A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (review)

Reflecting upon the established position of tea as Britain’s national beverage, one late- Victorian historian of tea estimated that in 1897 “80,000,000 cups of tea are daily imbibed” throughout the land (qtd. in Fromer 5). The assessment speaks to the tremendous material impact of tea as a fact or, in Fernand Braudel’s terms, a structure of everyday life in Victorian Britain. But it also signals the pronounced capacity of tea to perform the kind of sociocultural work that, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, allowed for Victorian commentators to imagine a rapidly changing nation. Driven by the contention that the “central importance of tea in nineteenth-century British culture has largely gone unexplored” (2), Julie E. Fromer’s interesting and valuable study takes up tea-drinking as a semiotic as well as a somatic phenomenon in order to explore how this foreign, exotic beverage came to be so significant to the quotidian ways in which Victorians thought about themselves, their communities, and their position in the world.

The archival scope necessary to such a cultural history is difficult to delimit, especially given the incredible expansion of print culture that accompanied the expansion of tea consumption in Britain from the late eighteenth century on. Fromer’s interest in the subject is primarily literary and falls upon representations of tea within Victorian novels including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894–95), Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881–82), Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883), and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861–62). But alongside other fictional sources that supplement detailed and nuanced readings of these novels, Fromer draws usefully on nineteenth-century histories of and advertisements for tea. In the first third of the book this nonfictional material is used in order to propose a Victorian idealisation of tea as a “necessary luxury”; an idealisation that cohered around a specifically English, middle-class, and domesticated vision of a united and prosperous nation.

The great success of the study is the fact that it elaborates so thoroughly and convincingly on novels that can be understood variously to underwrite, play with, or disrupt this vision. Thus, having set out that tea was acclaimed for its capacity to forge beneficent connections and draw proper distinctions in familial, socioeconomic, and geopolitical contexts, A Necessary Luxury shows the ways in which the fictional representation of the domestic consumption of tea could complicate or problematise as well as idealise relations between men and women, parents and children, middle and working classes, families and strangers, city and country, English values and British union, labour and leisure, prudence and indulgence, and body and soul. Fromer skilfully demonstrates the amount of work that a compelling and pervasive bourgeois understanding of tea performs in the symbolic economy of the Victorian novel: from Heathcliff’s poisonous subversion of the role of the “supposedly nourishing, nurturing woman” at the tea table in Wuthering Heights (166), to that most intriguing of scenes in North and South where Margaret Hale’s father uses her finger and thumb as a set of sugar-tongs, to the depiction of “the tea table as both a pleasantly old-fashioned leftover from an earlier epoch in English history and a potential trap designed to restrict women’s freedom” in The Portrait of a Lady (275).

Towards the end of her study Fromer acknowledges that the story of tea she traces “is part of a much wider arc that crosses time and space,” recognising that her focus upon representations of the Victorian tea table tends to efface from view “the colonized, classed labor that lies behind the imported commodity of tea” (301). Undoubtedly Fromer’s focus is illuminating and important, but she is also correct to insist...