THE ENGLISH TEA-TABLE: THE DOMESTIC

FEMINISATION OF AN EXOTIC COMMODITY, FROM

THE ARRIVAL OF TEA IN ENGLAND CIRCA 1660 TO 1760.
Maggie Henderson-Tew

Abstract: ‘Along with air and water, tea is the most widely-consumed substance on the planet.’1
This rather startling statement underlines the position of tea as England’s, and the world’s2, most
popular drink. Along with other exotic luxuries3 from the Orient, tea was introduced into
England in the mid-seventeenth century. The use of tea helped to define class and gender and
played a significant role in the development of taste and fashion within wealthy elite society.
Although tea-drinking and enjoyment was, of course, not limited to women, it is the rapidly-
feminised nature of tea-drinking during the first hundred years of its use in England that I
explore here, using two material objects as illustration. The first artefact is a physical object, a
tea-table. This item of domestic furniture was made in England around 1760, and is in the
collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Fig 1, below). The second object is a painting
of ‘An English Family at Tea’ (Fig 2, below), c. 1720, by the Flemish artist working in London,
Joseph Van Aken.

The dates 1660-1760 neatly bracket the first century of tea consumption in Britain. The first
official importation of the commodity, of just two ounces of black tea at the court of King
Charles II, is recorded in 1660, although tea had arrived in England a few years earlier. The
following hundred years were ones of escalating growth in British tea consumption. In the
decade 1671-80, the East India Company imported 536 lbs per annum and, by the decade 1751-
1760, imported 3,735,0004 lbs per annum5; almost seven thousand times as much.
To understand how popular tea drinking became in just a few decades in England, it is
important to know how, why and where it arrived, and by whom it was consumed. It is not
known precisely when the first tea arrived in the country and who brought it in, but, at first, tea
was sold by apothecaries, and others, as a medicinal product. Its animating and psychoactive
effect found great favour with ladies of the moneyed classes. This linkage legitimised the use of

1 An extract from the broadcast entitled ‘Tea’, from the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time archive: History. First broadcast
29 April, 2004.
2 This claim is made on the website of The United Kingdom Tea Council.
3 Other imported luxuries included cane, bamboo, rattan and lacquer-ware, porcelain, coffee and chocolate, as well

as parrots and monkeys.

4 Data from Chaudhuri, K. N., Table C19. Total imports of tea from China, derived from the East India Company,

General Ledger Books, India Office Records, British Library Services L/AG/1/1/1-20, in The Trading World of Asia
and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: CUP, 1978) pp 538-9. Information sourced from Ellis,
Markham, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010, in 4 volumes),
Introduction, p iv. This data represents only the legally imported, and therefore taxed, commodity, and not the far-
greater amount estimated to have entered the country through smuggling.
5 Although a huge proportional rise, the explosion in mass consumption occurred later, in the nineteenth century,

after two critical events; the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833 and the creation
of tea plantations in Assam, India, in the 1840s. The commodity was grown only in the closed market of China until
the early part of the nineteenth century.
36 VIDES 2014

