a sinking feeling

Anna Maria Russell, Queen Victoria and afternoon tea

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Tea rooms throughout the United Kingdom still credit Anna Maria Russell with popularizing the afternoon ritual (image via Wikimedia Commons)

As the legend goes, Anna Maria Russell complained of “a sinking feeling” in 1840.

This “sinking” sense of fatigue (and maybe, perhaps, boredom) overwhelmed her in the desert of time separating lunch from dinner. So the 57-year-old Duchess of Bedford came up with the cure: every afternoon, she and her friends would break for a bit of cake, a few tiny sandwiches and a hot cuppa. Soon enough, her “sinking feeling” evaporated — and thus, a British tradition was born.