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 identity, highly gendered symbolic meanings. Men connect 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