History

"The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State": The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness Author(syf 1 L F K R O D V 0 D V R n Source: Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2001yf S S 7 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058542 Accessed: 03-02-2017 03:53 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Literature and Culture This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Victorian Literature and Culture (2001yf 3 U L Q W H G L Q W K H 8 Q L W H G 6 W D W H V R I $ P H U L F D . Copyright ? 2001 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/01 $9.50 "THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE ARE IN A BEASTLY STATE": THE BEER ACT OF 1830 AND VICTORIAN DISCOURSE ON WORKING-CLASS DRUNKENNESS By Nicholas Mason i On July 23, 1830, Parliament passed "An Act to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cyder by Retail in England." Commonly known as the Beer Act of 1830, this law called for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed in England and Wales. In place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local magistrates complete control over the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated that a new type of drinking establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be opened by any rate-paying householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own drink lawsyf ) R r the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in England could now pur chase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1 In addition to dramatically deregulating the licensing of drink establishments, the Beer Act also repealed all duties on strong beer and cider. By conservative estimates, eliminating this tax immediately reduced the cost of a pot of beer by approximately twenty percent (Harrison, Drink 80yf 7 K H R Q O \ P D M R U U H V W U L F W L R Q L Q W K H Q H Z O D Z F D P H L Q D n amendment added in the House of Lords requiring all beer shops to close by 10 P.M. Eventually beer-sellers would complain vociferously about the competitive advantage this early closing time gave to publicans, who could remain open at all times except during Sunday morning church services. But in the months following the Beer Act's passage, beer-sellers had few complaints, as the law granted liberties and conveniences never imagined under the old system. So attractive was the idea of the beer house to both retailers and consumers, in fact, that within six months of the Beer Act's taking effect, over 24,000 beer houses had sprung up throughout England and Wales (Gourvish and Wilson 16yf . As might be expected, the laboring poor, for whom beer had traditionally been a dietary staple, were the chief beneficiaries of the Beer Act. Several decades after the Act's passage, beer houses in England still rang with the chorus, 109 This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 110 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Come, neighbours all, both great and small, Perform your duties here, And loudly sing Live Billy our King, For bating the tax upon beer. (Hughes 116; see also Hackwood 102yf However historically inaccurate this song may be ? "Billy," or William IV, in reality had little to do with the new law ? it effectively captures the general popularity the Beer Act enjoyed among the nation's laborers. At the opposite end of the social spectrum, however, the Beer Act quickly proved a cause for concern. From the moment the new law took effect on October 10,1830, many members of England's privileged classes complained about the widespread debauchery the law had supposedly incited. In a steady stream of sermons, poems, crime reports, and stump speeches, the beer house came to represent intemperance, idleness, and a lack of discipline ?in short, all the self-destructive vices of the working class. The Reverend Robert Ousby, a Lincolnshire curate, spoke for many when in 1834 he insisted that the only solution to Eng land's drunkenness problem was "'to close every beer-shop as soon as possible; to cut them up root and branch.'" He continued, "The public-houses, I thought, were bad before, and I endeavoured to counteract them; but it is absolutely impossible to do anything with these beer-houses'" (Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness 288yf . It is claims such as Ousby's that I would like to explore in this paper. As I will show below, most evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, suggests that the Beer Act at least initially increased levels of drunkenness among England's working class. But the most significant long-term effect of the Beer Act of 1830,1 would argue, was not so much the real levels of drunkenness it produced as the perceptions that were formed in its after math. From 1830 until the 1870s, it was counted as something of a truism in middle- and upper-class society that the Beer Act had touched off an irreversible course of working class drunkenness. Social commentators of all political persuasions, ranging from the conservative Henry Mayhew to the communist Friedrich Engels, viewed the Beer Act as a defining moment in the fortunes of England's working class, and few flinched when in 1884 the historian Richard Valpy French argued that the Beer Act was "prominent among the legislative beacons of the present century" (349yf , Q W K L V H V V D \ W K H Q , Z L O O D Q D O \ ] H W K e discourse surrounding the Act of 1830, showing how writers and speakers in a wide variety of genres depicted this law as a major turning-point in working-class history. In the end, I hope to have shown that while the year 1830 lacks the associative power of an 1832 or an 1848, it warrants recognition by cultural historians as a crucial moment in working-class history for the simple reason that it is the year in which this landmark piece of legislation passed into law. // Eight years after the passage of the Beer Act, James Bishop, Secretary of the Metropoli tan Protection Society, attempted to explain Parliament's motivations for passing this law: The year 1830, it will be recollected, was ushered in by a period of unexampled privation and want of employment among the working classes, agricultural and commercial; insubordina tion was spreading; and breaking of machinery and tumultuous meetings in the factory and This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 111 commercial districts, and riots and incendiary burnings in the agricultural parts of the king dom, were unhappily too general. In this state of affairs, Government was appealed to for relief .... [T]he greatest measure of relief it was in their power to bestow was, the repeal of the beer duty, and the opening of the Beer-trade. (6yf In his own terse manner, Cobbett shared this interpretation, dubbing the Beer Act "a sop to pot-house politicians" (398yf : L W K R X W T X H V W L R Q W K H O D Z R I I H U H G P X F K W R O L N H I R U ( Q J O L V h laborers, as it provided them with beer in greater abundance and at a lower price. In an era when many laborers questioned whether any Act of Parliament had been designed with the nation's workers in mind, the Beer Act seemed strong proof that England's leaders were indeed concerned about the plight of the masses. Much more contributed to the passage of the Beer Act, however, than compassion for the laboring poor or paranoia over the prospects of insurrection. Most of the Parliamentary debates on the subject, in fact, centered not so much on the plight of workers as on theories of free trade and the dangers of monopolies.2 Prior to 1830, the only way to obtain public house licenses was through local