Dr. Samuel Johnson, when taking tea with David Garrick, the tragedian, and Peg Woffington, about the year 1735, was amused at Garrick's audible complaints that the fascinating actress used too much of his costly tea at a drawing. In 1745 the British yearly consumption of tea was but 730,000 lbs. The Scotch Judge, Duncan Forbes, in his published letters of that period, wrote that the use of tea had become so excessive, that . . .
"the meanest families, even of laboring people, particularly in boroughs, make their morning's meal of it, and thereby disuse the ale which heretofore was their accustomed drink; and the same drug supplies all the laboring women with their afternoon's entertainment, to the exclusion of the twopenny," (i.e., dram of beer or spirits).
So that we may trace our ultra-fashionable 5 o'clock tea of 1900 back to its plebian origin among plain working people, to the working woman, to the washerwoman of 150 years ago. Let the revived custom not lose caste by this admission, but rather gain in wholesome popular estimation by evidence of a common tie between the humblest and the most fortunate of mankind.
A president of an English Court of Sessions also complained that tea was driving out beer, and indirectly injuring the farmer, in whose cottage, he omitted to say, the tea canister had begun to occupy a place of honor, despite the lessened demand for his malt.