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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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