magistrates, whose stinginess is evident in the steep decline in the number of public houses per capita during the eighteenth and early nine teenth centuries (Clark 333yf % \ W K H V W K H F R P P R Q S H U F H S W L R Q L Q ( Q J O D Q G Z D V W K D t magistrates were in the pockets of the dominant brewers, issuing licenses only to those who agreed to sell a certain brand of beer and purposely keeping the number of pubs low so the brewers could maintain their watchful eye over the industry. The actual extent of the conspiracy between brewers and magistrates is, of course, difficult to measure, but statistics bear out the degree to which the nation's leading brewers flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1748, most brewing still took place in the home or the small shop, with the twelve major brewers of England only producing 42yb R I W K H F R X Q W U \ s beer. In contrast, by 1830 new technology and the now-standard contracts between large brewers and publicans had pushed the major brewers' market share up to 85yb H V V H Q W L D O O y twice what it had been eighty years earlier (Mathias 26; see also Park 64yf $ O W K R X J K L Q V R P e regions small brewers still prospered, the trend clearly pointed to a future where the major brewers would have absolute control over the distribution of beer in England. Not surprisingly, in an era when the public was increasingly enamored of free trade and hostile towards anything resembling a monopoly, the supposed collusion between the big brewers and the country's magistrates became a frequent subject of complaint. During the first quarter of the century, several official and unofficial expos?s attempted to unearth the misdeeds of the brewing industry. Perhaps the most damning of these was an 1818 survey by the Committee on Public Breweries which documented not only the extent to which the major brewers had dominated the manufacturing and retailing of beer, but also how they had colluded to fix prices and adulterate their product with cheap stimulants (Gourvish and Wilson 6yf ( Q I O D P H G E \ U H S R U W V V X F K D V W K L V I R X U W H H Q W K R X V D Q G / R Q G R Q H U V V L J Q H G D Q 8 petition protesting the high prices and poor quality of the city's liquor (Clark 334yf . By the early 1820s, free-traders and monopoly busters had persuaded Parliament to begin debating brewing reform. It took another drink-related crisis, however, to pro duce the final momentum for the Beer Act. Independent of the beer debates, in 1825 Parliament passed an act calling for a 40yb U H G X F W L R Q R I W K H G X W L H V R Q V S L U L W V D P H D V X U e theoretically designed to reduce the temptation toward illicit trading and tax-dodging (Gourvish and Wilson 10yf $ V Z R X O G E H W K H F D V H I L Y H \ H D U V O D W H U Z L W K W K H % H H U $ F W , This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 112 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE this reduction of the spirits tax at least initially prompted a significant increase in con sumption. Whereas between 1821 and 1825 the annual quantity of spirits consumed in England fluctuated between 3.7 and 4.7 million gallons, the average annual consumption between 1826 and 1830 exceeded 7.4 million gallons (Harrison, Drink 66-67yf . Much of the blame for this upsurge in consumption fell on the working class, who were said to have abandoned their pot of beer for the much more intoxicating dram of gin. Once again, statistics are useful here in demonstrating the declining popularity of beer. In the early nineteenth century, when the population of England and Wales was increasing by slightly more than 15yb S H U G H F D G H E H H U V D O H V Z H U H H V V H Q W L D O O \ V W D J Q D Q W % H W Z H H Q D Q d 1830, for instance, English brewers never produced more than 4.1 million nor less than 3.6 million barrels of beer in a given year. All told, in the decade prior to the Beer Act, roughly the same amount of beer was being consumed in England and Wales as had been consumed thirty years earlier, when the population was approximately one-third smaller (Mathias 543yf 3 In the eyes of many, beer's declining popularity signified much more than a simple shift in taste. Rather, it represented the abandonment of a key component of Englishness. As George Evans Light has recently shown, since the sixteenth century, when the English began to cultivate hops on a large scale, beer had factored prominently into the English national identity. From a practical standpoint, beer was not only safer than the cholera-in fested water of many communities, but it was also widely seen as a major source of nutrition for the poor. Into the late Victorian age, laborers made claims such as, "Beer's made of corn as well as bread, and so it's stand to reason it's nourishing." Others argued that beer helped them "keep up their strength" during the long workday (Humpherys 59-60yf 2 Y H U W L P H K R Z H Y H U E H H U E H F D P H P X F K P R U H W K D Q D S U D F W L F D O G U L Q N E X W D P H D Q s by which the English distinguished themselves from the wine-drinking French. In 1909, Frederick Hackwood recollected how "at a recent Conference of Brewers, Lord Burton claimed that this country owed its high and proud position among the nations of the earth simply on account of its characteristic dietary, 'Beef and Beer.' Whereupon some one made the waggish comment, 'Why drag in the Beef?'" (94yf . That the Beer Act of 1830 was at least in part designed to turn English workers from gin back to the national drink is evidenced in a commentary appearing in the October 21,1830 issue of the Times. Written less than two weeks after the Act went into effect, this brief arti cle defends the new law primarily on the grounds that beer was the lesser of two alcoholic evils. The anonymous writer of the article contends, "Now if, as is assumed (not provedyf E y the cavillers, a greater number of people do indulge themselves inordinately with the Eng lish beverage of beer than formerly, it is plain to us, at least, that the consumption of beer has been increased at the expense of ardent spirits, and to their positive diminution." After a paragraph championing the free trade principles demonstrated by the Act, the writer goes on to point out that, compared to spirits, beer is "a far more salubrious, or rather a far less destructive liquor" and that "to commit excess in beer costs considerably more money, time, and trouble, than a similar performance with British gin, or whisky." /// With its promises of breaking up a monopoly, promoting free trade, and converting the poor away from the false religion of gin and back to the orthodoxy of beer, the This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 113 Beer Bill received unusually bipartisan support in the House of Commons, where it passed on its second reading by a margin of 245 to 29 votes. The only serious opponents of the bill were publicans and brewers, who anticipated that the new beer houses would vastly diminish their market share, and High Tories, who traditionally had allied them selves with the brewing industry. Both of these groups, however, lacked the numbers in the House of Commons to seriously challenge the popular measure, and thus it easily passed to the House of Lords, where after further discussion and a decision to add the closing-time amendment, the bill became law on July 12, 1830 (Harrison, Drink 75-79yf . Even evangelists and moral reformers, who were laying the foundations of the Tem perance Movement in 1830, voiced little objection to the new law, holding out hope that the spread of beer shops would put an end to the gin craze of the late 1820s (Clark 