and nonfictional representations—are, to some extent, maintained. Tea cannot completely blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction sources—tea histories, advertisements, and periodical articles—tend to portray tea drinking as a ritual that successfully elides boundaries between identity categories and does, in fact, create shared moments of Englishness. These nonfiction sources advise, exhort, instruct, and analyze the ideal vision of tea’s ability to temporarily erase certain boundaries and to create a shared community of English tea drinkers. Nonfiction sources suggest that if English tea drinkers will shop wisely for the “best and cheapest” tea, and if that tea is prepared correctly by middle-class women who earnestly undertake to nourish their families and their nation with their own hands, then tea can in fact produce ideal English domesticity. In such a context, tea crosses the boundaries of class and gender to bring people together in a moment of shared values—values that, at the same time, indicate a specific vision of Englishness clearly influenced by middle-class domestic ideology. According to histories and advertisements for tea, drinking tea can unite the diverse peoples of England.
Against this larger cultural depiction of tea’s creating shared ideals of community, I place my reading of nine nineteenth-century British novels, suggesting that fictional representations of tea drinking offer a more complex portrait of the role played by tea within English culture. Scenes of tea in novels suggest a wider spectrum for the possible outcomes of drinking tea together. For some characters, including Margaret Hale in North and South and Madeline Stavely in Orley Farm, the rituals of serving and drinking tea do open up liminal spaces, bringing men and women, working class and middle class, together. Played out in the fictional lives of characters such as Heathcliff, Alice in Wonderland, Rosamond Vincy, and Jude Fawley, however, tea drinking does not always lead to such ideal moments of community and connection. While nonfiction sources encourage readers to view tea drinking as a method of inserting a moment of ideal connection into everyday lives, fictional scenes of tea drinking suggest that the classed and gendered moments of preparing, serving, and consuming tea remain more complicated and embroiled in personal perspectives and potential misinterpretations.
Within Victorian novels, the production and presentation of class status often revolve around the consumption habits of the men and women who inhabit their social worlds. As historians have noted, class terminology in Victorian England often merged with moral classifications, rendering class divisions markers of moral character as well as economic position.36 But English men and women’s frequent social movement, rising and falling economically throughout the social order, created tangled questions about the link between socioeconomic class and moral character. With new families rising into the middle class and moving throughout the social structure, discerning between good and evil, moral and immoral, respectably middle class and merely wealthy with poor taste and no inner morality becomes a challenge fraught with anxiety. In these novels, the outer symbols of wealth and status within the community no longer serve as discernable signs of a character’s inner qualities. Class position has become confused, more closely allied with wealth rather than with the intangible characteristics that define a gentleman or a lady. Gauging characters on the basis of their consumer spending power or even the size of their house or estate no longer produces predictable results.
Instead, Victorian novels suggest that within a world of mutable class status and indeterminable signs of moral character, the day-to-day cultural habits of consumption provide the only reliable clues to social identity and inner morality. Many novels outline the relative social positions of characters who hover around the boundaries of the middle class, and their consumption practices indicate their relative position within the social world of the novel as well as within the moral compass of the narrators’ judgments. A character’s consumption habits reveal his or her inner moral status, these authors suggest, emphasizing flaws or virtues obscured by the outer symbols of wealth and position. Class status is therefore transformed from a fixed, static position within a defined social structure to a flexible, mutable social relationship that must be repeatedly rehearsed, literally “practiced” every day, with every meal and every cup of tea consumed. Class not only represents a flexible relationship across space and personalities but also suggests that identity is in flux through time and must be continually renewed through the practices of everyday life.
Among the detailed consumption practices that signal character and social status, the rituals of the tea table assert the clearest signals of a character’s inner qualities. Tea functions as a moral arbiter—an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability—aiding in determining characters’ class status and moral position and revealing how these two judgments are inextricably connected in Victorian ideology. The tea ritual thus becomes crucial in exhibiting characters’ inner morality and their familial bonds, and as such, the participation in this ritual by both men and women is essential, contributing to the reproduction of their middle-class status.
The everyday repetition of consumption habits in the domestic setting becomes a crucial ritual of establishing and reaffirming social identity and moral character. The domestic sphere, with its powerfully comforting, supportive rituals of eating and drinking, represents a place not simply of moral refuge but of moral construction, the foundation and scaffolding of the continued renewal of class, gender, and national identity.
As a beverage—as a choice of a liquid to drink in Victorian England—tea is ubiquitous and therefore could be viewed as relatively meaningless, like eating bread or drinking water. Having a cup of tea could be viewed as a simple necessity of life that passes unnoticed and unconsidered and thus, according to some views, as not worth exploring further. But necessary articles of life, such as bread and water, are rendered complex and meaningful when considered in a larger cultural context. Even such simple choices as what to drink when one is physically in need of slaking one’s thirst carry cultural weight and meaning. Water in nineteenth-century England bore multiple challenging and potentially threatening questions regarding hygiene, engineering, the responsibility of the state toward the health of its constituents, and temperance, as well as socioeconomic class.37 Bread, which seems relatively basic in terms of serving the human need of satisfying hunger, has been the focus of cultural studies works such as Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams. Tea thus becomes meaningful 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 the novels I have focused on here, carries cultural resonances that situate and articulate a character’s identity to himself or herself, to the author, and to the reader. No character in a novel is ever truly alone, of course, since the reader is an ever-present witness to ostensibly private scenes. These scenes signal important psychological information to the reader, and each cup of tea contributes to the larger picture of character being drawn throughout the novel. A quietly consumed cup of tea in solitude opens up a mental space for an individual, inviting reflection and conjuring a connection to the social ideals that tea represents: comfort, hominess, family, hospitality, spiritual nourishment, 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 one end, a relatively casual family gathering for breakfast in the center, and a more socially implicative, formal afternoon or evening tea with both family members and invited guests at the opposite end. No cup of tea is immune to social and cultural implications, but some events are more ritualistic and charged with meaning for the characters involved. For the most part, the novels I address focus on scenes of the tea table—a scene involving more than one person, with the serving of tea operating as a central moment in the scene. Gathering for tea functions as a marker of time, as a meal to break up the day, as an opportunity to socialize, and as a moment of intimacy and connection between characters. These primarily social functions become so tightly intertwined with the icon of tea that even on the few occasions when characters consume tea in solitude, the moment is described 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 includes, among codes of socioeconomic class and national
