DRINKING in VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN BRITAIN
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Thora Hands DRINKING in VICTORIAN & EDWARDIAN BRITAIN Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain Thora Hands Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard Thora Hands Social Sciences City of Glasgow College Glasgow, UK ISBN 978-3-319-92963-7 ISBN 978-3-319-92964-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92964-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943635 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover image: © Thora Hands Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Corky PREFACE It is not a dark secret, nor is it diffcult to perceive, that the established intellectual research disciplines … when they turned their attention to alcohol, man and society focused upon the painful aspects. They studied ‘drinks’ not drinkers; intoxication rather than drinking; the awful sequels of alcohol ingestion, not the usual. Studies of the causes of alcoholism for example, are legion, but studies of the causes of drinking are rare’1 My background is in social sciences and next to history, sociology is my second great interest. So before embarking on historical research for my thesis, my Ph.D. supervisor Jim Mills drew my attention to a collec- tion of sociological and anthropological studies on alcohol and drinking behaviour. The quote above is from Selden Bacon, an American sociol- ogist writing in the 1970s on the limitations of the problem framework within alcohol studies. Bacon and other sociologists, such as Harry Levine, were critical of scientifc approaches that focused primarily on the issue of pathology because they felt that these studies simply miss the point of alcohol consumption.2 Put simply, most people who drink alcohol are not alcoholics and therefore it seems illogical to focus almost exclusively on that aspect of drinking behaviour. Levine links the emergence of the pathological framework to a ‘tem- perance culture’ in which alcohol is viewed as a problem or social evil. In countries like Britain, this sort of attitude has prevailed for a long time— right back to the nineteenth century in fact.3 More recently, the idea of a temperance culture has a particular resonance because my country, vii viii PREFACE Scotland, passed a law that will introduce minimum unit pricing on alco- holic drinks. This is a population-wide measure to tackle the health and social problems associated with alcohol consumption. Whether it will make any kind of decisive impact on drinking behaviour is yet to be seen, but it is a measure that affects all alcohol consumers in Scotland and it is based upon the premise that alcohol is a social problem. The sociologist in me questions the limitations of the problem framework because it fails to account for human agency or for the complexities of alcohol production and consumption. This not only limits our understanding of drinking behaviour but it also impacts upon the majority of alcohol consumers. I’m not only talking about present-day drinkers in Scotland but also those in the past for whom alcohol was not a problem but a substance that held pleasure and mean- ing. As Bacon said, the ordinary aspects of alcohol have never really grabbed the limelight and that also applies to the historical record. The Victorian period was the original temperance culture, where alcohol and drunkenness were constructed as social and moral problems and that is why it offered the perfect place to start digging around for a dif- ferent side to the story. Thora Hands NOTES 1. Bacon S. 1979. ‘Alcohol Research Policy: The Need for an Independent Phenomenologically Oriented Field of Studies’: Journal of Studies of Alcohol: Volume 8:2: p. 26 2. Levine H. 1991. ‘The Promise and Problems of Alcohol Sociology’, in (ed.) Roman P. M. Alcohol: The Development of Sociological Perspectives on Use and Abuse: New Jersey: Rutgers Centre of Alcohol Studies. 3. Ibid.: p. 106. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book marks a journey that began ten years ago when I frantically scribbled a one-page essay to gain entry to a social sciences college course and ended when I received my doctorate in history. I hope that the journey is not yet over but for that stage at least, I have to thank the many people who helped me along the way. In my new role as a college lecturer, I now know just how commit- ted and inspiring my own lecturers were and without the help and sup- port of Lynn Dickie, Iain MacPherson and Jennifer Gemmell of the former Langside College, I would not have made it on to the degree programme at Glasgow Caledonian University. The jump from degree to Masters involved a mix of good luck in fnding the Girgenti records at the Mitchell library (so thank you drunken Edwardian women!) and fur- ther good fortune in having a wonderful supervisor, Dr. Janet Greenlees, who showed no end of patience and encouragement in guiding me on to the Ph.D. This book is based on my doctoral thesis and for that, I have to thank my Ph.D. supervisors Professor Jim Mills and Professor Matt Smith of Strathclyde University for their help and support. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Education and Society at City of Glasgow College for supporting the publication of this book. I owe a great debt of gratitude to The Wellcome Trust for funding my Doctoral research project titled ‘Reframing Drink and the Victorians: The Consumption of Alcohol in Britain 1869–1914’ (reference no. 099357/Z/12/Z). This allowed me to visit wonderful archives that contained fascinating material. I was awed by the sheer volume and ix x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS diversity of the Diageo archive near Stirling and I have to thank the gen- erosity and patience of the archivists there. I also owe many thanks to the archivists at The Athenaeum and The Reform Clubs in London for showing such interest in my research and allowing me to sift through their club records to uncover a wealth of material. I spent many happy days in the National Brewing Archive in Burton-upon-Trent and thank the archivists for their knowledge and guidance. Some of the best moments of my Ph.D. were at the conferences hosted by The Alcohol and Drug History Society. I have rarely spent time with a bunch of academics who are as supportive and generous with their time and knowledge and are generally just good fun to be around. I owe particular thanks to Dr. Iain Smith for being such a good travelling companion; to David Fahey for sharing his mighty knowledge of British alcohol history and to Dan Malleck for being an all-round good guy. My biggest thanks go to my mum Kathy and to my partner Andy for their support and most importantly, for pouring wine or mixing marga- ritas as and when necessary. My kids—Dan, Lewi, Peter and Beth have been with me throughout this journey. They have grown up with a mum often chained to a desk piled high with books, or packing a case to go off on research and they just rolled with it, as kids do, but they should know that I appreciate the time they gave me and that they have my love, always. CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Reframing Drink and the Victorians 1 Part I Drinkers 2 The Spectre of the Drunkard 13 3 The Great Army of Drinkers 25 4 The Secret Army of Drinkers 41 5 Testing the ‘Character of Drink’ 49 Part II Drinks 6 Selling ‘the Drink of the Empire’: Bass & Co. Ltd 59 7 Making Scotch Respectable: Buchanan and Walker 69 8 Selling the ‘Illusion’ of the Brand: W & A Gilbey 85 xi xii CONTENTS Part III Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain 9 Doctor’s Orders: A Prescription to Drink 95 10 Drinking for Health: Proprietary Tonic Wines 113 11 Neither Carnival nor Lent: Everyday Working Class Drinking 129 12 The Drinking Cultures of the Higher Classes 145 13 Conclusions 159 Appendix 165 Bibliography 185 Index 189 LIST OF FIGURES Fig.