… assembly. As an idea, the tea-table referred to a sociable encounter, including both men and women, occasioned by the consumption of tea, and typically characterized as focused on conversation and gossip. Objects > Furniture & Interior … was practised and understood in the British Enlightenment. The context for tea-table sociability is the emergence of the consumption of tea, the hot infusion of the oxidized and prepared leaves of Camellia sinensis , in Britain in the late … Tea drinking was not commonplace in Britain until the second decade of the eighteenth century or later. While coffee consumption was closely associated with the public socializing of the coffee-house, tea was strongly marked, from its …