Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  Part of the reason that the consumption of tea soared so dramatically was that it was inextricably interwoven with another commodity: sugar. Both had arrived at roughly the same time in Britain, one from India, one from the West Indies. The development of cane sugar in the West Indian plantations had made many British fortunes, through the possibility of sales at dramatically reduced prices.* In 1660, about 1,000 hogsheads of sugar were consumed in Britain; by 1730 that had risen a hundredfold, to 100,000 hogsheads. By the mid-1770s, sugar imports were valued at £3.3 million. Sugar and tea were now no longer luxuries: they were national characteristics. Consumption was running at 20 pounds of sugar per person per year; and up to 10 per cent of all money spent on food and drink went on sugar and tea.45*

  Tea had not conquered the market on its intrinsic worth alone. From the late eighteenth century it was heavily advertised, using a range of new methods to entice customers. Many advertisements centred on competitive pricing: one merchant was ‘determined to sell teas at such low prices…as the public have a right to expect’, another, heroically, aimed ‘at profits only sufficient to defray expenses, wholesale and retail’. Many claimed to be selling tea more cheaply than anywhere else; others advertised reduced prices for bulk purchases. Many supposedly nineteenthand even twentieth-century innovations were happily tried out by these eighteenth-century tradesmen: some used the ‘loss-leader’, selling sugar at below-cost prices with the purchase of full-price tea; others gave the chance of good fortune with a lottery ticket free on purchase of a pound of tea;† some offered customers ‘a new treatise on tea’, available, not by coincidence, with the purchase of tea; still others advertised money-back guarantees if customers were dissatisfied; some promised to match wholesale prices, or even undercut them47—and none of these advertisements suggested that these were new ways of selling.

  One shopkeeper who embraced these methods enthusiastically was Edward Eagleton, of the Tea Warehouse in Cheapside. In the Leeds Mercury in 1786 he advertised reduced prices, fixed prices for cash, mail-order sales, and money-back guarantees; he offered to post samples, or customers could come into his Tea Warehouse to taste the goods. In other advertisements he promoted his prices, which were, he claimed, 1s. per pound lower than anyone else’s. He sold entire chests of East India Company tea to small shopowners with only a 1 per cent mark-up. His most innovative move, however, was an arrangement with ‘outlets’ (it is unclear whether he meant shops or simply agents) in twenty-seven towns: he supplied them with packets of tea marked with his own sign, the Grasshopper, and advertised in local newspapers ‘fresh…teas…from Eagleton and Company…London…wholesale and retail…selling from ten to twenty per cent cheaper than [are now] sold…and carriage saved…[The tea is] packed and marked with the sign of the Grasshopper’, with a money-back guarantee and the motto ‘Taste, try, compare and judge’.48

  All of these sales techniques had been tried before, but Eagleton was one of the first to bring them together. The next to take up the retail challenge was a man who had originally been a printer in a firm that produced lottery tickets. When Frederick Gye himself won £30,000 in a lottery, he set himself up as a tea dealer and quickly became one of the most important in the trade, mostly by dint of advertisements. Instead of advertising his tea, he advertised himself as an indissoluble part of his product. First and foremost, he promoted the sale of his packaged tea, which, he promised, would save the ‘Tea Trade from the opprobrium attached to it by the late disclosures of adulteration’, promising not to ‘buy nor sell Bohea tea*…so commonly used to adulterate better sorts’. (With this he was in fact blurring the line between blending tea—a legitimate job, and a highly skilled one—and adulterating it, and so attacking other dealers. Attack ads were one of his specialities.) The brand was now all-important: he promised that every order over a quarter of a pound would be sent in a sealed package with a wrapper carrying an engraving of his shop; the quality of the tea, its price and a seal were stamped on it. He used some of Eagleton’s other methods as well: free carriage within ten miles of London for cash sales, and agents ‘in every principal town in England’—by 1819, four months after his shop opened, he advertised that he had 100 agents; seven months after that he claimed to have 500. Other dealers resented this newcomer, and advertised in return, using his methods, and thus by the early nineteenth century advertisements in local papers, country agents, and prepacked, branded, pre-priced tea were commonplaces.49

