Three constant issues have tended to underpin the drink question in Britain in all its various forms: social order, health, and economic responsibility. These are inflected by broader social frameworks, not least changing ideas about class, gender, and national identity. The period from the mid-1970s to the establishment of the Alcohol Health Alliance is the first time that a population approach has been established in which the definition of moderate drinking has been given quantifiable parameters. When looking critically at news coverage of binge drinking, it is tempting to see it as a species of moral panic. A number of recent studies have argued that the issues of binge drinking, a deregulated retail market, and the wider culture of alcohol consumption are ‘more than simply a reinvention of the long-standing “problem” of British drunkenness’. Perhaps the most fundamental contradiction that the drink question has exposed is that between the competing conceptions of freedom. The question is whether or not intoxication itself can be understood an expression of freedom.

This chapter addresses the issue of how to read and critically decode spectral messages. It analyses the literary qualities of spirit messages. Some of the literary works that are analysed in this chapter include Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’, where it explores the relationship between the literary imagination and clairvoyance. This chapter also takes a look at Browning's poems in order to examine the mysterious transmission of literary ideas.

The eighteenth century witnessed significant developments in the ‘medicalisation’ of problem drinking. The key features of the modern ‘disease model’ of addiction emerged in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, and had become fairly well established by the 1770s. Related to the burgeoning medical discourse on drink were long-running philosophical disputes over the nature of consciousness. These fuelled heated speculation over what drunkenness told us about the relationship between mind and body, and what the moral implications of that relationship might be. The Enlightenment sparked innumerable controversies as to the nature of reason and its relationship to moral responsibility. In Britain, the neat Cartesian division between body and mind had always been treated with some scepticism. Far from the health of the mind being divorced from the actions of the body, it seemed self-evident to many that physical well-being was inextricably, and causally, tied to mental health. This chapter explores early medical literature on drink in England and discusses the link between sobriety and sanity.

This chapter assesses the impact of the Millennium Dome, a structure that is believed to have been a part of an ideological project to negotiate the seeming fracture of a unified British ‘identity’. It introduces the ‘spectator of modernity’, which is the flâneur, who is able to take in the city as a totality, and a formulation that joins together with the subjectivity questioned by the modern nation-state. It then looks at Sinclair's move from the centre to the margins and his interest in studying the repressed, forgotten and suppressed. Finally, it shows how London is marked with histories of oppression and histories of resistance.

This chapter discusses Kelman's 1994 novel, How late it was, how late, which is voiced from Sammy Samuels' perspective and features the Hardie Street police station. It notes that this novel features Kelman's complex of resistances to the first person. The chapter describes Sammy as the first character through which Kelman celebrates the musicality of the Glasgow voice, one who shows an enriching evolution of Kelman's study of the relationship between sound and site, identity and speech, and locality and accent. It also takes a look at Sammy's poor literacy and the dynamics of the narrative, which are controlled by an active interpretation of space and sound, and examines the gap between textuality and orality.

This chapter presents a comparative reading of Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu and Rudyard Kipling. It argues that the representations of mimicry challenge the notions of colonial authority. It shows that Dickens's American Notes uses a ghost in the account of solitary confinement at the Philadelphian state penitentiary to explain the feelings of isolation endured by a prisoner. The ghost stories of Le Fanu and Kipling, on the other hand, uses images of mimicry and laughter that problematise any attempt to give them a coherent colonial perspective.

This chapter studies A Disaffection, one of Kelman's novels that feature a character with a working-class background. Unlike the protagonists of the other novels, however, A Disaffection's Patrick Doyle is the only one who attends university. The chapter states that Kelman describes Doyle as ‘a naive character’ and that he forces a political distinction between him and Doyle. Doyle is a character caught between two worlds, each of which he continually defines against the other. Kelman uses him as a representative of an alienated Scotland, and actively criticises education in this novel. The chapter also discusses the theme of control and the concrete references to the proper nouns of real historical personages.

This chapter takes a look at two more of Kelman's novels, namely Translated Accounts and You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, first examining the type of language Kelman uses in his fiction, namely ‘dialect’ and ‘vernacular’. This area of Kelman's work has been hotly contested by both cultural commentators and academics. The chapter then introduces Kelman's novels Translated Accounts and You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, where he approaches the violence of nationality through two very different frames, although he confronts language varieties in both novels. It also studies the suspicion of foreigners that is addressed in these novels.

This chapter discusses the concept of internal exile, which can be found in Sinclair's 2005 non-fiction text, Edge of Orison. It studies the issues of marginalisation, suffering and exile that are addressed in Rodinsky's Room, Sinclair's collaborative text with Rachel Lichtenstein. These issues are also located in the history of the Jewish East End, a place that plays a special role in Sinclair's imagination of London. This chapter also studies his ‘democratic’ emphasis on walking the city. internal exile; Edge of Orison; marginalisation; suffering; exile; Rodinsky's Room; East End; walking the city

In addition to the deep-rooted political impacts of prohibition, something else was happening in Georgian England which would shape the politics of consumption in a profound way, and which would prepare the ground for the Victorian temperance movement. This was the beginnings of a politics of sobriety. If wine, beer and port acted as signifiers of party allegiance after the Restoration, then that resonance was echoed by the way in which coffee came to signify a set of cultural, political, and philosophical values which transcended the fuzzy party lines of Georgian England. The first coffee houses appeared in England in the 1650s. In his influential study of democracy and the public sphere, the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas claimed that the coffee houses of Georgian London were fundamental to the rise of modern democratic culture. More than anything else, what coffee houses provided was a social space that reflected ‘politeness’ and ‘manners’.

This chapter investigates how representations of spectrality reformulate a model of national identity in Henry James. It shows that readings of haunted houses and hotels in several of James's works reveal how the historicity of the spectral expresses a nationally liminal Anglo-American identity politics. It also notes that a persistent theme of money and spectrality exists, which is familiar from Dickens, Riddell and Collins, and relates to conceptions of economic and national power and powerlessness.

The introduction of breath tests and statutory blood alcohol limits for drivers meant that, for the first time, the police had a quantifiable definition of drunkenness to work with and the powers to ascertain with precision, in legal terms at least, whether someone was guilty of posing a public risk through their insobriety. Drink-driving legislation was first introduced under the Road Traffic Act of 1930. The development of the psychiatric models of alcoholism contributed to the fragmentation of the drink question in that they tended to isolate problem drinking from wider political questions around the relationship between sobriety, intoxication, and social order. This tendency was not absolute, however, and those promoting public health approaches to alcoholism were well aware that while treatment may be driven by psychiatry, local conditions — family, work, built environment — were key contributory factors. Unit-based definitions of sensible drinking would, eventually, become established across the range of interest groups surrounding alcohol use.