But not all the women were tea-drinkers in those days. There was Madam Drake, the proprietress of one of the three private carriages Manchester could boast. Few men were as courageous as she in declaring against the tea-table when they were but invited guests. Madam Drake did not hesitate to make it known when she paid an afternoon's visit that she expected to be offered her customary solace--a tankard of ale and a pipe of tobacco.
Another female opponent of tea was the Female Spectator, which declared the use of the fluid to be not only expensive, but pernicious; the utter destruction of all economy, the bane of good housewifery, and the source of all idleness. Tradesmen especially suffered from the habit. They could not serve their customers because their apprentices were absent during the busiest hours of the day drumming up gossips for their mistresses' tea-tables.
This same censor says that the most temperate find themselves obliged to drink wine freely after tea, or supplement their Bohea with rum and brandy, the bottle and glass becoming as necessary to the tea-table as the slop-basin.
Although Jonas Hanway, the father of the umbrella, was successful in keeping off water, he was not successful in keeping out tea. All he did accomplish in his essay on the subject was to call forth a reply from Dr. Johnson, who, strange to say, instead of vigorously defending his favorite tipple, rather excuses it as an amiable weakness; confessing that tea is a barren superfluity, fit only to amuse the idle, relax the studious, and dilute the meals of those who cannot take exercise, and will not practise abstinence. His chief argument in tea's favor is that it is drunk in no great quantity even by those who use it most, and as it neither exhilarates the heart nor stimulates the palate, is, after all, but a nominal entertainment, serving as a pretence for assembling people together, for interrupting business, diversifying idleness; admitting that, perhaps, while gratifying the taste, without nourishing the body, it is quite unsuited to the lower classes.
It is a singular fact, too, that at that period there was no other really vigorous defender of the beverage. All the best of the other writers did was to praise its pleasing qualities, associations, and social attributes.
Still, tea grew in popular favor, privately and publicly. The custom had now become so general that every wife looked upon the tea-pot, cups, and caddy to be as much her right by marriage as the wedding-ring itself. Fine ladies enjoyed the crowded public entertainments with tea below stairs and ventilators above. Citizens, fortunate enough to have leaden roofs to their houses, took their tea and their ease thereon. On Sundays, finding the country lanes leading to Kensington, Hampstead, Highgate, Islington, and Stepney, "to be much pleasanter than the paths of the gospel," the people flocked to those suburban resorts with their wives and children, to take tea under the trees. In one of Coleman's plays, a Spitalfield's dame defines the acme of elegance as:
"Drinking tea on summer afternoons
At Bagnigge Wells with china and gilt spoons."
London was surrounded with tea-gardens, the most popular being Sadlier's Wells, Merlin's Cave, Cromwell Gardens, Jenny's Whim, Cuper Gardens, London Spa, and the White Conduit House, where they used to take in fifty pounds on a Sunday afternoon for sixpenny tea-tickets.
One D'Archenholz was surprised by the elegance, beauty, and luxury of these resorts, where, Steele said, they swallowed gallons of the juice of tea, while their own dock leaves were trodden under foot.
The ending of the East India Company's monopoly of the trade, coupled with the fact that the legislature recognized that tea had passed out of the catalogue of luxuries into that of necessities, began a new era for the queen of drinks destined to reign over all other beverages.