Alcohol and moral regulation: Public attitudes, spirited measures and Victorian hangovers

Alcohol and moral regulation is the latest addition to an expanding body of research on the long history of drinking cultures and alcohol policy in England. Starting with the 1830 Beer Act, it takes the reader through the rise of temperance, its division into moral suasionist and prohibitionist wings, to increasing controls during World War I, the relaxation of licensing from the early 1960s and the resurgence of public and political interest in the early 2000s. In revisiting this narrative, Yeomans sets out two key propositions. Firstly, he argues that contemporary alcohol policy remains strongly influenced by Victorian evangelicalism and the desire for “moral regulation”; secondly, he suggests research in this area has largely adopted an erroneously “rational” approach in assuming policy ideas simply respond to changes in overall consumption, rather than addressing sociological complexity.

Building on extensive work with newspaper archives, the book gives an overview of the broad drift of policy debates over the last two centuries. It remains committed to the key idea that alcohol control movements are fundamentally rooted in Victorian religious principles, with few other countervailing factors. The argument that temperance owed little to 18th century alcohol control campaigns seems to run counter to recent studies, such as Jessica Warner’s Craze (2003). Similarly, the depiction of Victorian temperance itself as almost universally motivated by religious moralism underplays the key role of progressive, nationalist and, indeed, socialist temperance movements over this period. By focussing on the legacy of evangelicalism, the role of national and international public health theory in the development of contemporary alcohol advocacy is also construed as a secondary influence.

The stated aim of this book is to correct “rationalist” approaches to alcohol history. However, far from being dominated by the naïve assumption that policy thinking simply echoes consumption patterns, most contemporary research on alcohol control movements – dating back to Brian Harrison’s seminal Drink and the Victorians (1971) – has taken as its core subject the multifaceted interaction of social and political contexts in shaping ideas about alcohol. Alcohol and Moral Regulation dwells on the continuities between contemporary alcohol advocacy and one evangelical strain within temperance thought. It, therefore, bolsters the popular perception that alcohol-control movements are, in the main, driven by a desire to tell other people how to behave. However, the notion that temperance was merely religious moralism, and that contemporary alcohol control policies are essentially a hangover of those Victorian values, feels somewhat narrow.

James Nicholls

Alcohol Research UK

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

London, UK

E-mail: [email protected]