culture, consumption, and identity - ohio university press

introductionTea, a Necessary Luxury

Culture, Consumption, and Identity

according to a nineteenth-century history of tea,tea was such a fundamental part of everyday life that English teadrinkers often failed to notice its significance within their dailylives. G. G. Sigmond, in the opening pages of Tea: Its Effects,Medicinal and Moral, declares, “Man is so surrounded by objectscalculated to arrest his attention, and to excite either his admi-ration or his curiosity, that he often overlooks the humble friendthat ministers to his habitual comfort; and the familiarity heholds with it almost renders him incapable of appreciating itsvalue.”1 By the early nineteenth century, tea had become a com-modity of necessity, forming a crucial part of daily patterns ofconsumption and domesticity. The habitual comfort of tea, ac-cording to Sigmond’s tea treatise, does not draw attention; it isquiet and familiar and thus goes unnoticed. Tea is representedas dependable, a frequent part of everyday life that forms a com-fortable, secure basis for the rest of life’s responses, decisions,and actions. As Sigmond declares, the English tea drinker is “in-capable of appreciating [tea’s] value” (1). What the typical teadrinker fails to recognize, Sigmond suggests, is the crucial rolethat tea plays in forming the foundation of everyday life.

Despite Sigmond’s attempts to rectify the humble status oftea in nineteenth-century English culture, tea has remained a

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relatively unrecognized aspect of Victorian life. Just as Sigmondimplies that the beverage’s mundane role precludes the tea drinkerfrom appreciating its importance, the continued significance of teain twentieth-century British society seems to have preventedscholars from adequately analyzing its role in British culture andnational identity. As Anthony Burgess has speculated, “Perhapstea is so woven into the stomach linings of the British that theycannot view it in either a scholarly or an aesthetic manner. It isa fact of British life, like breathing.”2 While numerous books,from the eighteenth century through to today, detail the historyof tea in England, they tend to dramatize legends and keep cul-tural analysis to a minimum. Many publications about tea havebeen sponsored by tea companies, and they popularize the in-triguing history of tea without attempting to analyze that historyor cultural context.3 A limited amount of research has been doneon the significance of tea in eighteenth-century Britain, corre-sponding with recent scholarship on the rise of the consumersociety in the late 1700s, but the central importance of tea innineteenth-century British culture has gone largely unexplored.4

Cultural analyses of Victorian everyday life have proliferated inrecent years, and literary scholars and historians have often notedthe presence of tea within the mid-nineteenth-century domes-tic space. For the most part, however, Victorian scholars haverelied on the iconographic power of tea to connote the domesticideal without pausing to investigate the role of tea in Victorianfiction and culture.5

A passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, first published in1853, describes a typical “English tea” and suggests the complexnegotiation of social identity that revolved around the tea table:

How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domesticcomfort! How warm in its amber lamp-light and ver-milion fire-flush! To render the picture perfect, teastood ready on the table—an English tea, whereof thewhole shining service glanced at me familiarly; from thesolid silver urn, of antique pattern, and the massive

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pot of the same metal, to the thin porcelain cups,dark with purple and gilding. I knew the very seed-cakeof peculiar form, baked in a peculiar mould, which al-ways had a place on the tea-table at Bretton. Grahamliked it, and there it was as of yore—set before Gra-ham’s plate with the silver knife and fork beside it.6

Lucy Snowe characterizes the Brettons’ tea as “perfect domesticcomfort,” representing all of the necessary elements of recogniz-ably English domesticity. The room she describes is swathed inblue damask and muffled by carpeting, creating a warm, relaxing,quiet space removed from the bustle of the city outside. An amberlamp and “vermilion fire-flush” warm up the cool blue tones ofthe walls and draperies with red-gold tints and suggest the warmthof the domestic hearth. In a subtle play on words, this scene isrendered “picture perfect” by the neatly laid tea table, completewith silver urn, porcelain cups, and seedcake.7 The tea table ispresented as a frozen tableau of Englishness, tempting Lucy withits familiar glance, solid traditions, high-quality equipage, andthe young man for whom the entire scene has been prepared.

Brontë’s passage illustrates the unique role of tea as an iconthat mediates between various subject positions within the largercategory of English national identity. The tea table offers sharedrituals and invites connection across its surface, creating com-munity by crossing boundaries between individuals. The familiar-ity that beckons to Lucy Snowe also speaks to the reader; therituals of the tea table, shared by all who claim an English iden-tity, create a sense of community that invites the reader to con-ceptually close the literary divide that separates him or her fromthe character and culture within the text. At the Brettons’ teatable, the rituals of tea drinking similarly work to re-create thelong-lost community that once united Lucy Snowe with theBretton family, shrinking the psychological and ideological dis-tance between the wealthy, successful English family and thepoor, orphaned teacher, between the older generation repre-sented by Mrs. Bretton and Lucy’s relative youth, and between

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the women who surround the table and Graham, the young manwho returns home for tea. The common enjoyment of a cup oftea, a slice of cake, and the warmth of the domestic hearth bringall of these various individuals together for a shared moment atthe tea table.

