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Phil Mellows is a freelance
 journalist living in Brighton 
 


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         The politics of drinking

            
December 5th, 2022


 

 

10 million years of drinking
Alcohol and humans

Beyond the dry month
Interview with Richard Piper, the new head of Alcool Concern

The Carlisle Experiment
100 years since they nationalised
pubs. 

The science of temperance
The story of the Institute of Alcohol Studies

More grey areas than a late Rothko
Off licence bans on superstrength beers

A figure that doesn't add up
The story behind the £21bn
cost of alcohol harm

The Beer Orders
... not just history

Learning from a dry society
Interview with Redemption Bar's Catherine Salway

Bye-Bye Booze Britain?
Young people seem to have gone off the drink...

Strength in Numbers 
Voluntary off-licence bans on strong beers and ciders

More Published Work


A novel approach: writing the dilemmas of drink

If nothing worse than ale happens to us, we are well off.

Wonderfully whimsical as it is taken out of context, Betsey Trotwood’s remark to David Copperfield in Charles Dickens’ eponymous novel, when considered in relation to her plight it uncovers hidden depths.

Betsey is in financial ruins, thanks to the machinations of Uriah Heep, and has, needing a lodging, suddenly appeared at David’s flat. Before bed, he begins preparing her “usual night-draught” when he is interrupted by his aunt.

“Not wine, my dear. Ale.”
“But there is wine here, aunt. And you always have it made of wine.”
“Keep that, in case of sickness,” said my aunt. “We mustn’t use it carelessly, Trot. Ale for me. Half a pint.”

Now, Trot/David (the bewildering play of identities in David Copperfield arguably makes it Dickens’ most interesting novel) has to go out and get the beer. It is an inconvenience, yet the symbolic power of choosing it over wine in Betsey’s cost-of-living crisis overwhelms all that.

And ironically, Heep has indirectly been able to bring her to such shame by exploiting a drink problem. Alcohol courses through the veins of Dickens’ novels like the Thames through his London, a focus for the chaos of life.

Indeed, as Pam Lock makes clear in her new essay,‘Drinking Himself to Death’: The chronic drunkard in British mid-Victorian fiction and culture, by the mid-19th Century fiction had become “a key player in the increasingly diverse public discourses on drinking and drunkenness” energised by “a significant surge of developments in medical interest in alcohol”.

“This new medical and public interest in the consumption of alcohol, combined with the rise of realism in in the 1840s, inspired a wide range of authors to write an unprecedented number of detailed and complex ‘alcoholic’ characters.”

While an unequivocal ‘temperance fiction’ certainly emerged in this period, Lock shows how authors were able to go beyond simple pro- and anti-drink positions to explore the complex play between moral and medical approaches, raising matters of class and, later, gender.

Dickens was himself a strong critic of temperance, believing that drinking was essential to convivial society. Even for him, though, you can have too much of a good thing. The line is crossed somewhere ahead of the point where, like Krook in Bleak House, you might spontaneously combust, and in David Copperfield before Mr Wickfield has drunk himself into the grinding hands of Heep.

At the same time, being able to hold your drink may, for Dickens, signify something sinister. In The Old Curiosity Shop the monstrous Quilp is able to put away prodigious quantities of booze to little apparent effect. In one key scene he deploys his unnatural resistance to gain mastery over the vulnerably drunken Dick Swiveller.

Getting tipsy is a human weakness, a sign of humanity. In an earlier paper, in Transgressive Appetites, Lock focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and notes that the scheming Long John Silver moderates his drinking among the rummed-up shipmates in order to have control.

The point here is that drink and drunks do more than add the texture of the real to these texts. Dickens, along with the other authors Lock deals with, is exploring and testing limits within social contexts. Betsey Trotwood’s insistence on drinking ale rather than wine is determined not so much by practicalities of cost as by the morality of drinking wine when you have lost the status that qualifies you to do that. There is something dishonest about it.

It is an example, among countless others, of how fiction, and in particular the realist novel, provided a holistic approach that enabled authors in the 19th Century to get to grips with the dilemmas of the drink question, the nuances and contradictions that science and religion were less well-equipped to embrace.


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