this expensive product by women6, although it was never seen as suitable only for female use. Dr
Johnson’s personal devotion to tea-drinking is well-known. He wrote:
Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full
meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence. That time is
lost in this insipid entertainment cannot be denied; many trifle away, at the tea-
table, those moments which would be better spent.7
The feminisation of the exotic commodity of tea in its English cultural context was a result of
two key factors. The first was the enthusiastic sponsorship of tea-drinking by three successive
queens of England; Catherine of Braganza and the daughters of King James II, Mary and Anne.
Given their position as leaders of fashion and creators of taste, these women were largely
responsible for the spread of tea-drinking at first laterally, within the elite, and then vertically, as,
through the desire to copy the habits of the privileged, the drink became popularised more
broadly throughout society. The second factor was the importance of the tea-table, which,
through its domestic setting in private houses, and its domination by women, gave a particularly
feminine tone to the ritual and social gatherings associated with tea-drinking.
To begin, I explore some of the uses, literal and metaphorical, of the term ‘tea-table’ in
the century from 1660-1760, and look at some of the ways in which this was a highly gendered
descriptor. The term was used literally, to describe a tea-table as a physical object, and
metaphorically, to describe the largely-female gatherings around it. The Oxford English Dictionary
gives the following definition: ‘a table at which tea is taken, or on which tea-things are placed for
a meal8. A special piece of furniture, usually small and of a light and elegant make,’ and further
defines it as; ‘the place for a social gathering for tea and conversation’ and ‘for the whole
company assembled at tea’. Neither the ‘gathering’ nor ‘the whole company’ would always have
been exclusively female, but, in the same way in which the contemporary, exclusively-male
preserve of the eighteenth century coffee-house in England gave the activity of coffee-drinking a
strongly masculine association, so tea-drinking developed the opposite polarity. Where the word
‘tea-table’ is used below in its metaphorical sense of a gathering, I shall present it in parenthesis,
to distinguish it from the literal use.
For a variety of political and fiscal reasons, the impoverished Charles II needed to marry
a wealthy European princess. After extensive negotiations, he married, in 1662, Catherine of
Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, one of the richest monarchs in Europe. 9
Luxury goods, including several chests of tea and sugar, were sent from Portugal as gifts and
tradable items in advance, enabling Charles II to sell them advantageously and pay off some of
his considerable debts. Trade links between Portugal and China meant that tea had arrived at the
Portuguese court many years before 1662. Its high price and exoticism established tea-drinking

6 Jonas Hanway's epistolary essay, An Essay on Tea, considered as pernicious to health, obstructing industry and impoverishing the
nation... appended to A Journal of Eight Days Journey (London, 1757), fulminated against what he regarded as the
excessive use of tea by women, warned them of the detrimental effect of the ‘the Chinese drug – tea’ on their health,
as their genetic weakness made them particularly susceptible to its effects : 'How many sweet creatures of your sex,
languish with weak digestion, low spirits, lassitudes, melancholy, and...nervous complaints? Tell them to change their
diet, and among other articles leave off drinking tea, it is more than probable the greatest part of them will be
restored to health’. He also appealed to their vanity - insisting that 'there is not quite so much beauty in this land as
there was' because so many women drank excessive quantities of tea.
7 Ellis, Markham, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010, in 4

volumes), Introduction, p iv, para 31.

8 Definitions are taken from The Oxford English Dictionary on-line edition.
9 Catherine of Braganza’s dowry was to comprise £500,000 in cash and all kinds of material goods, from

commodities and valuable artefacts to land, though, when it came to settlement, so much cash was not available.
 Maggie Henderson-Tew 37

as a very fashionable practice at the Court where Catherine grew up and this was mirrored at the
English court after Catherine’s arrival. As Queen-consort, she exerted huge influence over
fashions of all kinds at the English Court. The tea-drinking predilection of Queen Catherine was
so well-known, so quickly, that Edmund Waller wrote in this short public poem in honour of the
Queen’s birthday in 1663:
Venus her Myrtle, Phoebus has his bays;
Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise.
The best of Queens, the best of herbs, we owe
To that bold nation which the way did show
To the fair region where the sun doth rise,
Whose rich productions we so justly prize.
The Muse's friend, tea does our fancy aid,
Repress those vapours which the head invade,
And keeps the palace of the soul serene,
Fit on her birthday to salute the Queen.10
This poem credits Catherine with introducing the fashion of drinking tea to the nation and
emphasises its value, rarity and health and strongly-feminised psychoactive benefits. Her
enjoyment of tea was taken up by others in her sphere of influence and the practice spread
rapidly through aristocratic and noble circles.
Tea remained an expensive luxury for many decades, available only to men and women
of elite society. Women of fashion wanted the accoutrements of her tea-table to be as fine as
possible, preferably of rare Chinese porcelain11 or precious metal, but if not, then silver-plate or
English bone china. The tea-tables, kettles, cups, saucers, lockable caddies, sugar tongs and tea
spoons had practical utility but were also vehicles for the display of wealth and fashionable good
taste. The ritual of tea-preparation and drinking had all the exotic appeal of the ‘otherness’ of the
East and tea-tables, usually rectangular, like trays, often featured little fences of Chinese fretwork
to retain the precious objects.
There is only one tea-table12 currently on display at the Ashmolean (Fig 1). It is in Gallery
52, ‘Arts of the Eighteenth Century’. It is of typical style, being rectangular, with fretwork
surround, English-made, but of rare, expensive mahogany, a wood new to Europe and imported
from the English colonies in the West Indies. I have not chosen this piece because it is a
particularly beautiful, rare or remarkable item of eighteenth century domestic furniture, but more
because it is so typical, and illustrative of the expensive paraphernalia essential to tea-drinking at
socially elite level.

