Tea Party Diva - Life & Craft

Excerpt from A Victorian Book of Days - Time for Five O’Clock Tea

This section on Five O’Clock Tea is a good example of the language and style of the rest of the book’s commentary.

Narrated in the third person, we meet the fictitious Lady Margaret and follow her social calendar and the Victorian lifestyle through the different events and seasons of the year.

This approach gives an effective, informative and interesting insight into everyday life in the Victorian era for women of Lady Margaret’s social standing in society.

Meant to be a light meal to tide the diner over the lull between lunch and dinner, the Victorian tea expanded until the table could not hold another luscious muffin, scone, sandwich or cake.

During the Season, tea time for Lady Margaret and her family is a time for receiving informal calls unless she has an afternoon engagement.

She has a collection of wonderful tea gowns, those confections of embroidery and lace that allow the wearer to receive friends in flattering comfort. Often the younger children come in to be shown off and introduced because Lady Margaret thinks it helps to develop their poise and social grace.

Every two or three weeks she has a more formal “at home” tea, a larger afternoon party at which there is a professional entertainment, usually a singer or musician. Her friends take turns pouring at these events.

In the country, tea is a little earlier. It is often the first time in the day the whole house party is gathered together. Sometimes her husband brings a neighbour in after a day’s hunting, or other friends in the neighbourhood pay calls.

The tea table is more ample, too, to satisfy those who have been out of doors most of the day, and Lady Margaret makes sure that there are ham, beef and chicken sandwiches as well as the more delicate watercress and cucumber.

Madeira cake, fruit cake and Queen’s cake, warm muffins and buttered toast, jam tarts and assorted biscuits as well as tea and “something stronger for the gentlemen” helps to stave off the pangs of hunger until the gong sounds to dress for dinner.

Books & Magazines, Times Past