The community formed by tea drinking is, nevertheless,marked by the social categories that constitute English society.Class, gender, and national identity are all invoked in Lucy’s de-scription of “perfect domestic comfort.” Adjectives suggestingsecurity and stability reveal the Brettons’ middle-class status;the table bears a “solid silver urn” and a “massive” silver teapot.An “English” tea, therefore, which presumes to represent all ofEnglish culture, depends on a specifically middle-class position;it necessitates a certain income level to purchase relatively expen-sive commodities, the social knowledge and manners to prop-erly equip and set the tea table, and invisible—female—handsto perform the necessary domestic labor. The tea table thusmediated between men and women in Victorian culture andreaffirmed the ideological division of labor within the middle-class household. Tea similarly evokes the binary of labor andleisure. Obliquely referring to the work that went into the prepa-rations for the meal, this passage explicitly portrays the tea tableas an offering of leisure and refreshment to the man of thefamily upon his return from the outside, public, world of work.Occupying a liminal position between inside and outside, pri-vate and public, tea represents private repose and comfort to thefamily consuming it, while simultaneously suggesting the farreaches of the British Empire and beyond, through the verypresence of the Asian commodity.

Tea was introduced to Britain in the 1650s, imported fromChina through Dutch merchants. The British East India Com-pany (EIC) gradually began importing small amounts of tea alongwith the EIC’s usual cargoes of China silks and textiles.8 Likesugar and other imported “luxury” foods, tea originally signifiedstatus and wealth in English society.9 But the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic increase in the avail-

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ability and popularity of tea; by the early nineteenth century,tea had become a prominent part of daily life throughout En-glish society. In Tea: Its Mystery and History, Samuel Day reportsthat the first records of tea imports to England, in 1675, totaled4,713 pounds. Fifty years later, in 1725, tea imports had grownto 2 million pounds per year; imports had increased to 25 mil-lion pounds per year by 1800 and to 187 million pounds per yearby 1877. According to David Crole’s history of tea, Tea: A TextBook of Tea Planting and Manufacture, published in 1897,“80,000,000 cups of tea are daily imbibed” in England, resultingin an average consumption of more than five and a half poundsof tea per person per year.10 Crole’s statistic of the cups of teaconsumed each day in England emphasizes the quotidian natureof the beverage; the cups of tea consumed per person per dayresonate on an individual level, creating an image of millionsof English men and women simultaneously drinking their cupsof tea each day.

When tea was first imported to Britain in the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was sold as a preparedliquid beverage at London coffeehouses, like coffee and choco-late. Thus, like these other beverages, tea was initially con-sumed in public places, marketed as an exotic product withmultiple health benefits. Sources such as The Female Spectatorand various medical treatises responded by debating the moraland medicinal qualities of tea and warning consumers about thedangers of drinking tea.11 By the late eighteenth century, how-ever, tea had become immensely popular as a beverage brewedand consumed within the private realm of the home, and theresonances of English domestic life were added to the originallyforeign, exotic image of tea.12 Historians have offered a few the-ories for tea’s increased association with the domestic realmduring the eighteenth century. Unlike coffee beans, which mustbe roasted, ground, and percolated to obtain a beverage, tealeaves were relatively easy to brew within the home. Tea leavescould also be steeped numerous times, producing progressivelyweaker but still drinkable infusions and thus reducing the cost


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of each cup of tea. A gradual reduction of the import duties ontea throughout the eighteenth century brought the price of teainto the reach of more families across the economic spectrum.13

Against a backdrop of industrialization, urbanization, and theresulting changes in class structure in nineteenth-centuryBritain, the everyday habit of tea drinking acquires cultural andsocial significance that reflects larger Victorian struggles of self-definition. The nineteenth century saw increasing economicand social instability, as industrialization and imperialism cre-ated new opportunities for rising middle-class English men andwomen. Higher standards of living and cheaper mass-producedcommodities and imported goods from the British Empire con-tributed to the development of a fragmented range of middleclasses, diverse in occupation, religious affiliation, and politicalviews but unified by their levels of income, spending power,and a shared consumer culture.14 In the face of shifting classcategories and identities, new ways of identifying oneself andone’s status arose, centering on practices of consumption.15 Newidentification categories and new hierarchies of status devel-oped along lines stemming from consumption habits, creatingmoral guidelines based on what and when and how one con-sumed the commodities of English culture.16

Drinking tea was an evolving ritual in English culture, andrepresentations of the tea table reflect that fluidity. Tea, as a hotrestorative drink, could be and was consumed throughout theday (and night, as De Quincey attests),17 but the more ritualizedaspects of what we call the “tea table” were most often found atbreakfast and in the afternoon, at varying times between lunchand retiring to bed. Afternoon tea offered an opportunity for alight meal to fill the increasing gap between lunch and dinner—what historian Jamie Shalleck calls “low tea,” popularized byAnna, Duchess of Bedford.18 Midcentury novels such as An-thony Trollope’s Palliser series reveal the surprisingly late hourskept by members of Parliament and thus by fashionable homesin London; dinner was often served at midnight or later, andthus a late afternoon meal, anchored by tea, helped to tide one

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over until the more formal dinner much later. In WutheringHeights, tea functions as part of a large, substantial meal to bringall the people of the household together at one common time.In North and South, teatime occurs in the afternoon—Thorntonhas to leave work early to dress and attend tea at the Hales’—and it allows people who do not know each other well to be-come acquainted without the expense of a formal, seated din-ner. In Alice in Wonderland, the Hatter explains that his watchstopped at six o’clock, suggesting a late afternoon teatime po-tentially preceding a later supper (since the food includes onlybread and butter). Hester Vernon experiences endless after-noons filled with the scent of tea, while the narrator in ThePortrait of a Lady states that teatime occurs between the hoursof five and eight p.m., during the final hours of sunlight in thesummer months in England.

