I am a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol, UK. I teach on the part-time English Literature and Community Engagement (ELCE) degree course and oversee a series of literature short courses for the public. I completed my thesis 'Low Spirits: The Habitual Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture' at Bristol in 2019. I am also the Comms Officer for the Drinking Studies Network (https://drinkingstudies.wordpress.com/) Supervisors: Samantha Matthews
Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink... more Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink in public, private, or secretly, where we drink is closely connected to how and what we drink. Alcohol-related behaviour by women, enacted at home, can undermine or challenge social norms. However, the transgressive nature of drinking could lead to physical exile or the masking of women’s desire for self-determination. We explore how the social construct of the respectable, decent home relied heavily on façades to ‘keep up appearances’. We demonstrate the place of alcohol in building these façades, and revealing them for what they were. Alcohol in this context was much more than a simple relief for women whether they were a stressed entrepreneur, a violent spinster, or a suicidal mistress. The tensions between the actions of the eight figures examined and the expectations of patriarchal culture represented in these façades demonstrate the extent to which society shaped women’s behaviour towards alcohol in Poland and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.
As anti-drink campaigning gained traction in the 1850s, it was supported by the forceful fiction ... more As anti-drink campaigning gained traction in the 1850s, it was supported by the forceful fiction of upcoming (often female) writers such as Ellen Wood and Clara Lucas Balfour. In reaction, significant established forces in contemporary fiction like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins began to write against these temperance messages to support moderate drinking as a source of relaxation and relief. This article will explore tensions in the public and private discourses on what constituted acceptable levels of drinking in the mid-nineteenth century with particular attention to gender and class differences in these attempts to establish or protect cultural ‘norms’.
George Eliot wrote “Janet’s Repentance” as one of her Scenes from Clerical Life (1857) to support... more George Eliot wrote “Janet’s Repentance” as one of her Scenes from Clerical Life (1857) to support Barbara Leigh Smith’s campaign for freer access to divorce. Eliot was inspired to sign Smith’s petition by brutal stories of abused wives such as Caroline Norton. She was distressed by the idea of women trapped in marriages to violent men by the misogynistic divorce laws. Eliot then made the unusual artistic choice of writing a “scene” about middle-class drinking (as opposed to working- or upper-class drinking) and marriage featuring a lawyer, Robert Dempster, and his wife, Janet. Middle-class drinking was a subject rarely broached by popular novelists or temperance campaigners, who had until this time focussed on less socially transgressive subjects among the working-classes and aristocracy. However, Eliot was angered by the portrayals of innocent husbands trapped in unhappy marriages by their drunken and irresponsible wives written in temperance fiction and by popular authors such as Charles Dickens. The latter’s account of Stephen Blackpool’s wife in Hard Times, written to support his own campaign for changes to the divorce laws in the early 1850s, makes the figure of the drunken wife abhuman. Eliot’s “scene” counterbalances such common figures. This article will examine the cause and effect of Eliot’s portrayal of a drunken husband and the psychological impact on his intelligent and caring wife.
FORTHCOMING
This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contempo... more FORTHCOMING This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contemporary public discourses about male drunkenness and ‘alcoholism’. Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell’s drinking in relation to the harmful habitual drunkenness depicted in their novels. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing was a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. The ‘coarseness’ of Emily’s descriptions of Hindley’s decline into dissipation shocked critics at the time but are commensurate with contemporary medical and temperance accounts. Emily’s artistic interpretation of contemporary theories on the complex progression of comfort-drinking into compulsive inebriation addresses and challenges received ideas about ‘alcoholism’, grief, marriage, class, and heredity.
This special issue of 'The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs' comprises four articles based on ... more This special issue of 'The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs' comprises four articles based on papers from my conference on 'Public Drinking in the Nineteenth Century' held at the University of Bristol in February 2014.
Dr Granville’s Thunderbolt: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor..
James Kneale
Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics: Four case studies from the Victorian period.
Steven Earnshaw
The Alternative World of the Proud Non-Drinker: Nineteenth century public displays of temperance.
Annemarie McAllister
“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893).
Mary Lester
This article examines Anne Brontë’s dialogue with advanced
thinking about drunkenness in The Ten... more This article examines Anne Brontë’s dialogue with advanced
thinking about drunkenness in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) by comparing the novel’s approach to extreme drinking
with the advice of moral and medical theorists, and with
contemporary temperance fiction. It addresses the novelist’s
approaches to key questions about alcohol addiction: what are
its causes; what are its symptoms; how should the urge to
drink be understood; what constitutes successful treatment? It
argues that the death of Arthur Huntingdon, who embodies
Anne’s brother Branwell’s affliction, manifests her feelings
of hopelessness and resulting frustration with the positive
pictures of treatment and recovery presented by modern
This paper discusses the place of the Brontës’ novels in public discourses about male drunkenness... more This paper discusses the place of the Brontës’ novels in public discourses about male drunkenness and alcoholism in the 1840s, focusing on two novels: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell's drinking in relation to the harmful drinking depicted in these texts. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing is a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. There are, for example, notable similarities between Emily Brontë’s depiction of Hindley Earnshaw’s drunken rampages and passages in her father’s copy of Dr Graham’s manual Modern Domestic Medicine (1826).
However, they represented problem drinking at the risk of accusations of coarseness and vulgarity. Anne’s defiant ‘Preface’ to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, still published under her male pseudonym Acton Bell, demonstrates her determination to face out the ‘scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge’ to ‘reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller’. She quotes a review in The Spectator, which accuses the author of ‘a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal’. Reviewers frequently complained that depictions of the ‘revolting scenes’ at Huntingdon’s ‘brutified estate’ were unnecessarily detailed. Yet it is striking that both Anne and Charles Kingsley’s defences turn the Spectator’s ‘coarse’ into a vindication: ‘We must not lay Juvenal’s coarseness at Juvenal’s door, but at that of the Roman world which he stereotyped in his fearful verses’ (Fraser’s Magazine, 1849).
References to the problems caused by Branwell’s frequent intoxication are disguised but evident in his family’s letters and diary papers. Anne circumspectly records on 31 July 1845 that Branwell has had ‘much tribulation and ill health’ and that ‘we hope he will be better and do better in future’. Anne’s combination of conventional moral phrasing with reference to his tribulation and ill health complicates the implied meaning of ‘do better’ and ‘be better,’ revealing her mixed feelings about his ‘illness’. The combination of the sisters’ acquaintance with both the practical and theoretical aspects of alcoholism inspired them, in different ways, to challenge contemporary medical and social guidance on drunkenness in young men. This paper examines the representation of the decline and deaths of the ‘alcoholics’ Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw to position the Brontës’ artistic responses to Branwell’s problem drinking within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
This paper will examine the flow of influence across the Atlantic of temperance and ‘anti-tempera... more This paper will examine the flow of influence across the Atlantic of temperance and ‘anti-temperance’ fiction written in the US and Britain in the 1860s as part of the formation of the radical new genre, sensation fiction. I will address consumption in two ways; Victorian attitudes to the consumption of alcohol and the consumption of print in the form of fiction. Writers and readers were granted unusually easy access to temperance fictions. Because the written word formed a crucial part of temperance campaigners’ promotion strategies there was widespread cross-publication in cheap, loaned or gratis temperance collections, tracts, journals and newspapers in both countries. The importance of fiction to the expansion of the manifold temperance movements of the nineteenth century is further demonstrated by their frequent mention in histories written by Victorian temperance advocates such as Dawson Burns. To focus this study into the required timeframe, I will concentrate in particular on the best-selling of these temperance-style sensation fictions; Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860). Popular sensation fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon dominated book sales during this decade and carried a more unconventional, challenging approach to Victorian social norms including increasingly negative attitudes to alcohol. From Robert Audley’s solitary contemplative drinking to Gabriel Betteredge’s early morning tippling in pursuit of the hidden nightgown, popular sensation fiction often gives alcohol an unusually productive role in the solving of its various mysteries. I will explore the conflicts and symbioses of the growth of these two ideologically incongruent parts of the same genre in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims with particular attention to the consumption of alcohol.
