| Abstract: | ABSTRACTHistorians of nineteenth-century British tea consumption have highlighted the function of the substance as an index of middle-class civility and marker of national identity. In this article, I maintain that concerns about tea drinking were equally prominent throughout the late Victorian period. As medical practitioners increasingly intervened in food matters, apprehension about the physiological and psychological consequences of increasing access to tea in working-class communities proliferated. This pessimistic discourse can be firmly situated in the context of broader debates about national decline, physical and mental deterioration, the subversion of gender roles in the domestic sphere and Imperial expansion. |
