Drinking tea was an evolving ritual in English culture, and representations of the tea table reflect that fluidity. Tea, as a hot restorative drink, could be and was consumed throughout the day (and night, as De Quincey attests),17 but the more ritualized aspects of what we call the “tea table” were most often found at breakfast and in the afternoon, at varying times between lunch and retiring to bed. Afternoon tea offered an opportunity for a light meal to fill the increasing gap between lunch and dinner—what historian Jamie Shalleck calls “low tea,” popularized by Anna, Duchess of Bedford.18 Midcentury novels such as Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series reveal the surprisingly late hours kept by members of Parliament and thus by fashionable homes in London; dinner was often served at midnight or later, and thus a late afternoon meal, anchored by tea, helped to tide one over until the more formal dinner much later. In Wuthering Heights, tea functions as part of a large, substantial meal to bring all the people of the household together at one common time. In North and South, teatime occurs in the afternoon—Thornton has to leave work early to dress and attend tea at the Hales’—and it allows people who do not know each other well to become acquainted without the expense of a formal, seated dinner. In Alice in Wonderland, the Hatter explains that his watch stopped at six o’clock, suggesting a late afternoon teatime potentially preceding a later supper (since the food includes only bread and butter). Hester Vernon experiences endless afternoons filled with the scent of tea, while the narrator in The Portrait of a Lady states that teatime occurs between the hours of five and eight p.m., during the final hours of sunlight in the summer months in England.
In other literary representations, however, the most ritualized tea tables occur after characters have dined in the evening. In many novels, after characters have finished their dinner, the women “withdraw” into the drawing room (thus giving this room its name) while the men remain at the table to drink port and smoke cigars. Once the men have enjoyed enough of their masculine consumables, they rejoin the women in the drawing room for tea. Isabel Archer’s Thursday evenings, during which Pansy serves tea to her suitors, occur late in the evening and presumably after dinner, since Isabel and Pansy usually repair to bed as soon as their guests have gone home. In Middlemarch and Orley Farm, tea is specifically served after dinner. In these instances, the tea table offers an opportunity to bring men and women together again, reinforcing their shared domestic identities and values.
Everyday habits of consumption lend meaning to people’s lives in their familiarity, in the participation in tradition and ritual that carries forward both their own previous habits and those of the Englishmen and women around them. According to Fernand Braudel, historian and author of The Structures of Everyday Life, “Everyday life consists of the little things that one hardly notices in time and space. . . . The everyday happening is repeated, and the more often it is repeated the more likely it is to become a generality or rather a structure. It pervades society at all levels, and characterises ways of being and behaving which are perpetuated through endless ages. . . . The ways people eat, dress, or lodge, at the different levels of society, are never a matter of indifference.”19 The repetition of a specific consumption pattern gives it meaning, providing shape and order to the days of one’s life and one’s place within the family, the community, the nation, the empire, and the world. Repeated daily activities thus contribute to constructions of identity from within, but these are based on social norms and ideals and occur within social spheres. Habits confirm one’s sense of self, one’s place within the relationships of a household and within a community, affirming one’s identity by linking discrete segments of time and creating a more continuous, fluid experience of the self and one’s physical environment. Each time a habit is repeated, an individual is able to confirm his or her sense of self, reminding himself or herself of previous moments, envisioning future events, and connecting past, present, and future through the repetition of small daily habits.
My definition of habit draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. According to Bourdieu, an individual’s embodied dispositions, which may or may not reside at the level of conscious thought, are what influence intentional behaviors and actions.20 As “a product of history” that “produces individual and collective practices—more history,” habitus connects past, present, and future, incorporating the social conditions of the past and generating responses to future conditions based on past experiences (53). Serving and sharing tea within Victorian households follows formalized rules, forging ritualized behaviors out of daily habits. In the preface to The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu draws a useful distinction between habitus and ritual. He suggests that habitus, created by one’s social context, generates specific strategies for maintaining and forwarding one’s social position and accumulated capital (in its multiple forms: economic, cultural, symbolic). These strategies are articulated in formalized, stylized rituals; Bourdieu defines a ritual as “a social strategy defined by its position in a system of strategies oriented towards maximizing of material and symbolic profit . . . taking on its meaning in a system of strategies generated by the habitus” (16). The tasks of the tea table, defining the roles of nourisher and consumer, mother and father, parent and child, wife and husband, represent formal behaviors that fit anthropological definitions of secular rituals, and analyzing these tasks as rituals further reveals their important social function in Victorian everyday life.21
The implications of the repeated, ongoing rituals of the tea table expand the concept of identity toward a dynamic negotiation of one’s roles within one’s family, community, and nation. If, as Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff suggest in Secular Ritual, rituals offer insights into the ways in which people “think about social life,” then rituals inform individuals’ interactions with other people within their family and provide cultural scripts of larger patterns of approved English actions (4). Habits of drinking tea provide narratives of courtship, family pleasantries, visiting other women, male/female interactions, male patterns of creating domesticity within their home through their choice of wives, and wives’ responsibilities in terms of providing a warm, comforting, nourishing tea table at the center of their home. The term narrative implies action over time, incorporating the repeated, ongoing element of ritualized behavior and suggesting that each rendition of the ritual of tea drinking contributes in a slightly different way to the accumulated significance of tea within an individual’s everyday life. The rituals of tea drinking dramatize historical narratives of the origins 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