In this paper I will examine Dickens’s approach to the drinking habits of Stephen Blackpool’s unn... more In this paper I will examine Dickens’s approach to the drinking habits of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife in Hard Times (1854) within the love triangle between Stephen, his wife and Rachael. I will argue against the commonly held critical view that Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife is a ‘standard’ female alcoholic created from the stereotypes of contemporary novels and temperance writing.
Hard Times was written to support Dickens’s activism for changes to the British divorce laws in his weekly magazine, Household Words. The subplot of Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife complements and mirrors that of the main character, Louisa, and her relationship with Mr. Bounderby to create an extremely effective argument for divorce. Christine Alfano argues that ‘[b]y fashioning [Blackpool’s wife] along patented “guidelines,” Dickens was attempting to access for his readers a pre-established narrative, perhaps indirectly derived from temperance propaganda’. What Alfano and other critics have not acknowledged is that Dickens was also agitating against the teetotal movement at this time. This complicates his characterisation of Blackpool’s wife because Dickens is determined to explore the social causes of her inebriation to contrast to the focus of pro-abstinence writers on alcohol as a cause of social distress in itself. I will compare and contrast contemporary discourses on women’s drinking in newspapers, periodicals and temperance writing with his explorations of her unsatisfied sexual and material desires.
Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold hist... more Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold history, an unexplained transition so stark as to leave ‘no trace’ of the woman he married eighteen years before. Here habitual drunkenness has possessed a woman’s body and mind, changing her from a young bride to a wasted and tormenting ‘it’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dickens chooses female drunkenness to create the most foul and morally bankrupt woman he can imagine to support his argument for legislation to give access to divorce to the working-classes in Hard Times (1854). In contrast, Eliot’s portrayal of Janet Dempster in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes from Clerical Life, 1857) focuses on Janet’s motives for drinking excessively and her route to abstinence through the support of a Rechabite preacher, Mr Tryan. I will examine how the social hierarchies of drinking in the mid-nineteenth century complicates gender readings of these female drunkards.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his ‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically ruinous’.
In this paper I shall examine attitudes to female drunkenness in 1850’s fiction with particular a... more In this paper I shall examine attitudes to female drunkenness in 1850’s fiction with particular attention to Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Janet Dempster in Eliot’s ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857). These detailed character studies express the new ideals of the realist movement inherited from the ‘Condition of England’ novels of the 1840s such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). I will assess the relation of these fictional portrayals to attitudes to women and alcohol in contemporary newspapers and magazines and particularly in the growing temperance press (Alliance News (1853-present), the Temperance Record (1856-1902) and the League Journal (1857-1922)).
Dickens relies upon misogynist stereotypes in his depiction of Mrs Blackpool the labourer’s wife, ‘so foul’ in her ‘tatters, stains, […] and […] moral infamy’. In contrast, the drinking of Eliot’s Janet Dempster, a wealthy lawyer’s wife, is justified by her mistreatment by her abusive husband and tempered by a reputation for kindness among her peers and the poor. Is class bias the only explanation for why the working-class Mrs Blackpool is left begging money for drink at the end of Hard Times, while, with Mr Tryan’s support, the middle-class Janet achieves abstinence and salvation?
In this paper, I shall examine the treatment of suicide and its relationship to alcohol and alcoh... more In this paper, I shall examine the treatment of suicide and its relationship to alcohol and alcoholism in terms of two representative Trollopian suicides; Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (serialised 1874-5) and, a little more contentiously, Sir Roger Scatcherd in Doctor Thorne (1858). Trollope was fascinated by the destructive power of alcohol on the human body. His graphic descriptions of the internal melting and swelling resulting from long-term heavy drinking reflect the medicalised approach of contemporary newpaper reports . His descriptions are also surprisingly playful in parts; he invents a medical term - 'periporollida' (Doctor Thorne, p. 281) - for his mocking depiction of the dubious medical treatment of the alcoholic, Roger Scatcherd by Rerechild. The characterisation of both Melmotte and Scatcherd not only reflect the famous suicides of his era, particularly John Sadleir, but also foreshadow, in fictional terms, the commons traits shared by alcoholics and suicides described by suicidologist, Karl Menninger, in Man Against Himself (1938). Trollope's plotting of the two suicides compares closely with Jean Baechler's hypotheses on toxicomania in the 1970s, particularly in relation to the supposition that alcoholism is a form of self-annihilation and can be considered a means of 'gradual suicide' (Baechler, Suicides, p. 315).
In this paper I shall examine the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his gothic ... more In this paper I shall examine the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his gothic fiction to reflect not only the anxieties in his society regarding alcohol itself but also the crumbling class hierarchies of the late 19th Century. Stevenson utilises the established hierarchical drinking patterns of the early 19th Century to represent the widely held opinion that spirits were damaging the working classes who should be encouraged to drink wine instead. Perhaps surprisingly, given his bibacious reputation, Stevenson repeatedly advocates moderation through the ‘play’ (Memories and Portraits, P. 268) of his fiction. Fascinated by the corruption that excessive drinking could cause to the body and the soul, Stevenson assigns grotesque physical aspects to characters who drink spirits, particularly rum. Discussing The Body-Snatcher, Stephen Arata argues that ‘Macfarlane is compelled to look into the face of his own moral degradation’ (Edinburgh Companion to RLS, P. 63) when beholding the ‘rum and sin’ (The Body-Snatcher, P. 184) displayed on the prematurely aged face of Fettes. Alcohol, damnation and class subtly interact in many of Stevenson’s texts to produce a mesmerising warning leaving the reader with a sense that your choice of drink is mixed with your fate.
Science Fiction authors are fascinated by the monstrous humanoids that their human characters cre... more Science Fiction authors are fascinated by the monstrous humanoids that their human characters create. These creatures are, almost without exception, given artificially short life-spans (eg. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) or retain their lives only at the whim of their creators (eg. Never Let Me Go). But what makes the authors insist on this control?
In this paper I will examine the representation of unhuman characters in Karel Capek‘s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written in 1920 (which introduced the word ‘robot’) and Jenny Stevens’ radio play Jefferson 37, written as a special for BBC Radio 7.