In other literary representations, however, the most ritualizedtea tables occur after characters have dined in the evening. Inmany novels, after characters have finished their dinner, thewomen “withdraw” into the drawing room (thus giving thisroom its name) while the men remain at the table to drink portand smoke cigars. Once the men have enjoyed enough of theirmasculine consumables, they rejoin the women in the drawingroom for tea. Isabel Archer’s Thursday evenings, during whichPansy serves tea to her suitors, occur late in the evening andpresumably after dinner, since Isabel and Pansy usually repair tobed as soon as their guests have gone home. In Middlemarch andOrley Farm, tea is specifically served after dinner. In these in-stances, the tea table offers an opportunity to bring men andwomen together again, reinforcing their shared domestic iden-tities and values.

Everyday habits of consumption lend meaning to people’slives in their familiarity, in the participation in tradition andritual that carries forward both their own previous habits andthose of the Englishmen and women around them. Accordingto Fernand Braudel, historian and author of The Structures ofEveryday Life, “Everyday life consists of the little things that one


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hardly notices in time and space. . . . The everyday happeningis repeated, and the more often it is repeated the more likely itis to become a generality or rather a structure. It pervades so-ciety at all levels, and characterises ways of being and behavingwhich are perpetuated through endless ages. . . . The ways peopleeat, dress, or lodge, at the different levels of society, are never amatter of indifference.”19 The repetition of a specific consump-tion pattern gives it meaning, providing shape and order to thedays of one’s life and one’s place within the family, the commu-nity, the nation, the empire, and the world. Repeated daily ac-tivities thus contribute to constructions of identity from within,but these are based on social norms and ideals and occur withinsocial spheres. Habits confirm one’s sense of self, one’s placewithin the relationships of a household and within a commu-nity, affirming one’s identity by linking discrete segments oftime and creating a more continuous, fluid experience of the selfand one’s physical environment. Each time a habit is repeated,an individual is able to confirm his or her sense of self, remind-ing himself or herself of previous moments, envisioning futureevents, and connecting past, present, and future through therepetition of small daily habits.

My definition of habit draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory ofhabitus. According to Bourdieu, an individual’s embodied dispo-sitions, which may or may not reside at the level of consciousthought, are what influence intentional behaviors and actions.20

As “a product of history” that “produces individual and collec-tive practices—more history,” habitus connects past, present,and future, incorporating the social conditions of the past andgenerating responses to future conditions based on past experi-ences (53). Serving and sharing tea within Victorian house-holds follows formalized rules, forging ritualized behaviors out ofdaily habits. In the preface to The Logic of Practice, Bourdieudraws a useful distinction between habitus and ritual. He sug-gests that habitus, created by one’s social context, generatesspecific strategies for maintaining and forwarding one’s socialposition and accumulated capital (in its multiple forms: economic,

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cultural, symbolic). These strategies are articulated in formalized,stylized rituals; Bourdieu defines a ritual as “a social strategydefined by its position in a system of strategies oriented towardsmaximizing of material and symbolic profit . . . taking on itsmeaning in a system of strategies generated by the habitus”(16). The tasks of the tea table, defining the roles of nourisherand consumer, mother and father, parent and child, wife andhusband, represent formal behaviors that fit anthropologicaldefinitions of secular rituals, and analyzing these tasks as ritualsfurther reveals their important social function in Victorianeveryday life.21

The implications of the repeated, ongoing rituals of the teatable expand the concept of identity toward a dynamic negotia-tion of one’s roles within one’s family, community, and nation.If, as Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff suggest in SecularRitual, rituals offer insights into the ways in which people“think about social life,” then rituals inform individuals’ inter-actions with other people within their family and provide cul-tural scripts of larger patterns of approved English actions (4).Habits of drinking tea provide narratives of courtship, familypleasantries, visiting other women, male/female interactions,male patterns of creating domesticity within their home throughtheir choice of wives, and wives’ responsibilities in terms of pro-viding a warm, comforting, nourishing tea table at the center oftheir home. The term narrative implies action over time, incor-porating the repeated, ongoing element of ritualized behavior andsuggesting that each rendition of the ritual of tea drinking con-tributes in a slightly different way to the accumulated significanceof tea within an individual’s everyday life. The rituals of teadrinking dramatize historical narratives of the origins of Englishtea drinking, and they provide a glimpse of the future, high-lighting the imperial narrative of progress and providing acrucial sense of English history to authorize individual decisionsand goals.

When we begin to look at the specific products that Englishconsumers were purchasing, we begin to see the importance of


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national identity in the social character ideals being formed andtested by consumption patterns within the home. During themid-nineteenth century, many extremely popular commodities,essential to the construction of individual character and na-tional identity, were being imported to England from the empire.Goods ranging from Indian cotton to Caribbean sugar, fromChinese tea to Japanned trays and fans, from Indian shawls toAmerican tobacco were incorporated into the everyday habitsof middle-class English consumers.22 As Catherine Hall andSonya Rose argue, Britons’ “everyday lives were infused with animperial presence.”23 Importing and consuming goods fromoutside the borders of England created concern about defini-tions and boundaries, questions about what it meant to be En-glish and how to remain English despite habits that dependedon the production of commodities by other cultures and na-tions. In response, English consumers strengthened their self-image as English, articulating new boundaries—boundaries ofmorality, character, and respectability, of domesticity andgender identity—to help maintain national distinctions andindividual characteristics.

