The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture: From Conviviality to Cursed Thirst (Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture)

This book explores the fictional figure of the drunkard and why it was so important to Victorian thinking about what it meant to be human.From Jos’s life-changing hangover in Vanity Fair to Henchard’s twenty-one-year pledge of sobriety in The Mayor of Casterbridge, habitual drunkards were defining characters in nineteenth-century novels and short stories, creating chaos, joy, comedy, suffering and often their own destruction in works by authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope.Fiction played a key role in Victorian political discourses about the place of alcohol in society, fuelling the battle between temperance campaigners and defenders of moderation and pleasure, as well as disseminating and challenging new medical understandings of alcohol’s effects on the body and mind.By examining gendered and classed representations of drunkenness, The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture also documents