The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and CultureFrom Conviviality to Cursed Thirst

The first book-length study of alcohol in Victorian literature and culture

• Represents the first book-length study of alcohol in Victorian fiction and culture
  
• Demonstrates the place of fiction in the high-profile Victorian public discourses about new developments in the medical understanding of alcohol’s effect on the body and mind, both disseminating and challenging ideas about drinking and drunkenness
• Explores fiction’s key role in the battles between temperance campaigners and the defenders of the freedom to drink
• Examines gendered and classed representations of drunkenness to consider how and why women and working-class drunkards were portrayed more negatively in comparison with male and middle- or upper-class drinkers
• Explores how the figure of the drunkard was used to demonstrate and explore the vulnerability of the individuals pushing the boundaries of social mobility as class divisions became less fixed

This book explores the fictional figure of the drunkard and why it was so important to Victorian thinking about what it meant to be human. From Jos’s life-changing hangover in Vanity Fair to Henchard’s twenty-one-year pledge of sobriety in The Mayor of Casterbridge, habitual drunkards were defining characters in nineteenth-century novels and short stories, creating chaos, joy, comedy, suffering and often their own destruction in works by authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. Fiction played a key role in Victorian political discourses about the place of alcohol in society, fuelling the battle between temperance campaigners and defenders of moderation and pleasure, as well as disseminating and challenging new medical understandings of alcohol’s effects on the body and mind. By examining gendered and classed representations of drunkenness, The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture also documents how women and working-class drinkers were portrayed more harshly than their male and higher-class counterparts, reflecting wider religious and moral prejudices of the time. Pam Lock demonstrates the importance of studying literary drunkards both as evidence of Victorian attitudes to alcohol and as cautionary figures that remind us of the fragility and preciousness of life.