The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State The Beer Act of.docx

"The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State": The Beer Act of
1830 and Victorian Discourse
on Working-Class Drunkenness
Author(s): Nicholas Mason
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2001),
pp. 109-127
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Victorian Literature and Culture (2001), 109-127. Printed in the
United States of America.
Copyright ? 2001 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/01
$9.50
"THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE ARE IN A
BEASTLY STATE": THE BEER ACT OF
1830 AND VICTORIAN DISCOURSE ON
WORKING-CLASS DRUNKENNESS
By Nicholas Mason
i
On July 23, 1830, Parliament passed "An Act to permit the
general Sale of Beer and
Cyder by Retail in England." Commonly known as the Beer Act
of 1830, this law called
for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed
in England and Wales. In
place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local
magistrates complete control over
the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated
that a new type of drinking
establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be
opened by any rate-paying
householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had
their own drink laws). For
the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in
England could now pur

chase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1
In addition to dramatically deregulating the licensing of drink
establishments, the
Beer Act also repealed all duties on strong beer and cider. By
conservative estimates,
eliminating this tax immediately reduced the cost of a pot of
beer by approximately twenty
percent (Harrison, Drink 80). The only major restriction in the
new law came in an
amendment added in the House of Lords requiring all beer shops
to close by 10 P.M.
Eventually beer-sellers would complain vociferously about the
competitive advantage this
early closing time gave to publicans, who could remain open at
all times except during
Sunday morning church services. But in the months following
the Beer Act's passage,
beer-sellers had few complaints, as the law granted liberties and
conveniences never
imagined under the old system. So attractive was the idea of the
beer house to both
retailers and consumers, in fact, that within six months of the
Beer Act's taking effect, over
24,000 beer houses had sprung up throughout England and
Wales (Gourvish and Wilson
16).
As might be expected, the laboring poor, for whom beer had
traditionally been a

dietary staple, were the chief beneficiaries of the Beer Act.
Several decades after the Act's
passage, beer houses in England still rang with the chorus,
109
110 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Come, neighbours all, both great and small,
Perform your duties here,
And loudly sing Live Billy our King,
For bating the tax upon beer. (Hughes 116; see also Hackwood
102)
However historically inaccurate this song may be
?
"Billy," or William IV, in reality had
little to do with the new law ? it effectively captures the general
popularity the Beer Act
enjoyed among the nation's laborers.
At the opposite end of the social spectrum, however, the Beer
Act quickly proved a
cause for concern. From the moment the new law took effect on
October 10,1830, many
members of England's privileged classes complained about the
widespread debauchery the

law had supposedly incited. In a steady stream of sermons,
poems, crime reports, and stump
speeches, the beer house came to represent intemperance,
idleness, and a lack of discipline
?in short, all the self-destructive vices of the working class. The
Reverend Robert Ousby, a
Lincolnshire curate, spoke for many when in 1834 he insisted
that the only solution to Eng
land's drunkenness problem was "'to close every beer-shop as
soon as possible; to cut them
up root and branch.'" He continued, "The public-houses, I
thought, were bad before, and I
endeavoured to counteract them; but it is absolutely impossible
to do anything with these
beer-houses'" (Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry
into Drunkenness 288).
It is claims such as Ousby's that I would like to explore in this
paper. As I will show
below, most evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, suggests
that the Beer Act at least
initially increased levels of drunkenness among England's
working class. But the most
significant long-term effect of the Beer Act of 1830,1 would
argue, was not so much the
real levels of drunkenness it produced as the perceptions that
were formed in its after

math. From 1830 until the 1870s, it was counted as something
of a truism in middle- and
upper-class society that the Beer Act had touched off an
irreversible course of working
class drunkenness. Social commentators of all political
persuasions, ranging from the
conservative Henry Mayhew to the communist Friedrich Engels,
viewed the Beer Act as
a defining moment in the fortunes of England's working class,
and few flinched when in
1884 the historian Richard Valpy French argued that the Beer
Act was "prominent among
the legislative beacons of the present century" (349). In this
essay, then, I will analyze the
discourse surrounding the Act of 1830, showing how writers and
speakers in a wide variety
of genres depicted this law as a major turning-point in working-
class history. In the end, I
hope to have shown that while the year 1830 lacks the
associative power of an 1832 or an
1848, it warrants recognition by cultural historians as a crucial
moment in working-class
history for the simple reason that it is the year in which this
landmark piece of legislation
passed into law.
//