In turning toward the habits of everyday life in middle-classVictorian English culture, I focus on the daily activities withinthe home, within the domestic space. The term domestic signalsthe clearly delineated gender roles within the family, and thecomfort of the private sphere, as well as the location of Englandas the core, the domestic center of its empire. The nineteenthcentury represents an important period of domestication in thehistory of tea drinking in England, both in a local sense (as teabecame an important icon of the home) and in a more globalsense (as England struggled to gain economic and politicalcontrol over the production and importation of tea). England’staste for tea grew within a culture of shifting public and privateconsumption patterns accompanying imperial expansion, anincreasing influx of imported luxury commercial goods, and theindustrial and economic revolutions’ impact on English spend-ing capacity.24

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The fluid nature of tea as a signifier in English culture sug-gests that the rituals of the tea table operate as liminal, orthreshold, rituals, according to Victor Turner’s anthropologicalmodel. According to Turner, liminal rituals poise people on thebrink between various social positions—between childhood andadulthood, between layperson and clergy, between ordinary citi-zen and some kind of specialized social status. Rites of passageand other rituals that highlight such in-between states createtemporarily marginal positions that disrupt the hierarchicalpower structure of society; people who usually occupy the lowerrungs of the social system momentarily take on the power ofthose higher in rank, class, or prestige. While Turner’s examplesare drawn from religious rituals of maturity or investiture, hisanalysis implies a broader view of the role of liminal rituals insociety.25 He views society as dialectically cycling between twovery different states—a hierarchical, power-inflected structuredsystem that imposes order on individuals, and an unstructured,undefined state of connection between individuals, which hecalls communitas. Liminal rituals temporarily suspend hierarchi-cal structures and reverse systems of power, creating the oppor-tunity for communitas to emerge.26

The rituals of the tea table, occurring every day throughoutnineteenth-century English homes, function in many ways asliminal (or threshold) rituals. In Turner’s model, liminal ritualshelp to build community, or communitas, by temporarily revok-ing the structured elements of society and allowing for more-intimate connections to form between individuals. Nineteenth-century representations of tea highlight the role of the tea tablein forging a unified English national identity out of disparatesocial groups, economic classes, and genders separated by ideo-logically distinct spheres of daily life. Tea appears on the cuspbetween multiple binaries in Victorian culture, forging a linkbetween otherwise-opposing forces and simultaneously reinforcingthe distinction between them: men/women, middle class/lowerclass, labor/leisure, necessity/luxury, England/Orient, home/empire, ideal/real. Tea mediates all of these contradictions within


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Victorian culture, creating “communitas” in the ideal of a unifiedEnglish national identity. The shared culture of tea drinkingdomesticates tensions between these categories and ideologicalpositionings, bridging distinctions in ways that both forge con-nections and highlight the differences that mark those distinc-tions in the first place.

Tea, as a fluid constant in English culture, with its accompa-nying social rituals, was flexible enough to accommodate—andto mark—subtle differences in social status, to mediate thesedifferences between individuals, and to serve as a shared cul-tural symbol between groups within the English nation. Acommodity cultivated in the Orient crossed vast geographicaldistances to take its place on English tea tables, permeatingphysical boundaries of nation and body and thus creating anxi-eties about cultural and physiological pollution. Crossing colo-nial divides, tea sharpened the distinction between producerand consumer, affirming imperial practices and offering anideological nexus of questions concerning labor and leisurewithin the home, within the nation, and within the empire.

The authors of Victorian histories of tea award tea with thetitle of the “national beverage,” celebrating tea’s unique abilityto forge a national culture and identity through the habit ofdrinking tea.27 At the same time, however, the details of therituals of tea drinking signal differences in class status, gender,and generation, reinscribing the boundaries temporarily obscuredby the universal taste for tea and highlighting the underlyingmoral differences that supported class structure. Tea crossed classlines, appearing at the humblest suppers and gracing the table ofQueen Victoria, creating a universal English habit. People fromdifferent socioeconomic classes joined an imagined communityof like-minded tea drinkers each time they sat down to a hotcup of tea, according to Victorian tea histories, but at the sametime, the details of tea preparation and consumption marked classstatus and concomitant moral position within the culture. In asimilar way, tea drinking elided gendered boundaries by provid-ing a unique opportunity to share comestibles and conversation.

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Men and women met at the tea table, temporarily crossing ide-ological borders to form friendships, carry out courtships, andreaffirm marital bonds. The rituals of the tea table, however, in-sist on gender distinctions, and they highlight a woman’s privi-leged role in nourishing her family and her nation.

Women’s roles at the tea table—proffering a soothing, warm-ing drink that represented English identity—sustained Britainin all of its endeavors, including the enlargement of the empireto ensure continued supplies of the tea that symbolized the pro-cess of nourishment and imperial expansion. Within the ideal ofthe tea table, women nourished their family, providing physicaland moral sustenance for individual family members and for allof Britain. Tea histories, advertisements for tea, and Victoriannovels agree on the fundamental role of the tea table in repre-senting Englishness and the gendered activities that contributedto the domestic ideal. Performing household tasks constructs asense of identity for each member of the household and signalsthat identity to others, both within the home and within thelarger community.28 The roles that men and women enacted atprivate tea tables echoed their larger roles within the family andwithin English society.

