Until the mid-1800s tea was either sold from open chests and blended either by the tea dealer or the customer himself. One of the present volume’s earliest ancestors was published in 1785 under the awesome title The Tea Purchaser’s Guide to the Lady and Gentleman’s Tea Table: Useful Companion in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas to Which is Added the Art of Mixing One Quality with Another as Practiced by the Tea Dealer. But old-time tea dealers were no more alike than types of tea. Some of them were scrupulously honest, like one Maria Tewk (or Tuke), a Quaker spinster living in the north of England who set herself up as a tea merchant in 1725. Denied a license as a dealer in Tea and fined for trading without one, she paid the fines and went on doing business. John Company and the officers of the Crown had so much trouble from her that she was finally granted her license and founded a firm of such repute it remained in her family for seven generations. But in the absence of Tewk-like integrity, selling from the open chest was wide open to abuses.

Quakers played a disproportionate role in the tea business, no doubt because it comported with their sense of sobriety and right livelihood. Quaker firms included James Ashby, Cadbury, Baring and Travers. At a time when dealers enjoyed a widely deserved reputation for selling poor quality and short weight tea, honest Quaker John Horniman in 1826 became the first to sell tea by the packet, each “of guaranteed consistency and weight.” Horniman started out selling his packets in the hinterlands by peddler, but rapidly became a major brand name.