POETS and sweetness go together, or so the Greeks thought. Homer, lying in his cradle, was brushed on his lips by honey bees; Plato saw poets themselves as bees gathering nectar in the garden of the Muses. So it is hardly surprising that Percy Bysshe Shelley, lover of both Homer and Plato and an extraordinary poet in his own right, had a very sweet tooth indeed.

He loved dried plums, figs, apples and oranges. He doted on gingerbread and cakes. If you turned out the pockets of his black denim jacket (a jacket his wife Mary, a proper sort, was forever trying to get him to change) you would find, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles and miscellaneous pencils and a penknife and a damp handkerchief, a good store of pudding-raisins. He could make a supper of these raisins, just by themselves, eating them one by one from a particular flowered china plate. Honey, of course, he loved especially, slathered on bread and butter or crunched in the comb until the sticky goo ran down his chin. So sweet was his tooth that he would tiptoe up to pine trees and lick their resin, hoping it would taste as treacly as it looked.

Yet to have such saccharine tendencies at the start of the 19th century was politically tricky. The easiest way to make things sweet, then as now, was with white sugar. This was bought as a loaf, stored in a drawer, chopped with a knife as needed, pounded in a mortar and served in a bowl: with tongs or spoons if elegant, with fingers if not. But the filthiness of the servant's nails was not the worst of it. Sugar's problem was much more serious and “ghastly”, to use a favourite Shelley expression. In the words of the Baron d'Holbach, a famous materialist philosopher, not a cask of it came into Europe “to which blood is not sticking”.

The young Shelley read Holbach avidly. But he preferred the poems of Robert Southey; and Southey was even more explicit about where sugar came from.

The scorching Sun
As pityless as proud Prosperity,
Darts on him his full beams; gasping he lies
Arraigning with his looks the patient skies,
While that inhuman trader lifts on high
The mangling scourge. Oh ye who at your ease
Sip the blood-sweeten'd beverage! Thoughts like these
Haply ye scorn: I thank thee Gracious God!
That I do feel upon my cheek the glow
Of indignation...

Sugar was planted, cut and refined in conditions of appalling barbarity in the British-governed West Indies. Until the trade was stopped by the efforts of William Wilberforce and by act of Parliament, the slaves had been shipped there on vessels chartered out of Liverpool and Bristol, the two biggest slave-trading cities in the world. In 1787 alone, 38,000 shackled slaves were transported in English ships. Even after the trade stopped, the slavery persisted; it was not abolished in the British empire until 1833-34, and the stigma of slave-production clung to sugar for a good deal longer.

For young radicals, therefore, sugar was difficult to tolerate. Distaste for it was the first proof of the romantic and poetic imperative to feel the sufferings of others. It also marked—to put it in modern terms—the moment when consumers became globally aware, conscious that their own pleasure had involved the exploitation of other human beings many miles away. As a young man devoted to liberty, justice and philanthropy, Shelley was bound to approach sugar with a very long spoon.

In 1792, the year he was born, an organised consumer boycott had started against West Indian sugar. It was probably the world's first. Like all boycotts since, this one was fired by pamphlets, propaganda, questionable statistics and the sheer energy of relatively few people. The first manifesto of the Anti-Saccharine Society deliberately shocked the public by showing a cross-section of a slave ship, the shackled men packed in head-to-toe like sardines. The society claimed that if 38,000 families abstained, the planters' profits might fall so far that the trade would end.

At the peak of the boycott, according to Thomas Clarkson, one of its leaders, at least 300,000 people had given up sugar. Grocers reported that sales were falling by half. According to James Gillray, the vitriolic chief-caricaturist of the day, abstention even reached Buckingham Palace, where George III and Queen Charlotte urged the sulking princesses to take their tea unpolluted: “O my dear Creatures, do but Taste it! You can't think how nice it is without Sugar:—and then, consider how much Work you'll save the poor Blackamoors by leaving off the use of it! —and, above all, remember how much expence it will save your poor Papa!”

The tyrant's friend

With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the boycott withered. No one could quite agree whether it had done the trick; slave revolts in the colonies might have had more impact. And the general public had never really got the idea. “I own I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves,” wrote William Cowper, speaking for many:

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see,
What? give up our desserts, our coffee and tea!

