Drink (39 page)

The concept that humanity might live without any kind of alcoholic drink was revolutionary in Western thought. Although self-denial had been argued by early Christian hermits, who subsisted on a diet of bread and water supplemented by the odd handful of berries, mainstream opinion then and ever since had placed booze among the necessities of life. The age of steam, however, seemed receptive to abstinence, and the act of renouncing alcohol absolutely and forever acquired a name—
teetotalism.
The neologism was coined by Richard Turner, a man with a stutter, at a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society in 1833. Converts to abstinence at such events were in the habit of making a public pledge, and Turner stood up before the audience and declared “that he would ‘Be reet down out-and-out t-t-total for ever and ever.’”

The Preston teetotalers also innovated by organizing counterattractions to keep the dry out of the way of temptation, including tea parties, meetings, and marches. They refreshed themselves with moral lectures and revived their weary spirits after a long day’s work with hymn singing, rather than a gallon of stingo at the local boozer. Their efforts and achievements were observed with the keenest interest by reform-minded men and women in the middle classes. The success of the campaign to end the slave trade in British dominions had been the inspiration for similar crusades in favor of ethical legislation that would impose Christian standards of behavior on the general populace. Societies had been founded to promote church attendance and prohibit commercial activities on Sundays, to prevent cruelty to animals, and to outlaw the barbaric forms of traditional entertainment such as cock-fighting, bearbaiting, badger drawing, and chicken stoning that distracted the masses on holidays. Temperance was seized on as the next good cause, and the middle classes formed their own temperance societies, presided over by members of the clergy and wealthy philanthropists. These differed from the working-class organizations in that they promoted the
short pledge
—i.e., abstinence from spirits—rather than the
long pledge
—total abstinence—and some even numbered brewers among their patrons. They employed the techniques of agitation developed by the antislaving campaign, organizing meetings, marches, manifestos, committees, and petitions. The first such, the British and Foreign Temperance Society (BFTS), printed and distributed over two million temperance tracts in the early 1830s and by 1834 had nearly eighty thousand members.

The differences between middle- and working-class temperance societies were not limited to whether their members should give up all drinks or spirits only, but also encompassed how they should promote their messages. Working-class organizations favored dramatic meetings, at which individuals about to renounce the demon drink would stand up and confess their failings before making a tearful promise never to touch liquor again. Such performances had parallels with evangelical Christianity: The drinker played the lost soul, who had seen the light and found the path to redemption, in the manner of the apostle Paul en route for Tarsus. This secular impersonation of religious enlightenment alarmed the clergy, who tended to belong to middle-class temperance societies, and they reacted by preaching against mistaking sobriety for Grace.

The theatrical aspects of working-class meetings, some of which featured singing, dancing, and comic interludes, were also considered distasteful. Moral issues were to be taken seriously, and the music hall atmosphere that prevailed at the workers’ gatherings was deemed inappropriate to the seriousness of the subject. Moreover, in an age where it was considered ill-bred to speak of money or its absence, the tendency of teetotalers to emphasize the material gains they had enjoyed since turning abstinent revolted their social superiors. An example of this last sort of behavior was recorded by an appalled member of the professional classes, who attended a midcentury teetotal meeting, which featured a reformed drunk who, “after observing that for many years he had scarcely ever had a decent rag on his back, and was often without food, ‘all through drink,’ proceeded to dilate upon the fruits of teetotalism: the fruits in his case being . . . ‘this slap-up suit of black and this watch,’ pulling the latter article out of his pocket.” The reformed drinker then modeled his suit for the audience, told them how much it and the watch had cost, and exclaimed, “There’s the fruits of teetotalism for you.” As a finale, he waved the watch above his head and shouted, “Who wouldn’t be a teetotaler?”

In the event, it required considerable personal bravery to renounce drinking. In addition to being branded as vulgar, working-class teetotalers had to face the opprobrium of their peers. Giving up had social repercussions—teetotalers were often shunned by their fellow workers, who considered their refusal to participate in the traditional drinking rituals (which persisted in almost every trade) offensive. They also took genuine risks with their health, as most urban water supplies were contaminated, and cholera, in some areas, was endemic. They were forced to pay higher premiums for life insurance and, finally, suffered emotional pressure from friends who were genuinely concerned for their safety. At a Preston meeting, for example, as one man was about to take the long pledge, an acquaintance in the audience cried out, “Don’t do it, Richard! If tha gives up drinking tha shalt die!”

The evident courage of teetotalers, and their success in persuading their fellow workers to cleanse themselves of their thirsts, inspired contemporary writers to support their cause in print. The horror of drunkenness was the perfect theme for a show of fashionable compassion, for as the nineteenth century progressed, the Romantic Movement turned sentimental. Wild emotions were replaced in works of fact and fiction with proper feelings. This shift is apparent in the work of Charles Dickens, who started out as a court reporter and journalist before progressing to the panoramic novels of metropolitan life for which he is famous. Dickens was first and foremost an urban writer. Instead of focusing on rosy-cheeked peasants living in harmony with nature, he concentrated on the teeming masses in British cities. He aimed for a more accurate picture of the people of his age, especially its working classes, than the Romantics had attempted. He believed in giving detailed and faithful portraits of all his characters and used their drinking habits to assist him. He tells us what was drunk at every level of society and when. We see the survival of old customs and the emergence of new. Alcohol still formed a part of most people’s diets— beer was still served to minors. An eight-year-old David Copperfield, for instance, was provided with a half-pint to go with his dinner of mutton chops, and people of all stations punctuated their day with a glass of something here and there.

