Ask the average person the difference between “high tea” and “afternoon tea” and they will tell you, with considerable confidence, that high tea is the grander, more formal, more elevated affair. The word “high,” they will explain, suggests prestige. Luxury. Perhaps a butler.
They are, in virtually every respect, incorrect.
The Origins of Afternoon Tea
Afternoon tea as a formal custom is most closely associated with Anna Russell, the 7th Duchess of Bedford (1783–1857). In the 1840s, the Duchess found herself experiencing what she described as “a sinking feeling” in the long afternoon hours between the midday meal and the fashionably late dinner, which in aristocratic circles rarely began before eight o’clock in the evening. She began requesting that a pot of tea, bread and butter, and small cakes be brought to her private rooms around four o’clock.
She then began inviting friends to join her. The friends told their friends. By the 1860s, taking tea in the late afternoon had spread from the aristocracy to the growing middle class, and by the end of the Victorian era it had become an established institution across English society.
Afternoon tea was — and remains — a light social meal. Finger sandwiches. Scones with clotted cream and jam. Small cakes and pastries. Served at low occasional tables in the drawing room or parlour. Which is why it was also known, informally, as “low tea.” Not because it lacked sophistication. Because of the furniture.
So What Is High Tea?
High tea is a working-class meal. It takes its name, likewise, from furniture — specifically the high, straight-backed dining table at which the working classes sat for their meals, as opposed to the low occasional tables favoured by those who could afford to eat in a drawing room.
High tea was served later in the evening — typically between five and seven o’clock — after the working day had ended. It was a proper, sustaining meal: cold meats, cheese, bread, perhaps a hot dish. Tea was poured alongside it, not as the centrepiece, but as the beverage accompanying a practical dinner. It was hearty, unpretentious, and decidedly not the dainty affair that afternoon tea was designed to be.
The irony, then, is considerable: “high tea” is the less formal of the two meals. The grand, tiered-stand affair that modern hotels and tea rooms offer under the name “high tea” is, technically speaking, afternoon tea. The confusion is largely a 20th-century invention, and it has been enthusiastically exported.
Why It Still Matters
You may reasonably wonder whether this distinction matters in practical terms. In a hotel dining room in 2025, probably not. The scones will arrive regardless of what the menu calls them.
But understanding the distinction tells you something important about Victorian society and its preoccupations. The Victorians were intensely alert to the signals carried by everyday behaviour — where one ate, how one ate, at what hour, in what room, with whom. Tea was not merely a beverage. It was a statement about one’s place in the social order.
The Duchess of Bedford did not simply want a snack. She was refining a social ritual, marking out a time and manner of gathering that distinguished the leisured classes from those who ate at high tables because they had no choice. That the working classes later adopted tea culture wholesale — and that “high tea” subsequently became a term of aspiration rather than description — is one of history’s more amusing reversals.
The distinction between high tea and afternoon tea is one of the finer points covered in The Finishing Tour — along with a rather strong opinion on a centuries-old debate about milk that we shall leave for the experience itself.