“Under certain circumstances,” declares Henry James at the opening of The Portrait of a Lady, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” There are also few novels that are not agreeably enhanced by the presence of a good brew. As James says, “whether you partake of tea or not … the situation is in itself delightful”. Introduced to the English court in the middle of the 17th century by Catherine of Braganza, the fashion spread to the middle classes in the 18th century, offering an alternative brand of refreshment to the excitements of the coffee house.
“What part of confidante has that poor teapot played ever since the kindly plant was introduced among us,” observed William Thackeray in The History of Pendennis. And, as he remarks ironically, “what a series of pictures and groups the fancy may conjure up and assemble round the teapot and cup”. Here are some of literature’s best.
1 Catherine de Bourgh’s condescension (1813)
Tea is fundamental to Jane Austen’s social world – as you might expect for characters whose wealth ultimately depends on foreign trade – but specific examples of tea drinking are harder to find in her novels than you might expect. For pure comedy nothing can beat the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Lady Catherine de Bourgh can think of no greater “condescension” to Mr Collins than to ask his new wife and Elizabeth to “drink tea and spend the evening at Rosings”; the visit itself is excruciating, but Mr Collins’s “triumph in consequence of this invitation was complete”.
2 Miss Matty’s tea shop (1851)
If the tea table is the site of female power, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford tea becomes an agent of female emancipation. After losing all the money she invested in the Town and County Bank, Miss Matty attempts to alleviate her genteel poverty by selling tea as an agent for the East India Tea Company. The advantages (always supposing of course “that Miss Matty could get over the degradation of condescending to anything like trade”) are numerous, as Mary Smith explains.
Tea was neither greasy nor sticky – grease and stickiness being two of the qualities which Miss Matty could not endure. No shop-window would be required. A small, genteel notification of her being licensed to sell tea would, it is true, be necessary, but I hoped that it could be placed where no one would see it. Neither was tea a heavy article, so as to tax Miss Matty’s fragile strength.
Placing an advert where no one can see it seems a little counterproductive, but tea’s refined and distinguished qualities are the perfect accompaniment to this pioneering presentation of an older woman setting up her own business.
3 Pip’s great expectations (1861)
On Miss Havisham’s orders, Estella visits London and upon meeting Pip coldly bids him get her some tea, while he thinks miserably “that with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)”. The waiter accordingly produces “a casket of precious appearance containing twigs”.
These I steeped in hot water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I don’t know what for Estella.
How Pip has changed – can this really be the same boy who after taking tea with Wemmick earlier in the novel remarked “it was delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it”?
4 The Mad Hatter’s tea party (1865)
By the middle of the 19th century, the ceremony of tea had become so central to Victorian society that a short-lived periodical called The Anti-Teapot Review parodied so-called “Teapotism”. Lewis Carroll took aim at tea-table tittle-tattle with the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter. “It’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
This surrealist nonsense is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s 1946 expressionist painting The Tea Cup, which also portrays this symbol of civilisation as a vision of chaos, with people talking nonsense or at cross purposes, constantly interrupting one another.
5 Dr Jekyll’s demise (1886)
Tea even found a place in Gothic fiction, when Robert Louis Stevenson juxtaposed its supposedly civilising function – tea as an emblem of the newly ascendant middle class – with the corpse at the end of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business-table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea: the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London. Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde.
At this stage the onlookers don’t know that Hyde and Jekyll are one and the same man, but the table laid for tea is clearly a veneer beneath which the degeneration at the heart of social order lurks.
6 The Importance of Being Earnest (1894)
Wilde is at his most brilliant when taking the customs of the upper middle classes and subverting them: Algernon’s usurpation of the female tea-table in the opening scene of The Importance of Being Earnest is not just a consummate performance, it’s also a crucial indicator of his decadent aestheticism (something which many critics of the time saw as effeminate). After Algy scoffs all the cucumber sandwiches prepared for Aunt Augusta in the opening scene, the second act revolves completely around a tea scene: Cecily and Gwendolen both assert their engagement to a man named “Ernest”, during which tea descends into an elaborate war of excessive politeness (“Destestable girl! But I require tea!”, muses Gwendolen). At the end of the act, after Algy and Jack have been caught in their masquerades and are left to stew, Algy drowns his sorrows: “I haven’t quite finished my tea yet! And there is still one muffin left.”
7 The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock (1915)
Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons, but the crisis of TS Eliot’s groundbreaking poem is actually all about tea: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/ Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Of course, as the paralysed Prufrock finds, tea still leaves plenty of time to bottle it – “Time for you and time for me,/ And time yet for a hundred indescisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions/ Before the taking of toast and tea.” Needless to say he can’t summon the courage and consoles himself afterwards with the doubt that “After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,/ Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,/ Would it have been worth while …”
8 Proust’s madeleines (1913–1927)
Tea offers a much more fulfilling moment to Marcel Proust, whose madeleine is meaningless until dipped into the magic beverage: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me … The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.” The memory frames the whole series of books, appearing in both the first volume and the last.
9 Betjeman’s Bath teashop (1945)
When infusing tea with love we might think more readily of Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester, or his lesser known Dining Room Tea, or even Thomas Hardy’s parodic At Tea, where a husband and wife sup with the woman the husband would have preferred to marry. But you can’t beat the simplicity of John Betjeman’s charming In a Bath Teashop, whose perfection resides in its understatedness.
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.
10 Arthur Dent’s “long dark teatime of the soul” (1979)
Douglas Adams’s everyman in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent, feels as though something is missing when he is abducted by aliens: “Suddenly he realised what it was. ‘Is there any tea on this spaceship?’ he asked.” Later in the series, with a Vogon attack imminent, Arthur crashes the Heart of Gold’s computer by asking it to produce real tea, instead of the undefinable product of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer. What Douglas Adams proves comprehensively, as he says in And Another Thing …, is that “At the centre of an uncertain and possibly illusionary universe there would always be tea.”
