Jane Austen and the British Way of Tea

 Dr. Markman Ellis will analyze tea as a multi-faceted concept: a commodity sourced from Asia; a prepared hot beverage; a social event in which tea is consumed; and an ideological construct associated with politeness and the social behaviours of the middling classes. Austen’s fictions cast light on each of these aspects of the performance of tea-taking in Britain, that social ceremony not known as the British ‘way of tea’.