336yf . Over the years, historians have presented a wide range of views on what the actual legacy of the Beer Act turned out to be. Prior to the 1970s, the standard interpretation was what Brian Harrison has labeled the "debauchery theory." Most famously promoted in Sidney and Beatrice Webb's 1903 study, The History of Liquor Licensing in England, this theory holds that the Beer Act led to widespread degeneracy and should thus be remem bered as one of the great legislative blunders of British history. For nearly three-quarters of a century, the Webbs' reading of the Beer Act remained largely unquestioned. Since then, however, several of the most prominent historians of England's drink industry have raised doubts about just how large of an effect the Beer Act actually had on English culture. In his landmark study, Drink and the Victorians (1971yf + D U U L V R Q F R Q F H G H V W K D t for some "working people the beerhouse helped to emancipate their leisure from super vision" (83yf 7 K L V V D L G K R Z H Y H U K H F D O O V I R U U H V W U D L Q W Z K H Q L Q W H U S U H W L Q J W K H O R Q J W H U m effects of the Beer Act, arguing that the Webbs' strong feelings about this law were less the product of rigorous analysis than the couple's "taste for discipline, their puritanism, and their distance from popular culture" (84yf 6 L P L O D U O \ 7 5 * R X U Y L V K D Q G 5 * : L O V R n have recently argued that while the Beer Act certainly had a short-term impact on English society, by the 1840s the law's novelty had all but died out and it ceased to have a significant impact on daily life in England (16yf . Although picking sides in this debate is not my goal here, it is important to examine at least briefly the evidence that has produced such varying interpretations. As I alluded to in the beginning of this paper, the statistics measuring the Beer Act's influence can be staggering. In the first six months after the law took effect, the existing 51,000 licensed public houses in England and Wales were joined by over 24,000 beer shops (Gourvish and Wilson 3,16yf $ F F R U G L Q J W R V R P H F R X Q W V / L Y H U S R R O D O R Q H V X S S R U W H G H L J K W K X Q G U H G E H H r shops within three weeks of the Act's implementation, a number which only grew over the next several months, when fifty new beer shops reportedly opened in the city every week (Gourvish and Wilson 16; Webb and Webb 116yf $ V P L J K W E H H [ S H F W H G W K H V W H H S H V W U L V e in the number of beer shops occurred in late 1830 and early 1831, when the idea of vending from one's own home remained something of a novelty. Nevertheless, it wasn't until nearly a decade later that the rate at which beer licenses were issued began to decrease significantly. By 1838 at least 40,000 ? and, according to one count, closer to 46,000 ? beer shops were operating in England and Wales, a number which neared the sum total of other public houses, which had grown in number from 51,000 to 56,000 during the decade (Inhabitant 8; Hamer 3; Gourvish and Wilson 16yf . This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 114 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Not surprisingly, this exponential increase in the number of retailers reflected a corresponding rise in the amount of beer that was being consumed during the 1830s. For the years following the repeal of the beer tax, the most reliable figures on beer con sumption come from records on malt duties. These figures indicate that between 1829 and 1831 there was a 40yb L Q F U H D V H L Q W K H D P R X Q W R I P D O W W D [ H G L Q ( Q J O D Q G D Q G : D O H V . Tracking the shifts in malt consumption over a longer period, one sees an increase from an average of 26.5 million imperial bushels being taxed annually in the 1820s to 33.5 million in the 1830s, a growth of 26yb 0 L W F K H O O \f. Even factoring in the 16yb S R S u lation increase that occurred in England and Wales between 1821 and 1831, the malt duty figures still strongly suggest that the Beer Act led to immediate increases in con sumption. For the first time in the nineteenth century, beer drinking was on the rise. As Harrison and Gourvish and Wilson point out, however, it is debatable whether the beer house continued to have so significant an impact on the English cultural landscape beyond the 1830s. Technically, the number of beer houses in England and Wales actually increased between 1840 and 1869, the year in which the system of magisterial licensing was reinstituted. But, all told, the increase in the number of beer shops was relatively small in light of the population boom of the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, malt duty figures suggest that after the significant upswing in beer drinking during the 1830s, beer produc tion fluctuated between 30 and 40 million imperial bushels per year throughout the 1840s and 1850s (Mitchell 402yf . Statistics on drunkenness arrests in London show a similar trend of peak years coming on the heels of the Act of 1830 followed by a gradual leveling out or decline. During each of the first three years following the passage of the Beer Act, the Met ropolitan Police arrested approximately 20 people per 1,000 residents of London on drunkenness charges. Between 1834 and 1839, drunkenness arrests dipped slightly, but continued at a rate of roughly 13 per 1,000 residents. In 1840, however, the number of drunkenness arrests dropped to 8 per 1,000 residents, beginning a 35-year trend in which arrests for intoxication never again exceeded 1yb R I W K H S R S X O D W L R Q 5 H S R U W I U R P W K e Select Committee of the House of Lords 1:342yf $ W O H D V W S D U W R I W K H G H F O L Q H L Q D U U H V W s per capita, of course, may have resulted from changes in police department policies or the simple fact that the police force was overwhelmed by the swelling population. It seems at least as likely, however, that these statistics point to a general trend also seen in the figures for the licensing of beer houses and the taxing of malt ? namely, that beer consumption surged in the aftermath of the Beer Act but began to decline roughly a decade later. IV EVEN USING THE BEST available statistics, tracing trends in alcohol consumption or drunk enness from a distance of more than a century and a half is at best an inexact science.4 This is particularly the case when dealing with England, given the sheer number of recorded binges in the country's past. Nearly every period of modern history is replete with ac counts of a soused English populace. During the sixteenth century, Rabelais coined the simile "as drunk as an Englishman" (Hackwood 154yf $ F H Q W X U \ O D W H U 6 K D N H V S H D U H V O D J o observed that the English were "most potent in potting" and that "your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander ... are nothing to your English" in their ability This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 115 to imbibe (II.iii.77?79yf ' X U L Q J W K H I L U V W K D O I R I W K H H L J K W H H Q W K F H Q W X U \ V H Y H U D O D X W K R U V D Q d painters ? most notably Gay in The Beggar's Opera and Hogarth in Gin Lane ? depicted what they saw as the general drunkenness of England's underclass. Even during the Romantic period, an era historians have often treated as a moment of sobriety between the alcohol sprees of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, many Britons described their age as one marked by excessive drinking. As Anna Taylor has recently shown, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries several physicians began studying England's "crisis" of heavy drinking, and Coleridge ? far from a