Alice Loxton

It's part of this comforting ritual.

And actually tea is seen as a rejuvenating drink in the way that you might think about coffee today.

So I've got a few bits from Dickens that I thought we could have a look at.

One of the mentions is in Great Expectations and we follow the character Pip.

Mr Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o'clock in the parlour behind the shop where the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises.

I think he's sitting on a sack of peas.

Weird habits of the past.

But there we go.

So he's having bread and butter and a mug of tea, which seems, you know, I'd be up for that.

And so there's lots of mentions of tea throughout Dickens's books.

And it's basically accepted among historians that in this industrial period, tea is broadened out to be not just something for the elite, these kind of lovely, delicate types of tea, but actually it's for the masses too.

And it becomes increasingly important for industrial workers.

So by 1834, there's a lot of mills and factories where they're giving workers particular moments in the day which are specified as tea break.

Absolutely.

And during these gruelling shifts of long hours in the mills and the factories, they see tea as this great stimulant.

It's really sugary.

Yeah, it's an energy drink.

And we heard from Charles Dickens, but the British food historian, Penn Vogler, she has also written about this.

And she says that, interestingly, the way that Dickens writes about it, there is a bit of a divide between coffee and tea.

And that manifests as the baddies, the evil characters drinking coffee and the goodies, the good people in the books drinking tea.