From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"The teacup may harbor the tempest, but the creamer curdles first."  

"Surprised" (but cleverly not showing it), from Within Sound of the Sea by Charlotte Louisa Hawkins Dempster, 1879.

From Harry Lorrequer by Charles James Lever and illustrated by Phiz, 1892.

From The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder, illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1820.

From The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder, illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1820.

Here's a precursor to 1939's "The Teapot Song" (a.k.a. "I'm a Little Teapot"), from The Nightingale by Richard André, 1899.

Yes, a donkey drinking tea is very nearly a Googlewhack as of this posting (one search result being for a game of Interference in which "donkey drinking tea" breaks down into "black box.")  From Taking Tales by William Henry Giles Kingston, 1889.

"Ate her cake and drank her tea in a fairyland of enchantment," from Bushigrams by Guy Newell Boothby, 1897.

From our one-letter words department, here's the letter T meaning "tea."  Our illustration appears in Gazetteer and Business Directory of Rutland County, Vt., for 1881-82.

"These experiments re-invoke puppetry's recurrent philosophical issues: what constitutes a puppet?  What is human agency?" —The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, 2014

"A hypnotic tea party": an illustration from Hypnotism: Its Facts, Theories and Related Phenomena by Carl Sextus (1893).

The spirit of the teapot: an illustration from an 1862 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Now then, I'm ready if you are..."