In the English cultural imagination, tea occupies a peculiar place. More than a beverage, it is a social script, a sanctioned pause in the day: a set of expectations at once average and overdetermined, a domestic arrangement that appears trivial precisely because it is ubiquitous. lt’s therefore unsurprising that English literature returns, time and again, to setting the tea table (alongside the broader rituals of hospitality) as a site for exploring the staging of the “ordinary.” And within this tradition, Paul’s references to tea in his own lyrics become all the more curious.
Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, renders domestic normalcy as a construct rather than an inherent condition: it’s something achieved through ritualized repetition. The Boffins — an elderly, newly wealthy couple who make a point of playing host — embody the norm, the polished surface of English social life. Visitors are folded into the room, chairs are drawn up, the afternoon settles into its customary interlude as tea is offered as a matter of course. That said, normalcy is a managed illusion— not an inherent “truth,” but a careful choreography so familiar it escapes notice.
Through Jenny Wren, Dickens makes this act explicit. A disabled young woman living in cramped, precarious conditions, Jenny performs the gestures of domestic normalcy with meticulous care: small rituals of tending and order that strive to produce stability where it is structurally impossible. But she does so with an acuity that suggests she knows the terms of the performance. This is a rehearsal of the script in full awareness of her own exclusion from it, and of its artifice.
Lewis Carroll pushes the whole domestic tableau into parody. In Alice, the tea table and all its props remain, yet the scene no longer produces any sense of belonging, let alone coherence. Invitations are issued and withdrawn, etiquette multiplies and meaning evaporates. Gestures of genteel sociability persist long after their function has collapsed, and time itself becomes as meaningless as the performance. What remains is a scene everyone recognizes but no one can convincingly inhabit.
So if Dickens uses the rituals of hospitality to examine the “nature” of domestic performance, Carroll identifies the performance itself as nonsensical. But the form remains available as theater, and Paul, in his turn, treats it as such. Intimacy is repeatedly routed through an invitation to tea— an invitation to step outside linear time, into mutual imagination and collaboration, into an absurd pastiche of domesticity staged just for two. Closeness is created not in spite of the artifice, but through it: a game of pretend, played together.
The lyrics say ‘Very twee, very me’ and I think it is very me, that stuff. The Beatles made a sort of Englishy sort of music, once they got past their American influences. […] And so I really went to town on that whole fruity way of talking, that whole fruity language that I like. It’s, I think, it’s very endearing, very English, and I even managed to work in the word ‘peradventure’ which I was very proud of. […] I think, as I say, I read it in Dickens. […] So it was nice, it was that croquet, very English, lawns, hollyhocks, roses, very Alice in Wonderland, that was also in the back of my mind, which influenced a lot of me and John’s writing. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, that’s Alice to us, you know (sings): ‘Picture yourself…’ The whole idea of ‘picture yourself,’ you know, in a boat on a river, it’s very Alice, very Lewis Carroll, it’s just the way I like to write that, so a fruity little song.
Paul McCartney, interview by Gary Crowley, 2005
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