Afternoon tea

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Afternoon tea is the British practice of a light mid-afternoon meal of tea with bread, cake or sandwiches, conventionally credited to Anna Maria Russell, seventh Duchess of Bedford, around 1840. That attribution is disputed: taking tea in the afternoon was already ordinary among aristocratic women before her, and English spa towns such as Bath and Harrogate advertised 'afternoon teas' in the 1750s and 1760s. What the 1840s do mark is the codification and social fashion of the ritual among the Victorian elite, from which it spread downward. It is the last and youngest element in this Journey — the thing that reads as most timelessly English is roughly two centuries old, and depended on cheap colonial tea and cheap colonial sugar to become general.

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