Feature Endeavour Vol.32 No.1

Domestic science: making

chemistry your cup of tea

Melanie Keene

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

In the early Victorian home, there were plenty of scientificlessons to be uncovered. With the appropriate interrog-ation, everyday objects could transform seeminglymundane activities such as eating breakfast, washingclothes or reading by candle-light into household lecturesthat gave children a familiar base from which to explorethe hidden properties and marvellous histories ofcommon commodities. Responding to an unprecedentedhunger for scientific knowledge, a profusion of introduc-tory texts appeared in the mid-nineteenth century thatdirected lessons into homes across Britain and beyond. Inparticular, the science of chemistry found its way into thisdomestic setting, as writers promoted its practice andpractitioners as a source of authoritative expertise oneveryday life. One of the most compelling illustrationsof this encounter between the public and chemistry tookplace over a simple cup of tea.

Tea-pot: a familiar introductionHave you ever wished that learning about a scientificsubject was as easy as picking up a pebble, lighting acandle or even making a cup of tea? At the end of theeighteenth century, in their Evenings at Home, authorsJohn Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld attempted pre-cisely this, inviting young readers to learn about chemistrythrough ‘A Tea Lecture’ (Figure 1). In this short dialogue,the tutor asked his pupil to lay aside his book and talkabout the activity of tea-making instead:

Pup. An operation of cookery – is it not?

Tut. Youmay call it so; but it is properly an operation

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of chemistry.

Pup. Of chemistry! I thought that had been a very

deep sort of a business.

Tut. Oh – there are many things in common life that

belong to the deepest of sciences.

Making tea is the chemical operation called infusion,which is, when a hot liquor is poured upon a sub-stance, in order to extract something from it. Thewater, you see, extracts from the tea-leaves theircolour, taste and flavour [1].

By identifying the processes of cookery with chemistry,the tutor converted making the cup of tea itself into aninstructive experiment. Appeasing the fears of his youngpupil, the small receptacle demonstrably did not contain a‘very deep’ subject; it could be held, reassuringly tangible

Corresponding author: Keene, M. (mjk32@hermes.cam.ac.uk).

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and unthreatening. The tutor encouraged the pupil tothink more carefully about what happened during every-day activities that, as he pointed out, were also chemicaloperations with technical names such as ‘infusion’. Sim-ilarly, the process of solution could be demonstrated by‘throwing’ a lump of sugar into the tea and then ‘tasting’ it.The pupil watched on as the tea, along with his under-standing of solution, became clear [2].

The contrasting experiences of the tutor and pupil,highlighted by the written-out dialogue of the ‘lecture’,encouraged the reader to empathise with the seeing pupil,helping to clarify his own understanding of the process.The pupil went on to answer questions on hypotheticalexperiments with this newly acquired knowledge: suppos-ing, for example, ‘you had a mixture of sugar, salt, chalkand tea-leaves, and were to throw it into water, either hotor cold – what would be the effect?’ [3]. At the end of theshort dialogue, and of the tea-making, the tutor returned tothe question of fearing the ‘very deep’ subject of chemistry,affirming that the tea-making they had just carried outwas nothing less than ‘real chemistry’. Amazed that thiscould be understood ‘without any difficulty’, the pupil’schemical education had begun [4].

Throughout the nineteenth century, common objectssuch as coal, pebbles, feathers, candles, flowers, chalkand water were all used to provide a familiar entry-pointinto the sciences. By identifying the scientific processes atwork in everyday phenomena or activities, educators couldassuage fears about novel subjects. Existing knowledgecould be exploited and reworked to ‘open the eyes’ ofchildren to the wondrous world of science they inhabited.In particular, the various components of the tea-tray andthe rituals of tea-making were a convenient way to exposechildren to elementary experimentation, ideas of chemicalcontamination, steam power and imperial exploration;they were a rich resource to which home-based teacherscould repeatedly return.