The gendered activities of the tea table, of serving and drink-ing tea, functioned within an unbreakable cycle of private mo-ments of English domesticity reinforcing and mutually constitutingthe domesticity of England as a nation. Gender and class are in-tertwined in the creation of the domestic ideal, which dependedon financial spending power, a certain standard of living, andthe gendered labor of the nuclear family.29 In Sarah Ellis’s terms,domesticity provides a safe, private haven from the chaos of theouter world.30 As Ellis explains, the wives and women of En-gland constructed the domestic ideal in their own individualhomes, offering a peaceful refuge for their husbands and fathers.These men imbibed the moral influences of domesticity and femi-ninity at home and reentered the public, commercial, politicalworld refreshed and renewed, ready to impart their newly moraloutlook through their masculine tasks. Women’s individual roles


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as domestic angels thus resonated throughout English culture.As John Ruskin elaborates in “Of Queens’ Gardens,” womenworked toward ordering and beautifying the home, creating amoral environment for the education of children and contribut-ing to a moral nation.31

The portrait of Englishness offered by nineteenth-centuryrepresentations of tea depicts interconnected threads of iden-tity, including class relations, gender dynamics, the creation andsustenance of the family, and a sense of nation. Tea drinkingtemporarily united all of these categories within the space of thehome, offering a unique ritual that crystallized multiple identi-ties into a single vision of Englishness. But as Judy Giles andTim Middleton suggest, such unified visions of Englishnesstended to favor particularly powerful groups within the largercommunity.32 In Victorian culture, the middle class exemplifiedGiles and Middleton’s “particular social group” with the poten-tial to define English national identity in their own terms.33 Myanalysis of tea in Victorian culture and fiction suggests that themiddle-class values of consumerism—appreciating commoditieswithin the bounds of moderation and thrift—came to representthe nation as a whole.

Encapsulating a middle-class approach to moderated con-sumption, Victorian tea histories invoke the unique status oftea as a liminal icon by referring to tea as a “necessary luxury.”Tea thus straddles the ideological divide between necessity andindulgence, between frugality and excess, and between nourish-ment and pleasure. As an exotic commodity imported from afarand originally rare, difficult to acquire, and fiscally prohibitive formost individuals, tea initially represented a luxury item. Duringthe eighteenth century, the price of tea dropped dramatically,taxes on tea were reduced throughout the century, and importsof tea to Great Britain increased steadily. By the nineteenthcentury, tea had become popular in all social circles, economicclasses, and regions of the country and, according to Victoriantea historians such as Samuel Day and Arthur K. Reade, hadbecome necessary to the English diet, culture, and nation. Dub-

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bing tea a “necessary luxury,” these authors emphasize the sin-gular place of tea within Victorian ideology; tea epitomized theconcept of middle-class moderation by occupying a position be-tween necessity and luxury, between bodily needs and psycho-logical benefits, between the realities of a limited budget andthe tropes of consumer culture. Poised on the boundary thatseparated the abnegation or the neglectfulness of the workingclasses and the wanton, indiscriminate spending of the aristoc-racy, the middle classes found in tea an icon of moderation—theenjoyment of consumer goods tempered by the knowledge thatsuch goods were literally, physically, and culturally necessary totheir everyday lives.

Explanations of culture necessitate an exploration of the sig-nificance of naming the culture, the nation, and the people ofthe United Kingdom of Great Britain. The slippage between“English” and “British” highlights the tension between the si-multaneous inclusive/exclusive function of tea drinking innineteenth-century literature. Nevertheless, I have attemptedto draw a distinction between the terms “English” and “British.”I have chosen the term “British” to refer to the institutions andactions of people from Great Britain in their functions outsideof the nation itself. This term takes all of the subgroups withinGreat Britain into account, including people from England,Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (during the nineteenth century),as well as the different socioeconomic classes that made upnineteenth-century British society. As a signifier, “British” nec-essarily represents a heterogeneous mix of peoples and subcultures,both within the island nation and outside of its geographicalborders. Nineteenth-century tea histories tend to use the term“Great Britain” when specifically referring to the relationshipbetween their own country and its empire; this term signals thepolitical, economic, and imperial presence of the nation withina global context. When discussing tea drinking within theirown culture, however, nineteenth-century tea historians almostinvariably define their national identity as “English.” Similarly,most nineteenth-century novelists identify their characters as


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Englishmen and Englishwomen, rather than British men andwomen. Even the Scottish-born Margaret Oliphant explores theimplications of a specifically “English” identity in her novel Hes-ter, published in 1871 and discussed in further detail in chapter6. Following the tendencies of novels and histories of tea, I haveconsciously chosen this more limited, exclusionary term to indi-cate the cultural work performed by the rituals and representationsof tea drinking in nineteenth-century texts. The ideal domesticsetting evoked by many depictions of the tea table reflects a par-ticularly insular, enclosed, “English” sense of boundaries betweenself and other, between inside and outside, private and public,middle class and other, less culturally and economically privi-leged classes.34

