Necessary Luxury

Julie E. Fromer teaches at Corning Community College in Corning, New York.

"This book is a genuine tour de force." "(A)nyone who opens Julie Fromer's absorbing book may never read a Victorian novel in quite the same way again." (Mansfield News Journal) "A well-researched history of the development of a habit inextricably woven into England's national identity." (Dickens Quarterly) "Fromer draws usefully on nineteenth-century histories of and advertisements for tea. In the first third of the book this nonfictional material is used in order to propose a Victorian idealisation of tea as a 'necessary luxury'; an idealisation that cohered around a specifically English, middle-class, and domesticated vision of a united and prosperous nation. The great success of the study is the fact that it elaborates so thoroughly and convincingly on novels that can be understood variously to underwrite, play with, or disrupt this vision." (Victorian Studies) "With Fromer as one's guide, references in British literature to the serving and drinking of tea seem legion indeed." (Brontë Studies) "Fromer's straightforward writing style makes this book a useful introduction to close readings of passages from these texts (novels by Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Hardy, James, Carroll, Oliphant, and Trollope) and historical and cultural criticism." (CHOICE) "In her conclusion, Fromer brings the tea mystic to the present, with the new gourmet teas and the popularity of Indian/southeast Asian chai. From a symbol of British domesticity, tea has once again become an exotic foreign beverage." (Book News Inc.)