–Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859),
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

The eighteenth century was thus underway. “Slack about morals, strict about the proprieties,” as an old author has well said, “it produced far and away the most amusing and attractive society that England has ever known.” It was a society addicted to among other things, tea. They must have drunk that first ship’s load down and sent it back for more at once, for by 1725, England was using a quarter million pounds of tea a year.

Tea was still “tay” in 1711, when Alexander Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, with its often overlooked reference to Queen Anne presiding at Hampton Court:

Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea.

This could not be poetic license, for Pope never allowed himself any. The Old pronunciation persisted in parts of those “three realms” down through the nineteenth century, as witness the Irish-American railroad workers’ song, “So it’s work all day for the sugar in your tay–drill, ye tarriers, drill!” But Queen Anne, to correct Pope, drank tea not just “sometimes,” but regularly and in such quantities that she substituted a large, bell-shaped silver teapot for the tiny Chinese pots until then in fashion. Our earliest silver tea services date from her reign, and so does the ascendancy of the English coffeehouse, an uncommonly interesting eighteenth century social institution.