Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Summary

[H]appiness […] in my judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray: for tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual: and, for my part, I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a vellum internecinum against Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person, who should presume to disparage it.

Thomas De Quincey would cut a very different figure in literary history if he had authored Confessions of an English Tea-Drinker. The text he did write, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), reveals the opiumeater to be equally dedicated to drinking tea, but, unlike opium use, teadrinking simply is not the stuff of ‘confession’. Samuel Johnson made just this point in the piece to which De Quincey refers, a scoffing review of Jonas Hanway's 1756 diatribe against the British tea habit. In his Essay on Tea, Hanway had argued at length that Britons of all social ranks had developed a ‘wild infatuation’ with the fashionable beverage, to the detriment of the nation. Employing xenophobic and medical rhetoric to posit tea as a foreign invader and its consumption a form of malady, Hanway claimed that the tea trade was as bad for the British economy as teadrinking was pernicious to Britons’ health. Tea, he wrote, is a ‘Chinese drug’, an ‘intoxicating liquor’, and a ‘slow poison’; it is no less than ‘a seven-headed monster, which devours […] the best fruits of this land’. While the tea trade holds Britain in thrall to the Chinese – ‘the most effeminate people on the face of the whole earth’ – the consumption of tea ‘is an epidemical disease’ and ‘universal infection’. ‘Habit reconciles us to tea,’ Hanway warns, ‘as it does Turks to opium,’ and makes the British ‘act more wantonly and absurdly than the Chinese themselves’. Johnson countered the fervor of Hanway's claims by declaring himself ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and, with tea, welcomes the morning’.