of English tea drinking, and they provide a glimpse of the future, highlighting the imperial narrative of progress and providing a crucial sense of English history to authorize individual decisions and goals.
When we begin to look at the specific products that English consumers were purchasing, we begin to see the importance of national identity in the social character ideals being formed and tested by consumption patterns within the home. During the mid-nineteenth century, many extremely popular commodities, essential to the construction of individual character and national identity, were being imported to England from the empire. Goods ranging from Indian cotton to Caribbean sugar, from Chinese tea to Japanned trays and fans, from Indian shawls to American tobacco were incorporated into the everyday habits of middle-class English consumers.22 As Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose argue, Britons’ “everyday lives were infused with an imperial presence.”23 Importing and consuming goods from outside the borders of England created concern about definitions and boundaries, questions about what it meant to be English and how to remain English despite habits that depended on the production of commodities by other cultures and nations. In response, English consumers strengthened their self-image as English, articulating new boundaries—boundaries of morality, character, and respectability, of domesticity and gender identity—to help maintain national distinctions and individual characteristics.
In turning toward the habits of everyday life in middle-class Victorian English culture, I focus on the daily activities within the home, within the domestic space. The term domestic signals the clearly delineated gender roles within the family, and the comfort of the private sphere, as well as the location of England as the core, the domestic center of its empire. The nineteenth century represents an important period of domestication in the history of tea drinking in England, both in a local sense (as tea became an important icon of the home) and in a more global sense (as England struggled to gain economic and political control over the production and importation of tea). England’s taste for tea grew within a culture of shifting public and private consumption patterns accompanying imperial expansion, an increasing influx of imported luxury commercial goods, and the industrial and economic revolutions’ impact on English spending capacity.24
The fluid nature of tea as a signifier in English culture suggests that the rituals of the tea table operate as liminal, or threshold, rituals, according to Victor Turner’s anthropological model. According to Turner, liminal rituals poise people on the brink between various social positions—between childhood and adulthood, between layperson and clergy, between ordinary citizen and some kind of specialized social status. Rites of passage and other rituals that highlight such in-between states create temporarily marginal positions that disrupt the hierarchical power structure of society; people who usually occupy the lower rungs of the social system momentarily take on the power of those higher in rank, class, or prestige. While Turner’s examples are drawn from religious rituals of maturity or investiture, his analysis implies a broader view of the role of liminal rituals in society.25 He views society as dialectically cycling between two very different states—a hierarchical, power-inflected structured system that imposes order on individuals, and an unstructured, undefined state of connection between individuals, which he calls communitas. Liminal rituals temporarily suspend hierarchical structures and reverse systems of power, creating the opportunity for communitas to emerge.26
The rituals of the tea table, occurring every day throughout nineteenth-century English homes, function in many ways as liminal (or threshold) rituals. In Turner’s model, liminal rituals help to build community, or communitas, by temporarily revoking 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 table in forging a unified English national identity out of disparate social groups, economic classes, and genders separated by ideologically distinct spheres of daily life. Tea appears on the cusp between multiple binaries in Victorian culture, forging a link between otherwise-opposing forces and simultaneously reinforcing the distinction between them: men/women, middle class/lower class, labor/leisure, necessity/luxury, England/Orient, home/ empire, ideal/real. Tea mediates all of these contradictions within Victorian culture, creating “communitas” in the ideal of a unified English national identity. The shared culture of tea drinking domesticates tensions between these categories and ideological positionings, bridging distinctions in ways that both forge connections and highlight the differences that mark those distinctions in the first place.
Tea, as a fluid constant in English culture, with its accompanying social rituals, was flexible enough to accommodate—and to mark—subtle differences in social status, to mediate these differences between individuals, and to serve as a shared cultural symbol between groups within the English nation. A commodity cultivated in the Orient crossed vast geographical distances to take its place on English tea tables, permeating physical boundaries of nation and body and thus creating anxieties about cultural and physiological pollution. Crossing colonial divides, tea sharpened the distinction between producer and consumer, affirming imperial practices and offering an ideological nexus of questions concerning labor and leisure within the home, within the nation, and within the empire.
The authors of Victorian histories of tea award tea with the title of the “national beverage,” celebrating tea’s unique ability to forge a national culture and identity through the habit of drinking tea.27 At the same time, however, the details of the rituals of tea drinking signal differences in class status, gender, and generation, reinscribing the boundaries temporarily obscured by the universal taste for tea and highlighting the underlying moral differences that supported class structure. Tea crossed class lines, appearing at the humblest suppers and gracing the table of Queen Victoria, creating a universal English habit. People from different socioeconomic classes joined an imagined community of like-minded tea drinkers each time they sat down to a hot cup of tea, according to Victorian tea histories, but at the same time, the details of tea preparation and consumption marked class status and concomitant moral position within the culture. In a similar way, tea drinking elided gendered boundaries by providing a unique opportunity to share comestibles and conversation. Men and women met at the tea table, temporarily crossing ideological borders to form friendships, carry out courtships, and reaffirm marital bonds. The rituals of the tea table, however, insist on gender distinctions, and they highlight a woman’s privileged role in nourishing her family and her nation.
Women’s roles at the tea table—proffering a soothing, warming drink that represented English identity—sustained Britain in all of its endeavors, including the enlargement of the empire to ensure continued supplies of the tea that symbolized the process of nourishment and imperial expansion. Within the ideal of the tea table, women nourished their family, providing physical and moral sustenance for individual family members and for all of Britain. Tea histories, advertisements for tea, and Victorian novels agree on the fundamental role of the tea table in representing Englishness and the gendered activities that contributed to the domestic ideal. Performing household tasks constructs a sense of identity for each member of the household and signals that identity to others, both within the home and within the larger community.28 The roles that men and women enacted at private tea tables echoed their larger roles within the family and within English society.
The gendered activities of the tea table, of serving and drinking tea, functioned within an unbreakable cycle of private moments of English domesticity reinforcing and mutually constituting the domesticity of England as a nation. Gender and class are intertwined in the creation of the domestic ideal, which depended on financial spending power, a certain standard of living, and the gendered labor of the nuclear family.29 In Sarah Ellis’s terms, domesticity provides a safe, private haven from the chaos of the outer world.30 As Ellis explains, the wives and women of England constructed the domestic ideal in their own individual homes, offering a peaceful refuge for their husbands and fathers. These men imbibed the moral influences of domesticity and femininity at home and reentered the public, commercial, political world refreshed and renewed, ready to impart their newly moral outlook through their masculine tasks. Women’s individual roles as domestic angels thus resonated throughout English culture. As
