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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 …

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 […]. …

Coffeehouses [ Institutions / Food & Drink venues ]

… that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee houses.’ ( The Spectator no. 10, 12 March 1711) Addison’s and Steele’s essays in these papers … The Spectator was designed to read by both men and women, it reserved the coffeehouse for male sociability and the tea table for women. This sense of the coffeehouse as a masculine space would only be reinforced later in the eighteenth …

Hannah More (and philanthropic sociability) [ Religion & Philanthropy / Politics & Society / Religious Belief ]

… the abolition of slavery, the education of women and the alleviation of poverty. Having started as a provincial schoolteacher living in Bristol and educated in her father’s school, she soon became the author of a play, The Search after … rituals that had by then been established, with its round of breakfasts, parties, card-playing, the central role of the tea-table, and a conversation where books 5 – they could be exchanged – health matters and politics featured prominently. …