Two related, but subtly different, idealized images of the teatable illustrate the distinction I am drawing between the monikers“English” and “British.” An “English” tea, which recurs oftenthroughout the following chapters, necessitates an enclosed set-ting, complete with heavy fabric curtains or shutters coveringclosed windows and creating multiple layers of protection be-tween interior and exterior spaces. A shining silver urn, porce-lain cups, and delicate finger foods rest on a draped tea table,and a fire warms the hearth and casts a ruddy glow over the scene.A nuclear family consisting of mother, father, and children taketheir places around the table and perform their respective tasks.The entire image resonates with the qualities of enclosure, ex-clusivity, and security. My use of the term “British,” by contrast,can be illustrated by taking the same tea table, complete withtea urn and porcelain cups, and placing it under the hot sun ofan Indian tea plantation. Shaded by a canopy and fanned byyoung Indian boys, the same family partakes of the delicacieson the table, but the setting connotes a different sense of selfand one’s relationship to the world. The two senses of iden-tity—English and British—are mutually dependent. To be Britishconveys a stalwart confidence in one’s own power, in the face ofdifferent cultures and peoples, based on the might of the nationto which one belongs. The supreme inner strength of British-

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ness rests on a foundation of the safe, enclosed, domestic spacesthat exemplify English national identity. At the same time, thecomfortable security of the English tea table—an assurance ofthe protected nature of the domestic space—depends on theknowledge that the British Empire is ever-expanding and un-stoppable and that it will continue to provide the necessary luxu-ries that grace every English tea table.

Analyzing novels, tea histories, and advertisements, this studyestablishes the cultural context of tea in Victorian England. Myexploration of the representations of tea drinking in fiction, his-tory, and advertising suggests that diverse texts worked togetherto create a sense of self and society and to establish the role oftea in helping to shape that society. Written representations ofthe tea table clearly reflect contemporary and historical trends,but they also contribute to the continued resonance of theserituals within the culture. Tea histories quote from poetry andscientific treatises, and the images they depict influenced adver-tisements and further histories of tea in English culture.35 Small,specific details from fictional passages—such as a tea urn, awoman’s slender fingers preparing tea, male characters’ partici-pation in the rituals of the tea table, and the economic andmoral status of tea in Victorian culture—gain in significanceand meaning when placed beside the rich context of tea adver-tisements and historical accounts of tea drinking in England.The convergence of all of these texts, genres, and representa-tions of tea emphasizes the role of tea as a necessary luxury inVictorian culture.

This study explores representations of tea in both fiction andnonfiction texts, aiming to place fictional scenes of charactersserving and drinking tea against a larger backdrop of depic-tions of tea in nineteenth-century English everyday life—the“ephemera” that surround daily experiences negotiating theworld of consumer goods. Representations of tea in English cul-ture carry the resonances of a unique moment of creating an idealcommunity that crosses multiple boundaries of identity, fusingcomplex categories of self into a single moment of communitas.


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Tea mediates the contradictions inherent within the project ofconstructing a unified English national identity, negotiating be-tween the diversities of gender and class, and merging differ-ences into a single social community. Tea elides the binariesthat define capitalism: production and consumption, labor andleisure, masculine and feminine, necessity and luxury. Withinthe context of imperialism, tea bridges the gap between colonyand metropole and between an exotic product of the empire andthe domestic consumer in the heart of England.

Nevertheless, generic boundaries—boundaries between fic-tional and nonfictional representations—are, to some extent,maintained. Tea cannot completely blur the boundaries betweenfiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction sources—tea histories, adver-tisements, and periodical articles—tend to portray tea drinkingas a ritual that successfully elides boundaries between identitycategories and does, in fact, create shared moments of English-ness. These nonfiction sources advise, exhort, instruct, andanalyze the ideal vision of tea’s ability to temporarily erase cer-tain boundaries and to create a shared community of English teadrinkers. Nonfiction sources suggest that if English tea drinkerswill shop wisely for the “best and cheapest” tea, and if that teais prepared correctly by middle-class women who earnestly un-dertake to nourish their families and their nation with theirown hands, then tea can in fact produce ideal English domestic-ity. In such a context, tea crosses the boundaries of class andgender to bring people together in a moment of shared values—values that, at the same time, indicate a specific vision of En-glishness clearly influenced by middle-class domestic ideology.According to histories and advertisements for tea, drinking teacan unite the diverse peoples of England.

Against this larger cultural depiction of tea’s creating sharedideals of community, I place my reading of nine nineteenth-century British novels, suggesting that fictional representationsof tea drinking offer a more complex portrait of the role played bytea within English culture. Scenes of tea in novels suggest a widerspectrum for the possible outcomes of drinking tea together. For

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some characters, including Margaret Hale in North and Southand Madeline Stavely in Orley Farm, the rituals of serving anddrinking tea do open up liminal spaces, bringing men andwomen, working class and middle class, together. Played out inthe fictional lives of characters such as Heathcliff, Alice in Won-derland, Rosamond Vincy, and Jude Fawley, however, tea drink-ing does not always lead to such ideal moments of communityand connection. While nonfiction sources encourage readers toview tea drinking as a method of inserting a moment of idealconnection into everyday lives, fictional scenes of tea drinkingsuggest that the classed and gendered moments of preparing, serv-ing, and consuming tea remain more complicated and embroiledin personal perspectives and potential misinterpretations.

