Overview

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

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9781399502221

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Reviews

The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture is an absorbing, expert account of that troublesome nineteenth-century figure: the habitual drunkard. In this book Pam Lock brings together the various literary, medical and social contexts with great flair and authority, while providing insight after insight across a range of popular novels. An absolute pleasure to read. -- Steven Earnshaw, author of The Existential Drinker and The Pub in Literature

Author Information

Pam Lock is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol and co-Director of the Drinking Studies Network (DSN). She has been working on alcohol in Victorian fiction and culture since 2012 and has published widely on alcohol in the works of well-known Victorian authors including the Brontës, Dickens and Eliot, and lesser known popular and temperance authors such as Florence Marryat and Clara Lucas Balfour. Pam has recently completed a collaborative project with her research partner, Dorota Dias-Lewandowska on women and alcohol sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland.

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