within their daily lives. G. G. Sigmond, in the opening pages of Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral, declares, “Man is so surrounded by objects calculated to arrest his attention, and to excite either his admiration or his curiosity, that he often overlooks the humble friend that ministers to his habitual comfort; and the familiarity he holds with it almost renders him incapable of appreciating its value.”1 By the early nineteenth century, tea had become a commodity of necessity, forming a crucial part of daily patterns of consumption and domesticity. The habitual comfort of tea, according to Sigmond’s tea treatise, does not draw attention; it is quiet and familiar and thus goes unnoticed. Tea is represented as dependable, a frequent part of everyday life that forms a comfortable, secure basis for the rest of life’s responses, decisions, and actions. As Sigmond declares, the English tea drinker is “incapable of appreciating [tea’s] value” (1). What the typical tea drinker fails to recognize, Sigmond suggests, is the crucial role that tea plays in forming the foundation of everyday life.
Despite Sigmond’s attempts to rectify the humble status of tea in nineteenth-century English culture, tea has remained a relatively unrecognized aspect of Victorian life. Just as Sigmond implies that the beverage’s mundane role precludes the tea drinker from appreciating its importance, the continued significance of tea in twentieth-century British society seems to have prevented scholars from adequately analyzing its role in British culture and national identity. As Anthony Burgess has speculated, “Perhaps tea is so woven into the stomach linings of the British that they cannot view it in either a scholarly or an aesthetic manner. It is a fact of British life, like breathing.”2 While numerous books, from the eighteenth century through to today, detail the history of tea in England, they tend to dramatize legends and keep cultural analysis to a minimum. Many publications about tea have been sponsored by tea companies, and they popularize the intriguing history of tea without attempting to analyze that history or cultural context.3 A limited amount of research has been done on the significance of tea in eighteenth-century Britain, corresponding with recent scholarship on the rise of the consumer society in the late 1700s, but the central importance of tea in nineteenth-century British culture has gone largely unexplored.4 Cultural analyses of Victorian everyday life have proliferated in recent years, and literary scholars and historians have often noted the presence of tea within the mid-nineteenth-century domestic space. For the most part, however, Victorian scholars have relied on the iconographic power of tea to connote the domestic ideal without pausing to investigate the role of tea in Victorian fiction and culture.5
A passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, first published in 1853, describes a typical “English tea” and suggests the complex negotiation of social identity that revolved around the tea table:
How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort! How warm in its amber lamp-light and vermilion fire-flush! To render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the table—an English tea, whereof the whole shining service glanced at me familiarly; from the solid silver urn, of antique pattern, and the massive pot of the same metal, to the thin porcelain cups, dark with purple and gilding. I knew the very seed-cake of peculiar form, baked in a peculiar mould, which always had a place on the tea-table at Bretton. Graham liked it, and there it was as of yore—set before Graham’s plate with the silver knife and fork beside it.6
Lucy Snowe characterizes the Brettons’ tea as “perfect domestic comfort,” representing all of the necessary elements of recognizably English domesticity. The room she describes is swathed in blue damask and muffled by carpeting, creating a warm, relaxing, quiet space removed from the bustle of the city outside. An amber lamp and “vermilion fire-flush” warm up the cool blue tones of the walls and draperies with red-gold tints and suggest the warmth of the domestic hearth. In a subtle play on words, this scene is rendered “picture perfect” by the neatly laid tea table, complete with silver urn, porcelain cups, and seedcake.7 The tea table is presented as a frozen tableau of Englishness, tempting Lucy with its familiar glance, solid traditions, high-quality equipage, and the young man for whom the entire scene has been prepared.
Brontë’s passage illustrates the unique role of tea as an icon that mediates between various subject positions within the larger category of English national identity. The tea table offers shared rituals and invites connection across its surface, creating community by crossing boundaries between individuals. The familiarity that beckons to Lucy Snowe also speaks to the reader; the rituals of the tea table, shared by all who claim an English identity, create a sense of community that invites the reader to conceptually close the literary divide that separates him or her from the character and culture within the text. At the Brettons’ tea table, the rituals of tea drinking similarly work to re-create the long-lost community that once united Lucy Snowe with the Bretton family, shrinking the psychological and ideological distance between the wealthy, successful English family and the poor, orphaned teacher, between the older generation represented by Mrs. Bretton and Lucy’s relative youth, and between the women who surround the table and Graham, the young man who returns home for tea. The common enjoyment of a cup of tea, a slice of cake, and the warmth of the domestic hearth bring all of these various individuals together for a shared moment at the 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 description of “perfect domestic comfort.” Adjectives suggesting security 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 of English culture, depends on a specifically middle-class position; it necessitates a certain income level to purchase relatively expensive commodities, the social knowledge and manners to properly equip and set the tea table, and invisible—female—hands to perform the necessary domestic labor. The tea table thus mediated between men and women in Victorian culture and reaffirmed the ideological division of labor within the middle-class household. Tea similarly evokes the binary of labor and leisure. Obliquely referring to the work that went into the preparations for the meal, this passage explicitly portrays the tea table as an offering of leisure and refreshment to the man of the family upon his return from the outside, public, world of work. Occupying a liminal position between inside and outside, private and public, tea represents private repose and comfort to the family consuming it, while simultaneously suggesting the far reaches of the British Empire and beyond, through the very presence of the Asian commodity.
Tea was introduced to Britain in the 1650s, imported from China through Dutch merchants. The British East India Company (EIC) gradually began importing small amounts of tea along with the EIC’s usual cargoes of China silks and textiles.8 Like sugar and other imported “luxury” foods, tea originally signified status and wealth in English society.9 But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic increase in the availability and popularity of tea; by the early nineteenth century, tea had become a prominent part of daily life throughout English society. In Tea: Its Mystery and History, Samuel Day reports that the first records of tea imports to England, in 1675, totaled 4,713 pounds. Fifty years later, in 1725, tea imports had grown to 2 million pounds per year; imports had increased to 25 million pounds per year by 1800 and to 187 million pounds per year by 1877. According to David Crole’s history of tea, Tea: A Text Book of Tea Planting and Manufacture, published in 1897, “80,000,000 cups of tea are daily imbibed” in England, resulting in an average consumption of more than five and a half pounds of tea per person per year.10 Crole’s statistic of the cups of tea consumed each day in England emphasizes the quotidian nature of the beverage; the cups of tea consumed per person per day resonate on an individual level, creating an image of millions of English men and women simultaneously drinking their cups of tea each day.
When tea was first imported to Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was sold as a prepared liquid beverage at London coffeehouses, like coffee and chocolate. Thus, like these other beverages, tea was initially consumed in public places, marketed as an exotic product with multiple health benefits. Sources such as The Female Spectator