10 ‘Of Tea, Commended by Her Majesty’ a poem by Waller, Edmund, taken from Gilfillan, Rev. George, Waller, The
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir Richard Denham, with memoir and dissertation by the Rev. George Gilfillan 1882
(Project Gutenberg, E Book 12322, release date May 10, 2004). No page reference.
11 So that valuable cargoes of tea would not be contaminated on the long sea voyage from the Far East to Europe,

Chinese blue and white porcelain was used as necessary ballast and the fashion for these tea-wares (known
generically as ‘China’) grew as rapidly as the appetite for the drink itself.
12 The museum label on this item of furniture reads: English, about 1760, Mahogany, Presented from the estate of

Walter and Anne Stoye, WA. 1978. 114, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
38 VIDES 2014

Fig 1

Tea could be bought from tea traders, apothecaries or from coffee-houses, where it was sold in
leaf or liquid form. It could be consumed publically, in coffee-houses, from which women were
excluded, or in the public tea-gardens in which the fashionable could promenade or sit, or drunk
privately, at home. Public gardens, like those established at Ranelagh13 and Vauxhall14 in London,
where tea could be bought and consumed, rapidly became too popular to remain socially
exclusive, with the consequence that the beau mode met in their own homes and gardens, apart
from the hoi-polloi. Invitations to day-time or evening gatherings around a noble tea-table became
a mark of membership of elegant society.
Queen Mary reinforced the same taste for tea, porcelain and lacquer-ware that Catherine
of Braganza had begun, and by the time that Anne15 succeeded her sister Mary as Queen,
remarked Richard Steele in The Tatler (1710), 'instead of three rumps of beef' for breakfast, as
during time of Queen Elizabeth I, 'tea and bread and butter....have prevailed of late years'. Anne
succeeded to the throne in 1702 and the association of tea-drinking with the Queen, the Court
and, particularly, with women, continued. In Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712),
Canto III refers to Anne’s tea-drinking habit in the following mock-heroic couplets:
Close by those Meads for ever crown'd with Flow'rs,
Where Thames with Pride surveys his rising Tow'rs,
There stands a Structure of Majestick Frame,
Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its Name.
Here Britain's Statesmen oft the Fall foredoom
Of Foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home;
Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take — and sometimes Tea.16
In the final line of this extract, the oppositional relationship between ‘Counsel’ and ‘Tea’ is set
up. Both activities are appropriate for a queen, but there is a bathetic contrast between the

13 Ranelagh House and grounds, beside the Chelsea Hospital in London, were bought in 1741 by a commercial
syndicate and opened to the public the next year, for the entrance fee of 2s 6d. At its centre was a rotunda, a
‘Chinese House’, which was a venue for promenading by the fashionable and for concerts. Nine-year old Mozart
performed there in 1765.
14 Vauxhall Gardens, a public pleasure garden, to which entrance was gained by a fee, initially of one shilling, pre-

dated the imitative Ranelagh Gardens, and was on the south bank of the Thames. It was a place for promenading
and public entertainments and contained a number of buildings, including one built in the style of rococo
chinoiserie. Music, fireworks, dramatic enactments and other events were staged and, in 1749, a crowd of over
12,000 assembled to hear a rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.
15 Queen Anne was the daughter of James II and niece of Charles II, and came to the English throne in 1702.
16 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, https://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu(-jlynch/Text/rapelock.html), Canto

111, lines 1-8.

