The Pleasures and Problems of Drink—Introduction

The articles in this collection and the visual resources they discuss are testaments to how alcohol weaves its way into the fabric of our cultural history. Alcohol has for thousands of years been the dominant drug of western society: a substance which plays a role in rituals of socialization, the construction of both collective and individual identities, and even philosophical and religious discourse. Look at many of the touchstones of cultural production and you are likely to find alcohol somewhere: from Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (painted 1495–1498) to Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), alcohol appears in its various roles as an agent of transformation, a source of solace, an engine of social engagement, and, of course, a cause of destruction and despair. Alcohol is intriguing because it is both ubiquitous and ambivalent: it occupies both the center and the margins of culture. In terms of physiological effects, there is little difference between the glass of champagne raised at a wedding toast, the pint of beer in the pub, and the bottle of cheap vodka downed on the street. What differ are context, belief, and signification. Alcohol is a chemical that embodies culture, a strange substance indeed.

Alcohol, as we know, has been a feature of social and cultural life for millennia. However, in the West especially, the social functions and status of alcohol began to change as new technologies of production and distribution were developed from the early modern period onward. The widespread adoption of hops as a preservative in brewing, the development of more efficient production techniques, and, critically, the development of distillation, led to changes in drinking cultures in Europe which, in their turn, triggered new political concerns and forms of control.1 In Britain, licensing by local magistrates was established in the mid-sixteenth century, and licensing powers were widely extended in the course of the seventeenth century.2 These developments not only reflected changes in production and retail, but also social changes, such as urbanization and the expansion of the “laboring classes.” Since alcohol consumption was so tied to everyday social existence, this could be policed in part through the regulation of alcohol. What is more, disparate concerns over the threats posed by new social formations were often articulated through concerns over drink and drunkenness. William Hogarth's Gin Lane (1751), for instance, is as much about poverty and urban chaos as the effects of drink.3 Alcohol has always been and continues to provide a powerful medium for the expression of social anxiety.

The perception of alcohol as a social menace triggered the great temperance movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As this special issue highlights, temperance organizations in Russia, the UK, and the US each used rich visual cultures/resources, with distinctive temperance iconographies, which changed over time. Harry Levine has suggested some reasons for the emergence of “temperance cultures” in Anglophone and Northern European contexts, and it is indeed true that such cultures offer a rich focus to examine the “problems” of drink as well as its “pleasures.”4 Though often viewed today as the preserve of finger-wagging naysayers, temperance was, in fact, a complex, diverse, and global social movement. It is, perhaps, best compared to the environmentalist movement today: a coalition, which, while sharing certain core values, incorporates an enormous diversity of opinion and perspective. Temperance meant many things to many different people. For some, it simply meant voluntarily electing to drink moderately, for others the complete prohibition of all trade in alcohol. Temperance drew together conservative Christian moralists, utopian socialists, pragmatic liberals, nationalists, abolitionists, feminists, and anticolonial agitators. It cut across otherwise coherent ideological boundaries: in Britain, leading liberal thinkers clashed over the question of temperance reform, while in America, prohibition drew together nativist fears over the cultural impact of German brewers with socialist anger at the exploitative nature of the drinks industry. Temperance created some unexpected coalitions, often dividing the drinks industry. In France, for instance, wine producers took up the fight against absinthe as World War I broke out; in Britain beer producers joined forces with temperance groups to lobby against liberalization of the wine trade in 1860.5 By focusing on just three national cultures of temperance/temperance iconographies, this special issue aims to kick-start the process of revaluating a widespread cause, which became such an influential social, cultural, and political force in its time.