teetotaler himself ? lamented, "'No Country in God's Earth labours under the tremendous curse of Drunkenness equally with England'" (qtd. in Taylor 13yf . In light of commentaries such as these, it can be difficult when reviewing English history to tell when one binge ends and another begins. In the case of the increased levels of drunkenness in the 1830s, for example, it might be asked whether this phenomenon was merely a continuation of the gin craze of the late 1820s or a distinctive consequence of the Beer Act. Pushing the issue even further, in light of Taylor's recent findings on drunken ness in the Romantic era, it might even be argued that England experienced one unbroken spell of intoxication from the 1720s through the end of the Victorian Age. Considering the frequency of drunkenness in England's cultural past, I would argue that what ultimately makes the Beer Act of 1830 distinctive is not the actual debauchery it produced, but the degree to which for many Victorians it came to symbolize a clear turning point in the behavior of the laboring people. Whether in Temperance tracts, satirical poems, or Parliamentary reports, much of the Victorian discourse on working class drunkenness repeats a narrative in which the Act of 1830 almost instantly placed a beer house in every neighborhood, thus exposing the poor to temptations they were too weak to resist. In the perception of many middle- and upper-class Britons, after 1830 the nation's poor were never the same. A working-class culture previously centered around the home, the church, and the work-site now quite clearly found its focal point in the neighborhood beer house. Literally within hours of the Beer Act's passage, several members of the privileged classes believed they were witnessing unprecedented levels of drunkenness among the nation's laborers. In perhaps the most famous observation on the Beer Act's immediate effects, the Reverend Sydney Smith reported to John Murray, "Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state" (Holland 481yf , Q D Q R W K H U D F F R X Q W D Q R E V H U Y H U D W . L Q J V / \ Q Q U H F R U G H G K R Z 2 F W R E H U , 1830 "was kept as a jubilee by all the devotees of Sir John Barleycorn," with drunken workers spilling out of the town's forty-plus new beer houses into the streets (Clark 336yf . Three years later, William Holmes, a former mayor of Arundel, recalled before a Select Committee on the Sale of Beer, "T was obliged to get out of my gig three times from people coming along, waggoners drunk, when I was returning from shooting on the very day of the operation of this Bill'" {Report from the Select Committee on the Sale of Beer 45-46yf ( Y H Q D Q D U G H Q W V X S S R U W H U R I W K H % H H U $ F W K D G W R D G P L W L Q W K H 2 F W R E H U 0 issue of the Times that "people have now and then, since the Act was passed, been seen 'summot fresh' with beer." Within a few years, a number of voices were calling for a repeal of the new law. An anonymous pamphlet from 1833, for instance, labels the statute "one of the most mischie vous measures, which a mistaking policy ever devised" and claims that in a few short years This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 116 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE the law had "materially increased the domestic distress" of the laboring poor (A Few Remarks 4yf 7 R L O O X V W U D W H K R Z W K H % H H U $ F W K D G S U R Y H Q S D U W L F X O D U O \ G L V D V W U R X V L Q W K e provinces, the pamphleteer includes a "General Report of the disturbed district of East Sussex." After recounting how beer shops had immediately become havens for prosti tutes, thieves, and radicals, this report quotes an East Kent magistrate who believes "'no single measure ever caused so much mischief in so short a time, in demoralizing the labourers'" (23yf . One of the best indicators of how widely discussed the Beer Act was during the 1830s is its appearance in satire. In the mid-1830s, for instance, the parodist James Smith penned an eight-line poem simply entitled "Beer Shops": "These beer shops," quoth Barnabas, speaking in alt, "Are ruinous ? down with the growers of malt!" "Too true," answers Ben, with a shake of the head, "Wherever they congregate, honesty's dead. That beer breeds dishonesty causes no wonder, 'Tis nurtured in crime ? 'tis concocted in plunder; In Kent, while surrounded by flourishing crops, I saw a rogue picking a pocket of hops." While the agricultural wordplay of the punch-line ? a "pocket" as used here is literally a large bag used for harvesting hops ? may be lost on most modern readers, the poem's general idea remains fairly clear. Smith's target is not the beer shop itself, but the debates that have followed in its wake. Specifically, he lampoons the frenzied morality of Temper ance advocates, suggesting that detractors of the Beer Act have seized upon the slightest misdeeds of the working class to make sweeping statements about the law's "ruinous" effects. By 1833 the types of complaints Smith parodies had become so numerous that Parlia ment saw fit to organize a Select Committee on the Sale of Beer. This would be the first in a long series of such bodies that summoned magistrates, physicians, temperance work ers, and other members of the privileged classes to testify concerning the social problems excessive drinking was causing among England's poor. Typical of the testimonies given before the 1833 committee is that of the chaplain of Reading gaol, who estimated that "'four-fifths of the offences committed by the agricultural population are traceable to beer houses'" (Report by the Select Committee on the Sale of Beer 86yf 6 L P L O D U O \ W K H F K L H f constable of Leeds reported that there had been three times as many arrests for drunken ness in his city in the thirty months since the Beer Act as in the preceding three years. Following up on the work of the 1833 committee, in 1834 the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness deposed witnesses from around the country, who gave further testimony about the general dissipation that had followed the Beer Act. Edwin Chadwick, a member of Parliamentary committees on factory labor and the poor laws, reported how "'the workman when he comes home from work, in passing through the village where there was formerly only one public-house, has now to run the gauntlet of three or four beer-shops, in each of which are fellow-labourers carousing, who urge him to stay and drink with them'" (Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness 31yf $ t the same session, the Temperance worker Joseph Livesey related how he had long been This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 111 in the practice of visiting the poor on Sunday mornings, which had given him occasion to note the significant increase in levels of drunkenness since the appearance of beer houses (89-92yf . Perhaps the most interesting trend in the 1834 testimonies, however, is the number of witnesses who suggested that the Beer Act had not only created beer houses, but had also precipitated the conversion of traditional pubs into "gin palaces." Witness after witness detailed a pattern in which competition from beer houses drove publicans to remodel their taverns or inns into extravagant gin palaces. The glamour of these new establishments, according to most accounts, lured in curious laborers, which led to another wave of gin-drinking. In the end, then, rather than turning workers away from gin, the Beer Act had only increased the amount of spirits being consumed by the working class. The most succinct testimony concerning this trend is that of Robert Edwards Broughton, a