 Maggie Henderson-Tew 39

importance of masculine statecraft, and the triviality of tea-drinking, with its strongly feminine
associations. The anti-climax of this line underlines the association of tea-drinking with the
effeminate gossip of the court. The Canto continues:
Hither the Heroes and the Nymphs resort,
To taste awhile the Pleasures of a Court;
In various Talk th' instructive hours they past,
Who gave the Ball, or paid the Visit last:
One speaks the Glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian Screen.
A third interprets Motions, Looks, and Eyes;
At ev'ry Word a Reputation dies.17
Queen Anne held court across the silver of her tea-table, and, in imitation, fashionable women in
England sipped Chinese tea from tiny porcelain bowls and ordered one of the new tea-tables on
which to serve it.
An oil painting (Fig 2) entitled ‘An English family at Tea’18, circa 1720, by Flemish artist,
Joseph Van Aken, features an unidentified, but obviously affluent, English family and their
servants in an elegantly neo-Classical interior. The equipment necessary for tea drinking has been
set up by servants, the drink has been brewed by the hostess (aided by a servant bringing hot
water as required), and is served by her to her guests. The tea-table, around which the family is
grouped rather stiffly, and upon which are displayed the expensive necessities in silver and
porcelain of tea-preparation and consumption, is very like the table in the Ashmolean (Fig 1) in
appearance, complete with fretwork fencing. Though not a picture of great artistic significance or
merit, this is a self-reflexive piece of commissioned metatheatrics, reflecting the desire of these
tea-drinkers in the early eighteenth century to project their expensive habit and their genteel
domestic informality as the epitome of civilized behaviour within the wealthy elite. Tea-drinking
provided those rich enough to indulge; ‘an opportunity to display their wealth and magnificence
in the matter of teapots, cups and so on.'19 This painting illustrates well some of the complex
cultural formulations associated with tea-drinking and the social gatherings of ‘the tea-table’.

Fig 2

17 Pope, lines 9-16.

18 ‘An English Family at Tea’, c. 1720, oil painting by Flemish artist, Joseph Van Aken, working in London. In the
collection of the Tate Gallery, London.
19 Duc du Rochefoucauld, quoted in Thomas, Gertrude Z, Richer than Spices: how a royal bride's dowry introduced cane,

lacquer, cottons, tea, and porcelain to England, and so revolutionised taste, manners, craftsmanship, and history in both England and
America. (New York: Knopf, 1965), p 115.
40 VIDES 2014