  When tea became fashionable, in the early eighteenth century, it naturally became necessary to have the right accoutrements to brew it in and from which to drink it. We have seen that as late as the 1690s hot-drink utensils were rarely to be found domestically, while by 1725 most prosperous households had some.50 In the early part of the century porcelain had been imported from China, before local production stepped in to capture the market with equipment better suited to British rather than Chinese tea-drinking habits. In China, tea was brewed in a kettle, then cooled before drinking; in Britain, it was brewed in a teapot and poured out while still hot. Therefore the British teapot shape was adapted not from a Chinese tea kettle, but from a wine flask, with a handle added so that the tea could be poured before it was cooled; equally, handles on cups were useful for hot tea.51 Further, the British drank their tea sweetened, and with milk, so both a sugar bowl and a milk jug needed to be designed, along with a new size of spoon—the teaspoon—and a saucer on which to place the wet spoon, creating by the eighteenth century a British tea set that was considerably different from its Chinese ancestor.

  Many manufacturers rushed to fill the void. In 1757 James Watt, soon to be known as the inventor of the steam engine, was working as ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University’ in Glasgow. Despite living a fairly straitened life, he wrote to his father asking him to send ‘1/2 Doz afternoon China tea cups a stone teapot not too small a sugar Box & Slop Bowl as soon as possible’.52 The use of such precise terms is fascinating—a relatively poor man, Watt still specified ‘afternoon’ cups, as distinct, one assumes, from breakfast china, and a stoneware teapot, not an earthenware or porcelain one; also, the sugar and slop bowls* were not to be omitted. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Josiah Wedgwood had such an immediate success when he produced his Queensware in 1765.†

  It is almost impossible for us to realize today what a sensation china was when it first appeared. Before the eighteenth century, the rich in

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  Britain used silver and pewter; moderately prosperous households used pewter or, sometimes, early forms of earthenware; the poor used wood. European porcelain factories were set up under royal patronage after the secret of hard-paste porcelain was discovered by Meissen in 1709. The hard-paste porcelain from China, however, remained highly prized. The Dutch, who at that time held the monopoly on trade with the Chinese, sent drawings of their pewter and stoneware utensils for the Chinese to copy in porcelain: in this way the goods that arrived in Europe were at once startlingly new in material and reassuringly familiar in shape. A few factories began to produce soft-paste porcelain in Britain—Bow, Derby, Pomona, and Longton Hall in Staffordshire—but the cost of production was staggering: before any work could be carried out, for example, the clay had to be weathered for nearly three years. Without a beneficent monarch to pay the bills, these works had little chance of survival: Longton Hall was bankrupt by 1760, Bow in 1763.54

  While this was bad news for porcelain manufacturers, it opened up the earthenware market to the manufacturer with an eye to the market. No one would have picked Josiah Wedgwood as that man of destiny at his birth: the twelfth child of a cadet branch of a family of potters in Burslem,* he started in the general trade, as one of dozens of earthenware potters selling to the local retailers at the cheap end of the market. Earthenware was porous, and chipped and broke easily; stoneware, fired at higher temperatures, was a slightly better product, having a shiny, non-porous surface, but it was still fragile. By the 1760s, however, Wedgwood had produced his first tech
nical breakthrough, which moved him from a local to a national market: creamware, an earthenware that could withstand sudden temperature changes without shattering, had a richly glazed surface, and was still relatively inexpensive. It also had a purer colour than had ever been achieved except with porcelain, and its worth was quickly recognized: in 1765 Queen Charlotte ordered a creamware tea set from him. The technical breakthrough was essential, and through his life Wedgwood continued to work at new methods and processes. Even when he was not the inventor himself, he always recognized important advances and quickly made use of them. In 1750 a mezzotint engraver had developed a way of using transfer printing on earthenware, to decorate it to look like hand-painted porcelain. Wedgwood swooped, and soon creamware was carrying black, rust or purple images of flowers, birds, garlands, genre scenes, classical groups, even Masonic emblems and designs to commemorate people and events—the King and Queen, Frederick the Great, Pitt, Wesley and John Wilkes were all immortalized in earthenware.