London barrister and magistrate, who explained, "In the course of things, [beer houses] very much interfered with the business of the regular publicans, and the capital laid out by the original houses was materially wasted and damaged, and therefore the persons are driven, many of them as a matter of necessity, to try those schemes which should retrieve them, or prevent them from failing, and that is the cause of a great number of what are called in the newspapers gin-palaces. The old public-houses, where a man could have his steak dressed, and sit down and take his ale, are extinct; they are obliged to convert them into splendid houses, and sell gin at the bar." {Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness 14-15yf As Broughton implied, whereas the only enticements of the beer house tended to be the company and the drink, the gin palace offered workers an escape from reality, complete with hired musicians, comfortable surroundings, and strong drink. Observing the rapid proliferation of gin palaces following the Beer Act, in 1835 Dickens wrote "Gin Shops," an essay he eventually included in Sketches by Boz. In this piece, Dickens describes how the fashion for ostentatiously decorating one's shop had begun with the haberdashers and drapers of London but had recently spread "with tenfold violence" to the city's publicans. Trying to build the most extravagant gin palace yet, publicans had taken to "knocking down all the old public houses, and depositing splendid man sions, stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and illuminated clocks, at the corner of every street" (182yf 7 K H D O O X U H R I V X F K H G L I L F H V I R U Z R U N H U V L V S H U K D S s best captured in another commentary from 1835, Cruikshank's The Gin Juggarnath, Or, the Worship of the Great Spirit of the Age (Figure 1yf : L W K G D U N F O R X G V J D W K H U L Q g ominously in the background, Cruikshank's gaudy gin palace stands as a beacon for the drunken masses, who throng forward to partake of its splendors. As if the scene weren't already self-explanatory, Cruikshank includes a caption, warning that the Gin Juggarnath's "Devotees destroy themselves ? It's progress is marked with desolation, misery and crime." Concluding that the Beer Act was at least partially responsible for the rise of the gin palace and a number of other social ills, the Select Committee on Drunkenness issued a report in 1834 calling for a major crackdown on beer houses. This report demonstrates the extent to which the new beer law was already being recognized as a turning point in the behavior of English laborers. Rather than condemning drunkenness as a vice prevalent This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 118 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Figure 1. George Cruikshank, "The Gin Juggarnath," 1835. Etching, from William Bates, George Cruikshank: The Artist, the Humorist, and the Man (London: Houlston and Sons, 1879yf % H W Z H H n 56-57. among all ranks of society, the Committee's report focuses explicitly on the working class, going so far as to maintain that "the vice of Intoxication has been for some years past on the decline in the higher and middle ranks of society; but has increased within the same period among the labouring classes" (Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness iiiyf , Q W K H & R P P L W W H H V D V V H V V P H Q W W K H F U L V L V R I Z R U N L Q J F O D V V G U X Q N H Q Q H V s had reached such a point that it now constituted a distinct threat to the nation's economic well-being. Across the country, one work day in six was reportedly being lost to drunken ness (vyf D Q G D O O W R O G W K H & R P P L W W H H F R Q F O X G H G W K D W W K H U H W D U G D W L R Q R I L P S U R Y H P H Q t caused by the excessive use of Intoxicating Drinks, may be fairly estimated at little short of fifty millions sterling per annum" (viyf . Based on findings such as these, in 1834 Parliament conceded that "much Evil" had arisen from the creation of beer houses and determined to make amends by revising the Act of 1830 ("An Act to amend an Act"yf 7 K H Q H Z O D Z L Q F U H D V H G W K H D Q Q X D O E H H U V K R p licensing fee from two to three guineas, granted police unlimited rights to inspect beer shops for fugitives, and required beer-sellers to obtain a "Certificate of Good Character" This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 119 signed by six rate-payers in their district.5 The most radical aspect of the 1834 Act, however, came in its division of beer shops into two types: those that could serve drinks on-site and those that could only sell "take-out" beer. According to the dictates of the new law, beer-sellers with an on-site license were to post a sign above their door declaring "To be drunk on the Premises." The potential ambiguity in this wording provoked Richard Polwhele to write "Beershops," another satirical poem from the era that suggests the extent to which the Beer Act had become a favorite subject of popular discourse: Whether Beershops encourage or not inebriety, Of opinions, it seems, there has been a variety. But, unless he would fly in the face of an Act, (The product, too true, of the crazy or cracktyf The Lord or the villein, will hail kidliwinks, An honester subject the deeper he drinks; And a sot tho' he be, who can fancy the blame is his, Required by the law "to be drunk on the premises?" Unlike James Smith, who in the previously quoted poem mocks the doomsday rhetoric of the Temperance crowd, Polwhele sees the nation's lawmakers as being the most deserving target of ridicule. Suggesting that the Beer Act of 1834 could only have proceeded from the "crazy or crackt," Polwhele questions the competence of a legislative body that attempts to curb drunkenness by posting signs in beer shops advising laborers "to be drunk on the premises." Cruikshank also noticed the potential humor in the new signs, drawing a caricature of workers who had become "'Drunk' ? according to Act of Parliament" (Figure 2yf . Considering Polwhele's and Cruikshank's mockery of the Act of 1834, it comes as little surprise that the new law ultimately did little to calm the storm over beer shops. That the original Beer Act of 1830 continued to be viewed as a pivotal event in English cultural life even after the Act of 1834 is manifest in an 1838 Manchester pamphlet debate. The participants in this dispute were two local citizens: "An Inhabitant of Manchester," who not-so-artfully attempts to disguise his actual identity as a publican, and John Hamer, one of the new class of beer-sellers. The first shot in the battle came from the Inhabitant, who begins his pamphlet with the sweeping claim that "if ever public opinion was unanimous upon a parliamentary measure, it is in its condemnation" of the Beer Act of 1830 (3yf + e proceeds to suggest that publicans and beer-sellers alike were on the verge of financial collapse as a result of the competition the Beer Act had introduced. Furthermore, he argues that beer shops had quickly established themselves as hubs for England's under world. In the pamphlet's most agitated passage, the Inhabitant maintains, "The Beer Act has planted the source of vice at every man's door. As if drunkenness was not before sufficiently prevalent, that Act has sent for 40,000 missionaries to inculcate it. Under its influence, the most odious exhibitions of indecency have acquired a locomotive power, by which they have penetrated every lane, alley, and street" (9yf . Hamer's relatively polished reply to the Inhabitant's "malignant and scurrilous at tack" addresses his antagonist's arguments point by point. From Hamer's perspective, by