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    When Tea Reaches Its Boiling Point In Fiction, So Too May The Story

    Across tea-drinking cultures, writers have milked hot tea for all its worth to add a splash of narrative panache to comic or erotic scenes or to build mood, momentum and character.
    by Nina Martyris May 28, 2019 5 minutes
    Quilp, the epitome of evil in Charles Dickens' <em>The Old Curiosity Shop</em>, seen here with Little Nell, is a dwarf with the head of a giant and a "few discolored fangs" for teeth. But his most grotesque trait is his trick of drinking "boiling tea without winking" and eating "hard eggs, shell and all."

    A recent study in the International Journal of Cancer revealing a link between hot tea and the risk of esophageal cancer has provoked a range of reactions — from concern and vindication (for those who've long warned family and friends about the dangers of ingesting boiling liquid) to mockery (Not one more study!) to outright defiance. (You can pry that hot cuppa from my cold, dead hands.)

    Hardened habitués were inclined to treat the study with the same solemnity as did the great Victorian limericist Edward Lear when he wrote:

    There was an old man who forgot,

    That his tea was excessively hot;

    When they said 'Let it cool'

    He answered 'You fool!

    I shall pour it back into the pot.'

    The warning is no laughing matter — esophagealis the world's eighth most common cancer, and this finding affects millions of tea-drinkers. But the defensiveness that greeted it was scarcely

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