creating a moral environment for the education of children and contributing to a moral nation.31
The portrait of Englishness offered by nineteenth-century representations of tea depicts interconnected threads of identity, including class relations, gender dynamics, the creation and sustenance of the family, and a sense of nation. Tea drinking temporarily united all of these categories within the space of the home, offering a unique ritual that crystallized multiple identities into a single vision of Englishness. But as Judy Giles and Tim Middleton suggest, such unified visions of Englishness tended to favor particularly powerful groups within the larger community.32 In Victorian culture, the middle class exemplified Giles and Middleton’s “particular social group” with the potential to define English national identity in their own terms.33 My analysis of tea in Victorian culture and fiction suggests that the middle-class values of consumerism—appreciating commodities within the bounds of moderation and thrift—came to represent the nation as a whole.
Encapsulating a middle-class approach to moderated consumption, Victorian tea histories invoke the unique status of tea as a liminal icon by referring to tea as a “necessary luxury.” Tea thus straddles the ideological divide between necessity and indulgence, between frugality and excess, and between nourishment and pleasure. As an exotic commodity imported from afar and originally rare, difficult to acquire, and fiscally prohibitive for most individuals, tea initially represented a luxury item. During the eighteenth century, the price of tea dropped dramatically, taxes on tea were reduced throughout the century, and imports of tea to Great Britain increased steadily. By the nineteenth century, tea had become popular in all social circles, economic classes, and regions of the country and, according to Victorian tea historians such as Samuel Day and Arthur K. Reade, had become necessary to the English diet, culture, and nation. Dubbing tea a “necessary luxury,” these authors emphasize the singular place of tea within Victorian ideology; tea epitomized the concept of middle-class moderation by occupying a position between necessity and luxury, between bodily needs and psychological benefits, between the realities of a limited budget and the tropes of consumer culture. Poised on the boundary that separated the abnegation or the neglectfulness of the working classes and the wanton, indiscriminate spending of the aristocracy, the middle classes found in tea an icon of moderation—the enjoyment of consumer goods tempered by the knowledge that such goods were literally, physically, and culturally necessary to their everyday lives.
Explanations of culture necessitate an exploration of the significance of naming the culture, the nation, and the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. The slippage between “English” and “British” highlights the tension between the simultaneous inclusive/exclusive function of tea drinking in nineteenth-century literature. Nevertheless, I have attempted to draw a distinction between the terms “English” and “British.” I have chosen the term “British” to refer to the institutions and actions of people from Great Britain in their functions outside of the nation itself. This term takes all of the subgroups within Great Britain into account, including people from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (during the nineteenth century), as well as the different socioeconomic classes that made up nineteenth-century British society. As a signifier, “British” necessarily represents a heterogeneous mix of peoples and subcultures, both within the island nation and outside of its geographical borders. Nineteenth-century tea histories tend to use the term “Great Britain” when specifically referring to the relationship between their own country and its empire; this term signals the political, economic, and imperial presence of the nation within a global context. When discussing tea drinking within their own culture, however, nineteenth-century tea historians almost invariably define their national identity as “English.” Similarly, most nineteenth-century novelists identify their characters as Englishmen and Englishwomen, rather than British men and women. Even the Scottish-born Margaret Oliphant explores the implications of a specifically “English” identity in her novel Hester, published in 1871 and discussed in further detail in chapter 6. Following the tendencies of novels and histories of tea, I have consciously chosen this more limited, exclusionary term to indicate the cultural work performed by the rituals and representations of tea drinking in nineteenth-century texts. The ideal domestic setting evoked by many depictions of the tea table reflects a particularly insular, enclosed, “English” sense of boundaries between self and other, between inside and outside, private and public, middle class and other, less culturally and economically privileged classes.34
Two related, but subtly different, idealized images of the tea table illustrate the distinction I am drawing between the monikers “English” and “British.” An “English” tea, which recurs often throughout the following chapters, necessitates an enclosed setting, complete with heavy fabric curtains or shutters covering closed windows and creating multiple layers of protection between interior and exterior spaces. A shining silver urn, porcelain 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 take their places around the table and perform their respective tasks. The entire image resonates with the qualities of enclosure, exclusivity, and security. My use of the term “British,” by contrast, can be illustrated by taking the same tea table, complete with tea urn and porcelain cups, and placing it under the hot sun of an Indian tea plantation. Shaded by a canopy and fanned by young Indian boys, the same family partakes of the delicacies on the table, but the setting connotes a different sense of self and one’s relationship to the world. The two senses of identity—English and British—are mutually dependent. To be British conveys a stalwart confidence in one’s own power, in the face of different cultures and peoples, based on the might of the nation to which one belongs. The supreme inner strength of Britishness rests on a foundation of the safe, enclosed, domestic spaces that exemplify English national identity. At the same time, the comfortable security of the English tea table—an assurance of the protected nature of the domestic space—depends on the knowledge that the British Empire is ever-expanding and unstoppable and that it will continue to provide the necessary luxuries that grace every English tea table.
Analyzing novels, tea histories, and advertisements, this study establishes the cultural context of tea in Victorian England. My exploration of the representations of tea drinking in fiction, history, and advertising suggests that diverse texts worked together to create a sense of self and society and to establish the role of tea in helping to shape that society. Written representations of the tea table clearly reflect contemporary and historical trends, but they also contribute to the continued resonance of these rituals within the culture. Tea histories quote from poetry and scientific treatises, and the images they depict influenced advertisements and further histories of tea in English culture.35 Small, specific details from fictional passages—such as a tea urn, a woman’s slender fingers preparing tea, male characters’ participation in the rituals of the tea table, and the economic and moral status of tea in Victorian culture—gain in significance and meaning when placed beside the rich context of tea advertisements and historical accounts of tea drinking in England. The convergence of all of these texts, genres, and representations of tea emphasizes the role of tea as a necessary luxury in Victorian culture.
This study explores representations of tea in both fiction and nonfiction texts, aiming to place fictional scenes of characters serving and drinking tea against a larger backdrop of depictions of tea in nineteenth-century English everyday life—the “ephemera” that surround daily experiences negotiating the world of consumer goods. Representations of tea in English culture carry the resonances of a unique moment of creating an ideal community that crosses multiple boundaries of identity, fusing complex categories of self into a single moment of communitas. Tea mediates the contradictions inherent within the project of constructing a unified English national identity, negotiating between the diversities of gender and class, and merging differences into a single social community. Tea elides the binaries that define capitalism: production and consumption, labor and leisure, masculine and feminine, necessity and luxury. Within the context of imperialism, tea bridges the gap between colony and metropole and between an exotic product of the empire and the domestic consumer in the heart of England.
Nevertheless,