ending the tyranny of magistrates and brewers, lowering prices, and improving the quality This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 120 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Figure 2. George Cruikshank, "To Be Drunk on the Premises," c. 1834. Illustration, from George Cruikshank, Four Hundred Humorous Illustrations (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, 1895yf , of England's beer, the Act of 1830 had accomplished all of its original purposes (5yf . Significantly, though, the only point from the Inhabitant's pamphlet that Hamer sidesteps is the link between the rise of beer shops and the increase in levels of working-class drunkenness. Perhaps perceiving that public opinion on this matter was firmly set, Hamer chooses first to express how strongly he "deplores" the "great national evil" of drunken ness and then to deflect a portion of the blame away from beer houses and toward "those public-houses which are regularly the scenes of midnight revelry and dissipation" (16yf , n the end, Hamer's inability to dissociate the beer house from working-class drunkenness suggests that in the late 1830s even a beer-seller had little hope of disproving what most middle- and upper-class Britons had come to accept as an established fact ? that the Beer Act of 1830 had had a disastrous impact on the behavior of England's laborers. V While the conversations from the 1830s about the Beer Act's effects are certainly important, the Act's real legacy comes through the continued prominence it held in the This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 121 discourse on working-class drunkenness for decades to come. Even after the growth rate of beer shops began to decline in the early 1840s, the beer shop remained a prominent symbol of working-class degeneracy in the discourse of the privileged classes. For several generations to come, middle- and upper-class Britons would remember how seemingly overnight the beer house went from being non-existent to being conspicuously present on nearly every block of the average English town. Given this memorable explosion of drinking establishments, 1830 seemed an obvious (and conveniently roundyf G D W H I R U W K e beginning of the most recent phase in working-class history. In surveying the plight of England's poor during the 1840s, both Friedrich Engels and Henry Mayhew devoted a significant amount of space to what they saw as the trail of drunkenness that followed the Beer Act. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844yf ( Q J H O V Q R W H V K R Z E H H U V K R S V K D G E H F R P H W K H K X E V R I 0 D Q F K H V W H U V V O X P V . This was not due to the elegance of these houses or the comforts they provided, but because the poor "are deprived of all enjoyments except sexual indulgence and drunken ness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command" (129yf : K L O H ( Q J H O V D V V X U H V K L V U H D G H U V W K D W K H D G Y R F D W H s neither promiscuity nor intoxication, he also makes it clear that the blame for working class drunkenness lay not with the workers themselves, but with the nation's leaders and the system they had created. In ratifying the Beer Act, he argues, Parliament "facilitated the spread of intemperance by bringing a beerhouse, so to say, to everybody's door" (152yf . Although he stops short of arguing, as some Temperance workers were wont to do, that the Beer Act was little more than a conspiracy of the rich to subjugate the poor (Harrison, "Pubs" 183yf ( Q J H O V L Q V L V W V W K D W W K H S R R U V K R X O G Q R W E H K H O G D F F R X Q W D E O H I R U F R Q G L W L R Q s over which they have no control.7 In this era's other monumental survey of working-class life, London Labour and the London Poor (1849-52yf 0 D \ K H Z U H F R U G V Q X P H U R X V W D O H V R I I D P L O L H V R Q W K H E U L Q N R f starvation because of the ever-present appeal of the local beer shop. The typical pattern is for a husband to receive his wages on Saturday night and to have spent them all on drink by Sunday morning (423-24yf 2 Q H Z R U N L Q J F O D V V Z R P D Q R E V H U Y H V W K D W L Q S R V W % H H r Act London, "a shilling goes further with a poor couple that's sober than two shillings does with a drunkard" (127yf 2 Y H U D O O 0 D \ K H Z G H V F U L E H V D S R W H Q W L D O O \ F D W D V W U R S K L F W U H Q d among the poor of beer shops leading to drunkenness, drunkenness leading to poverty, poverty leading to children on the streets, and children on the streets leading to robbery, prostitution, and the general decay of English society (162yf : K H U H D V ( Q J H O V V H H V a proletarian revolution as the only solution to the cycles of poverty, Mayhew suggests that the most effectual means of reducing the poor rates would be providing "wholesome amusements" as alternatives to drink (41-42yf , Q 0 D \ K H Z V W K L Q N L Q J L I Z R U N L Q J S H R S O e have alternatives to "the conversation, warmth, and merriment of the beer-shop" (17yf , they will be able to save their wages and rise from the squalor into which they have sunk.8 To the extent that Mayhew's comments on the evils of drunkenness derive from his participation in the Temperance Movement, London Labour and the London Poor be longs to a large body of Temperance literature designed to counteract or overturn the Beer Act. Perhaps the figure most responsible for the dissemination of the Temperance message during the mid-nineteenth century was Cruikshank, whose Gin Juggernath was This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 122 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE just one of many images he created to convince the nation of the dangers of drink. Cruikshank's extremely popular series The Bottle (1847yf Z K L F K W H O O V R I D I D W K H U V D G G L F W L R n to drink and how it reduces his family from relative comfort to misery, murder, and insanity, was priced at a shilling so that, as Cruikshank explained, "'it might be within the reach of the working classes'" (qtd. in Evans and Evans 127yf . A year after the remarkable success of The Bottle, Cruikshank produced a sequel entitled The Drunkard's Children. As had been the case with The Bottle, The Drunkard's Children was accompanied by a Charles Mackay poem that added details to the story found in Cruikshank's drawings. One scene from The Drunkard's Children that Mackay develops at some length is how the drunkard's son, Edward, receives lessons in debauch ery amid "the 'Beer-shop's' wild uproarious throng." Mackay's poem invokes all of the increasingly stereotypical images of beer-shop culture, as is evidenced in the fourth stanza of Part III: There Ben, half-drunken, bounets drunken Hal, There Jack, that swept the crossing all the day, Calls for his pipe and pot: there joyous Sal Takes from her prostrate Joe his "yard of clay"; Places her bonnet, decked in ribbons gay, Upon his head, and sports his fantail hat; And Costermonger Dick attempts a lay From the "Flash Songster," dull, obscene, and flat All noises mixed in one, songs, laughter, shrieks, and chat. For most middle- and upper-class Victorians, for whom beer shops were socially off-limits, images such as these provided the only access they had to beer-shop society. Not surprisingly, then, beer shops increasingly became favorite symbols of the moral depths to which the English working class had sunk. Typical of the mid-nineteenth-century rhetoric surrounding beer shops and the Beer Act is the Reverend J. M. Calvert's 1852 sermon The Impropriety of Religious Characters Keeping Beer-Houses. As his title suggests, Calvert's general message is that, no