Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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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.

      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

      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:

      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