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

… Résumé 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 ]

… Résumé 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 Mots-clés 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 Mots-clés 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 …

Essay periodical [ Reading & Writing / Communication / Literary & Artistic genres / Taste & Manners ]

… Résumé The rise of the leisure press after 1690 caused the appearance of new forms of middle-class sociability. The tea-table is a case in point, around which the two sexes gathered, read periodical essays together, which provided subject … readers to devote a daily quarter of an hour to reading the paper, claiming that it would later conveniently ‘furnish tea table talk.’ 1 1 . The Spectator n° 4, ed D. F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 5 vols.) vol. 1, p. 21. The …

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 …