Tea-leaf: chemical purityFreidrich Accum’s 1821 Culinary Chemistry followed theargument of Evenings at Home by suggesting that afamiliar activity was already scientific; that cooks werealready chemists: ‘the art of preparing good andwholesomefood is, undoubtedly, a branch of chemistry; the kitchen is achemical laboratory,’ he wrote [5]. However, with concernsemerging over the safety of science and the contaminationof foodstuffs during the nineteenth century, this similaritydrawn between cookery and chemistry was not necessarilya comfortable or comforting one. Indeed, the contents of acup of tea were one of the household products most at riskof contamination: the adulteration of tea, it was claimed,

d. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2008.01.003

Figure 1. Illustration to ‘‘A Tea Lecture’’, from Evenings at Home, undated early

twentieth century Routledge edition, p. 143.

Figure 2. The Use of Adulteration, published in 4 August 1855 issue of Punch. The

caption reads: ‘‘Little girl: If you please, Sir, Mother says, will you let her have a

quarter of a pound of your best tea to kill the rats with, and an ounce of chocolate

as would get rid of the black beadles’’. This image may be used without prior

permission for any scholarly or educational purpose. Reproduced from The

Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/periodicals/punch/adulteration.html).

Feature Endeavour Vol.32 No.1 17

‘has been practised in this country to an enormous extent’[6]. The anonymous author of Deadly Adulteration andSlow Poisoning, a self-proclaimed ‘enemy of fraud andvillainy’, also declared that ‘[n]o article of consumptionismore subject to adulteration than the pleasant onewhichforms the principal ingredient of the tea-table’ [7](Figure 2).

If chemicals posed a threat, however, they also offered asolution. Fears about adulterated foodstuffs could be over-come by learning this chemistry of cookery, particularly aseries of simple domestic tests that greatly resembled thekind of elementary experiments elaborated in introductorytreatises [8]. Deadly Adulteration, for instance, describedseveral tests for the presence of spurious substances thatthe reader could carry out at home: adding grains of vitrioland watching for a particular colour change; noting theprecise shape of the tea-leaves; and by taste: an infusion ofadulterated ‘dyed tea’, rather than being ‘smooth andbalsamic to the palate’, ‘tastes rougher and harsher thanthe genuine tea does’ [9]. An entire genre of writing thustaught readers how to be chemical detectives by using theirsenses to detect adulterated foodstuffs.

Derbyshire chemical lecturer Albert Bernays adopted asimilar rhetoric in his 1853 Household Chemistry, arguingthat appreciating the proper chemical nature of everydayfoodstuffs would ensure they had not been tampered with.Whilst other writers were content with the reduction of acup of tea to its precise chemical components, Bernaysinvited his readers to engage with the ‘Chemistry of theBreakfast-Table’, using simple experiments to reveal thechemical contents of tea, their nutritive properties, and howto extract particular chemicals like thein and tannin [10].

Not only would this kind of insight help avert thepotentially calamitous results of drinking ersatz produce,it could also be used to improve the flavour of genuine tea.In Culinary Chemistry, Accum had pondered how theconductivity of crockery might influence the taste of thetea, describing the ‘singular effects of different kinds ofteapots, on the infusion of tea’ [11]. In The ScientificPhenomenon of Domestic Life, published in 1847, CharlesFoote Gower even demonstrated how best to put a lump ofsugar into tea: holding it in a spoon at the surface of the cup

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made themost of circulating currents so that the sugar was‘constantly in contact with a fresh portion of unsweetenedtea’ [12]. Bernays too followed on from his chemistryexperiments with a list of recommendations for tea-drin-kers everywhere: since a long infusion releases morevolatile oil, ‘the longer the tea is allowed to draw, the lesspleasant becomes the taste’; as others had suggested,‘heating the tea in a dry tea-pot, before the hot water isadded’, as well as pouring on only a small amount of wateruntil the leaves have fully expanded, might improve thetea-drinking experience [13]. Bernayswound up each chap-ter with questions that put his readers’ understanding tothe test: ‘is hard or soft water best formaking tea?’; ‘What isthein?’; ‘To what family does the tea-plant belong?’; andeven ‘How much tea is annually prepared?’ [14].

