Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture

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

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.