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Despite appearances, this 18th century
teapot was made in England. For
Europeans, tea drinking then was an
obscenely expensive – and therefore
aspirational – activity. It wasn’t just the
imported tea that cost a pretty penny but
also the serving ware. One London
magazine claimed in 1744 that it could cost
more to maintain a fashionable tea table
than keep two children and a nurse.
Porcelain teapots were often imported
from China along with the tea. Once
teapots were mastered by the Meissen
factory in Germany, a wave of new
businesses opened in England in the mid
18th century, including Wedgwood, Spode
and Royal Worcester, who made this one.
The depiction of Chinese scenes was
especially popular: Samuel Johnson
described the “contagion of china-fancy”
among Europeans. However, tea really
took hold in Britain after the passing of the
Commutation Act in 1784, which reduced
import duties and made tea more affordable.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for tea snobs, the
affordability of tea made the possession of
an elegant teapot even more prized.A TASTE FOR CHINA
Think Victorian teatime and it’s unlikely
that this sleek and stylish tea kettle is what
you’d imagine atop of the table. Designer
Christopher Dresser bucked the prevailing
trends. Like his contemporary William
Morris, Dresser believed that good design
should be for everyone: that things could
be both beautiful and functional. Unlike
Morris, he believed that industrialisation
could help provide the answer.
Dresser spent four months travelling in
Japan in 1877, which profoundly inf luenced
his thinking. “Where is the English
kettle,” he asked, “which has utilitarian
qualities comparable with those of the
Japanese example; and where can we
find kettles with art qualities equal with
those under consideration?”
This kettle, dating to the 1880s, was just
one of his proposed solutions: he also
designed square, spherical and even a
diamond-shaped teapot with its hole in the
centre. Some were too avant-garde for the
tastes of the time and never put into
production – although wouldn’t you be
happy if you had a forward-thinking
ancestor who’d snapped up this design?AHEAD OF ITS TIME
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALAMY; MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY; TOPFOTO
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