The combination of impact and appeal across social strata made visual images an important element of Victorian temperance discourse. Organized temperance in Britain had its earliest roots in a broadly middle-class anti-spirits movement that sprang up in the late 1820s, following the lead set by groups such as the American Temperance Society (founded in 1826). However, it was soon supplemented by an indigenous, radical, and, indeed, utopian, teetotal movement whose social base was the skilled working classes of northern and Scottish industrial cities. The novel contribution of the Victorian teetotal movement to public debates on alcohol was the claim, supported by the “total abstinence” pledge, that all drinking was wrong, not just the consumption of spirits or drinking-to-get-drunk. As Hogarth's Beer Street, the companion engraving to Gin Lane, demonstrated, earlier anti-alcohol social campaigns were partial in their targets (although the principle of total abstinence was a feature of some medical writing in Georgian England). Teetotalism, by contrast, sought to overcome the inconsistency, not to mention hypocrisy, of the rather patrician anti-spirits movement by making the radical argument that all drinking was essentially damaging, and that society would be transformed for the better if alcohol were to be abandoned. Joseph Livesey (1794–1884), the Preston-born “father of temperance” and a tireless writer, speaker, and campaigner for teetotalism in Britain, frequently drew on John Bunyan's (1628–1688) metaphor of “Eye-gate” and “Ear-gate,” advising advocates to employ the visual whenever possible. Speaking to a sometimes illiterate audience, but also seeking to distil its messages into memorable, high impact forms, Victorian teetotalism developed a visual language that captured its key messages: that each drink was a step on a slippery slope; that habitual drinking caused both destitution and domestic chaos; and that the victims of alcohol were not just the drinker, but also those around them.

The politics of temperance and of alcohol, more broadly, are complex precisely because alcohol is both ubiquitous and ambiguous. For some, alcohol is a source of social pleasure and drinking an assertion of personal freedom. For others, alcohol is a habit-forming drug that creates an array of detrimental social effects, even allowing for the pleasure it can occasionally bring. Alcohol is also a market commodity and, as such, tied inextricably to debates on political economy and trade regulation. Indeed, at the heart of much of the debate on alcohol—both historically and today—is the question of whether alcohol is an “ordinary” commodity or not.6 In 1829, an editorial in the Times, written in favor of licensing liberalization, stated that “the power of selling beer [ought] to be no more obstructed or restrained than that of selling potatoes”; by contrast, some years later, at the height of debates on the legitimacy or otherwise of alcohol prohibition in the UK, Liberal lawyer Samuel Pope (1826–1901) wrote, also in the Times, that “the appetite for drink is not like any other appetite. Indulgence is followed not by satiety but by increased craving.”7

Although narrowly related to debates in the UK, these competing claims capture the underpinning tensions, which drove Victorian temperance and continue to drive debates on alcohol policy today. The question goes to the heart of modern, liberal culture: should I be free to drink as I wish so long as I do no harm to others? Or, more broadly, should the state restrict the right of everyone to drink alcohol on the grounds that it is abused by some? It is no coincidence that John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the great theorist of Victorian liberalism, was drawn publicly into debates on alcohol, since those debates hinged on the “harm principle” that he set out in his book On Liberty: that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”8

To a moderate drinker who has suffered little worse than a hangover as a consequence of drinking, it may seem that Mill's harm principle should self-evidently apply. However, to those affected directly by alcohol addiction, or those who have suffered alcohol-related harms themselves, the answer may not be so clear. What is “freedom” where habit-forming drugs are concerned? This was a question put to Mill by his contemporaries in the temperance movement, and it remains an unresolved question today. A second question concerns how harm to others is defined. While assault or excessive expenditure may be simple to identify, many alcohol-related harms are not immediately obvious: the broader costs to the economy arising from absenteeism at work, for instance, or the health costs arising from long-term physical damage. Again, these concerns ran through Victorian debates on alcohol and continue to shape the landscape on this issue today.