The table was open to men and women, although women presided, and the ideological and
metaphorical constructions of ‘the tea-table’ were central to eighteenth century conceptions of
gender and domesticity. By the mid-eighteenth century, a lady would serve tea to a select group
of friends, or family, in her parlour and the equipment necessary for enjoyment of tea had
formed a highly-ritualised pattern of its own, which mimicked in some ways, although it never
rivalled in cultural significance or intricacy, the highly-feminised tea-making, -serving and -
drinking rituals of China and Japan that survive today.
‘The tea-table’ and ‘the coffee-house’20 function as the most significant historiographical
models of contrasting male and female interests; the former masculine and public and the latter
feminine and private. Both function within a highly-complex cultural landscape, in which
socialising, interests, fashion, consumption, display, politeness, good taste and manners were
interlinked, but highly-gendered, activities.21 The exclusively-male coffee-houses were open to
any man who could afford the entrance fee, but the tea-table was a private preserve, to which
access was limited and sought-after. The fashion for tea and ‘the tea-table’ created a novel kind
of social life22, providing a locale where men and women, but particularly women, could meet
with propriety.
On a spectrum of social activity, the ‘tea-table’ could be a gathering place for intellectual
women, such as the Bluestockings23, excluded from masculine spheres of intellectual and political
activity, or the tea-table could be the domain of female gossip and triviality, and, as such, highly-
satirised. Such conceptions are fundamental to an extract of text from the William Congreve’s
Restoration Comedy, The Way of the World, first performed in London in 1700, in which the ‘tea-
table’ is presented as a feminine preserve of refined cultural expression, gossip and fashion.
Those scions of fashionable society, the beau, Mirabell, and the ‘fine lady’24 of his desire, Mrs
Millamant, negotiate the nature of their relationship beyond their forthcoming marriage:
Mira: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your demands are pretty
reasonable.
Milla: Trifles, - as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; ...to
be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never presume to approach
without first asking leave...
Mira: Lastly, to the dominion of the tea-table I submit, - but with proviso, that you
exceed not your province; but restrain yourself to native and simple tea-table
drinks, as tea, chocolate, and coffee. As likewise to genuine and authorised tea-table
talk - such as mending of fashions, spoiling reputations, railing at absent friends,
and so forth…25
Congreve’s play celebrates elite London society to itself and satirises aspects of behaviour and
habit of this milieu. Millamant’s and Mirabell’s discussion places the tea-table, and the social
interactions associated with it, firmly in Millamant’s domain. The purchase of the tea-table, the
luxury commodity of tea (by 1700 regarded as ‘native’) and the tea-ware will be Mirabell’s

20 There were over 500 coffee-houses in London by the turn of the eighteenth century.
21 This paragraph is indebted to Ellis, Markham, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth Century England (London: Pickering
& Chatto, 2010, in 4 volumes), General Introduction, pp xvi-xvii.
22 Thomas, p 106.
23 ‘Blue Stockings’ was the name given to intellectually- and politically-engaged women who gathered around hostess

Elizabeth Montagu in the 1750s.

24 Millamant is thus described in the Dramatis Personae that precedes the play.
25 Lawrence, Robert G., Restoration Plays (London: Dent, 1976), Congreve, William, The Way of the World, 1700, Act

IV, Sc v, p 212.
 Maggie Henderson-Tew 41

responsibility, but, thereafter, ownership of this social sphere passes to his wife. This mistrusted
female milieu is perceived as a potentially transgressive space, in which women deny men’s
authority and assert their own agendas, which Mirabell seeks to contain. Millamant responds; ‘I
hate your odious provisos,’26 to which he retorts, with presumptive, dominating masculinity; ‘Then
we are agreed.’27 Functioning as a space in which women could assert their own authority and
pursue conversations, serious and trivial, that were not sanctioned by men, and therefore
potentially subversive, the ‘tea-table’ was subject to constant masculine attack in prose, poetry,
plays and visual media.
The power of tea to change habits, tastes and, ultimately, society itself, was extraordinary.
As an alternative to alcoholic beverages, tea played; ‘an important part of the movement towards
greater refinement of manners, behaviour and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries’28. It is accurate to characterise much of this ‘refinement’ as feminising of social
behaviour, with the prevailing construct of femininity defining itself largely in opposition to a set
of ascribed, often boorish, masculine behaviours. ‘Of all the foreign oddities her dowry loosed
on England, it would be tea which most affected English tastes and habits’29, wrote Gertrude
Thomas of Catherine of Braganza and Waller's celebratory poem30 presents Catherine in
historical perspective, linking the East and the West as the royal sponsor of tea 31. Although the
excesses of the Restoration Court stimulated interest, and legitimised desire, for all sort of
luxuries that had been denied during the austere Puritan Commonwealth, tea became the very
essence of Englishness. Within 150 years of its arrival, tea was viewed, not as an exotic luxury,
but a daily necessity at all levels of society, drunk by men and women, but sponsored principally,
and continuously, by women.

26 Ibid, p 213.
27 Ibid, p 213.
28 Thomas, p 104.
29 Ibid, p 102.
30 See p 3 of this article.
31 Thomas, p 99.
42 VIDES 2014

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 Maggie Henderson-Tew 43

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