with other men over other substances, including tobacco (in Middlemarch), coffee (in David Copperfield), alcohol (in Jude the Obscure), or intellectual debate (in Middlemarch and Jude). When men seek a hot beverage to restore them emotionally and physically, they usually choose coffee. Women, in contrast, select tea as a restorative even when they are alone. When men and women assemble to share a moment or a meal together, they all drink tea. Tea, therefore, is associated with women; tea is the drink that women choose when alone, and tea functions as a beverage that can cross gender lines to bring men into the domestic space of the home. Tea is ranged with more-feminine, private, domestic connotations, and it lubricates men’s transitions into the domestic space of the home.
Victorian novels suggest that tea (especially but not exclusively the rituals of the tea table) enables, allows, and enhances connection between characters. The consumption of tea establishes expectations of connection and allows characters to interact in ways that would be more strained or awkward, or even impossible, without tea. Tea is expected to create connection, to signal hospitality, warmth, and friendship, to break down barriers, and to temporarily elide boundaries of gender, class, profession, and family. Tea is consistently associated with an ideal: an ideal moment of hospitality, community, nourishment, and comfort, and an ideal vision of femininity to uphold all of those elements of home. As Victorian novels depict, however, this vision of the ideal comforts of home continually eludes the characters who attempt to enact it at their tea tables. Nevertheless, the rituals of serving and consuming tea offer characters opportunities, every day, to rehearse this ideal moment of Englishness.
In an effort to articulate the nexus of identity categories within concepts of the “domestic,” I have selected nonfiction sources that particularly address the arenas of national identity, class, and gender and fall into three generic categories. Single-sheet advertisements from grocers, tea dealers, and importing firms offer glimpses into circulating ideas about tea, gender, class, domesticity, and English identity. Rather than offering the reader a proliferation of images, I have chosen to focus on a limited number of specific advertisements, and I read and interpret these visual and verbal constructions with the same careful attention to detail, language, and nuance as I apply to the novels that follow. I have concentrated on advertisements that highlight the portrayal of tea as a liminal commodity—a commodity on the boundaries of identity. The advertisements I analyze in the chapters that follow offer fascinatingly intertwined ideological messages of gender, class, empire, and nation.38
I have also focused on a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise—the booklength tea history. Appearing throughout the nineteenth century and often explicitly funded by various portions of the changing tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial), tea histories formed an ongoing, intertextual record of the role of tea in English culture. Although some tea histories focus on the technological or the financial impact of the burgeoning tea industry, I have primarily relied on three particular tea histories that emphasize the cultural significance of tea in England: G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (1839), Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History (1878), and Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking (1884). When Sigmond’s text was published, the East India Company had recently lost its China monopoly. Sigmond’s text honors the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii) and celebrates British ingenuity in securing sources of tea for the British population. Samuel Phillips Day, writing forty years later, suggests that more-recent technological innovations provided similar assurances of quality and safety for tea imported from China.39 Day’s history emphasizes changes in tea manufacturing, as well as the shifts in the balance of power between the East India Company and smaller private tea-importing firms. Arthur K. Reade’s Tea and Tea Drinking, published almost half a century after Sigmond’s text, builds on Sigmond’s earlier national pride, and Reade quotes extensively from Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral. Reade’s text celebrates Indian tea production and the British Indian Empire, reflecting the political and agricultural advances that Britain had accomplished in India in the intervening forty-five years. Reade’s emphasis on the salutary power of tea draws from the previous decades of temperance reform and the importance of tea as a proposed alternative to alcohol, allegedly forming the basis of the word teetotaler or, as it occasionally appears, teatotaler.
I also include several articles from periodicals such as the Westminster Review; Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts; All the Year Round; and Temple Bar. These articles range from paeans to the “social influence of tea” to analyses of the financial impact of tea on the empire, and from romantic details of the manufacture of tea in China to exhortations to support British efforts to produce tea in India. Together, these sources provide a cultural overview of tea drinking in nineteenth-century England and the technological and cultural changes occurring during this period.
Structurally, the image of concentric rings informs my approach to the different arenas of identity impinged upon by tea. I begin with the concept of national identity, specifically a national identity forged with and against the increasingly global world of the nineteenth century. This category encompasses the broadest group of people, of all classes, both men and women, who identify themselves as English. From there, I move down a level to the category of class, exploring the ways in which tea drinking is inflected by class in advertisements, articles, tea histories, and novels and focusing on the defining middle-class characteristics of the idealized English tea table. Within this portrait of middle-class Englishness, however, there remains a third level of identity, which neatly bifurcates those participating into two parties: men and women. Thus, I then move on to discuss the interplay between gender identity and the rituals of the tea table. Finally, I turn to the ways in which the role of tea in mediating domestic identity shifted toward the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting broader questions of class and gender that were emerging in fin-de-siècle England.
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“A Typically English Brew”
Victorian Histories of Tea and Representations of English National Identity
Individually and nationally we are deeply indebted to the tea-plant.
G. G. Sigmond, Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral
What was first regarded as a luxury, has now become, if not an absolute necessity, at least one of our daily wants, the loss of which would cause more suffering and excite more regret than would the deprivation of many things which were once counted as necessaries of life.
Samuel Day, Tea: Its Mystery and History
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WITNESSED THE DOMESTICATION of tea in Britain as tea was transformed from an exotic luxury consumed primarily by men in public coffeehouses to a necessity of everyday life enjoyed by both men and women in the private, domestic space of the home. In the nineteenth century, tea became an icon of English domesticity and was associated with privacy, intimacy, and the nuclear family. According to nineteenth-century tea histories and advertisements, tea helped to define English identity, character, and class values. Tea united the English people, temporarily erasing the boundaries between individuals to unify the nation into a coherent whole.
As an icon of the domestic sphere, tea exemplifies domesticity’s primary goal of enclosing the English self, of protecting that self by ensconcing him or her behind a set of firm boundaries. The domestic sphere’s safety was ensured by enclosing it behind the walls of a house, within swathes of draperies, warmed by a fire that kept the bitter cold of the outdoors at bay. The layers of enclosure functioned as fail-safe mechanisms to separate the domestic from all that raged without—the storms, the rest of the world that did not live at a “high
