Afternoon tea wasn’t a new phenomenon in the 1890s but during this decade entertaining friends at four or five o’clock in the afternoon became a craze. Newspaper articles about “one of the most pleasant innovations of modern times” proliferated, along with advice about etiquette.

Australians were already among the biggest tea drinkers in the world, with tea first arriving in the colony with the First Fleet. It was, initially, a luxury item, imported by the officer class for their own use and only added to convict rations in 1819. By the 1850s, though, tea was more widely available and tea parties were even held on the goldfields. An account, in Elizabeth Ramsay’s Social Life and Manners in Australia (1861) tells of afternoon tea served in a tent:

Soon after we settled in our tent-home at Castlemaine we received an invitation to tea. The party was numerous, the tent, one of the largest in the camp, was lined with green baize; one end of it was fitted up with sofas, arm-chairs, and a grand piano. Small round tables were tastefully dispersed, on which some very pretty ornaments, books, and portfolios of drawings were placed. At the other end there was a large table with cups and saucers of every size and pattern …. The ladies — for ladies they were in every sense of the word — were well-dressed, some even elegantly, in the newest fashions. After tea had been disposed of and the things taken away, we had some vocal and instrumental music, and for a time forgot we were in the land of the diggings.

From the 1880s, tea rooms began to appear around the country, one of the first being that of Alfred Bushell in Brisbane. The custom of inviting friends for afternoon tea at home became more common and seems to have exploded in the 1890s, although not everyone was enamoured of the idea. “And now we must register our protest against the modern afternoon tea craze,” the Riverine Recorder wrote. “This is a custom chiefly observed among those who have a late dinner. It is bad enough in the case of persons who dine in the evening, as the amount of tea and rich cake consumed during a round of calls is enough to destroy nerve tone, and slowly but surely provokes indigestion; and, besides, the habitual observance of this practice destroys the natural appetite for what should be the chief meal of the day.”

Despite the occasional nay-sayer, afternoon tea was very much in vogue and developed its own conventions. In 1895, several newspapers applauded it as “the easiest form of hospitality” and offered the following rules for hostesses:

Don’t have very large teacups. Ladies usually pay several visits during the afternoon, and do not want a large cup of tea.

Don’t if your room be full, ask each visitor if she takes milk or sugar: hand the cream jug and sugar basin after the cup, that she may help herself, unless a servant is assisting with the tea, in which case a small tray should contain all that is required.

Don’t have the saucers of your tea service so small that a piece of bread and butter or cake cannot rest at the side.

Don’t provide cakes or biscuits so crisp that they cannot be eaten without a disagreeable crunching sound, or if bitten the whole thing breaks and falls to the ground.

Don’t provide sticky things, so that your guests soil their gloves. Bread and butter should be rolled, and sandwiches so tidily made that no soiling of the fingers is necessary.

Don’t, if you live in the country district, provide the same cake that everyone else has.

Don’t have the tea too strong.

Don’t let it stand long on the leaves. If the tea is required at intervals during a long afternoon, place the tea in a muslin bag, which can be removed when the tea has drawn; it can then be kept hot as long as is necessary. 

Dishes for afternoon tea in this high Victorian era included brown and white bread and butter, fancy biscuits or wafers and, ideally, two kinds of cake. Fruit cake, then known as plum cake, was so common that it was decried as monotonous. And, of course, there were sandwiches. These had to be “dainty”. No chunky cold cuts – the preferred fillings were potted salmon or crab, tinned lobster, sardines and cress or even sardines and cucumber. And the bread had to be sliced wafer thin. Scones and muffins were optional.

As the decades passed, the formal afternoon tea migrated from private homes to upmarket hotels where it continues today. Melbourne’s Hotel Windsor has been serving it since 1883, making it the longest-running afternoon tea in the city. Of course, many of these establishments call it High Tea, which would puzzle our 19th-century forbears.  High tea, for the upper classes, was a light meal taken in the early evening instead of dinner. It was always served with diners seated at a “high” table rather than relaxing in armchairs and generally involved a knife and fork rather than fingers. Among high tea dishes could be fish, meat or egg dishes, although certain doctors warned against the ill-effects of drinking tea with your meat.

Some looked down their noses at high tea, snorting that it had “plebian” origins, with the Gippsland Gazette writing in 1913:

Superior persons, of course, at once question whether “high tea” survives at all. To such it seems so entirely provincial as to be beneath their consideration.

Indeed, high tea did have humble origins as the evening meal of the working classes, who needed substantial sustenance at the end of the working day and didn’t want to wait until eight or nine o’clock like the dilettante elite. The “high tea” eventually became just “tea”. Growing up in the 1950s, my family always ate tea rather than dinner, the word dinner being reserved for the Sunday roast or Christmas lunch.

But language is a changing thing. If the fancy hotels want to call their fancy afternoon teas high tea, falsely assuming that the “high” refers to its elevated social status or gourmet qualities, who am I to argue?