Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture

Nyhet

From Conviviality to Cursed Thirst

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Av Pam Lock, University of Bristol) Lock, Pam (Senior Lecturer

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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 Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy. 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 understanding 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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-05-31
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieGender and the Body in Literature and Culture
Antal sidor264
FörlagEdinburgh University Press
ISBN9781399502221

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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.

List of FiguresAcknowledgementsSeries PrefaceIntroduction: Defining and Reading the DrunkardPart I: Anti-Drink Campaigners vs Agitation for Moderation1. Monstrous and Broken: The Drunkard in Anti-Drink Literature2. Fighting for the Right to Drink: Distancing the Convivial Drinker from the Drunken MonsterPart II: Gender3. The Dangers of Drink: The Brontës’ Drunken Men4. The Monstrous Figure of the Drunken Woman in Dickens and EliotPart III: Social Mobility, Drunkenness and Sobriety: Anxieties about the Self-Made Man in Trollope and Hardy5. ‘[B]etter able than most drunken men to steady himself’: Melmotte’s Catastrophic Binge Drinking in The Way We Live Now6. ‘I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come’: Binge Drinking and Sobriety in Henchard’s Rise and Fall in The Mayor of CasterbridgeConclusion: What Do We Learn from These Drunkards?BibliographyIndex