Within Victorian novels, the production and presentation ofclass status often revolve around the consumption habits of themen and women who inhabit their social worlds. As historianshave noted, class terminology in Victorian England often mergedwith moral classifications, rendering class divisions markers ofmoral character as well as economic position.36 But English menand women’s frequent social movement, rising and falling eco-nomically throughout the social order, created tangled questionsabout the link between socioeconomic class and moral charac-ter. With new families rising into the middle class and movingthroughout the social structure, discerning between good andevil, moral and immoral, respectably middle class and merelywealthy with poor taste and no inner morality becomes a chal-lenge fraught with anxiety. In these novels, the outer symbols ofwealth and status within the community no longer serve as dis-cernable signs of a character’s inner qualities. Class position hasbecome confused, more closely allied with wealth rather thanwith the intangible characteristics that define a gentleman or alady. Gauging characters on the basis of their consumer spend-ing power or even the size of their house or estate no longerproduces predictable results.

Instead, Victorian novels suggest that within a world of mu-table class status and indeterminable signs of moral character,


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the day-to-day cultural habits of consumption provide the onlyreliable clues to social identity and inner morality. Many novelsoutline the relative social positions of characters who hoveraround the boundaries of the middle class, and their consump-tion practices indicate their relative position within the socialworld of the novel as well as within the moral compass of thenarrators’ judgments. A character’s consumption habits revealhis or her inner moral status, these authors suggest, emphasizingflaws or virtues obscured by the outer symbols of wealth and po-sition. Class status is therefore transformed from a fixed, staticposition within a defined social structure to a flexible, mutablesocial relationship that must be repeatedly rehearsed, literally“practiced” every day, with every meal and every cup of teaconsumed. Class not only represents a flexible relationshipacross space and personalities but also suggests that identity is influx through time and must be continually renewed through thepractices of everyday life.

Among the detailed consumption practices that signal charac-ter and social status, the rituals of the tea table assert the clearestsignals of a character’s inner qualities. Tea functions as a moral ar-biter—an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability—aidingin determining characters’ class status and moral position and re-vealing how these two judgments are inextricably connected inVictorian ideology. The tea ritual thus becomes crucial in exhibit-ing characters’ inner morality and their familial bonds, and as such,the participation in this ritual by both men and women is essen-tial, contributing to the reproduction of their middle-class status.

The everyday repetition of consumption habits in the domes-tic setting becomes a crucial ritual of establishing and reaffirmingsocial identity and moral character. The domestic sphere, with itspowerfully comforting, supportive rituals of eating and drinking,represents a place not simply of moral refuge but of moral con-struction, the foundation and scaffolding of the continued re-newal of class, gender, and national identity.

As a beverage—as a choice of a liquid to drink in VictorianEngland—tea is ubiquitous and therefore could be viewed as

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relatively meaningless, like eating bread or drinking water. Hav-ing a cup of tea could be viewed as a simple necessity of life thatpasses unnoticed and unconsidered and thus, according to someviews, as not worth exploring further. But necessary articles oflife, such as bread and water, are rendered complex and mean-ingful when considered in a larger cultural context. Even suchsimple choices as what to drink when one is physically in needof slaking one’s thirst carry cultural weight and meaning. Waterin nineteenth-century England bore multiple challenging andpotentially threatening questions regarding hygiene, engineer-ing, the responsibility of the state toward the health of its con-stituents, and temperance, as well as socioeconomic class.37 Bread,which seems relatively basic in terms of serving the human needof satisfying hunger, has been the focus of cultural studies workssuch as Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams. Tea thus becomesmeaningful because it is consumed every day, around the nation;it becomes meaningful because “it’s just a cuppa.”

Even a single cup of tea consumed in private, according to thenovels I have focused on here, carries cultural resonances thatsituate and articulate a character’s identity to himself or herself,to the author, and to the reader. No character in a novel is evertruly alone, of course, since the reader is an ever-present witnessto ostensibly private scenes. These scenes signal importantpsychological information to the reader, and each cup of teacontributes to the larger picture of character being drawnthroughout the novel. A quietly consumed cup of tea in solitudeopens up a mental space for an individual, inviting reflectionand conjuring a connection to the social ideals that tea repre-sents: comfort, hominess, family, hospitality, spiritual nourish-ment, connection to others and to the past—communitas.

The cultural concept of tea can be interpreted as a continuum,with a simple cup of tea consumed when one is alone at oneend, a relatively casual family gathering for breakfast in the cen-ter, and a more socially implicative, formal afternoon or eveningtea with both family members and invited guests at the oppositeend. No cup of tea is immune to social and cultural implications,


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but some events are more ritualistic and charged with meaningfor the characters involved. For the most part, the novels I ad-dress focus on scenes of the tea table—a scene involving morethan one person, with the serving of tea operating as a centralmoment in the scene. Gathering for tea functions as a markerof time, as a meal to break up the day, as an opportunity to so-cialize, and as a moment of intimacy and connection betweencharacters. These primarily social functions become so tightlyintertwined with the icon of tea that even on the few occasionswhen characters consume tea in solitude, the moment is de-scribed in largely social terms and has an impact on characters’social personas within the novel.

