Let's Talk About Tea

TEA: A LITERARY TOUR

By Eileen Reynolds

The New Yorker

Let’s talk about tea—not the Tea Party (for once), but the hot drink. “Under certain circumstances, there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea,“ Henry James declares in the opening of “The Portrait of a Lady.” “From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.” Five until eight—that is an eternity! Imagine if we could all step out of our hectic lives, for three hours at a time, to enjoy a sumptuous spread of cakes and scones and sandwiches!

There’s no sense longing to live in a Henry James novel, I suppose, and yet I remain a strong advocate for the afternoon-tea break. Is there any other drink that, taken in a moment of pause, can leave one feeling so rejuvenated—so alert, and yet so calm?

I suspect that many of you, dear readers, are tea drinkers, too (tea and the literary life just seem to fit together, somehow), which is why I thought it essential to share with you the following bit of startling news: Twinings of London is moving its tea production to Poland. Poland! Twinings, the company that opened London’s first tearoom in 1706! Twinings, who may have introduced the Western world to Earl Grey—that fragrant blend of black tea and bergamot oil. (Actually, Jacksons of Piccadilly also claims to have sold the first batch. But at any rate, the Twinings blend is the one that bears the seal of approval from Richard Grey, the sixth and current Earl Grey.)

The Brits are predictably distraught at the news, and the fact that soon-to-be-laid-off Twinings employees will be made to train their own Polish replacements doesn’t help. (The Independent identified this requirement as a “quite extraordinary piece of corporate crassness.”) In the Guardian, Martin Wainwright mourns and muses on tea’s imperialist past: It was only through one of “history’s great cultural hijackings”—from the East, “beyond the Milk and Sugar curtain”—that tea came to be known as the British national drink. “But tea produced in Poland? No, no,” he quips. “That is against the laws of God and man.”

Wainwright is being cheeky, but you don’t have to share Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist zeal to realize that without the tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka, Romantic and Victorian literature as we know it would all but cease to exist. Do you have favorite tea scenes in the novels by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or the Brontë sisters? We started to make a list, only to find that tea is everywhere. Which important plot twists don’t involve tea? At teatime, would-be lovers exchange longing glances; mothers choose suitors for their daughters; and rivals trade veiled insults in polite, singsong tones.

In fact, there’s so much tea in Austen’s fiction, for instance, that Kim Wilson thought to write a bookon the subject, complete with nineteenth-century recipes, quotes from the novels, and anecdotes from Austen’s life. Wilson writes:

At the center of almost every social situation in her novels one finds—tea. In “Emma,” does Miss Bates drink coffee? Of course not: “No coffee, I thank you, for me—never take coffee—a little tea if you please.” In “Sense and Sensibility,” what is everyone drinking when Elinor notices Edward’s mysterious ring set with a lock of hair? Tea, of course. And in “Pride and Prejudice,” what is one of the supreme honors Mr. Collins can envision Lady Catherine bestowing on Elizabeth Bennet and her friends? Why, drinking tea with her, naturally.

Wilson also gleans from Austen’s letters that the author herself frequented the Twinings warehouse to replenish her own supply of tea. (It’s difficult to picture her traveling to Poland for such an errand!)

But when most people think of tea in literature, it’s usually Lewis Carroll’s delightfully absurd “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” that first comes to mind. As children, my sister and I reënacted the Mad Hatter’s tea party hundreds of times—laughing without being able to pinpoint exactly what was funny. (Why is a raven like a writing desk?) This exchange was a perennial favorite:

“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.”

It’s a great parody of refined teatime chatter. Everyone talks, but nobody quite listens to or understands what anyone else is saying. In writing what sounds like nonsense, Carroll exposes the essential meaninglessness of the pleasantries that we exchange every day.

Of all the many Dickens tea scenes, I’m most fond of the tortured interactions between Pip and Estella in “Great Expectations.” “Whatever her tone with me happened to be,” Pip reflects during one such meeting at a restaurant, “I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it always was.” He then rings the waiter, who brings “by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of tea not a glimpse.” What finally appears is 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.” Pip: once an orphan, now a tea snob. It’s a remarkable transformation, and yet in the end, he’ll need much more than fancy tea to win the girl.

This particular brand of lovesick, tea-induced anxiety carries right through to the work of T. S. Eliot. Tea is everywhere in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which is an ode to inaction and paralysis. Just how does one broach the subject of love at afternoon tea? Planning out the right words takes time:

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Inevitably, in the course of all that fretting, our hero begins to lose his nerve:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

In the end, of course, he says nothing; this is a poem about self-doubt and aching regret—two conditions, perhaps, that even a soothing cup of tea cannot cure.

It seems wrong to end on such a sad note, so I’ll leave you with this cheery excerpt from one of Sydney Smith’s letters, dated 1807:

A dreadful controversy has broken out in Bath, whether tea is most effectually sweetened by lump or pounded sugar; and the worst passions of the human mind are called into action by the pulverists and the lumpists.