Introduction

This book concerns the historical development of public attitudes and the regulation of alcohol. Within this broad remit, the last chapter noted the potential salience of the Victorian temperance movement to these issues and outlined the book's specific intentions to explore this further. How did this social movement relate to public attitudes to alcohol and the governance of drinking in England and Wales? This chapter will investigate this question through an examination of public discourse on alcohol and legal sources before and during the period in which the temperance movement emerged. Somewhere in the region of 500 newspaper and periodical sources have been considered and, additionally, a number of other sources are used, from David Wilkie’s painting ‘The Village Holiday’ to A History of Teetotalism in Devonshire by the West Country temperance activist W. Hunt. These sources supplied a large quantity of evidence with which certain key issues are explored. What were the views of the first wave of temperance followers? Did these differ from 18th-century concerns about drinking? How did the temperance movement relate to the legal and ideological context of its period?

The emergence of the British temperance movement could feasibly be explained, using either moral panic theory or the rational, objectivist model of alcohol policy, as a straightforward response to a liberal legal stimulus. The first British temperance groups were formed in the late 1820s, before spreading across the country in the 1830s. The advent of temperance societies, therefore, coincided with a period of licensing reform, most notably engendered by the Beer Act 1830. This was a liberalising piece of legislation, which enabled householders to sell beer without the permission of the local licensing justice. This Act, in addition to the gradual replacement of domestic brewing with largescale commercial brewing, coincided with a surge in the numbers of premises nationwide selling beer and an accompanying increase in the number of arrests for drunkenness. These trends were not unnoticed and, ultimately, the Beer Act 1830 fermented considerable unease about the drinking habits of the population. It was in this context of increased availability of alcohol and apparently diminishing social order that the early temperance movement flourished.