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Urban Problems and Rural Solutions: Drink and Disestablishment in the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Stuart Mews
Stuart Mews*
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster
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Over ten years ago Brian Harrison drew attention to certain inadequately explored areas ‘where Marx’s classes still make their appearance but are overlain by the more lasting dichotomies of traditionalist versus radical, provincial versus Londoner, town-dweller versus countryman, intellectual versus the mass, Anglican versus Nonconformist, male versus female’. This paper does not isolate the urban-rural dichotomy which for most of the twentieth century has chiefly acquired a separate social significance only in and through the romantic speculations of intellectuals, but assumes its importance as one of several factors in interaction with each other which have divided and sometimes united societies and segments of societies along horizontal rather than vertical lines. Two areas which demand that complex analysis, sensitive to social and cultural cross-pressures, proposed by Harrison, are leisure (an area in which he has himself practised with distinction what he has preached) and secularisation. This paper considers one aspect of each of these, namely drink and disestablishment, as they impinged upon each other in a very specific episode in 1915.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 16: The Church in Town and Countryside , 1979 , pp. 449 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1979

References

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