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Sacred and Useful Pleasures: The Temperance Tea Party and the Creation of a Sober Consumer Culture in Early Industrial Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2013

Erika Rappaport
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Abstract

This essay argues that the strict branch of the temperance movement helped create and spread an idea of a sober consumer culture in early Victorian Britain. It specifically examines the material and gustatory, political, and religious culture of the mass temperance tea parties that emerged in the 1830s and the 1840s. Supported by middle- and working-class followers, evangelicals, and liberals, the strict branch of the temperance movement insisted that the consumption of tea, sugar, and wheat-based baked goods in a heterosocial setting would demonstrate the rewards of a religious and sober life. Mass tea parties disciplined consumers through satisfying the body and encouraging pleasurable cross-class and mixed-gender interactions. Temperance advocates hoped that the behaviors and values inculcated at the tea table would radiate to the home, the factory, and the marketplace. The temperance movement thus contributed to the notion that drinking tea produced well-behaved and energetic workers, as well as rational consumers.

Keywords

temperanceliberalismfree tradeevangelicalismteasugarwheatcottonindustrializationfactorymass cultureconsumer culture
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 990 - 1016
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

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References

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141 Ibid., 60.

142 Report of the Executive Committee of the American Union, 1844 (New York, 1844), 14.

143 There is a growing body of literature on American consumer culture and the China trade. See Frank, Caroline, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago, 2011)Google Scholar; Dolin, Eric Jay, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

144 “The Tea Saloon,” Public Opinion 26, no. 25 (June 1899): 782Google Scholar.

145 The American Missionary Register for the Year 1825 VI (December 1825): 375.

146 See, for example, a 2,000-person tea party described in Chronicle of the London Missionary Society XII, no. 137 (May 1903): 111.

147 Quoted in John, L. and Comaroff, Jean, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 (Chicago, 1997), 236Google Scholar.

148 Rev. Campbell, John, Travels in South Africa, undertaken at the request of the London Missionary Society; being an account of a Second Journey in the Interior of the Cape, vol. 1 (London: Francis Westley, 1822), 164Google Scholar.

149 These accounts also imply that Africans were not yet connected to the world economy, and this has been disproved by a number of historians. On East Africa in this period, see Prestholdt, Jeremy, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, 2008)Google Scholar.

150 Gurney, Co-Operative Culture.

151 League, 28 September 1844, quoted in Pickering, Paul A. and Tyrell, Alex, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London: 2000), 134Google Scholar.

152 Report of the Conservative Tea Party (Birmingham, 1836), 49.

153 The Temperance Record, 25 January 1873, 47. By the 1880s, a specialized journal, the Temperance Caterer, served this socially minded catering trade.

154 For a further elaboration, see Erika Rappaport, Tea Revives the World: The British Empire and the Making of a Global Consumer Culture (forthcoming).

155 Miller, Daniel, “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad,” in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Miller, Daniel (Chicago, 1998), 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

156 Appadurai, Arjun, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996), 42Google Scholar.