The choice of what beverage to drink in Victorian novels in-cludes, among codes of socioeconomic class and national identity,highly gendered symbolic meanings. Men connect with othermen over other substances, including tobacco (in Middlemarch),coffee (in David Copperfield), alcohol (in Jude the Obscure), orintellectual debate (in Middlemarch and Jude). When men seeka hot beverage to restore them emotionally and physically, theyusually choose coffee. Women, in contrast, select tea as a restora-tive even when they are alone. When men and women assem-ble to share a moment or a meal together, they all drink tea.Tea, therefore, is associated with women; tea is the drink thatwomen choose when alone, and tea functions as a beverage thatcan cross gender lines to bring men into the domestic space ofthe home. Tea is ranged with more-feminine, private, domesticconnotations, and it lubricates men’s transitions into the do-mestic space of the home.

Victorian novels suggest that tea (especially but not exclu-sively the rituals of the tea table) enables, allows, and enhancesconnection between characters. The consumption of tea estab-lishes expectations of connection and allows characters to in-teract in ways that would be more strained or awkward, or evenimpossible, without tea. Tea is expected to create connection,to signal hospitality, warmth, and friendship, to break downbarriers, and to temporarily elide boundaries of gender, class,

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profession, and family. Tea is consistently associated with an ideal:an ideal moment of hospitality, community, nourishment, andcomfort, and an ideal vision of femininity to uphold all of thoseelements of home. As Victorian novels depict, however, this vi-sion of the ideal comforts of home continually eludes the char-acters who attempt to enact it at their tea tables. Nevertheless,the rituals of serving and consuming tea offer characters oppor-tunities, every day, to rehearse this ideal moment of Englishness.

In an effort to articulate the nexus of identity categories withinconcepts of the “domestic,” I have selected nonfiction sourcesthat particularly address the arenas of national identity, class,and gender and fall into three generic categories. Single-sheetadvertisements from grocers, tea dealers, and importing firmsoffer glimpses into circulating ideas about tea, gender, class, do-mesticity, and English identity. Rather than offering the readera proliferation of images, I have chosen to focus on a limitednumber of specific advertisements, and I read and interpretthese visual and verbal constructions with the same careful at-tention to detail, language, and nuance as I apply to the novelsthat follow. I have concentrated on advertisements that high-light the portrayal of tea as a liminal commodity—a commodityon the boundaries of identity. The advertisements I analyze inthe chapters that follow offer fascinatingly intertwined ideologi-cal messages of gender, class, empire, and nation.38

I have also focused on a slightly peculiar genre that blurs theboundaries between fiction and nonfiction, advertisement andtravelogue, personal account and scientific treatise—the book-length tea history. Appearing throughout the nineteenth centuryand often explicitly funded by various portions of the changingtea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equiva-lent of an infomercial), tea histories formed an ongoing, inter-textual record of the role of tea in English culture. Althoughsome tea histories focus on the technological or the financialimpact of the burgeoning tea industry, I have primarily reliedon three particular tea histories that emphasize the culturalsignificance of tea in England: G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects,


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Medicinal and Moral (1839), Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery andHistory (1878), and Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking(1884). When Sigmond’s text was published, the East India Com-pany had recently lost its China monopoly. Sigmond’s text hon-ors the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii)and celebrates British ingenuity in securing sources of tea forthe British population. Samuel Phillips Day, writing forty yearslater, suggests that more-recent technological innovations pro-vided similar assurances of quality and safety for tea importedfrom China.39 Day’s history emphasizes changes in tea manufac-turing, as well as the shifts in the balance of power between theEast India Company and smaller private tea-importing firms.Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking, published almost half acentury after Sigmond’s text, builds on Sigmond’s earlier na-tional pride, and Reade quotes extensively from Sigmond’s Tea:Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral. Reade’s text celebrates Indiantea production and the British Indian Empire, reflecting the po-litical and agricultural advances that Britain had accomplishedin India in the intervening forty-five years. Reade’s emphasis onthe salutary power of tea draws from the previous decades oftemperance reform and the importance of tea as a proposed al-ternative to alcohol, allegedly forming the basis of the wordteetotaler or, as it occasionally appears, teatotaler.

I also include several articles from periodicals such as theWestminster Review; Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Sci-ence, and Arts; All the Year Round; and Temple Bar. These articlesrange from paeans to the “social influence of tea” to analyses ofthe financial impact of tea on the empire, and from romanticdetails of the manufacture of tea in China to exhortations tosupport British efforts to produce tea in India. Together, thesesources provide a cultural overview of tea drinking in nineteenth-century England and the technological and cultural changes oc-curring during this period.

Structurally, the image of concentric rings informs my ap-proach to the different arenas of identity impinged upon bytea. I begin with the concept of national identity, specifically a

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national identity forged with and against the increasingly globalworld of the nineteenth century. This category encompasses thebroadest group of people, of all classes, both men and women,who identify themselves as English. From there, I move down alevel to the category of class, exploring the ways in which teadrinking is inflected by class in advertisements, articles, tea his-tories, and novels and focusing on the defining middle-classcharacteristics of the idealized English tea table. Within thisportrait of middle-class Englishness, however, there remains athird level of identity, which neatly bifurcates those participat-ing into two parties: men and women. Thus, I then move on todiscuss the interplay between gender identity and the rituals ofthe tea table. Finally, I turn to the ways in which the role of teain mediating domestic identity shifted toward the end of thenineteenth century, reflecting broader questions of class andgender that were emerging in fin-de-siècle England.


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culture, consumption, and identity - ohio university press

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