“Freedom” and “choice” are thus the themes that inform all the essays contained in this special issue. From a temperance perspective, the freedom to drink, what that freedom costs to others, and the extent to which the state can legitimately curtail that liberty were at the heart of the “drink question.” From a trade perspective, the assumption has always been that moderate drinkers should be free to enjoy alcohol—and yet the rights of the consumer, and power to choose, also operate in this domain. Indeed, the liberalization of licensing laws in Britain in 1830—which, arguably, crystallized the nascent temperance movement and gave impetus to teetotalism—were a consequence of widespread anger at restrictive practices in the brewing trade. Adulteration was also a long-running concern of both consumers and politicians in the nineteenth century. The right to drink a decent beer in pleasant surroundings was serviced both through legislation and competition, and both contributed to moves within the trade to encourage a culture of choice and taste as a means of encouraging custom.

Fiona Fisher's paper takes the reader to the drinking environment of the London public house in the late nineteenth century, where “modernity” could be visually inscribed in several ways. Fisher shows how the publicans and brewers used visual strategies to counter concerns about their wares. The sparking, clear, and healthy qualities ascribed to the appearance of beer, ironically, recall the illustrations of crystal streams and fountains of water in temperance propaganda. Here, we see sections of the trade seeking to resist temperance accusations that the pub was a site of exploitation and despair by positing it, instead, as a place where taste and cultural aspiration could be freely articulated.

The illusion of freedom presented by alcohol is another theme. At the heart of rhetoric of organized teetotalism and the prohibitionist movements that followed, was the claim that drinking was merely the illusion of freedom: that each drink was not a step towards sociality and pleasure, but rather a step towards compulsion, habituation, and despair. Ultimately, how to prevent people from beginning that journey became the critical question. For early teetotal campaigners, it was imperative that the decision to forego drink should be taken voluntarily, as a consequence of individual moral choice. For later prohibitionists, by contrast, the matter was too pressing—and alcohol too capable of destroying the reason, on which freedom of choice rested— to risk leaving it to the individual. Prohibition was, by consensus, an infringement on individual freedom, and many leading Victorian liberal thinkers objected vehemently to it (John Stuart Mill described alcohol prohibition as a “monstrous theory”). For their part, however, supporters of prohibition on both sides of the Atlantic were prepared to tackle the individual freedom argument head-on. The pleasures of alcohol, they reasoned, were so greatly outweighed by its harms that, on the grand scale of social wellbeing, the price paid by moderate drinkers was small by comparison. Furthermore, because alcohol created habit, it simply could not be treated like other commodities: in the case of ordinary commodities, consumption produced satiety; in the case of alcohol, the opposite was true.

A further solution was found in Proverbs 22:6, to “Train up a child in the way he should go,” and the children's movement, the Band of Hope, can be seen as the most successful temperance movement in the UK, claiming over 3 million child members each year between 1897 and 1914, and surviving from 1847 to 1995. Annemarie McAllister's study of the visual means by which this organization spread its message and trained adults and children as teetotal missionaries highlights the pioneering visual tools it developed and employed. Education of a different kind is explored by Christopher Williams in his discussion of the complex politics of the pleasures and problems of drink in Soviet Russia. He shows the ways in which a monolithic state sought to control heavy drinking, perceived as an economic and social problem, by education rather than legislation—and apparently failed. The enshrinement of vodka drinking as a cultural feature of Russian life was something even a force as powerful as the Soviet state could not eradicate.

Alcohol, so many temperance campaigners argued, was also deterministic: fall under the spell of the bottle, they argued, and you lose control over your own fate. Frank Murray's article carries out a detailed exploration of the “road to ruin” trope and the development and uses of the contrast device from its origins in early material. His discovery that subject matter and format, the single illustration depicting drunkenness, remained the norm in a significant proportion of illustrated temperance propaganda for over fifty years shows the power of these narratives. The narrative of the “drunkard's progress,” common in both British and American temperance discourse, was a story of enslavement and a justification for state-sponsored prevention at the point of first drink. Prohibitionism took the belief that every drink was potentially the first step to habituation and combined it with the political principle that the state had a duty to protect its citizens from harming both themselves and others. It took very seriously the idea that the habits created by drink were so powerful as to necessitate radical preventative measures.