Capek’s robots are made from artificially produced flesh and organs to be cheap workers for the world. Stevenson’s clones are grown using human umbilical cord from their originals in artificial womb sacks. The robot’s maximum life-span is twenty years before they wear out while the clones only function is to provide spare parts for their rich ‘originals’ and they are not legally human so they can be terminated at the will of the doctors. Both robots and clones are made monstrous by their dislocated similarity to humans.
Like Frankenstein, the creators in both plays are punished not for creating unhumans but for making them monsters through their inhuman treatment. Capek’s play prophesizes a posthuman reality when the robots kill all but one human on earth because ‘Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.’ Stephenson’s play explores the impossibility of a docile humanoid.
But what do these monsters represent? I will argue that these authors are suggesting that a posthuman future is inevitable. If we must die out then the only way for humanity to cope is to ensure that that future will at least retain our shape. For, as Terry Pratchett suggests, ‘…if an intelligent creature takes a human shape it starts to think human. Form defines function.’ (The Time Thief) But facing the dominant species of the future makes humanity shudder, especially when it looks so like us.
Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink... more Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink in public, private, or secretly, where we drink is closely connected to how and what we drink. Alcohol-related behaviour by women, enacted at home, can undermine or challenge social norms. However, the transgressive nature of drinking could lead to physical exile or the masking of women’s desire for self-determination. We explore how the social construct of the respectable, decent home relied heavily on façades to ‘keep up appearances’. We demonstrate the place of alcohol in building these façades, and revealing them for what they were. Alcohol in this context was much more than a simple relief for women whether they were a stressed entrepreneur, a violent spinster, or a suicidal mistress. The tensions between the actions of the eight figures examined and the expectations of patriarchal culture represented in these façades demonstrate the extent to which society shaped women’s behaviour towards alcohol in Poland and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.
As anti-drink campaigning gained traction in the 1850s, it was supported by the forceful fiction ... more As anti-drink campaigning gained traction in the 1850s, it was supported by the forceful fiction of upcoming (often female) writers such as Ellen Wood and Clara Lucas Balfour. In reaction, significant established forces in contemporary fiction like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins began to write against these temperance messages to support moderate drinking as a source of relaxation and relief. This article will explore tensions in the public and private discourses on what constituted acceptable levels of drinking in the mid-nineteenth century with particular attention to gender and class differences in these attempts to establish or protect cultural ‘norms’.
George Eliot wrote “Janet’s Repentance” as one of her Scenes from Clerical Life (1857) to support... more George Eliot wrote “Janet’s Repentance” as one of her Scenes from Clerical Life (1857) to support Barbara Leigh Smith’s campaign for freer access to divorce. Eliot was inspired to sign Smith’s petition by brutal stories of abused wives such as Caroline Norton. She was distressed by the idea of women trapped in marriages to violent men by the misogynistic divorce laws. Eliot then made the unusual artistic choice of writing a “scene” about middle-class drinking (as opposed to working- or upper-class drinking) and marriage featuring a lawyer, Robert Dempster, and his wife, Janet. Middle-class drinking was a subject rarely broached by popular novelists or temperance campaigners, who had until this time focussed on less socially transgressive subjects among the working-classes and aristocracy. However, Eliot was angered by the portrayals of innocent husbands trapped in unhappy marriages by their drunken and irresponsible wives written in temperance fiction and by popular authors such as Charles Dickens. The latter’s account of Stephen Blackpool’s wife in Hard Times, written to support his own campaign for changes to the divorce laws in the early 1850s, makes the figure of the drunken wife abhuman. Eliot’s “scene” counterbalances such common figures. This article will examine the cause and effect of Eliot’s portrayal of a drunken husband and the psychological impact on his intelligent and caring wife.
FORTHCOMING
This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contempo... more FORTHCOMING This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contemporary public discourses about male drunkenness and ‘alcoholism’. Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell’s drinking in relation to the harmful habitual drunkenness depicted in their novels. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing was a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. The ‘coarseness’ of Emily’s descriptions of Hindley’s decline into dissipation shocked critics at the time but are commensurate with contemporary medical and temperance accounts. Emily’s artistic interpretation of contemporary theories on the complex progression of comfort-drinking into compulsive inebriation addresses and challenges received ideas about ‘alcoholism’, grief, marriage, class, and heredity.
This special issue of 'The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs' comprises four articles based on ... more This special issue of 'The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs' comprises four articles based on papers from my conference on 'Public Drinking in the Nineteenth Century' held at the University of Bristol in February 2014.
Dr Granville’s Thunderbolt: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor..
James Kneale
Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics: Four case studies from the Victorian period.
Steven Earnshaw
The Alternative World of the Proud Non-Drinker: Nineteenth century public displays of temperance.
Annemarie McAllister
“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893).
Mary Lester
This article examines Anne Brontë’s dialogue with advanced
thinking about drunkenness in The Ten... more This article examines Anne Brontë’s dialogue with advanced
thinking about drunkenness in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) by comparing the novel’s approach to extreme drinking
with the advice of moral and medical theorists, and with
contemporary temperance fiction. It addresses the novelist’s
approaches to key questions about alcohol addiction: what are
its causes; what are its symptoms; how should the urge to
drink be understood; what constitutes successful treatment? It
argues that the death of Arthur Huntingdon, who embodies
Anne’s brother Branwell’s affliction, manifests her feelings
of hopelessness and resulting frustration with the positive
pictures of treatment and recovery presented by modern
This paper discusses the place of the Brontës’ novels in public discourses about male drunkenness... more This paper discusses the place of the Brontës’ novels in public discourses about male drunkenness and alcoholism in the 1840s, focusing on two novels: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell's drinking in relation to the harmful drinking depicted in these texts. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing is a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. There are, for example, notable similarities between Emily Brontë’s depiction of Hindley Earnshaw’s drunken rampages and passages in her father’s copy of Dr Graham’s manual Modern Domestic Medicine (1826).
However, they represented problem drinking at the risk of accusations of coarseness and vulgarity. Anne’s defiant ‘Preface’ to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, still published under her male pseudonym Acton Bell, demonstrates her determination to face out the ‘scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge’ to ‘reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller’. She quotes a review in The Spectator, which accuses the author of ‘a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal’. Reviewers frequently complained that depictions of the ‘revolting scenes’ at Huntingdon’s ‘brutified estate’ were unnecessarily detailed. Yet it is striking that both Anne and Charles Kingsley’s defences turn the Spectator’s ‘coarse’ into a vindication: ‘We must not lay Juvenal’s coarseness at Juvenal’s door, but at that of the Roman world which he stereotyped in his fearful verses’ (Fraser’s Magazine, 1849).
