Tea-table [ Furniture & Interior decoration / Rituals & Ceremonies / Eating & Drinking ]
… As an event, the practice of tea drinking was a polite and sociable encounter staged around the tea-table. In media representations (visual culture, poetry, essays) the term ‘tea-table’ increasingly served as a synecdoche for the sociable … Modern Manners, ed. Anna Dulau (London: Paul Holberton, 2008), p. 50-76. From the early eighteenth century, literary representations of tea consumption helped shape understanding of the tea-table experience. In poems (Nahum Tate’s Panacea: … A Poem in Praise of Tea [1712]), as well as plays (Congreve, Way of the World [1700]), the tea-table was repeatedly represented as a synecdoche for the sociable event of tea service. In other words, the term ‘the tea-table’ increasingly …
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