Abstract:
Tea arrived on the River Thames in the 1650s on East India Company ships and has been a profound influence on British culture ever since, but never more so than in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth- century London was a city that dictated the latest trends for the rest of the nation, and contemporaries’ varied responses to the popular beverage are immensely fascinating. What is also fascinating is the increasing importance contemporaries placed on the notion of “politeness”, as they examined and debated the uses and meanings of tea.
This thesis compiles multiple sources in social, medical, and commercial settings which exemplify key contemporary responses, and they tell historians a considerable amount about how contemporaries perceived the selling and drinking of tea. In distinctive ways, contemporary rhetoric establishes diverse connections between tea-drinking and moral instruction surrounding polite virtues. Tea-drinking was part of a series of objects and hobbies that determined the politeness of the individual, yet these sources suggest that contemporary observers worried that this habit may undermine or contradict norms of politeness. The goal of this thesis is to explore this paradox and contribute to scholarship a picture of how tea-related practices both reinforced and challenged eighteenth-century understandings of polite behaviour.