References to the problems caused by Branwell’s frequent intoxication are disguised but evident in his family’s letters and diary papers. Anne circumspectly records on 31 July 1845 that Branwell has had ‘much tribulation and ill health’ and that ‘we hope he will be better and do better in future’. Anne’s combination of conventional moral phrasing with reference to his tribulation and ill health complicates the implied meaning of ‘do better’ and ‘be better,’ revealing her mixed feelings about his ‘illness’. The combination of the sisters’ acquaintance with both the practical and theoretical aspects of alcoholism inspired them, in different ways, to challenge contemporary medical and social guidance on drunkenness in young men. This paper examines the representation of the decline and deaths of the ‘alcoholics’ Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw to position the Brontës’ artistic responses to Branwell’s problem drinking within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
This paper will examine the flow of influence across the Atlantic of temperance and ‘anti-tempera... more This paper will examine the flow of influence across the Atlantic of temperance and ‘anti-temperance’ fiction written in the US and Britain in the 1860s as part of the formation of the radical new genre, sensation fiction. I will address consumption in two ways; Victorian attitudes to the consumption of alcohol and the consumption of print in the form of fiction. Writers and readers were granted unusually easy access to temperance fictions. Because the written word formed a crucial part of temperance campaigners’ promotion strategies there was widespread cross-publication in cheap, loaned or gratis temperance collections, tracts, journals and newspapers in both countries. The importance of fiction to the expansion of the manifold temperance movements of the nineteenth century is further demonstrated by their frequent mention in histories written by Victorian temperance advocates such as Dawson Burns. To focus this study into the required timeframe, I will concentrate in particular on the best-selling of these temperance-style sensation fictions; Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860). Popular sensation fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon dominated book sales during this decade and carried a more unconventional, challenging approach to Victorian social norms including increasingly negative attitudes to alcohol. From Robert Audley’s solitary contemplative drinking to Gabriel Betteredge’s early morning tippling in pursuit of the hidden nightgown, popular sensation fiction often gives alcohol an unusually productive role in the solving of its various mysteries. I will explore the conflicts and symbioses of the growth of these two ideologically incongruent parts of the same genre in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims with particular attention to the consumption of alcohol.
In this paper I will examine Dickens’s approach to the drinking habits of Stephen Blackpool’s unn... more In this paper I will examine Dickens’s approach to the drinking habits of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife in Hard Times (1854) within the love triangle between Stephen, his wife and Rachael. I will argue against the commonly held critical view that Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife is a ‘standard’ female alcoholic created from the stereotypes of contemporary novels and temperance writing.
Hard Times was written to support Dickens’s activism for changes to the British divorce laws in his weekly magazine, Household Words. The subplot of Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife complements and mirrors that of the main character, Louisa, and her relationship with Mr. Bounderby to create an extremely effective argument for divorce. Christine Alfano argues that ‘[b]y fashioning [Blackpool’s wife] along patented “guidelines,” Dickens was attempting to access for his readers a pre-established narrative, perhaps indirectly derived from temperance propaganda’. What Alfano and other critics have not acknowledged is that Dickens was also agitating against the teetotal movement at this time. This complicates his characterisation of Blackpool’s wife because Dickens is determined to explore the social causes of her inebriation to contrast to the focus of pro-abstinence writers on alcohol as a cause of social distress in itself. I will compare and contrast contemporary discourses on women’s drinking in newspapers, periodicals and temperance writing with his explorations of her unsatisfied sexual and material desires.
Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold hist... more Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold history, an unexplained transition so stark as to leave ‘no trace’ of the woman he married eighteen years before. Here habitual drunkenness has possessed a woman’s body and mind, changing her from a young bride to a wasted and tormenting ‘it’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dickens chooses female drunkenness to create the most foul and morally bankrupt woman he can imagine to support his argument for legislation to give access to divorce to the working-classes in Hard Times (1854). In contrast, Eliot’s portrayal of Janet Dempster in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes from Clerical Life, 1857) focuses on Janet’s motives for drinking excessively and her route to abstinence through the support of a Rechabite preacher, Mr Tryan. I will examine how the social hierarchies of drinking in the mid-nineteenth century complicates gender readings of these female drunkards.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his ‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically ruinous’.
In this paper I shall examine attitudes to female drunkenness in 1850’s fiction with particular a... more In this paper I shall examine attitudes to female drunkenness in 1850’s fiction with particular attention to Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Janet Dempster in Eliot’s ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857). These detailed character studies express the new ideals of the realist movement inherited from the ‘Condition of England’ novels of the 1840s such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). I will assess the relation of these fictional portrayals to attitudes to women and alcohol in contemporary newspapers and magazines and particularly in the growing temperance press (Alliance News (1853-present), the Temperance Record (1856-1902) and the League Journal (1857-1922)).
Dickens relies upon misogynist stereotypes in his depiction of Mrs Blackpool the labourer’s wife, ‘so foul’ in her ‘tatters, stains, […] and […] moral infamy’. In contrast, the drinking of Eliot’s Janet Dempster, a wealthy lawyer’s wife, is justified by her mistreatment by her abusive husband and tempered by a reputation for kindness among her peers and the poor. Is class bias the only explanation for why the working-class Mrs Blackpool is left begging money for drink at the end of Hard Times, while, with Mr Tryan’s support, the middle-class Janet achieves abstinence and salvation?
In this paper, I shall examine the treatment of suicide and its relationship to alcohol and alcoh... more In this paper, I shall examine the treatment of suicide and its relationship to alcohol and alcoholism in terms of two representative Trollopian suicides; Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (serialised 1874-5) and, a little more contentiously, Sir Roger Scatcherd in Doctor Thorne (1858). Trollope was fascinated by the destructive power of alcohol on the human body. His graphic descriptions of the internal melting and swelling resulting from long-term heavy drinking reflect the medicalised approach of contemporary newpaper reports . His descriptions are also surprisingly playful in parts; he invents a medical term - 'periporollida' (Doctor Thorne, p. 281) - for his mocking depiction of the dubious medical treatment of the alcoholic, Roger Scatcherd by Rerechild. The characterisation of both Melmotte and Scatcherd not only reflect the famous suicides of his era, particularly John Sadleir, but also foreshadow, in fictional terms, the commons traits shared by alcoholics and suicides described by suicidologist, Karl Menninger, in Man Against Himself (1938). Trollope's plotting of the two suicides compares closely with Jean Baechler's hypotheses on toxicomania in the 1970s, particularly in relation to the supposition that alcoholism is a form of self-annihilation and can be considered a means of 'gradual suicide' (Baechler, Suicides, p. 315).
In this paper I shall examine the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his gothic ... more In this paper I shall examine the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his gothic fiction to reflect not only the anxieties in his society regarding alcohol itself but also the crumbling class hierarchies of the late 19th Century. Stevenson utilises the established hierarchical drinking patterns of the early 19th Century to represent the widely held opinion that spirits were damaging the working classes who should be encouraged to drink wine instead. Perhaps surprisingly, given his bibacious reputation, Stevenson repeatedly advocates moderation through the ‘play’ (Memories and Portraits, P. 268) of his fiction. Fascinated by the corruption that excessive drinking could cause to the body and the soul, Stevenson assigns grotesque physical aspects to characters who drink spirits, particularly rum. Discussing The Body-Snatcher, Stephen Arata argues that ‘Macfarlane is compelled to look into the face of his own moral degradation’ (Edinburgh Companion to RLS, P. 63) when beholding the ‘rum and sin’ (The Body-Snatcher, P. 184) displayed on the prematurely aged face of Fettes. Alcohol, damnation and class subtly interact in many of Stevenson’s texts to produce a mesmerising warning leaving the reader with a sense that your choice of drink is mixed with your fate.
