A Necessary Luxury : Tea in Victorian England.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (324 pages)
Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- introduction -- Tea, a Necessary Luxury: Culture, Consumption, and Identity -- one -- "A Typically English Brew": Victorian Histories of Tea and Representations of English National Identity -- two -- Mediating Class Distinctions: The Middle-Class Englishness of Drinking Tea -- three -- "Tea First Hand": Gender and Middle-Class Domesticity at the Tea Table -- four -- Class, Connection, and Communitas: Wuthering Heights, North and South, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- five -- Gender, Sexuality, and the Tea Table: David Copperfield, Middlemarch, and Orley Farm -- six -- Tea Drinking, Nostalgia, and Domestic Entrapment: Hester, The Portrait of a Lady, and Jude the Obscure -- conclusion -- Tracing the Trajectory of Tea -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
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.