In radical circles, however, West Indian sugar remained in disgrace. The job, after all, was only half done. Or perhaps less than half: Shelley, for one, did not believe the British interest in the trade had ended. In 1824, two years after Shelley's death, another boycott on sugar was proposed.

Shelley himself had two particular reasons for avoiding the blood-caked white powder: the oppression it represented, and its importance for the nefarious projects of the British government. Sugar was a supremely handy commodity, a luxury in universal use that was easily taxed at entry. The governments of Pitt, Grenville and Liverpool made full use of it to fund what Shelley called their “liberticide” wars against the revolutionist Americans and the French. By 1815 the tax on sugar brought in almost £3m a year, more than the revenue from wine or tobacco: a sweet slush-fund for tyrannous behaviour.


Yet to give up sugar was no small sacrifice for Shelley, or for most other Britons at the time. On average each family consumed five pounds (2kg) a week, and sugar was the country's biggest import. Between 1650 and 1800 British consumption had risen by 2,500%. Eating of sugar was driven by drinking of tea, and sweetened tea had become the beverage of choice. It was served in the primmest parlours, but also quaffed by labourers beside the roads.

For Shelley, tea-drinking was a passion. He freely downed cup after cup. When people called him an atheist (which he was), he would reply that on the contrary he was a théist. But into tea, normally, went sugar. Shelley seems to have tried to avoid the problem by going for the best green tea which, unlike black tea, was smooth and sweetish by itself. But in general the only sweetness a true lover of liberty could allow himself in tea was the kind Shelley found at the home of his friends the Boinvilles in 1814: the delicate grace of a young woman as she handed him a cup, and her tenderness as she sponged him down afterwards (he having spilt the stuff in his emotion).

As the etiquette of tea-drinking was complicated, so too was the etiquette of West Indian sugar-avoidance. The wilder elements conducted public smashings of teacups besmirched by sugar, but most abstainers tried to make their point more politely. Some bought East Indian sugar instead, which was a good deal more expensive. Grocers advertised this as sugar produced by freemen, though it later transpired that many slaves laboured in those canefields too. Such sugar, nonetheless, could be served in gold-rimmed bowls bearing the words “Not produced by Slaves”. When tea was served, the hostess would ask: “Are you a friend of the planter?” The expected answer was no; in which case no sugar would be offered.

In 1817 Thomas Love Peacock—a friend and neighbour of Shelley's in those days—wrote a tea-taking scene in his comic novel “Melincourt”. The host, one Sylvan Forester, was based on Shelley. Forester was the organiser of the local Anti-Saccharine Society, never suffering “an atom of West Indian produce to pass my threshold”, including the sugar concealed in currant-jelly. When a guest, helping himself to tea, mildly observed that the sugar was missing, he drew down a rant that ended: “How can the consumer of sugar pretend to throw on the grower of it the exclusive burden of their participated criminality?...the use of sugar is economically superfluous, physically pernicious, morally atrocious, and politically abominable.” The guest, shattered, “poured some cream into his unsweetened tea, drank it, and said nothing”.

He could have found arguments against, of course. Abstainers were told that their virtuousness was hurting commerce and depriving the country of revenue. By cutting the planters' profits, they might also be worsening the condition of the very slaves they assumed they were helping. But most of all, they were hypocrites. If they were truly serious about boycotting slave produce, they would also eschew the coal in their fires and the shirts on their backs, both produced under dreadful conditions in Britain itself.

Shelley, though he read accounts of the northern cotton mills, and was horrified by them, boycotted neither the coal nor the shirts. Like everyone else's, his consumer rage was selective. And then there was his sweet tooth.

His friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg caught him one day making a peculiar dish called panada. He tore off “a surprising quantity” of bread, piled it in a bowl and poured on boiling water. Then he strewed it with nutmeg, which made it look interestingly gory. “I lap up the blood of murdered kings!” screamed the poet, applying the spoon. And then the finishing, irresistible touch: a sprinkling of loaf sugar, the blood of slaves.