Science Fiction authors are fascinated by the monstrous humanoids that their human characters cre... more Science Fiction authors are fascinated by the monstrous humanoids that their human characters create. These creatures are, almost without exception, given artificially short life-spans (eg. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) or retain their lives only at the whim of their creators (eg. Never Let Me Go). But what makes the authors insist on this control?
In this paper I will examine the representation of unhuman characters in Karel Capek‘s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written in 1920 (which introduced the word ‘robot’) and Jenny Stevens’ radio play Jefferson 37, written as a special for BBC Radio 7.
Capek’s robots are made from artificially produced flesh and organs to be cheap workers for the world. Stevenson’s clones are grown using human umbilical cord from their originals in artificial womb sacks. The robot’s maximum life-span is twenty years before they wear out while the clones only function is to provide spare parts for their rich ‘originals’ and they are not legally human so they can be terminated at the will of the doctors. Both robots and clones are made monstrous by their dislocated similarity to humans.
Like Frankenstein, the creators in both plays are punished not for creating unhumans but for making them monsters through their inhuman treatment. Capek’s play prophesizes a posthuman reality when the robots kill all but one human on earth because ‘Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.’ Stephenson’s play explores the impossibility of a docile humanoid.
But what do these monsters represent? I will argue that these authors are suggesting that a posthuman future is inevitable. If we must die out then the only way for humanity to cope is to ensure that that future will at least retain our shape. For, as Terry Pratchett suggests, ‘…if an intelligent creature takes a human shape it starts to think human. Form defines function.’ (The Time Thief) But facing the dominant species of the future makes humanity shudder, especially when it looks so like us.
In this paper I shall examine the way that Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his novel, Trea... more In this paper I shall examine the way that Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his novel, Treasure Island and the colonial adventurers (sometimes known as pirates) who inspired him to do so. With more than 50 mentions in a relatively short novel, rum almost constitutes a character in its own right. Stevenson paints a wide variety of characters but the divide between good and bad is starkly black and white. In drawing this opposition, Stevenson uses alcohol as a key feature. Rum is drunk exclusively by the sailors and pirates. Brandy, usually cognac, is the drink of the ‘good guys’. This is emphasized by the position of the cunning and ambiguous character of Long John Silver who stands between the two and, as he moves from one group to the other, changes his drink to suit his company. When he is with the pirates, he drinks rum, when he is with the ‘good guys’, he drinks cognac.
In relation to this emphasis on rum, I shall examine the impact of the Navy’s decision to change the beer ration to rum in 1655 following the capture of Jamaica. This decision came, in part, from the increasing distances that the Navy were travelling as their colonial explorations and routes grew longer. However, it also seems to have created a taste for rum among the sailors which they retained even if they left the navy and joined less salubrious crews. It is significant that an entry in Blackbeard’s journal describes ‘such a day, Rum all out: -our company somewhat sober: -a damn confusion among us! Rogues a plotting; -great talk of separation. - So I look'd sharp for a prize; - such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damn'd hot, then all things went well again.' So even Edward Teach (on whom Stevenson’s Captain Flint is supposed to have been based) talks about rum specifically as essential to the smooth running of a ship. The implication in Treasure Island is that rum softened the difficult circumstances of the sailors but also shortened their lives. Rum clearly played a very important part in the forging of the British Empire and in the creation of Treasure Island but at what cost?
In this paper I shall examine the idea of the emergence of the post human subject in Alfred Beste... more In this paper I shall examine the idea of the emergence of the post human subject in Alfred Bester’s work. I shall explore the idea of the human evolving into something post human, the motivation for that evolution (must it be the threat of death that forces us to change or to find the potential waiting within us), the way that machines are, and are not, used in his work and the importance of making his characters fit for survival in the 24th Century and beyond.
Alfred Bester cannot allow technology to develop faster than the men manufacturing it. In Bester’s version of the future, man’s evolution is as rapid and extreme as the technology he is developing around him. In Tiger! Tiger! human beings are developing the ability to teleport, known as jaunting in the book, while in The Demolished Man, telepathy has become so common that a Guild must be created to separate and control the new sub-set of humanity. In the 1950’s Bester was writing against a tide of literature, which predicted the destruction of the human race by natural (The Kraken Awakes, The Day of the Triffids) or alien catastrophe (The War of the Worlds, The Midwich Cuckoo), through its technological advances (A Canticle for Liebowitz, The Chrysalids) or the triumph of the machine, particularly the robot (The Complete Robot). In the desperate and violent action of Bester’s Science Fiction, we are presented with a difficult but potentially hopeful alternative future. But to what extent is his vision a positive one? The punishments of the societies he depicts revolve around the loss, the control or the rebuilding of the mind and the powerful controlling forces of corruption and greed he draws, reflect the society he saw around him and which we still see today.
Published in February 1860 by the Scottish Temperance League, four months after the first episode... more Published in February 1860 by the Scottish Temperance League, four months after the first episode of The Woman in White appeared in All the Year Round, Danesbury House, brought together two seemingly incongruent genres; temperance and sensation fiction. Despite its consistent popularity during the latter half of the nineteenth century, little modern criticism of substance has been written on Danesbury House with the exception of Marie Riley’s densely researched chapter ‘Writing for the Million: The Enterprising Fiction of Ellen Wood’ (2004). Given the number of comparable contemporaneous novels that are being plucked from obscurity by critics and celebrated by new publishing houses such as Catherine Pope’s Victorian Secrets, it is time for a reappraisal of Ellen Wood’s first novel, Danesbury House.
This paper examines 'Danesbury House' as an important link in the evolution and history of sensation and temperance fiction. I am particularly interested in the conflicts and symbioses of these two ideologically incongruent genres in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims.
This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship between the Brontës' novels and public discourses... more This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship between the Brontës' novels and public discourses of alcoholism in the 1840s. I focus on two novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The harmful drinking in these novels is commonly interpreted autobiographically in relation to their brother Branwell’s problem drinking. However, this paper argues that the pivotal role of alcoholism, as it came to be known, in the Brontë sisters’ writing is a product, not only of personal experience, but of prominent medical and social discourses of harmful drinking.
The first half of the nineteenth century, the period in which these novels were produced and published (1847-8), represents a development in the active public discourse on problem drinking. New and contradictory medical and religious approaches to the figure of the individual in cases of habitual drunkenness featured commonly in newspapers and journals, published sermons and political rhetoric. The conflict represented by the polarities of these theories, habitual drunkenness as either vice or disease, produces tensions in both novels. For example, Anne Brontë's Arthur Huntingdon is both the undisciplined playboy lacking the self-control to regulate his propensity for drink and also the afflicted son of a hereditarily dissipated family whose organ of veneration, left unchecked, phrenologically dooms him to a life of self-destruction.