Tea-kettle: steam powerAnother important component of the tea-table, the tea-kettle, took introductory writers in a different scientificdirection: the steaming spout led to evaporation, tometeor-ology and to the steam engine. Gower’s Scientific Phenom-ena of Domestic Life identified the breakfast table as theappropriate site for a simple experiment in condensation:

If we hold a cold tumbler near the spout of a boilingkettle so as to receive the steam, we shall immedi-ately perceive it condensing in small drops on thesides of the tumbler, and running down in a minia-ture shower. . . [15]

Gower implicitly relied on mythologised stories of theyoung JamesWatt and his observation of the boiling kettle.This, it was said, inspired his ideas about steam power andwas one of the most famous examples of how clear, scien-tific thinking about everyday occurrences could lead toinsights into the laws of nature [16].

Watt also received a mention in a short story on the‘Mysteries of a Tea-Kettle’, published in 1850 in CharlesDickens’ periodicalHousehold Words, after which Bernayshad named his Household Chemistry. A discussion thatbeganwith definingwhether a kettle brought into the roomby a servant was boiling led to talk of steam, and, even-tually, the inevitable pun:

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‘‘For all which,’’ remarked Mr. Bagges, ‘‘we haveprincipally to thank what’s his name’’.

Figure 4. ‘‘Figurative Geography’’, from The Comic Offering; or Ladies’ Melange of

Literary Mirth (1833), p. 13.

‘‘Watt was his name, I believe, uncle. . . .’’ [17]

The comedy value aside, this scene enticed children ontoscientific territory in at least two ways. First, they couldidentify with Gower’s precocious protagonist as he intro-duced his mother and buffoon of an uncle to what he hadlearned at the Royal Institution. Just as children couldpreside over a playful dolls’ tea party in the nursery, theycould also get to play at giving chemical lectures. Second,since Watt was supposed to have had his ‘Eureka’ momentas a boy, Gower’s treatment invited children to connectwith the man himself, and to think of themselves asprospective discoverers.

Tea-cup: exoticism and experimentationNot all the works in this genre used their tea lectures as anopportunity to advocate experimentation; others usedthese interdisciplinary objects to teach about a range ofother subjects. The Chemistry of Common Life (1855), forexample, stressed the ‘extensive use’ of ‘the beverages weinfuse’, taking readers around the globe to places includingCentral America, Labrador, Georgia, the West Indies,Spain, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, Arabia, China, Tartaryand Thibet, Siberia and Sumatra [18]. For Accum, too,the tea-leaves became owners of an exotic and inter-national history: from Dutch adventurers trading sage toLinnaean natural history to Japanese tea ceremonies.

Other works focused on the china of the cup rather thanthe tea itself to connect the household with the world:Caroline A. Halsted’s Investigation; or, Travels in theBoudoir (1847) talked of both Oriental china and Europeanporcelain [19]. Bymaking these connections, the authors ofsuch books were not just stirring up tea-leaves and sugarbut also history, mystique and exoticism. Humorous pub-lications of the 1830s played heavily upon such associ-ations, constructing a ‘China-man’ made from crockery(Figure 3), for example, or representing China itself as atea-cup and saucer (Figure 4).

This tradition of literary tea lectures continued through-out the nineteenth century as an appealing way of intro-ducing young audiences to scientific subjects. And by thetime of high imperialism, talking about tea provided anopportunity to demonstrate the work that went into the

Figure 3. ‘‘A China-Man’’ from The Comic Magazine (1836), p. 20.

