A less formal but more usual tea scene is the subject of another Hogarth painting, The Wollaston Family, now in the Leicester Art Gallery, England. The afternoon gathering has divided into two groups, one playing cards, the other drinking tea. An atmosphere of ease and comfort surrounds the party. The men and women seated at the card table are discussing the hand just played, while the women seated about the square tea table in front of the fireplace are engaged in conversation. A man listens as he stands and stirs his tea. Each drinker holds a saucer with a cup filled from the teapot on a square tile or stand in the center of the table. One woman is returning her cup, turned upside down on the saucer, to the table. More about this particular habit later.
The same pleasant social atmosphere seen in English paintings seems to have surrounded teatime in America, as the previously cited entries in Nancy Shippen’s journal book suggest. Her entry for January 18, 1784,[[27]] supplies a description that almost matches The Wollaston Family:
“A stormy day, alone till the afternoon; & then was honor’d with the Company of Mr Jones (a gentleman lately from Europe) Mr Du Ponceau, & Mr Hollingsworth at Tea—We convers’d on a variety of subjects & playd at whist, upon the whole spent an agreable Eveng.”
Tea was not only a beverage of courtship; it also was associated with marriage. Both Peter Kalm, in 1750, and Moreau de St. Méry, in the 1790’s, report the Philadelphia custom of expressing good wishes to a newly married couple by paying them a personal visit soon after the marriage. It was the duty of the bride to serve wine and punch to the callers before noon and tea and wine in the afternoon.[[28]]
No doubt, make-believe teatime and pretend tea drinking were a part of some children’s playtime activities. Perhaps many a little girl played at serving tea and dreamed of having a tea party of her own, but few were as fortunate as young Peggy Livingston who, at about the age of five, was allowed to invite “by card ... 20 young misses” to her own “Tea Party & Ball.” She “treated them with all good things, & a violin,” wrote her grandfather. There were “5 coaches at ye door at 10 when they departed. I was much amused 2 hours.”[[29]]
Figure 4.—Conversazioni, by W. H. Bunbury, published 1782. In Print and Photograph Division, Library of Congress.
Tea seems to have been the excuse for many a social gathering, large or small, formal or informal. And sometimes an invitation to drink tea meant a rather elegant party. “That is to say,” wrote one cosmopolitan observer of the American scene in the 1780’s, the Marquis de Chastellux, “to attend a sort of assembly pretty much like the conversazioni [social gathering] of Italy; for tea here, is the substitute for the rinfresco [refreshment].”[[30]] A view of such an event has been depicted in the English print Conversazioni ([fig. 4]), published in 1782. It is hoped that the stiffly seated and solemn-faced guests became more talkative when the tea arrived. However, this tea party may have been like the ones Ferdinand Bayard attended in Bath, Virginia, of which he wrote: “The only thing you hear, while they are taking tea, is the whistling sound made by the lips on edges of the cups. This music is varied by the request made to you to have another cup.”[[31]] At tea parties, cakes, cold pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, and plates of cracked nuts might also be served, according to Mrs. Anne Grant’s reminiscences of pre-Revolutionary America.[[32]] Peter Kalm noted during his New York sojourn in 1749 that “when you paid a visit to any home” a bowl of cracked nuts and one of apples were “set before you, which you ate after drinking tea and even at times while partaking of tea.”[[33]] Sometimes wine and punch were served at teatime, and “in summer,” observed Barbé-Marbois, “they add fruit and other things to drink.”[[34]] Coffee too might be served. As the Frenchman Claude Blanchard explained:[[35]]
They [the Americans] do not take coffee immediately after dinner, but it is served three or four hours afterwards with tea; this coffee is weak and four or five cups are not equal to one of ours; so that they take many of them. The tea, on the contrary, is very strong. This use of tea and coffee is universal in America.
Dealing with both food and drink at the same time was something of an art. It was also an inconvenience for the uninitiated, and on one occasion Ferdinand Bayard, a late-18th-century observer of American tea ritual, witnessed another guest who, “after having taken a cup [of tea] in one hand and tartlets in the other, opened his mouth and told the servant to fill it for him with smoked venison!”[[36]]