This paper examines the decline and deaths of the alcoholics Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
This conference seeks to explore the radical aspects of the avoidance of alcohol. We are looking ... more This conference seeks to explore the radical aspects of the avoidance of alcohol. We are looking for contributions from a range of perspectives, places and periods and from both academic and non-academic contributors.
The Literary and Visual Landscapes seminar series is proud to present a symposium on Drinking Spa... more The Literary and Visual Landscapes seminar series is proud to present a symposium on Drinking Spaces and Places at the University of Bristol on Saturday 23rd April 2016.
We envision that the symposium will focus on the places and spaces associated with drinking. We seek papers addressing the ways in which real and imagined spaces of alcohol consumption are detailed and represented in historical material, literary and artistic works, and geographic data and maps.
Whether it be drinking in public or the public’s drinking habits, public drinking was taken serio... more Whether it be drinking in public or the public’s drinking habits, public drinking was taken seriously in the nineteenth century. The day explores the paradoxical status of alcohol in the period both as social enabler and source of pleasure, and cause for social and personal concern. The event will enable networking between scholars working in different subject areas to develop this dynamic field of study.
We invite papers to explore the spaces, habits and discourses of social and anti-social drinking. Speakers may discuss representations of drinking practices, drunks and drunkenness in fiction, theatre, periodicals, medical literature, art and the wider culture, and the afterlives of nineteenth-century drinking. We are open to international influence – rum, vodka, curaçao and absinthe are as welcome intellectual stimulation as British beer, whisky and gin.
I run a variety of Writers' Retreats at the University of Bristol for postgraduates and academic ... more I run a variety of Writers' Retreats at the University of Bristol for postgraduates and academic staff. Sponsored by the Bristol Doctoral College, Academic Staff Development, individual DTEs and Faculty Education Directors, these vary from faculty- and discipline-specific days to university-wide retreats.
Retreats include some discussion and exercises on good writing practice and how to approach your writing as a professional task and the vast majority of the day is devoted to writing without distraction.
'Quality Papers' provides a process that can help you write with greater speed and confidence, at... more 'Quality Papers' provides a process that can help you write with greater speed and confidence, at the same time as increasing your chance of getting published in your target journal. The course gives strategies for getting the best from your co-authors and streamlining thinking, writing and editing.
This site makes accessible issues from volumes 1-5 of the journal Dionysos.
We would very much l... more This site makes accessible issues from volumes 1-5 of the journal Dionysos.
We would very much like to thank: Roger Forseth for kindly granting permission to make these issues publicly available.
Shana Aue at the University of Wisconsin-Superior Library for creating the pdfs, and to Laura Jacobs for helping facilitate this in the first place.
Have you seen the new online Guide to Collaboration created by GW4? It is filled with advice and ... more Have you seen the new online Guide to Collaboration created by GW4? It is filled with advice and tips from experienced academics together with a range of resources and links to you build and manage your research collaboration.
Project founded by National Science Centre Poland application no 2020/39/D/HS3/00568
http://www.w... more Project founded by National Science Centre Poland application no 2020/39/D/HS3/00568 http://www.womenandalcohol.net/
With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind... more With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans’ perception of reality.
Featuring drink-fuelled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.
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This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contemporary public discourses about male drunkenness and ‘alcoholism’. Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell’s drinking in relation to the harmful habitual drunkenness depicted in their novels. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing was a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. The ‘coarseness’ of Emily’s descriptions of Hindley’s decline into dissipation shocked critics at the time but are commensurate with contemporary medical and temperance accounts. Emily’s artistic interpretation of contemporary theories on the complex progression of comfort-drinking into compulsive inebriation addresses and challenges received ideas about ‘alcoholism’, grief, marriage, class, and heredity.
https://theconversation.com/brontes-under-the-influence-the-legacy-of-branwells-drinking-85649
Dr Granville’s Thunderbolt: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor..
James Kneale
Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics: Four case studies from the Victorian period.
Steven Earnshaw
The Alternative World of the Proud Non-Drinker: Nineteenth century public displays of temperance.
Annemarie McAllister
“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893).
Mary Lester
thinking about drunkenness in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) by comparing the novel’s approach to extreme drinking
with the advice of moral and medical theorists, and with
contemporary temperance fiction. It addresses the novelist’s
approaches to key questions about alcohol addiction: what are
its causes; what are its symptoms; how should the urge to
drink be understood; what constitutes successful treatment? It
argues that the death of Arthur Huntingdon, who embodies
Anne’s brother Branwell’s affliction, manifests her feelings
of hopelessness and resulting frustration with the positive
pictures of treatment and recovery presented by modern
medicine and temperance fiction.
However, they represented problem drinking at the risk of accusations of coarseness and vulgarity. Anne’s defiant ‘Preface’ to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, still published under her male pseudonym Acton Bell, demonstrates her determination to face out the ‘scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge’ to ‘reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller’. She quotes a review in The Spectator, which accuses the author of ‘a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal’. Reviewers frequently complained that depictions of the ‘revolting scenes’ at Huntingdon’s ‘brutified estate’ were unnecessarily detailed. Yet it is striking that both Anne and Charles Kingsley’s defences turn the Spectator’s ‘coarse’ into a vindication: ‘We must not lay Juvenal’s coarseness at Juvenal’s door, but at that of the Roman world which he stereotyped in his fearful verses’ (Fraser’s Magazine, 1849).
References to the problems caused by Branwell’s frequent intoxication are disguised but evident in his family’s letters and diary papers. Anne circumspectly records on 31 July 1845 that Branwell has had ‘much tribulation and ill health’ and that ‘we hope he will be better and do better in future’. Anne’s combination of conventional moral phrasing with reference to his tribulation and ill health complicates the implied meaning of ‘do better’ and ‘be better,’ revealing her mixed feelings about his ‘illness’. The combination of the sisters’ acquaintance with both the practical and theoretical aspects of alcoholism inspired them, in different ways, to challenge contemporary medical and social guidance on drunkenness in young men.
This paper examines the representation of the decline and deaths of the ‘alcoholics’ Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw to position the Brontës’ artistic responses to Branwell’s problem drinking within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
Writers and readers were granted unusually easy access to temperance fictions. Because the written word formed a crucial part of temperance campaigners’ promotion strategies there was widespread cross-publication in cheap, loaned or gratis temperance collections, tracts, journals and newspapers in both countries. The importance of fiction to the expansion of the manifold temperance movements of the nineteenth century is further demonstrated by their frequent mention in histories written by Victorian temperance advocates such as Dawson Burns. To focus this study into the required timeframe, I will concentrate in particular on the best-selling of these temperance-style sensation fictions; Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860).
Popular sensation fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon dominated book sales during this decade and carried a more unconventional, challenging approach to Victorian social norms including increasingly negative attitudes to alcohol. From Robert Audley’s solitary contemplative drinking to Gabriel Betteredge’s early morning tippling in pursuit of the hidden nightgown, popular sensation fiction often gives alcohol an unusually productive role in the solving of its various mysteries.
I will explore the conflicts and symbioses of the growth of these two ideologically incongruent parts of the same genre in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims with particular attention to the consumption of alcohol.
