How did you do with Part 2: Finding Festive Feasts Quiz?! You can share your answers through project social media.

Did you know that, in Georgian times, coffee was generally drunk from small, handled, cups, known as ‘cans’; while, until late Georgian times, teacups were made without handles. These ‘tea-bowls’ were paired with deep saucers known as tea-dishes – out of which people often drank tea (which might be considered bad-manners today!).

Although not usually as expensive as imported Chinese porcelain, such objects would’ve still been costly – so it’s more likely that well-off, rather than poorer, people would’ve use similar sets to these.

Tea drinking had by this time become a regular ritual – for those who could afford it (and, while prices for tea had dropped over the last century, some still could not): it was often drank at certain times, using special equipment (such as ‘china’ or pottery sets), and in particular rooms.

The small country cottages occupied by the rural poor often comprised only a single room, with loft space above for sleeping. Their occupants (such as farm labourers, and their families) might not have been able to afford tea, or the requisite equipment, at this time.

Tea-drinking was spreading down the social scale in the 1820s – 1830s, and along with it the manufacturing of less expensive pottery sets to capture this new market – with ‘pearlware’ teapots; and then the still cheaper white-bodied earthenware, such as ‘stone china’ and ‘ironstone’; made for comfortably-off working people: perhaps better-off small-holders and artisans. Their small houses might include a ‘parlour’, that is, a room in which people might socialise in a formal, or semi-formal, manner. But – as discussed in the Interactive Guide – changes to the rural landscape, hand-in-hand with mechanisation, reduced incomes for some, perhaps making tea an out-of-reach luxury once more.

At this time of change, when many were worried that their social positions were under threat from the ‘nouveau riche’, the better-off ‘middling-sorts’ from ‘established’ families might have shown-off good-quality, but older, tea-ware such as this pair, as a way of signalling that they had been able to afford tea before many of their neighbours. Their houses might contain (as well as a dining room) a morning room, and drawing room, used for socialising (including tea-drinking).

Christmas was a time associated with hospitality; perhaps these vessels would have been well used over the season by neighbourly visitors in late Georgian times?!

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The next mystery objects display (Part 3) is here.