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was smuggled – it was estimated that 7 million lbs (3 million kilograms) of tea were illicitly trafficked into Britain, against only 5 million lbs (2 million kilograms) imported legally. In 1785, under pressure from the law-abiding tea traders, the government slashed the duty on tea, which wiped out the illegal smuggling trade virtually overnight. The price of tea dropped sharply. It could now become a truly popular drink. But cheapness was only one factor in the nation’s growing taste for tea. At some point early in the eighteenth century, people had started adding milk and sugar, which transformed bitter refinement into sustaining sweetness. Consumption rocketed. Unlike coffee, tea was positively marketed as a respectable drink for both sexes – with women particularly targeted. Tea houses and tea gardens flourished in London and china tea sets became an essential part of the fashionable household, while less costly versions in pottery – like the object in this chapter – spread through society.

As it got cheaper, tea also spread rapidly to the working classes. By 1800, as foreigners remarked, it was the new national drink. By 1900 the average tea consumption per person in Britain was a staggering 6 lbs (3 kilograms) a year. In 1809 the Swede Erik Gustav Geijer commented:

Next to water, tea is the Englishman’s proper element. All classes consume it … in the morning one may see in many places small tables set up under the open sky, around which coal-carters and workmen empty their cups of delicious beverage.

The ruling classes had a real interest in promoting tea drinking among the growing urban population, who were poor, vulnerable to disease and perceived as prone to disorderly drunkenness. Beer, port and gin had become a significant part of the diet of men, women and even children, partly because alcohol as a mild antiseptic was much safer to drink than unpurified city water. But by the nineteenth century alcohol was a growing social problem. Religious leaders and temperance movements made common cause to proclaim the merits of tea. A cup of sweet, milky tea was cheap, energy-giving, refreshing and tasted very good. Celina Fox explains how it was also a wonderful instrument of social control:

Temperance was huge. Drink for the Victorians was a very big issue. The desire to have a working population that was sober and industrious was very strong, and there was a great deal of propaganda to that effect. Sobriety was tied in with dissent, Methodism and so on, and tea really was the drink of choice. So it’s happening on two levels: dissent and having an upright and working population which gets to the factory on time and isn’t drunk out of its mind, which always seems to be a British problem, and on top of that you have the ritual of afternoon tea. So tea drinking really takes off in a massive way in the nineteenth century.

As tea displaced beer as the defining national drink, it became a symbol of the rebranded British character – polite and respectable, with none of the old boisterous conviviality. An anonymous temperance poem from the nineteenth century makes the point:

With you I see, in ages yet unborn,

Thy votaries the British Isles adorn,

Till rosy Bacchus shall his wreaths resign,

And love and tea triumph o’er the vine.

But a loving, tranquil cup of tea has a violent hinterland. When all tea came into Europe from China, the British East India Company traded opium for silver and used that silver to buy tea. The trade was so important that it brought the two countries to war. The first of the conflicts, which we still refer to as the Opium Wars – they were in fact just as much about tea – broke out more or less as our teapot was leaving the Wedgwood factory. Partly because of these difficulties with China, in the 1830s the British set up plantations in the area around Calcutta and Indian tea was exempted from import duty to encourage demand. Strong, dark Assam tea became the patriotic British cuppa – and sustained the empire. As the century went on, tea plantations were established in