Hard Times was written to support Dickens’s activism for changes to the British divorce laws in his weekly magazine, Household Words. The subplot of Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife complements and mirrors that of the main character, Louisa, and her relationship with Mr. Bounderby to create an extremely effective argument for divorce. Christine Alfano argues that ‘[b]y fashioning [Blackpool’s wife] along patented “guidelines,” Dickens was attempting to access for his readers a pre-established narrative, perhaps indirectly derived from temperance propaganda’. What Alfano and other critics have not acknowledged is that Dickens was also agitating against the teetotal movement at this time. This complicates his characterisation of Blackpool’s wife because Dickens is determined to explore the social causes of her inebriation to contrast to the focus of pro-abstinence writers on alcohol as a cause of social distress in itself. I will compare and contrast contemporary discourses on women’s drinking in newspapers, periodicals and temperance writing with his explorations of her unsatisfied sexual and material desires.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his ‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically ruinous’.
Dickens relies upon misogynist stereotypes in his depiction of Mrs Blackpool the labourer’s wife, ‘so foul’ in her ‘tatters, stains, […] and […] moral infamy’. In contrast, the drinking of Eliot’s Janet Dempster, a wealthy lawyer’s wife, is justified by her mistreatment by her abusive husband and tempered by a reputation for kindness among her peers and the poor. Is class bias the only explanation for why the working-class Mrs Blackpool is left begging money for drink at the end of Hard Times, while, with Mr Tryan’s support, the middle-class Janet achieves abstinence and salvation?
In this paper I will examine the representation of unhuman characters in Karel Capek‘s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written in 1920 (which introduced the word ‘robot’) and Jenny Stevens’ radio play Jefferson 37, written as a special for BBC Radio 7.
Capek’s robots are made from artificially produced flesh and organs to be cheap workers for the world. Stevenson’s clones are grown using human umbilical cord from their originals in artificial womb sacks. The robot’s maximum life-span is twenty years before they wear out while the clones only function is to provide spare parts for their rich ‘originals’ and they are not legally human so they can be terminated at the will of the doctors. Both robots and clones are made monstrous by their dislocated similarity to humans.
Like Frankenstein, the creators in both plays are punished not for creating unhumans but for making them monsters through their inhuman treatment. Capek’s play prophesizes a posthuman reality when the robots kill all but one human on earth because ‘Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.’ Stephenson’s play explores the impossibility of a docile humanoid.
But what do these monsters represent? I will argue that these authors are suggesting that a posthuman future is inevitable. If we must die out then the only way for humanity to cope is to ensure that that future will at least retain our shape. For, as Terry Pratchett suggests, ‘…if an intelligent creature takes a human shape it starts to think human. Form defines function.’ (The Time Thief) But facing the dominant species of the future makes humanity shudder, especially when it looks so like us.
This paper discusses the place of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in contemporary public discourses about male drunkenness and ‘alcoholism’. Much has been written on the sisters’ experience of their brother Branwell’s drinking in relation to the harmful habitual drunkenness depicted in their novels. However, I propose that the pivotal role of alcoholism (a term only coined in 1849) in the Brontë sisters’ writing was a product, not only of personal experience, but of their knowledge of contemporary medical and public discourses on harmful drinking. The ‘coarseness’ of Emily’s descriptions of Hindley’s decline into dissipation shocked critics at the time but are commensurate with contemporary medical and temperance accounts. Emily’s artistic interpretation of contemporary theories on the complex progression of comfort-drinking into compulsive inebriation addresses and challenges received ideas about ‘alcoholism’, grief, marriage, class, and heredity.
https://theconversation.com/brontes-under-the-influence-the-legacy-of-branwells-drinking-85649
Dr Granville’s Thunderbolt: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor..
James Kneale
Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics: Four case studies from the Victorian period.
Steven Earnshaw
The Alternative World of the Proud Non-Drinker: Nineteenth century public displays of temperance.
Annemarie McAllister
“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893).
Mary Lester
thinking about drunkenness in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) by comparing the novel’s approach to extreme drinking
with the advice of moral and medical theorists, and with
contemporary temperance fiction. It addresses the novelist’s
approaches to key questions about alcohol addiction: what are
its causes; what are its symptoms; how should the urge to
drink be understood; what constitutes successful treatment? It
argues that the death of Arthur Huntingdon, who embodies
Anne’s brother Branwell’s affliction, manifests her feelings
of hopelessness and resulting frustration with the positive
pictures of treatment and recovery presented by modern
medicine and temperance fiction.
However, they represented problem drinking at the risk of accusations of coarseness and vulgarity. Anne’s defiant ‘Preface’ to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, still published under her male pseudonym Acton Bell, demonstrates her determination to face out the ‘scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge’ to ‘reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller’. She quotes a review in The Spectator, which accuses the author of ‘a morbid love of the coarse, if not of the brutal’. Reviewers frequently complained that depictions of the ‘revolting scenes’ at Huntingdon’s ‘brutified estate’ were unnecessarily detailed. Yet it is striking that both Anne and Charles Kingsley’s defences turn the Spectator’s ‘coarse’ into a vindication: ‘We must not lay Juvenal’s coarseness at Juvenal’s door, but at that of the Roman world which he stereotyped in his fearful verses’ (Fraser’s Magazine, 1849).
References to the problems caused by Branwell’s frequent intoxication are disguised but evident in his family’s letters and diary papers. Anne circumspectly records on 31 July 1845 that Branwell has had ‘much tribulation and ill health’ and that ‘we hope he will be better and do better in future’. Anne’s combination of conventional moral phrasing with reference to his tribulation and ill health complicates the implied meaning of ‘do better’ and ‘be better,’ revealing her mixed feelings about his ‘illness’. The combination of the sisters’ acquaintance with both the practical and theoretical aspects of alcoholism inspired them, in different ways, to challenge contemporary medical and social guidance on drunkenness in young men.
This paper examines the representation of the decline and deaths of the ‘alcoholics’ Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw to position the Brontës’ artistic responses to Branwell’s problem drinking within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
Writers and readers were granted unusually easy access to temperance fictions. Because the written word formed a crucial part of temperance campaigners’ promotion strategies there was widespread cross-publication in cheap, loaned or gratis temperance collections, tracts, journals and newspapers in both countries. The importance of fiction to the expansion of the manifold temperance movements of the nineteenth century is further demonstrated by their frequent mention in histories written by Victorian temperance advocates such as Dawson Burns. To focus this study into the required timeframe, I will concentrate in particular on the best-selling of these temperance-style sensation fictions; Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860).
Popular sensation fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon dominated book sales during this decade and carried a more unconventional, challenging approach to Victorian social norms including increasingly negative attitudes to alcohol. From Robert Audley’s solitary contemplative drinking to Gabriel Betteredge’s early morning tippling in pursuit of the hidden nightgown, popular sensation fiction often gives alcohol an unusually productive role in the solving of its various mysteries.
I will explore the conflicts and symbioses of the growth of these two ideologically incongruent parts of the same genre in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims with particular attention to the consumption of alcohol.