matter how religiously inclined, Christians who sell beer from their homes inevitably fall under condemnation for bringing drunkenness to their commu nities and, more deplorably, vice into their homes. When addressing the specific effects of the Beer Act, Calvert falls back on what had by 1852 become the conventional ways of assessing the law's effects. Near the beginning of his sermon, he reflects, "I am just old enough to remember the law being passed which gave leave to open houses of an inferior character for the sale of beer and porter; and well do I recollect the change for the worse which took place in the village where I then resided, after the opening of two or three of these Beerhouses" (4yf . By 1864 public distress over the Act of 1830's ruinous effects had become so wide spread that a group of concerned citizens organized the "Special Committee of Temper ance Reformers for Procuring the Repeal of the Beer Act of 1830." Five years later, the Convocation of Canterbury published a Report by the Committee on Intemperance, which demonstrates the extent to which the discourse surrounding the Beer Act remained virtually unchanged since the Select Committee hearings of the early 1830s. For example, one clergyman quoted in this report maintains, This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 123 "If I am asked to point out the great cause and encouragement of Intemperance, I have no hesitation in ascribing it in a great measure to that most disastrous Act of Parliament which set Beer-Shops on foot. It has inflicted a terrible curse on this country. I would sooner see a dozen Public-Houses in a parish than one Beer-Shop. I believe no greater boon could be conferred on the working classes than to repeal that Act." (23yf Another veteran minister recollected, '"Many families in which the wives and children were formerly well clad and apparently well fed have since the introduction of the Beer-Shops been in rags and poverty-stricken'" (25yf . Records from the numerous Parliamentary hearings on drunkenness held during the 1870s are filled with similar claims about the Beer Act of 1830. In 1872, for instance, several magistrates, constables, and physicians told the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards that the simple solution to England's drunkenness problem would be reducing or altogether eliminating beer houses (12-13,136,176yf 6 L P L O D U W H V W L P R Q L H V R F F X U W K U R X J h out the three reports issued in 1877 by the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance. Speaking before this committee, Henry William Schneider, the Mayor of Burrow-in-Furness, called the beer shop "the very worst style of house that is licensed in England; it is impossible to have anything so bad" (2: 333yf . Another witness, the Reverend Canon Ellison, a former chairman of the Church of England Temperance Society, conceded that the original intentions of the Beer Act were "essentially and thoroughly good" (3: 84yf 7 K H $ F W V U H V X O W V K R Z H Y H U K D G E H H Q Q R W K L Q g short of disastrous in his estimation. According to a statistical report Ellison prepared for the Committee, between 1824 and 1874 there was an 88yb L Q F U H D V H L Q ( Q J O D Q G V S R S X O a tion but a 92yb L Q F U H D V H L Q W K H F R Q V X P S W L R Q R I E H H U D \b increase in the consumption of British spirits, a 152yb L Q F U H D V H L Q W K H F R Q V X P S W L R Q R I I R U H L J Q V S L U L W V D Q G D \b increase in the consumption of wine {Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance 3:85yf ) U R P ( O O L V R Q V S H U V S H F W L Y H W K e Beer Act of 1830 had sparked a general revolution in the way all alcoholic beverages were marketed and distributed in England. Simply put, the single most significant cause of England's drunkenness problem in 1877, as Ellison saw it, was the Beer Act that had been passed forty-seven years earlier. Although Ellison doesn't appear to have noticed, by 1877 what he had long been campaigning for ? the demise of the English beer house ? was already underway. The first major blow to the common beer house came in 1869, when Parliament placed the licensing of beer-sellers under the control of magistrates, effectively reversing one of the most radical elements of the Act of 1830. At approximately the same time, the country's major brewers began aggressively purchasing beer shops and pubs and ex panding their distribution networks. Under the watchful eye of both the magistrate and the large brewer, the distinctively working-class character of the beer house gradually disappeared (Clark 338, Gourvish and Wilson 19-20yf % H F D X V H R I W K L V K L V W R U L D Q V R f British brewing have traditionally defined the "beer shop era" as stretching from 1830 until roughly 1870. During this forty-year span, the beer shop undeniably had a profound effect on the English cultural landscape. For the poor, the rise of the beer house impacted where they congregated, what they drank, and how much beer they consumed. At the same time, the Beer Act also influenced the drinking customs of the middle and upper classes. In the This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 124 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE years following 1830, the social codes for what respectable Englishmen could drink and where they could drink it changed dramatically. Whereas in the early nineteenth century beer was a common form of refreshment for the wealthy, from roughly 1830 forward, tea, spirits, and wine increasingly replaced beer in the homes of the well-to-do (Davidoff and Hall 385, Pool 212yf 0 R U H R Y H U G X U L Q J W K L V V D P H H U D / R Q G R Q J H Q W O H P H Q E H J D Q W R G R W K H L r drinking at home, establishing a trend that would eventually spread to the provinces. As Harrison documents, "By the late 1830s the village inn, where all classes drank together, had become a nostalgic memory ? even if it had never been as widespread as its admirers imagined. By the 1850s no respectable urban Englishman entered an ordinary public-house" (Drink 46yf 9 In the end, the Beer Act of 1830, a law initially designed to ease class tensions, only exacerbated the rifts between the various ranks of society. On one level, the Beer Act literally isolated the rich from the poor, replacing the public house of the eighteenth century ? which in many ways had been the embodiment of the Habermasian public sphere ? with the exclusively working-class beer house. Although no laws prohibited the rich from frequenting a beer house or the poor from drinking at an inn, the Beer Act intentionally made the beer house the most convenient and inexpensive place for the poor to do their drinking. In addition to increasing the actual space between the rich and the poor, the Beer Act also widened the imaginary gap separating the classes. Cumulatively, the myriad attacks on the Beer Act and the beer shops it produced only reinforced stereotypes of the poor. During an era when wealthy Britons increasingly prided them selves on their domestic virtues, the discourse surrounding the Beer Act suggested that the working poor were moving in the opposite direction, abandoning the simple comforts of the home for the revelry of the beer shop. The ultimate legacy of this law, then, was much more than the beer binge of the 1830s. In significant ways, the Beer Act of 1830 helped shape how the rich viewed the poor and, undoubtedly, how the poor came to view themselves. Brigham Young University NOTES 1. At this early point in my argument, I should clarify some of the terms I will be using frequently. Technically speaking, a "publican" is anyone who operates a "public