Culture, not drink per se, has moulded the drink question in England. The ‘gin craze’ represents a change of emphasis in this regard. The feverish public debate on gin was shot through with anxieties over class, the economy, national identity, and the protection of moral norms. Over time, gin exposed fundamental contradictions at the heart of the new market economy of which London was the crucible. As levels of drunkenness continued to rise a small but well-organised group of campaigners led by Thomas Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the physician Stephen Hales and Sir Joseph Jekyll, MP for Reigate, began to lobby for a radical and previously untried strategy: gin legislation which was ‘in its nature a prohibition’. Both Wilson and Hales built many of their arguments around the language of disease. The effects of the 1736 Gin Act were a salutary lesson for those who felt that the practical difficulties of prohibition were surmountable. Prohibition also provided the opportunity for Robert Walpole's political opponents to exploit legislation widely perceived as an attack on individual liberty.

This chapter considers the way Sinclair addressed the sense of ‘decline’ that is characteristic of British society. It looks at his use of the ‘savage comedy’, Gothic overtones, and apocalyptic satire in order to study the matter of Britain, which indicates his rejection of collectivist politics. It examines his ‘open-field narratives’ in Downriver and the evident tension between agency and witness. It reveals that Downriver serves as an angry critique of Margaret Thatcher's policies and an ugly caricature of the prime minister as ‘the Widow’. This chapter also reviews the wider implications of Sinclair's small-press publication activities in the period between Suicide Bridge and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.

This chapter examines the ‘British poetry revival’ that Sinclair was engaged in when he wrote and published Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It considers the importance of William Blake to Suicide Bridge, and examines the factors that were used to define the poetic practice of the British poetry revival poets. It then shows how Sinclair adopted Michael Faraday's conception of the field for the purposes of cultural and social critique, and how Sinclair included the fourth dimension—namely time—in the Suicide Bridge. Finally, it shows how Nicholas Hawksmoor helped Sinclair reimagine London and its myths, and discusses Sinclair's troubling and conflicted understanding of the workings of myth and the scientific metaphors he used in his works.

This chapter examines A Chancer, whose protagonist is a habitual gambler with a tendency to leave social situations, noting that this novel is considered as Kelman's puritanical text and is at the extreme end of the spectrum of Kelman's realist project in its goal to present an unrestricted ‘facticity’. It explains why Kelman chooses to allow extended access to Tammas' mind only during gambling episodes. The chapter also considers the protagonist's departure from Glasgow, which was not previously presented in The Busconductor Hines.

This book deals with transformations that have characterised thinking about alcohol in England. It shows that the drink question has never been singular, even when it appeared to be. While this is a book about the politics of alcohol, it looks at the role of drink as a political issue in the widest sense. Drink is interesting for many reasons, but the main interest here is how ideas about drink provide an insight into the wider culture. The pub is, with good reason, seen as a social institution of unparalleled importance in English cultural life and beer has few equals in the pantheon of cultural signifiers of Englishness. And yet we have recently seen the phrase ‘Binge Britain’ become a media cliché; and when Tony Blair complained in 2004 that legislators faced a ‘new British disease’ of binge drinking he was not only repeating a sentiment commonplace in the contemporary press, but one which stretches back to some of the earliest texts examined by the book.

The period between 1880 and 1918 would see prohibitory legislation put on the statute books for the first time, the passing of legislation formalising arrangements for the reduction of licences, and the State itself taking direct control not only of licensing regulations, but the actual ownership of breweries and pubs. It would see the Liberal Party repeatedly stake its reputation on the drink question, and a parade of leading politicians publicly identify the drink question as the single most important social problem facing the country. Does the State, while retaining free trade principles, have a right to directly reduce the scale of alcohol trade? This chapter looks at the drink question in England at the turn of the century. It focuses on the Licensed Victuallers Defence League, the test case Sharp v. Wakefield and its implications for local magistrates, the National Liberal Federation's adoption of local option as official policy, and the approach taken by the influential Church of England Temperance Society.

In 1628, a writer called Richard Rawlidge published a pamphlet with the eye-catching title A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered. That monster was drunkenness. According to Rawlidge, England was suffering from an explosion of social disorder caused by a dramatic rise in the number of alehouses springing up across the country. Much of the legislation which had been passed in Rawlidge's lifetime was designed to shore up the power of local magistrates who had been tasked with using their licensing powers to control excessive drinking. The development of a public discourse on drink, in which drink was identified as a specific social ‘problem’ in both literature and legislation, accompanied the spread of the Reformation. This is not to say that there was a direct causal link between the rise of Protestantism and the earliest appearance of the drink question. This chapter discusses drunkenness in early modern England, drink and popular festivities, the development of the alehouse, drunkenness as a ‘monstrous plant’, and drink as a political threat.