Hard Times was written to support Dickens’s activism for changes to the British divorce laws in his weekly magazine, Household Words. The subplot of Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife complements and mirrors that of the main character, Louisa, and her relationship with Mr. Bounderby to create an extremely effective argument for divorce. Christine Alfano argues that ‘[b]y fashioning [Blackpool’s wife] along patented “guidelines,” Dickens was attempting to access for his readers a pre-established narrative, perhaps indirectly derived from temperance propaganda’. What Alfano and other critics have not acknowledged is that Dickens was also agitating against the teetotal movement at this time. This complicates his characterisation of Blackpool’s wife because Dickens is determined to explore the social causes of her inebriation to contrast to the focus of pro-abstinence writers on alcohol as a cause of social distress in itself. I will compare and contrast contemporary discourses on women’s drinking in newspapers, periodicals and temperance writing with his explorations of her unsatisfied sexual and material desires.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his ‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically ruinous’.
Dickens relies upon misogynist stereotypes in his depiction of Mrs Blackpool the labourer’s wife, ‘so foul’ in her ‘tatters, stains, […] and […] moral infamy’. In contrast, the drinking of Eliot’s Janet Dempster, a wealthy lawyer’s wife, is justified by her mistreatment by her abusive husband and tempered by a reputation for kindness among her peers and the poor. Is class bias the only explanation for why the working-class Mrs Blackpool is left begging money for drink at the end of Hard Times, while, with Mr Tryan’s support, the middle-class Janet achieves abstinence and salvation?
In this paper I will examine the representation of unhuman characters in Karel Capek‘s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written in 1920 (which introduced the word ‘robot’) and Jenny Stevens’ radio play Jefferson 37, written as a special for BBC Radio 7.
Capek’s robots are made from artificially produced flesh and organs to be cheap workers for the world. Stevenson’s clones are grown using human umbilical cord from their originals in artificial womb sacks. The robot’s maximum life-span is twenty years before they wear out while the clones only function is to provide spare parts for their rich ‘originals’ and they are not legally human so they can be terminated at the will of the doctors. Both robots and clones are made monstrous by their dislocated similarity to humans.
Like Frankenstein, the creators in both plays are punished not for creating unhumans but for making them monsters through their inhuman treatment. Capek’s play prophesizes a posthuman reality when the robots kill all but one human on earth because ‘Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.’ Stephenson’s play explores the impossibility of a docile humanoid.
But what do these monsters represent? I will argue that these authors are suggesting that a posthuman future is inevitable. If we must die out then the only way for humanity to cope is to ensure that that future will at least retain our shape. For, as Terry Pratchett suggests, ‘…if an intelligent creature takes a human shape it starts to think human. Form defines function.’ (The Time Thief) But facing the dominant species of the future makes humanity shudder, especially when it looks so like us.
In relation to this emphasis on rum, I shall examine the impact of the Navy’s decision to change the beer ration to rum in 1655 following the capture of Jamaica. This decision came, in part, from the increasing distances that the Navy were travelling as their colonial explorations and routes grew longer. However, it also seems to have created a taste for rum among the sailors which they retained even if they left the navy and joined less salubrious crews. It is significant that an entry in Blackbeard’s journal describes ‘such a day, Rum all out: -our company somewhat sober: -a damn confusion among us! Rogues a plotting; -great talk of separation. - So I look'd sharp for a prize; - such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damn'd hot, then all things went well again.' So even Edward Teach (on whom Stevenson’s Captain Flint is supposed to have been based) talks about rum specifically as essential to the smooth running of a ship. The implication in Treasure Island is that rum softened the difficult circumstances of the sailors but also shortened their lives. Rum clearly played a very important part in the forging of the British Empire and in the creation of Treasure Island but at what cost?
Alfred Bester cannot allow technology to develop faster than the men manufacturing it. In Bester’s version of the future, man’s evolution is as rapid and extreme as the technology he is developing around him. In Tiger! Tiger! human beings are developing the ability to teleport, known as jaunting in the book, while in The Demolished Man, telepathy has become so common that a Guild must be created to separate and control the new sub-set of humanity. In the 1950’s Bester was writing against a tide of literature, which predicted the destruction of the human race by natural (The Kraken Awakes, The Day of the Triffids) or alien catastrophe (The War of the Worlds, The Midwich Cuckoo), through its technological advances (A Canticle for Liebowitz, The Chrysalids) or the triumph of the machine, particularly the robot (The Complete Robot). In the desperate and violent action of Bester’s Science Fiction, we are presented with a difficult but potentially hopeful alternative future. But to what extent is his vision a positive one? The punishments of the societies he depicts revolve around the loss, the control or the rebuilding of the mind and the powerful controlling forces of corruption and greed he draws, reflect the society he saw around him and which we still see today.
This paper examines 'Danesbury House' as an important link in the evolution and history of sensation and temperance fiction. I am particularly interested in the conflicts and symbioses of these two ideologically incongruent genres in the context of their divergent moral and socio-cultural aims.
The first half of the nineteenth century, the period in which these novels were produced and published (1847-8), represents a development in the active public discourse on problem drinking. New and contradictory medical and religious approaches to the figure of the individual in cases of habitual drunkenness featured commonly in newspapers and journals, published sermons and political rhetoric. The conflict represented by the polarities of these theories, habitual drunkenness as either vice or disease, produces tensions in both novels. For example, Anne Brontë's Arthur Huntingdon is both the undisciplined playboy lacking the self-control to regulate his propensity for drink and also the afflicted son of a hereditarily dissipated family whose organ of veneration, left unchecked, phrenologically dooms him to a life of self-destruction.
This paper examines the decline and deaths of the alcoholics Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.
We envision that the symposium will focus on the places and spaces associated with drinking. We seek papers addressing the ways in which real and imagined spaces of alcohol consumption are detailed and represented in historical material, literary and artistic works, and geographic data and maps.
We invite papers to explore the spaces, habits and discourses of social and anti-social drinking. Speakers may discuss representations of drinking practices, drunks and drunkenness in fiction, theatre, periodicals, medical literature, art and the wider culture, and the afterlives of nineteenth-century drinking. We are open to international influence – rum, vodka, curaçao and absinthe are as welcome intellectual stimulation as British beer, whisky and gin.
Abstracts (300 words max.) should be sent to Pam Lock (pam.lock@bristol.ac.uk) by
16 December 2013. More details will follow at http://bristolunidrinkconference14.wordpress.com/ or follow us on Twitter @UoBrisDrinkConf
Retreats include some discussion and exercises on good writing practice and how to approach your writing as a professional task and the vast majority of the day is devoted to writing without distraction.
Contact me on pam.lock@bristol.ac.uk if you would like to find out more.
We would very much like to thank:
Roger Forseth for kindly granting permission to make these issues publicly available.
Shana Aue at the University of Wisconsin-Superior Library for creating the pdfs, and to Laura Jacobs for helping facilitate this in the first place.
Please send queries to:
Pam Lock - Pam.Lock@bristol.ac.uk
Steven Earnshaw - s.l.earnshaw@shu.ac.uk
http://www.womenandalcohol.net/
Featuring drink-fuelled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.