When did "tea and sympathy" come into usage as a phrase?

When did "tea and sympathy" come into usage? I'm writing about a Western character in 1879.

A number of examples of the phrase turn up in newspaper articles from the United States and from Australia in an Elephind search. The earliest is from a U.S. source. From John De Forest, "Chanet" serialized in the Burlington [Vermont] Weekly Free Press (August 26, 1870):

Arrived in her parlour-bedroom with this strange companion, Janet Holcum's heart fluttered. It was the first time that a man had been with her there alone. If visitors should arrive, what would they think? Of course it would be impossible to explain that here was a gentleman whom she had caught trying to commit suicide, and whom she had undertaken to cure of his self-destroying propensities by means of tea and sympathy.

De Forest's story was reprinted numerous times in various U.S. newspapers over the next half century. However, it is the only U.S. instance of "tea and sympathy" from the nineteenth century. In Australia, meanwhile, the phrase first pops up 14 years after the De Forest instance, but it seems to have spread far more widely and deeply. From "A True Story of an Australian Christmas: A Tale for the Little People," in the [Melbourne, Victoria] Australasian (December 27, 1884):

But there was no time to waste in lamenting over ruined clothes and complexions, and, with a strength born of renewed confidence, the weary children set off again on their homeward route. When they climbed to the top of the first high hill they could see right across to the waters of the bay, and they felt sure that if they could once reach the friendly, and familiar, front beach, even at a point distant from their home, they would be at an end of their difficulties. They would surely find tea and sympathy in any of the fishermen's huts, and some kind of conveyance would quickly be procured to take them to their anxious parents.

From "Cloistered Bohemia" in the [Melbourne, Victoria] Argus (May 16, 1891):

Generally speaking, one may distrust all legends of lovely, fascinating, light-hearted, and successful lady artists, poetesses, journalists, and so on. The real ones work "in irons" mostly. One notable exception in Chenies-street is a lady doctor Miss Dionysia Dimple—really a young and handsome woman, who gets patients just because she is nice to look at. Hysterical youths, of advanced principles, who imagine that they are suffering from obscure and newly-identified maladies, come to consult her; she gives them tea and sympathy.

From M.E. Braddon, The Venetians, serialized in the [Adelaide] South Australia Chronicle (April 30, 1892):

"If I did not know you are saying that for kindness I might think you one of those unsympathetic people who don't care for tea."

"Do tea and sympathy go together?"

"I think most nice people are tea drinkers, indeed it seems to me that tea is the link that holds society together. Oh, what should we do with our afternoons—however could we go and call on people—if it were not afternoon tea?"

From "Social Gossip," in [Melbourne, Victoria] Punch (January 8, 1914):

Mrs. Spencer Brunton, looking the picture of dignity, arrived somewhat; late with her distinguished-looking hubby. By the time the last race had come and gone the men looked sadder and wiser, and the women were only really for Winter Gardens, tea and sympathy.

From "Through the Eyes of a Woman Goodbye," in the [Sydney, New South Wales] Mirror of Australia (May 5, 1917):

The "Joan Committee" (as the women have got to call it) does not content itself with tendering tea and sympathy, however. Although the social and sentimental side of its activities was best expressed in the Anzac Day gathering, when something over three hundred women were entertained, there is a very practical work of advice and relief conducted most capably by M'me Boult. Gifts of arm garments and other winter comforts are always welcome at her studio in Hunter Street, and many a bereaved family comes to her for succour and guidance in their trial and difficulties.

From Charles Leslie, A Plunge into the Unknown," serialized in the [Brisbane] Queenslander (September 1, 1917):

Less than an hour of his discovery of her, they were occupying two chairs in friendly intimacy at a small table in a tea-room near the Crown, and Eva was feeling a different woman. She now knew that what she was needing when she sat solitary and in tears in the park was tea and sympathy. Lord Doulton had given her both without stint. And hope shone on the horizon like a star.

Leslie's novel was serialized in multiple other Australian newspapers in the early 1920s.

From "Under the Red Triangle: Y.M.C.A. Girls in France," in the Creswick [Victoria] Advertiser (November 23, 2017):

The town is fairly bristling with the well-known Red Triangle; everywhere there are notices, huts, hostels or canteens. There is a hostel for the relatives of the wounded. The Y.M.C.A. undertakes to provide shelter and to convey to the different hospitals the relatives of those dangerously ill. At the head of this hostel is a motherly w0man who is ready at any hour with the two great comforts, hot tea and sympathy. This establishment is an oasis in the desert for the travel-worn and sorrow-stricken.

The dates and locations of the Australian instances are striking: 1884 (Melbourne, Victoria); 1891 (Melbourne again); 1892 (Adelaide, South Australia); 1914 (Melbourne again); 1917 (Sydney, New South Wales); 1917 (Brisbane, Queensland); and 1917 (Creswick, Victoria). From the early concentration of matches from Melbourne, we might suspect that the expression was especially popular there; and from the cluster of matches during World War I, we might imagine that the expression became more widespread during those years of slaughter.

Although I had thought it likely that the expression originated in Britain, newspaper database matches do not back up that hypothesis. The first unmistakable match for "tea and sympathy" from a British newspaper is a version of the article about YMCA hostels in France that appeared (three months later) in the Creswick Advertiser cited above. In Britain, the British Newspaper Archive finds its first definite match in a version of that article that appeared the Yorkshire Evening Post of August 21, 1917.

Conclusions

The pairing of "tea and sympathy" may be natural enough to have arisen independently numerous times among English speakers. Nevertheless, it shows signs of having had some degree of local popularity as a set phrase in Melbourne, Victoria, beginning in the 1880s. A second rush of usage occurred during World War I—again, especially in Australia—where it seems to have been used to connote commiseration in bereavement.

The 1953 instance of Tea and Sympathy as the name of a Broadway play may be independent of the earlier instances of the phrase. The playwright, Robert Anderson, was an American, born in 1917 and thus unlikely to have had a close connection to World War I use of the phrase. I don't think it at all unlikely, though, that vestigial use of "tea and sympathy" as a set phrase persisted long after the Armistice. Perhaps Anderson was exposed to the expression at some point and found it appealing.