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- Title
The Cup of the Empire: Understanding British Identity through Tea in Victorian Literature.
- Authors
Weygandt, Ariel
- Abstract
The 400-year-old British love affair with tea initially began as the drink of the wealthy and slowly spread throughout the classes, becoming both a staple within the British diet and a national symbol. This cultural consumption of tea allowed for the creation of a cultural hegemonic condition in which every Briton, from the workingman to wealthy noble, could partake. By making tea available to all, tea drinking created a sense of unity and national pride each time one participated in the ritual. The tea table acts as a space that forms 'imperial attitudes, references, and experiences' that reinforced class, racial, and prejudicial boundaries to distinguish divisions (Said xii, xiii). The literary work of the nineteenth-century demonstrates how the tea table acts as both an inclusive and exclusive space that had the power to strengthen or weaken class boundaries. In North and South (1855), a genteel former parson, Mr Hale, and a working class weaver, Higgins, transform the tea table into a space in which class and employment lines are obscured. However, its ability to also strengthen boundaries, as seen in the Sedley family's refusal to take tea with their servants in Vanity Fair (1848), demonstrates tea's ability to segregate classes. This demand for tea solidified Britain's presence within colonized India, transforming the tea table into a hegemonic space that sustained and reinforced British empirical expansion for the production of tea and continuation of the tea table. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how popular nineteenth-century British literature presented tea as a vital commodity and integral part of the British national identity that was ultimately made possible through the exploitation of Indian labour.
- Subjects
BRITISH cooking; TEA; FOOD habits; FOOD preferences; IMPERIALISM; GROUP identity
- Publication
At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 2018, Vol 97, p143
- ISSN
1570-7113
- Publication type
Article