  These advances would have occurred sooner or later, with or without Wedgwood; it was how he parlayed his successes into an empire that marked out Wedgwood—and his unfairly overlooked partner Thomas Bentley—as unique. Wedgwood saw the route ahead the minute the royal tea set had been ordered. He immediately renamed his creamware Queensware, and asked for the right to call himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’. He wrote to Bentley:

  The demand for this said Creamcolour, Alias Queen’s Ware, Alias Ivory, still increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread allmost† over the whole Globe, how universally it is liked. How much of this general use, & estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction—& how much to its real utility and beauty? are questions in which we may be a good deal interested for the government of our future Conduct…For instance, if a Royal, or Noble introduction be as necessary for the sale of an Article of Luxury, as real Elegance & beauty, then the Manufacturer, if he consults his own interest will bestow as much pains, & expence too, if necessary, in gaining the former of these advantages, as he would in bestowing the latter.55

  In 1770 Wedgwood wrote, as always, to Bentley:

  Wod you advertise the next season as the silk mercers in Pell mell do,—Or deliver cards at the houses of the Nobility & Gentry, & in the City,—Get leave to make a shew of his Majesty’s Service for a month, & ornament the Dessert with Ornamental Ewers, flower baskets & Vases—Or have an Auction at Cobbs room of Statues, Bassreliefs, Pictures, Tripods, Candelabrias, Lamps, Potpouris, Superb Ewers, Cisterns, Tablets Etruscan, Porphirys & other Articles not yet expos’d to sale. Make a great route of advertising this Auction, & at the same time mention our rooms in Newport St—& have another Auction in the full season at Bath of such things as we now have on hand, just sprinkled over with a few new articles to give them an air of novelty to any of our customers who may see them there,—Or will you trust to a new disposition of the Rooms with the new articles we shall have to put into them & a few modest puffs in the Papers from some of our friends such as I am told there has been one lately in Lloyd’s Chronicle.56

  Barely pausing for breath, he had suggested in just a few lines many of the major new selling techniques of the century: advertising in the press—by paid advertisements, by auction announcements and by getting friends to insert ‘puff ‘ pieces; delivering trade cards to customers and potential customers; various forms of exhibition—by displaying a service he had made for the King, with its concommitant ‘royal’ publicity, and more conventionally by auction and in his showrooms; highlighting new goods to attract the fashionable; and redesigning his showrooms, again to attract the fashionable by novelty. And this is a single letter from the hundreds that poured out over the decades.*

  Wedgwood understood the benefits of publicity in all its varied forms. His most tried and trusted method was to get nobility (if royalty were not available) to promote his wares for him. In 1776 he had some new bas-relief vases to sell. He fired off yet another missive to Bentley: ‘Sir William Hambleton,* our very good Friend is in Town—Suppose you shew him some of the Vases, & a few other Connoisieurs not only to have their advice, but to have the advantage of their puffing them off against the next Spring, as they will, by being consulted, and flatter’d agreeably, as you know how, consider themselves as a sort of parties in the affair, & act accordingly.’57 To make sure of success, before the vases went on sale Wedgwood and Bentley had private viewings for Mrs Chetwynd (their conduit to Queen Charlotte), the dukes of Northumberland and Marlborough, the earls of Stamford and Dartmouth, Lords Bessborough, Percy, Clanbrazil, Carlisle and Torrington, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and, by comparison, the rather humble-sounding MP Mr Harbord Harbord (who was, however, later to become the 1st Baron Suffield).58

