A Necessary Luxury

Tea in Victorian England

Julie E. Fromer

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780821442197
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Tea drinking in Victorian England was a pervasive activity that, when seen through the lens of a century's perspective, presents a unique overview of Victorian culture. Tea was a necessity and a luxury; it was seen as masculine as well as feminine; it symbolized the exotic and the domestic; and it represented both moderation and excess. Tea was flexible enough to accommodate and to mark subtle differences in social status, to mediate these differences between individuals, and to serve as a shared cultural symbol within England. In A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England, Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions within the literature as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability, aiding in the determination of class status and moral position. She reveals the way in which social identity and character are inextricably connected in Victorian ideology as seen through the ritual of tea. Drawing from the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, history, and anthropology, A Necessary Luxury offers in-depth analysis of both visual and textual representations of the commodity and the ritual that was tea in nineteenth-century England.

Index

Alexander, Bobby C., 310n25, 311n26

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), x, 7, 19, 116, 118, 151, 169–79, 198, 265, 339–41nn33–38

Appadurai, Arjun, 308n16

Armstrong, Nancy, 316n11, 340n34

Ashford, Charles, Grocer, vii, 32–34, 60, 75, 315–16nn8–10

Baildon, Samuel, 55–59, 80–81, 311n27, 313n39, 315n6, 323n40, 326n54, 327n5, 329n14

Ball, Samuel, 313n39

Barbauld, Mrs. Anna Lætitia, 133, 337nn14–15

Barrell, John, 320n30

Bealer, Bonnie K., 325n50

Beaumont, Matthew, 339n27

Ben-Yishai, Ayelet, 344n12

Berg, Maxine, 315n5, 325n52

Berry, Christopher J., 60–61, 314n5, 324n48, 325n49, 325nn51–52, 329n16

Bivona, Daniel, 320n28, 340n34, 341n36

Book of Household Management, Mrs. Beeton’s, 306n7, 318n18

Boumelha, Penny, 350n17

Bourdieu, Pierre, 8–9, 310n20, 329n15, 329n21, 347n6

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley’s Secret, 289–92, 351n1

Bramah, Edward, 305n3, 317n16, 318n18

Braudel, Fernand, 7, 310n19, 310n24

British East India Company (EIC), 4, 24, 40, 47, 50–53, 62, 75, 91, 307n8, 313n39, 317n16, 319n26, 322n35, 322nn37–38; loss of China monopoly, 24, 40, 47, 51, 75, 319n26, 322n35

British Empire: and English national identity, 15, 17, 27–28, 46, 59, 65, 88, 319n22; commodities imported from, ix, 4, 6, 10, 12, 18, 32, 39, 46, 59, 63–65, 66–68, 88–90, 123, 289–93, 301–2, 307n13, 310n22, 319n22, 320n30, 321nn32–34, 324n45; discovery ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• introduction
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index