This week’s Time Out: London is devoted to tea. The highlight is an essay on the history of tea in London, written by Roy Moxham, author of Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire. When the beverage had its first real surge of popularity in London, Moxham says…

There was impassioned debate about whether it was good or bad for the health. Perhaps the most venomous attack on tea ever written came in 1757, from noted philanthropist Jonas Hanway in An Essay On Tea Considered as Pernicious to Health, Obstructing Industry, and Improverishing the Nation:”To what a height of folly must a nation be arrived, when common people are not satisfied with wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest regions to please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane near Richmond, where beggars are often seen, in the summer season, drinking their tea…. He who should be able to drive three Frenchmen before him, or she who might be a breeder of such a race of men, are to be seen sipping tea! …Were they the sons of tea-sippers, who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?”

Intrigued, I did a little more research on Mr. Hanway (sipping a cup of tea the entire time, I must confess.) It turns out that, in addition to his efforts to protect the Englishman from the pernicious effects of tea, Mr. Hanway played a role in the adaptation of another London icon: he was a “pioneer of the umbrella, which he was the first person to use in the streets of London; it only became accepted after many years of ridicule.”
While Mr. Hanway’s view of the umbrella came to be accepted by his countrymen, his view of tea–needless to say–did not. It was attacked from the get-go by such contemporaries as Samuel Johnson, who, before diving into his response to Hanway, warned Hanway that he could “expect little justice from the author of this extract, a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”
I can’t find Hanway’s essay online in its entirety, but Dr. Johnson quotes it extensively, including the following plaintive passage:

“Men seem to have lost their stature and comeliness, and women their beauty. I am not young, but, methinks, there is not quite so much beauty in this land as there was. Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose, by sipping tea. Even the agitations of the passions at cards are not so great enemies to female charms. What Shakespeare ascribes to the concealment of love, is, in this age, more frequently occasioned by the use of tea.”