Prohibitionism was also importantly a running critique of the laissez-faire economic principles that were gaining ground in Britain and America throughout the nineteenth century. In an innovative argument, Guy Jordan traces the wider context of intemperance in a case study of Thomas Cole's cycle of five landscape paintings, The Course of Empire (1836). Here, alcohol and financial speculation, both holding an intoxicating power, are seen within a context of contemporary medical opinion as febrile and self-destructive excess. Free-trade economics rested on the notion that the role of the state was to facilitate the freedom of individuals and the market, with other social agents taking responsibility for ameliorating the more damaging consequences of those liberties. Many early teetotalers were also supporters of free trade, which is why they believed the “annihilation of alcohol,” as Livesey put it, could and should be achieved through individual choice.9

Prohibitionists, by contrast, saw the state as having a duty of care which, where necessary, overruled its duty to protect the freedom of the individual. This adoption of the principles of what Isaiah Berlin once termed “positive liberty” explain how both conservative moralists in America and the utopian Bolsheviks of early Soviet Russia could agree on the principle of alcohol control: both felt the state had a duty to protect individuals from their lesser, sinful, or—in the Marxist framing—falsely conscious selves.10 If they could agree on nothing else, they concurred that the Good—and the sustainable—Society was one in which alcohol had no place.

Such grand debates over the relationship between alcohol, the state, and individual freedom receded in the mid-twentieth century for a number of reasons: the rise of medical models of addiction, which placed an emphasis on the diseased drinker, rather than the supply side; the development of postwar consumerist ideology and its commitment to market choice; the globalization of the alcohol trade and the diversification of the market from production to retail. Recently, however, such questions have begun to return to the foreground. In particular, increased awareness of long-term health impacts of alcohol, combined with mounting concerns over the costs of healthcare in developed countries, has brought the question of alcohol regulation back onto the political agenda. With the World Health Organization calling for greater restrictions on both availability and marketing, and with economic interventions such as minimum unit pricing being introduced in both Scotland and England, the time is ripe for a reassessment of how those questions have been framed in the past. The papers in this special issue are an important contribution to that, and their relevance, therefore, extends beyond historical curiosity and into the world we inhabit today.

Acknowledgments

The Heritage Lottery Fund, in the UK, has recognized the importance of temperance to the national heritage by supporting the “Temperance and the Working Class” project, directed by Annemarie McAllister. Exhibitions in Preston and in Manchester (2012–2013) have excited considerable media interest, and to spread the message in a way the temperance pioneers themselves would have approved, materials have been made available around the world in a virtual exhibition at http://www.demondrink.co.uk. Dr. Jennifer Hillman, Research Assistant to this project, has also been of great assistance in the editorial process for this collection of articles.

Notes

Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, eds., The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002); Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History (London: Longman, 1983); Jessica Warner, “Good Help is Hard to Find: A Few Comments about Alcohol and Work in Preindustrial England,” Addiction Research 2, no. 3 (1995): 259–69.

James Nicholls, “Wine, Supermarkets and British Alcohol Policy,” History and Policy: Connecting Historians, Policymakers and the Media, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-110.html.

Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. III: Art and Politics, 1750–1764 (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1993), 26.

Harry G. Levine, “Temperance Cultures: Alcohol as a Problem in Nordic and English-Speaking Cultures,” in Malcom Lader, Griffith Edwards, and D. Colin Drummon, eds., The Nature of Alcohol and Drug-Related Problems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–36.

Jack S. Blocker, David M. Fahey, and Ian R. Tyrrell, Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2003), 251–53; Nicholls, “Wine, Supermarkets and British Alcohol Policy.”

Thomas F. Babor, et al., eds., Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

James Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 90, 117–19.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; West Valley City, UT: Boomer, 2007), xvii.

Joseph Livesey, The Preston Temperance Advocate 4, no. 1 (1837): 2.

See Isaiah Berlin “Two Conceptions of Liberty” (1958), in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217.