Search Results

In the late 1880s, there was renewed vigor among evangelicals in the South to redeem and transform society by ending intemperance, not just among members of their church, but also among their neighbors. By the turn of the century, southern evangelicals were deeply immersed in a moral and political crusade based on a modified strategy that involved: the widespread embrace of teetotalism; the shift from moral suasion alone to legal suasion; the emergence of several key evangelical leaders who made prohibition the primary focus of their ministry; multiple lines of argumentation aimed at convincing both the faithful and those outside the church of the rightness of prohibition; increased political activity and lobbying; and an evolving, pragmatic advocacy of increasingly broad legislation culminating in statewide prohibition.

The 1830 Beer Act triggered the most intense period of public debate on alcohol since the 1750s and radicalised the temperance movement in Britain. The appearance of prohibitionism would split the temperance movement, but it would also bring to a head the questions of liberty and State regulation. For all its fiery rhetoric, British teetotalism made little impact on actual levels of alcohol consumption. Moderate drinking threatened to undermine the whole temperance project by showing that alcohol was not inherently destructive. The Maine Law of 1851 sidestepped the limitations of moral suasionism by identifying the source of the problem not in drinkers, but in the drinks trade itself. There was the optimistic notion that, freed from the undue influence of the State, individuals will automatically choose to indulge their ‘higher’ faculties — something which, in the context of the debates over prohibition, presupposed a reasonable level of sobriety. However, what was left out of the equation on all sides was the possibility that drunkenness might sometimes be — to put it simply — a good thing.

The single factor which distinguished the Victorian temperance movement from the raft of anti-drink activity that preceded it was the emergence of organised temperance societies. That is, local, and later national, associations whose defining feature was their goal of reducing or eradicating alcohol consumption across society. Evangelicalism was spreading the message of organised social and moral reform at the same time as increasing numbers of individuals who were publicly mooting the idea of partial or even total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. However, it was the ‘fusion of the idea of association with the idea of abstinence’ which was needed to kick-start the temperance campaign. In post-colonial America, as in Hanoverian England, alcohol consumption tapped into deep-set concerns about both freedom and national identity. Organised teetotalism was a revolutionary idea, especially among the working class. It was after the teetotallers conjured up their vision of a sober millennium that it became possible to think about entirely new levels of social and political freedom as being achieved through sobriety.

The third chapter will look at the impact of repression and imprisonment between 1839 and 1843 on Chartist leaders, and argues that this experience was the impetus for moral improvement to increasingly come to the forefront of the movement, as many imprisoned activists turned away from violence towards a longer-term strategy of movement building. A consequence of this was sexuality, satire, and violent acts and language losing their prominence, and a new counter-culture taking their place.

This chapter examines the advent of the temperance movement in England and Wales in the late 1820s and its turn to teetotalism in the 1830s. It considers, firstly, the movement’s relationship with earlier instances of public alarm about alcohol, such as the Georgian ‘gin panics’, before, secondly, considering its connections to contextual historical factors such as the spread of evangelicalism and the Beer Act 1830. It is argued that the teetotal temperance movement was distinct, in a number of significant ways, from earlier expressions of public anxiety about alcohol. This was a new project to morally regulate the use of alcohol and hence its emergence, in the 1830s, marks a turning point in how alcohol is understood in this country.

Chapter Three begins to assess the impact of the temperance movement on public attitudes and regulation. It focuses on the new forms of drink regulation established between 1864 and 1872 with a particular concern for the Licensing Act 1872, the basis of much current alcohol regulation. It argues that the campaigns of the teetotal temperance movement were significant in instigating and legitimating the expansion of legal restrictions over the drinks trade. Furthermore, connections are identified between teetotal temperance ideas and the qualitative character of the system of alcohol regulation implemented in this period. The orthodox historical view that the temperance movement accomplished little is thus challenged.

Chapter Four continues the examination of the impact of temperance groups and ideas with an investigation of the period 1914-1921. It considers World War One, during which a host of new restrictions on drink sales were pioneered and various authorities urged citizens, for the good of the nation, to abstain from alcohol. It also analyses the post-war drink settlement in which some wartime restrictions were scrapped but others were retained. Ultimately, it highlights the widespread acceptance in this period of the idea that alcohol was essentially problematic, that teetotalism was largely positive and that both legal restrictions and moral compulsion should be used to govern drinking. The attitudinal and regulatory responses to both war and peace were thus, to an extent, shaped by the temperance movement.