This chapter discusses Kelman's The Busconductor Hines, a novel that reflects his tenure as a busconductor in Glasgow, but also notes that Kelman had many other occupations to choose from and tries to determine why he chose a busconductor as the subject of his first novel. It addresses the question why Kelman placed his protagonist on Glasgow buses, and introduces the idea of ‘Medit’ sections, also examining the belief that Glasgow should never be forgotten in Kelman's texts.

This chapter discusses Sinclair's three novels, namely Dining on Stones, Landor's Tower and Radon Daughters. It notes that these three novels share structural similarities, motifs that have to do with roads and journeys are repeated, and the significance of narration and the narrator are centrally placed in the text. The discussion also determines that these three novels display an increasingly conscious appreciation of issues of gender and subjectivity.

In the seventeenth century, the stream of alehouse legislation in England was accompanied by a rising tide of religious anti-drink literature. The drinking of healths, toasts, and pledges caused particular anxiety among seventeenth-century religious writers. Numerous writers claimed that the drunkenness which occurred in alehouses and taverns was the result of drinking rituals. The Civil War led to a new intensification of the political symbolism of alcohol — both in terms of drinks and drinking rituals. Historically, wine was subject to far more legislative control than ale or beer. In practice, the kind of people who made up the political elite in the late seventeenth century all drank wine — at least, in the privacy of their own houses. Nevertheless, in the political discourse of the Restoration drink became a symbolic marker of cultural difference in which Tories stood for claret, and Whigs stood for beer. By the 1680s, historical and cultural distinctions between wine and beer-drinking had become embroiled in the new party politics which followed the Exclusion Crisis.

During the passage of the Licensing Bill, there was some concern over 24-hour licensing but the issue in no way dominated public debate. It was not until the start of the following year that the tone changed. In 2004, ‘binge Britain’ — and the variation ‘booze Britain’ — would become part of the everyday language of the debate on alcohol. Alcohol consumption figures from public health campaigners often provided the statistical background to press reporting. Comparisons have been drawn between the representation of binge drinking, especially among women, and the fevered debate on gender and alcohol that characterised the gin craze. In the years that followed the implementation of the Licensing Act of 2003, the British government came under increasing pressure both from newspapers demanding greater intervention to deal with law and order and from public health groups calling for greater intervention to curb levels of overall consumption.

While the second half of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of new philosophical and medical speculations on the nature of intoxication and addiction, it also saw the return of some much older concerns over licensing and the social role of alehouses. In 1830, the passing of a Beer Act would, in one dramatic move, undo almost three centuries of work towards placing beer retail under the control of magistrates. The Beer Act of 1830 represented a victory of free trade capitalism over the established power of local economic and political elites. The 1830 Beer Act transformed an anti-spirits movement which stretched back to the days of the gin craze into a radical and well-organised teetotal temperance campaign. A confluence of anxieties over gin drinking and alehouses, radicalised by the pressures of a drift towards laissez-faire capitalism, kick-started a temperance movement which would become one of the dominant political forces of Victorian England. In 1787, George III was cajoled by William Wilberforce into issuing a Royal Proclamation against vice, profaneness, and immorality.

This introductory chapter focuses on James Kelman, a writer whom many critics consider to be the chief among a school of ‘miserablists’. The discussion begins with a section on the various opinions writers and critics have of Kelman, who has become the senior Scottish fiction writer of urban alienation, and from there shifts to a study of his creative work, which ranges from short stories to plays and novels. It shows that his fictional texts are broadly variable, polyvalent, inconsistent and fluid, while the voices of the narrator and the characters are so intertwined that it is often impossible to separate the two (direct speech and indirect speech). The chapter ends with a section on the language of Kelman's realism.

The ‘ungovernable passions’ which characterised the habitual drinker took on a new resonance as sensibility mutated into full-blown Romanticism. Whereas habitual drinkers had previously been described, diagnosed, defined, and dissected from the outside — by sober preachers, doctors and moralists — they were about to start speaking for themselves. The first example of this appeared in a book called Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors, published in 1814 by Basil Montagu. Charles Lamb's use of Miltonic allusion both aggrandises the experience of addiction, and creates an analogy between intoxication and the Fall of Man. Intoxication has always had a special relationship with art. Symposiastic poetry, which praised alcohol for both its conviviality and its ability to inspire, was popular from the Renaissance onwards. Robert Burns revitalised the tradition of symposiastic verse in poems such as ‘Scotch drink’, as well as incorporating them into ‘Tam O'Shanter’: a poem which celebrated the pleasures of convivial drinking in the warmest terms, while using drunkenness as the occasion for the wildly hallucinogenic imagery of the denouement.

This chapter examines Sinclair's first novel, White Chappell. It shows that this novel drew upon the events of the autumn of 1888, namely the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ of Jack the Ripper, and even some popular literary novels (A Study in Scarlet and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). From there the discussion focuses on the concept of temporal co-presence and multi-presence, and looks at how Sinclair uses the metaphysic of topographic presence to emphasize the mythic constructions of his narrative. This chapter also considers the ‘haunted’ nature of books and the dissection and division of human bodies.