Dickens is also a mine of information on the places in which people drank. He recorded both traditional watering holes, such as alehouses and coaching inns, and new establishments—
restaurants
and
gin palaces
. The gin palaces, as their name suggests, were ostentatious in their decoration, and since they were usually located in the filthiest slums, their appearance was all the more striking. Dickens pictured one such as a brightly lit and gilded version of hell, where the poor destroyed themselves like moths in a gas lamp. The “Gin Shop” in
Sketches by Boz
(1836) aimed to shock. While it begins with an affectionate scene of Londoners at ease, discussing the pleasures and hardships of life over a dram, it ends with a drunken brawl at closing time: “The potboy is knocked among the tubs . . . the landlord hits everybody, and everybody hits the landlord; the barmaids scream; the police come in; the rest is a confused mixture of arms, legs, staves, torn coats, shouting, and struggling. Some of the party are borne off to the station-house,
and the remainder slink home to beat their wives for complaining, and kick the children for daring to be hungry.
”

Dickens drew the curtain over the action after his italics, implying, in true Romantic tradition, that the horrible life of the poor was a “sight to dream of, not to tell.” A moral followed: “We have sketched this subject very slightly, not only because our limits compel us to do so, but because, if it were pursued farther, it would be painful and repulsive. Well-disposed gentlemen, and charitable ladies, would alike turn with coldness and disgust from a description of the drunken besotted men, and wretched broken-down miserable women, who form no inconsiderable portion of the frequenters of these haunts; forgetting, in the pleasant consciousness of their own rectitude, the poverty of the one, and the temptation of the other.”

Dickens covered similar ground in the same collection of sketches with the fictional “The Drunkard’s Death,” a masterpiece of sentiment, in which a surprisingly hardy inebriate ruins himself and his family over twenty or so years before fulfilling the promise of the title. The tale inspired a new literary genre—
temperance noir
—adult fairy tales with sots as ogres. Dickens’s pioneering work kicks off with a description of the agent of its hero’s ruin. Drunkenness was a “fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, happiness, and station; and hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death.” Despite such a breathless opening, there was little subsequent hurrying on the part of the doomed drunkard. The action commences at the deathbed of his wife, who is being comforted in extremis by her mother, and four children, all of whom fix accusatory stares at their inebriated father. The instant she expires he returns to his local watering hole; twenty years pass, during which his sons run away, and he beggars his sickly daughter, who works herself to the bone to support him through a misguided sense of duty. One son returns, seeking refuge from the police (a lack of parental guidance has turned him into a murderer), and informs his father that one of his brothers is dead, while the other has emigrated. The father betrays his son to thief takers, the son is tried and executed, the daughter runs away, a few more years pass, during which the drunkard becomes homeless and suicidal and finally, by luck as much as by intent, drowns himself in the river Thames. “A week afterwards the body was washed ashore, some miles down the river, a swollen and disfigured mass. Unrecognized and unpitied, it was borne to the grave; and there it has long since moldered away!”

19 APOSTLES OF COLD WATER

On January 22, 1842, Charles Dickens arrived in Boston for a tour of the United States. He began his visit full of optimism—certain he would fall in love with the republic and its people. The confidence was reciprocated—Americans revered his work and gathered in their thousands for a chance to see the creator of their favorite fictional characters. On February 14, when he reached New York, Washington Irving organized the
Boz
ball in his honor at the Park Royal Theater. Its decoration was themed after Dickens’s first transatlantic best-seller,
³⁵
and in between dances, sketches were acted of popular scenes from his other works. Despite similarly ecstatic receptions in other cities, and the initial goodwill on both sides, the visit was accounted a failure. Dickens was accused of disrespect to his hosts for daring to raise the issue of copyright (most U.S. editions of his work were pirated); the author was offended by slavery, by American eating habits, and the twin practices of tobacco chewing and spitting.

The year after his return to Britain, Dickens published
American Notes
—a journal of his experiences that was poorly received on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain it was labeled “frivolous and dull,” in America it was considered to be a shameful abuse of hospitality. Despite such partial criticism, the book provides an instructive picture of American society at the time, including its drinking habits. Like those of many foreign visitors to the United States, Dickens’s initial impressions were of wonder at the variety of booze on offer in the republic. Shortly after his arrival in Boston, he noted with pleasure his initiation into “the mysteries of Gin-sling, . . . Sangaree, Mint Julep, Sherry-cobbler, Timber Doodle,” and various other cocktails. He was likewise fascinated by the addition of ice to drinks, which was almost unknown at the time in Great Britain. In New York, in contrast, every bar had a supply of it, a fact Dickens evidently expected would surprise and delight his British readers: “Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass!” Ice was commonplace in America as a result of advances in storage technology. A new style of icehouse had been developed that preserved it through the long hot summers, so that every major city had a cheap supply all year round. Yankees were proud of their ice and compared its abundance at home, where “the use of ice . . . is an American institution,” to its rarity in Europe where “the poorer, and even middle classes, know nothing of ice. It is confined to the wine cellars of the rich.”

Another peculiarity in American drinking habits to strike Dickens on his tour, especially when traveling between places, was the tendency to serve only water—usually iced—with meals. Moreover, food was consumed in silence, and with what seemed to him to be indecent haste. He found the quiet, barring the sound of mastication, disturbing: “Sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his Yahoo’s trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.” The contrast to Britain, where meals were convivial affairs, washed down with large quantities of alcohol, and where people lingered at the table over bottles of port after eating, could not have been greater. In America, with the exception of formal dinners, drinking and eating were separated. Whereas a man might spend only quarter of an hour over his food, he would follow up his meal with two hours at the bar, smoking, drinking, and indulging in what Dickens perceived to be the national pastime—talking politics.