How did the afternoon tea tradition start?

 If you've been reading my blog, you'll know that I've started having tea on Sundays -- not at the traditional 4 pm hour, but about noon, because on weekends and any other non-work days, I like to eat dinner early. 

I was inspired to address the question of how this traditional began in the first place.

Having tea in pretty china had been popular with the aristocratic and high-society English since Georgian times; it was a way to show off your expensive porcelain (which became known as "china", since that's often where it was made). 

The woman who is credited with starting the 4 pm afternoon tea ritual was Anna Maria Russell, the 7th Duchess of Bedford, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, around 1840. To explain why, we have to look at the history of mealtimes in Britain and their evolution to what we're familiar with now.

Today, most people in the developed world are used to three meals a day: breakfast, eaten in the morning; lunch, eaten around noon, and dinner, eaten in the early evening. 

But in the past, our meals were a little different. Breakfast was eaten usually quite early in the morning by average people. Dinner (defined as the main meal of the day) was around the noon hour, and then supper was in the evening. Even in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series, she refers to her school day "dinner pail" instead of her "lunch pail." It made more sense to have your most substantial meal in the middle of the day to give you energy for work, especially if you did manual labor, as most men did. Also, before decent lighting, you wanted to do your cooking during the day so you could see. 

Throughout Georgian and Victorian period in England, "dinner" kept sliding later and later into the day, especially for the upper classes, leaving a gap that was filled by a new meal: luncheon. Due to the Industrial Revolution, more people were working at jobs away from home instead of in the fields, and were unable to come home for "dinner." By the 1830s, the aristocratic and wealthy of Britain ate breakfast usually much later than working people, they'd have "luncheon" around 1 pm, but dinner would not be until about 8 pm. So you'd have a good seven hours between luncheon and dinner. One late afternoon, the hungry 7th Duchess of Bedford decided to have some tea, and asked for some little sandwiches and sweets with it. She decided she really liked this daily 4 pm ritual , and soon had her friends join her. As word of this got out, others began to emulate the duchess, and the practice filered down the social ladder. To this day (though probably not as much as in the past) afternoon tea is a tradition still observed by many across the UK and Ireland. 

The mealtimes for working people in Britain were a little different: they really had FOUR meals a day. If you look at the White Star Line menus that survived the Titanic sinking, 1st and 2nd class passengers had breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. But the 3rd class passengers had breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper. "Tea" was not "afternoon tea", the upper class affair with scones and jam and cakes. It was "high tea", a heartier, more savory meal that basically just happened to have tea served with it. Their "supper" was much lighter, for example, some porridge and a bit of cheese before bed.

I didn't want to get too in-depth on the evolution of mealtimes in Britain and the U.S. in this post, but if you're interested, I can do a series on the history of each meal. Let me know in a comment if that's something you'd like to see.