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global reach of the Victorian home. Aunt Martha’s CornerCupboard (1875), authored by Mary Kirby and her sisterElizabeth, was a moralising tale about how to inspire idleboyswith a thirst for knowledge and a sense of industry. Itsmatronly instructress – ‘‘a lady of a lively imagination’’ –decided to educate her nephews with histories of common-place items: ‘‘everything in that cupboard, – her china, hertea, . . . her sugar, . . . had a story to tell, and a mostentertaining one too’’ [20]. At each successive tea-time,Aunt Martha narrated the history of a different object,stressing the labour that had gone into producing it:

The tea-cup seems a simple thing, and you use andhandle it very often, and drink your tea out of it everyafternoon. But perhaps you have never been told itswhole history ‘‘from beginning to end’’, as the story-books say, and do not know that it takes a vastamount of labour, and sets numbers of persons towork, before it can become a cup at all [21].

AuntMartha’sCornerCupboardunderscored the import-ance of the imperial sphere, embodied in its everyday arte-facts: by telling these stories of far-off places and people theauthors demonstrated how the ‘common’ things of life weredependent on, and helped forge, the British Empire.

From another perspective, the tea-cup was appropri-ate for teaching elementary chemical instruction as itwas often used as one of the components of experimentalapparatus, particularly in home experiments. Manyintroductory chemical works in this period required acombination of household equipment and apparatus pur-chased especially for the job. Samuel Parkes’ ElementaryTreatise, for example, contained many such directions,including an experiment that involved inverting a bell-glassover a tea-cup containing alcohol, and putting it on the fire,thereby reversing the water-into-wine miracle [22]. Andalthough John JosephWardwrote hisCompanion to accom-pany Robert Best Ede’s ‘Youth’s Laboratory’ (an earlyexample of a children’s chemical cabinet), his first exercisedemanded use of everyday domestic items:

To discover whether any substance is soluble inwater, is easily ascertained by suspending it in thefluid. For instance, by holding a lump of sugar fas-tened by a thread, or in a tea-spoon, in a glass of clearwater; if it be soluble, you will observe a stream ofbubbles continually descend until it is all graduallydissolved or melted away; and so, you will no longerbe able to perceive its presence in the fluid, nordiscover it, except by taste. . . [23]

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Rather than dipping directly into the strange andcharmed contents of Ede’s chemical cabinet, Ward decidedto introduce his young audience to chemistry with exactlythe same demonstration given by others with a cup of tea.There was no clear divide between the kind of experimentsthat could be conductedwith everyday commodities or withthe contents of a chemical cabinet.

Tea-tray: conclusionIn the nineteenth century, the household ritual of tea-making served as an illuminating illustration of a rangeof scientific phenomena, including chemistry, physics andnatural history. With assistance from a knowledgeableguide, a close examination of tea with eyes, nose, handand tongue could introduce children to theories of solution,infusion, evaporation and even steam power. The scienceswere grounded in smelly, tasty and reassuringly tangibleexperiences: the perfumed whiff of an exotic origin, thesweetness of a sugary solution, the warmth and weight ofeveryday commodities as they rested in the hand. Further-more, in their imagination, children could traverse the farreaches of the globe, searching out leaves in exotic landsand china from China, all whilst remaining in the safety oftheir familiar domestic surroundings.

The implicit similarity between household activitiesand chemical experiments brought the distant realms ofscience into the eminently attainable home, helping toconquer fears about learning the subject. The cup of teawas an especially appropriate vehicle for these lessons:with widely propagated scares about adulterated food-stuffs and fluvial pollution, many Victorians felt anxiousabout the safety of the leaves, sugar and water that wentinto making their tea. Learning about chemistry was oneway of overcoming such concerns, and many of the elemen-tary tests for adulterated commodities resembled intro-ductory scientific experiments. Not only did such domesticchemistry make science seem more accessible to children,it also suggested that men of science were well placed togive advice on household activities, ensuring the safety offoods and enhancing their preparation.

