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' Today Social Customs Are Greatly Simplified And Remarkably Flexible ...

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Today social customs are greatly simplified and remarkably flexible (Fanshawe, 2005). According to Fanshawe (2005) social customs represent current trends in our society. For example, it is a typical British etiquette that a man will hold a door open allowing females to enter a room before him. In this example etiquette is both a civility and a series of British customs. Tea drinking in the 19th century was popular amongst workers and wealthy people, especially because the water is boiled tea were viewed as having reduced urban disease. Furthermore, during the 19th century, a middle class of merchants was growing rich through their own right and not through inherited riches and they wanted to share the power of aristocracy. The aristocracy was trying to stop the rise of the middle classes in several ways and one effective way was by adopting complex aristocratic rules governing manners. Therefore a middle class man may become rich but would find it extremely difficult to behave in an aristocratic way having the correct behaviours, or etiquette, governing the upper-class life (Gray, 2006). For example, some middle class people copying upper class behaviours made embarrassing mistakes such as saying ‘toilets' instead of ‘lavatories'. In terms of drinking tea, for example, some middle class people crooked their little finger while holding a tea cup was seen by the aristocracy as a middle class attempt to copy the upper class customary way of drinking tea. Of course none of that matters today.
Etiquette has influenced tea drinking in Britain in the past indicating social class and this was reflected by timing and linguistic indicators (Fox, 2004). To everyone, apart from the working classes, ‘tea' signifies a light meal eaten around four o'clock in the afternoon, usually consisting of tea (the drink) with cakes, scones, jam, biscuits and sometimes with little sandwiches traditionally including cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Differently, the working classes refer to this as ‘afternoon tea' in order to indicate it is different from the evening ‘tea' that the middle and upper classes call supper or dinner. If somebody calls the meal ‘tea' and eats it around half past six then this person is probably working class or of working class origin (Fox, 2004). Furthermore, if one calls the meal ‘my tea', ‘our tea' and ‘your tea as in ‘I must be going home for my tea' that signifies that one is probably a northern working class person.
The introduction of tea into Britain has produced a range of fashionable trends and rules over the centuries. Afternoon tea, High Tea and Teatime are examples of such trends and fashions being influenced by tea. Rules in which when to have tea, where to have tea and what to wear to tea related events were all answered according to the latest fashion along with questions like 'Should one always use a teapot?

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