house." A "public house," in the term's broadest sense, could be any site where alcohol is legally consumed on the premises. In the debates surrounding the Beer Act, however, the term "public house" was narrowed to refer primarily to the old-style establishments, such as taverns and inns. In contrast to beer houses, which were generally quite spartan and were only licensed to sell beer, public houses tended to be more comfortably furnished and could sell all types of alcoholic beverages. Another distinction which grew out of the Beer Act was between the publican, who operated a public house, and the beer-seller, who operated a beer shop. Occasionally the generic meanings of public house and publican were still used after 1830, but for the sake of clarity, in this essay I follow the tradition of speaking of public houses and beer houses, and publicans and beer-sellers, as mutually exclusive categories. Two terms I will use interchangeably are "beer shop" and "beer house," since in the nineteenth century there was generally no distinction between the two. In various regions of This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness 125 the country, unique nicknames developed for beer-only establishments. In the Midlands, for instance, beer shops were often called "Tom and Jerries," while in the West they were commonly known as "kiddle-a-winks" or "kidliwinks" (Clark 336yf . 2. While nearly every historical account of the Beer Act of 1830 discusses the role theories of free trade played in the law's passage, Gourvish and Wilson and Harrison provide particu larly detailed narratives of the principal figures involved in the debates and the history behind the issues at hand. See Gourvish and Wilson 3-22 and Harrison, Drink 64-86. 3. According to census figures, 8,893,000 people lived in England and Wales in 1801. By 1831, the total population had risen to 13,897,000, a 64yb L Q F U H D V H 0 L W F K H O O \f. 4. In an 1834 pamphlet on the Improvement of the Working People, Francis Place implies that many crusaders against working-class drunkenness manipulate statistics to support their arguments. According to Place, if statisticians were to study patterns of consumption among the different classes, they might discover that the incidences of drunkenness per capita were just as high among the rich as the poor. "When a man in easy circumstances gets drunk," he argues, it is either at his own house or at the house of a friend, whence he goes home in a coach and is not exposed to the public gaze. A working man gets drunk at a public-house and staggers along the streets; here he is seen by every body, and is inconsiderately taken as a fair example of his class; and thus, through the occa sional drunkard, or the drunken vagabond, the whole body are stigmatized and condemned as drunkards, when in fact the number of those who are really drunkards is, when compared with the whole body, a very small number. (21yf 5. Supposedly to compensate for these new restrictions, the Beer Act of 1834 allowed beer-sell ers to remain open until 11 P.M. upon approval from the local magistrate. As beer-sellers later complained, however, the magistrates, still stinging from the limits the original Beer Act had placed on their authority, often abused this new power, forcing some beer shops to close as early as 9 P.M., an hour before the closing time mandated in the Act of 1830. Of the 1834 Act, James Bishop complained in 1838, These circumstances left the Beerseller in a position much worse than that in which he was previously. He has to pay an additional price for his license, and to give additional guarantee for good behaviour .... [T]he very hour, for the attainment of which he had agreed to pay an increase of fifty per cent, upon the price of his license, was made subject to the control and caprice of those, by whom he is looked upon as an innovator, and who cannot be unbiassed [sic] thereby. (16yf 6. See note 1 on alternative names for beer shops. 7. To corroborate his opinion that working-class drunkenness is the direct result of poverty and is thus morally excusable, Engels later cites two physicians, a Dr. Hawkins and a Dr. Kay, who subscribe to the same theory (178,193yf . 8. However convinced Mayhew may have been that the increased availability of "whole amuse ments" would solve the drink problem, he did acknowledge that on occasion the squalor of working-class dwellings left them little alternative but to escape through drink. At one point he records a conversation with a tenant of a particularly run-down boarding house who claims that drinking is the only way to tolerate life amid such conditions. This poor man insists, '"You must get half-drunk, or your money for your bed is wasted. There's so much rest owing to you, after a hard day; and bugs and bad air'll prevent its being paid, if you don't This content downloaded from 129.25.131.235 on Fri, 03 Feb 2017 03:53:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 126 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE lay in some stock of beer, or liquor of some sort, to sleep on'" (115yf 6 X F K D S U D J P D W L c approach to drink echoes the sentiment expressed in an oft-repeated working-class maxim of this era: "Drink is the quickest way out of Manchester" (Shiman 3yf . 9. The penalties for transgressing the new class-based drinking codes are laid out in several literary texts of this era. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for instance, we learn exactly how taboo it was for a member of the privileged classes to drink working-class beverages in a working class setting. In the process of attempting to secure his place in the will of his wealthy aunt, James Crawley makes the unpardonable blunder of getting drunk at a lowly tavern. As expected, Miss Crawley subsequently disinherits him, leading the narrator to explain, "Had he drunk a dozen bottles of claret, the old spinster could have pardoned him. Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan drank claret. Gentlemen drank claret. But eighteen glasses of gin consumed among boxers in an ignoble pothouse ? it was an odious crime and not to be pardoned readily" (377yf . By the time Hardy published Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874, the doctrine of separate drinks for separate classes had become unmistakably clear. At the harvest home celebration in Chapter XXXVI of this novel, the reckless Sergeant Troy decides to treat his laborers to brandy instead of their usual beer. Realizing the danger in this, Bathsheba implores her husband, "No ? don't give it to them ? pray don't Frank. It will only do them harm" (252, ch.36yf 7 U R \ S H U V L V W V K R Z H Y H U D Q G E H I R U H O R Q J D O O K D Y H S D V V H G R X W I U R m too much brandy. After describing this scene, the narrator explains, "Having from their youth up been entirely unaccustomed to any liquor stronger than cider or mild ale, it was no wonder that they had succumbed one and all with extraordinary uniformity after the lapse of about an hour" (256, ch. 36yf . WORKS CITED "An Act to amend an Act passed in the First Year of His present Majesty, to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cide by Retail in England." 1834. Bishop, James. A Defence of the New Beer Trade. London: Dean and Munday, 1838. Calvert, J. M. The Impropriety of Religious Characters Keeping Beer-Houses. Sheffield: J. Blurton, 1852. Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830. London: Longman, 1983. Cobbett, William. The Political Register. 27 March 1830. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Dickens, Charles. "Gin Shops." 1835. 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