From: Consuming Culture: Food Fictions and the Consumption of Western Modernity in the 18 th and 19 th Centuries, ed. Tamara Wagner (Lexington). Foreign Tastes and “Manchester Tea-Parties”: Eating and Drinking with the Victorian Lower Orders Tamara Ketabgian In the preface to her novel Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell claims that she seeks to portray “the state of feeling among… many of the factory-people in Manchester.” 1 Not surprisingly, in the chapters that follow we hear plenty about Victorian working-class rage, middle-class ignorance, and the generally unhappy state of labor relations. We also, however, encounter a number of “Manchester tea-parties,” to use Gaskell’s term for the domestic gatherings that populate her text in great detail. Many modern critics view these scenes as either disengaged from or implicitly hostile to the more politically fraught world of the factory. 2 Yet, as this essay will show, Gaskell’s juxtaposition of tea drinking and industrial life is far from coincidental. For Gaskell and her contemporaries, tea inseparably belonged to the scene of industrial production and consumption. In Mary Barton, Hard Times (1854) and early Victorian works of social investigation, this stimulating liquid addressed the emergence of foreign and specifically classed forms of affect and appetite. Whether faulted or celebrated for its “exciting” effects, tea crowned an industrial rhetoric of consumption and showed how this rhetoric—like the British factory itself—was deeply tinged by Orientalist fantasies of social and political order. For, just as factory hands might indulge a taste for Eastern luxuries, so might they impersonate colonial servility in their workaday lives—as obedient “menials” serving a “gentle genii” 3 of steam. Rivaling beer and gin as the “condiment” of choice among Lancashire’s proletarian masses, tea infused working-class domestic ritual with remarkably comforting connotations. In addition, however, it inspired searching questions about industrial pleasure, labor, sociality, and waste—questions properly belonging to the realm of political economy. For Gaskell and her contemporaries, tea drinking resonated with both work and play: this “regular” habit sought to recreate a sense of the continuous and intense “excitement” allied with machine culture. Thus preoccupied by the industrialization of the