Underscoring some of this contemporary rhetoric wereideas of an egalitarian chemical community, in which allcould contribute to ongoing research [24]. In the 1820s, acorrespondent had written to The Chemist to applaud itsaims of promoting a community in which all couldparticipate: he outlined, in a reference to WilliamWollaston, how ‘‘the profoundest of the English chemistsdiscards the fopperies of apparatus, and keeps hislaboratory within the compass of a tea-tray; a few glasstubes, a blowpipe, some twenty little phials, and three orfour wine glasses, suffice for his experiments’’ [25]. Manyof the extensions from the tea-kettle to laws of naturerelied on this argument that the same type of activitywas engaged in on Wollaston’s tea-tray laboratory andaround the breakfast table: children were already beingchemists, and could go on to develop further chemicalexpertise. Therefore, sensory lessons on the science of

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common things did not simply encourage their audiencesto rethink everyday activities: they were a spur toparticipation in this communal enterprise throughfurther, and unfamiliar, practical experimentation.Chemistry would in this way become their ‘cup of tea’in more senses than one.

AcknowledgementsThanks to Jim Secord for supervising the PhD research on which thisarticle is based, and to seminar audiences at BSHS and HSS conferencesfor their crucial feedback. My research has been funded by the Arts andHumanities Research Council.

References1 Aiken, John and Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (1809) Evenings at Home, or

The Juvenile Budget Opened (8th ed.), Thoemmes Press (EditionSynapse reprint, 2003), pp. 70–71

2 Ibid., p. 723 Ibid., p. 734 Ibid., pp. 80–815 Accum, Friedrich (1821) Culinary Chemistry, Exhibiting the Scientific

Principles of Cookery. . .. R. Ackermann, (London), p. iv6 Accum, Culinary Chemistry, p. 2987 Anon. (1830) Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning; or, Disease and

Death in the Pot andBottle. . ., Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper (London), p.83. Note that in Sarah Freeman (1989) Mutton and Oysters: TheVictorians and Their Food, Victor Gollancz (London), it is pointedout that relatively little tea was adulterated at this time

8 Accum, Friedrich (1820) A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food andCulinary Poisons. . .. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown,(London), p. 298

9 Anon., Deadly Adulteration, pp. 89–92; p. 9010 Bernays, Albert (1853) Household Chemistry. Samson Low & Son,

(London), pp. 63–6411 Accum, Culinary Chemistry, pp. 299–30012 Gower, Charles Foote (1847) The Scientific Phenomena of Domestic

Life. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans (London), pp. 37–3813 Ibid., pp. 64–6514 Ibid., p. 8815 Ibid, pp. 23–24; p. 2516 See Miller, David Philip (2004) True myths: James Watt’s kettle, his

condenser, and his chemistry. History of Science 42, pp. 332–360. forhow this story originated and was used to assert Watt’s expertise.Though now used to emphasise Watt’s insights into steam power,Miller argues that the story could be (and indeed was) used todemonstrate his thinking on the properties of steam, and on thechemical composition of water itself

17 Leigh, Percival (1850) TheMysteries of a Tea-Kettle.Household Words34 (November 16), pp. 169–192; p. 179

18 Johnston, James F.W. (1855) The Chemistry of Common Life. WilliamBlackwood and Sons (Edinburgh and London), p. 155

19 Halsted, Caroline A. (1837) Investigation; or, Travels in the Boudoir.Smith, Elder and Co., (London) Chapter 9 (pp. 160–182) discussesOriental china; chapter 10 (pp. 183–206) discusses European porcelain.A tea-cup makes an appearance on page 170

20 Mary and Kirby, Elizabeth (1875) Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard. T.Nelson and Sons (Thoemmes Press reprint, 2004), pp. 13–14

21 Ibid., p. 1822 Parkes, Samuel (1839) Elementary Treatise. E. Palmer (London), p. 50;

p. 12123 Ward, John (1837) Ward’s Companion: or, Footsteps to Experimental

Chemistry. Thomas Tegg and Son (London), p. 1424 Golinski, Jan (1992) Science as Public Culture. Cambridge University

Press, (Cambridge)25 Quoted in Ibid., p. 263. The periodical also referenced Benjamin

Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and Watt to demonstrate how greatdiscoveries could be made with mainly household objects