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Tea-table [ Furniture & Interior decoration / Rituals & Ceremonies / Eating & Drinking ]

… Abstract The tea-table is an object, an event, and an idea, the context of which is the emergence of tea drinking in Britain in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. As an item of furniture, the tea-table is a small table, imported from Asia or of domestic manufacture, whose purpose was to facilitate tea drinking. As …

Sugar [ Food & Drink ]

… Abstract In the eighteenth century, sugar, once a luxury item, became more affordable and was used as a sweetener for tea and baked goods at a time when the tea-table was coded as domestic and feminine. The production of sugar was closely linked to transatlantic slavery, as …

Luxury [ Taste & Manners ]

… impact on employment and free trade. Concepts > Taste & Manners Keywords Luxury Mandeville Hume Porcelain Shopping Tea-table Consumerism Women The rise of consumer goods and consumerism made luxury a much-debated topic throughout the … by an elite but also by members of the middle class, even working people, in sociable contexts, for instance at the tea-table (china) and dances (dress), likewise in public leisure spaces. 3   Eighteenth-century Britain saw an ongoing …

Conversation piece [ Art & Luxury ]

… scale also meant that accompanying objects and settings could be represented in detail, facilitating the portrayal of tea parties, assemblies and card games. Objects > Art & Luxury Keywords Portraiture Painting William Hogarth George Vertue Card game Tea-table As the practices, objects and sites of sociability flourished in early eighteenth-century Britain, so a new mode of …

Solitude [ Feelings and Emotions ]

… desire to entertain and instruct, he sought to bring men and women out of closets ‘to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee houses’. 1   Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that sociability was both natural and … did not come without its consequences. This view was heavily indebted to the ethics of Aristotle and Plato, and the teachings of Cicero and the Stoics, who all emphasised civic society above the individual. The dominant view among …

Women's travel writing [ Reading & Writing / Mobility ]

… can produce an ‘imagined community’ in which reading women can exercise their Christian sociable skills, on the model of tea-table assemblies, an idealised form of communal sociability later to be echoed in Adam Smith’s concept of ‘harmony and … most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical assertions which only appear to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles […]. …