  ‘Fashion,’ as Wedgwood recognized, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects…It is plain from a thousand instances that if you have a favourite child you wish the public to fondle & take notice of, you have only to make a choice of proper sponcers. If you are lucky in them no matter what the brat is, black, brown or fair, its fortune is made.’59 And with his ‘sponcers’ Wedgwood started at the top, believing that the greatest in the land would influence the lesser: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile ‘till authoris’d by their betters—by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’60 Queen Charlotte had started him on his way with Queensware; after a queen, who but an empress? In 1770 Catherine the Great had commissioned a Queensware service decorated with wheat husks. Three years later came a greater challenge: she wanted a service for state occasions: a 680-piece dinner service and a 264-piece dessert service, plus tureens, salvers, fruit baskets, ‘glaciers’ (ice-cream bowls) etc. to accompany them.† Each piece was to have on it an image of an actual country house, or a park or garden, or a palace, or even industrial ‘sights’ such as the Plymouth docks or the Bridgewater Canal. The cost was fantastic—not for the manufacture, but for an artist to be sent around the country to make drawings, and then for the 1,200 drawings to be worked up so they could be transferred to the dishes. But Wedgwood was a born publicist, and he had planned a coup de théâtre—he would show the entire service before it was shipped off to Russia, and, whatever he had lost on the manufacture, ‘it would bring an immense number of people of fashion into our Rooms—would fully complete our notoriety to the whole Island, & help us greatly, no doubt, in the sale of our goods, both useful & ornamental. It would confirm the consequence we have attain’d, & increase it, by showing that we are employ’d in a much higher scale than other Manufacturers.’61 His one anxiety was that some of his noble patrons would be offended that their houses were not included, or were put ‘upon a small piece, or not flattering it sufficiently’. To make the event even more exclusive, admission to the showroom would be by ticket. It was all a great success, with the King and Queen of Sweden paying a special visit, as well as Queen Charlotte, Prince Ernst of Mecklenberg, and hordes of the aristocracy. No one was aggrieved to find their great houses represented on some of the smaller dishes; on the contrary they came time and again to point their lasting fame out to friends.62

  The difference between Wedgwood and earlier craftsmen who had relied on the nobility and gentry for their livings was that, as far as Wedgwood and Bentley were concerned, the nobility were a means to an end:

  The Great People have had these Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the Middling Class of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior, in number to the great, and though a great price was, I believe, at first necessary to make the vases esteemed Ornament for Palaces, that reason no longer exists. Their character is established and the middling People would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced price.63

  Once that principle was established, it was not surprising that Wedgwood thought he could sell anything to anyone. In the 1780s his works could not keep up with the retail demand, and he bought in ware that other manufacturers had been unable to
sell. He slapped a higher price on it, together with his name, and everything was snatched off the shelves in a fashionable frenzy. It was the ultimate marketing triumph: to sell goods no one else could shift—and at a higher price.

  Wedgwood used every possible route to reach the ‘middling People’. There had long been a reluctance for luxury trades in general to advertise in the newspapers, because there was no control over how their advertisements would appear: auctions—of houses, pictures or just household goods—cockfights, draper’s shops, patent medicines, bug-killers, carefully worded advertisements for the ‘removal of obstructions’ (abortifacients), all appeared pell-mell, one after the other, in column after column. The newspapers, meanwhile, were doing their best to make advertisers believe that their pages were the haunts of none but the very finest manufacturers and retailers. In 1757 the Liverpool Chronicle, in its first edition, suggested,

  It is not many years since it was thought mean and disreputable, in any tradesmen of worth and credit, to advertise the sales of his commodities in a public Newspaper, but as those apprehensions were founded only on custom, and not on reason, it is become now fashionable for very eminent tradesmen to publish their business, and the peculiar goods wherein they deal, in the News Papers, by way of Advertisement; nor can any one make appear what disgrace there can be in this, for do not the great trading corporations apprize the public of their sales in the public News Papers?64