Eight years after the passage of the Beer Act, James Bishop,
Secretary of the Metropoli
tan Protection Society, attempted to explain Parliament's
motivations for passing this law:
The year 1830, it will be recollected, was ushered in by a period
of unexampled privation and
want of employment among the working classes, agricultural
and commercial; insubordina
tion was spreading; and breaking of machinery and tumultuous
meetings in the factory and
The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-
Class Drunkenness 111
commercial districts, and riots and incendiary burnings in the
agricultural parts of the king
dom, were unhappily too general. In this state of affairs,
Government
was
appealed to for
relief .... [T]he greatest
measure of relief it was in their power to bestow was, the repeal
of
the beer duty, and the opening of the Beer-trade. (6)
In his own terse manner, Cobbett shared this interpretation,
dubbing the Beer Act "a sop

to pot-house politicians" (398). Without question, the law
offered much to like for English
laborers, as it provided them with beer in greater abundance and
at a lower price. In an
era when many laborers questioned whether any Act of
Parliament had been designed
with the nation's workers in mind, the Beer Act seemed strong
proof that England's
leaders were indeed concerned about the plight of the masses.
Much more contributed to the passage of the Beer Act, however,
than compassion for
the laboring poor or paranoia over the prospects of insurrection.
Most of the Parliamentary
debates on the subject, in fact, centered not so much on the
plight of workers as on theories
of free trade and the dangers of monopolies.2 Prior to 1830, the
only way to obtain public
house licenses was through local magistrates, whose stinginess
is evident in the steep
decline in the number of public houses per capita during the
eighteenth and early nine
teenth centuries (Clark 333). By the 1820s, the common
perception in England was that
magistrates were in the pockets of the dominant brewers,
issuing licenses only to those who
agreed to sell a certain brand of beer and purposely keeping the
number of pubs low so the
brewers could maintain their watchful eye over the industry.

The actual extent of the
conspiracy between brewers and magistrates is, of course,
difficult to measure, but statistics
bear out the degree to which the nation's leading brewers
flourished in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In 1748, most brewing still took
place in the home or the
small shop, with the twelve major brewers of England only
producing 42% of the country's
beer. In contrast, by 1830 new technology and the now-standard
contracts between large
brewers and publicans had pushed the major brewers' market
share up to 85%, essentially
twice what it had been eighty years earlier (Mathias 26; see also
Park 64). Although in some
regions small brewers still prospered, the trend clearly pointed
to a future where the major
brewers would have absolute control over the distribution of
beer in England.
Not surprisingly, in an era when the public was increasingly
enamored of free trade and
hostile towards anything resembling a monopoly, the supposed
collusion between the big
brewers and the country's magistrates became a frequent subject
of complaint. During the
first quarter of the century, several official and unofficial
expos?s attempted to unearth the
misdeeds of the brewing industry. Perhaps the most damning of
these was an 1818 survey

by the Committee on Public Breweries which documented not
only the extent to which the
major brewers had dominated the manufacturing and retailing of
beer, but also how they
had colluded to fix prices and adulterate their product with
cheap stimulants (Gourvish and
Wilson 6). Enflamed by reports such as this, fourteen thousand
Londoners signed an 1818
petition protesting the high prices and poor quality of the city's
liquor (Clark 334).
By the early 1820s, free-traders and monopoly busters had
persuaded Parliament
to begin debating brewing reform. It took another drink-related
crisis, however, to pro
duce the final momentum for the Beer Act. Independent of the
beer debates, in 1825
Parliament passed an act calling for a 40% reduction of the
duties on spirits, a measure
theoretically designed to reduce the temptation toward illicit
trading and tax-dodging
(Gourvish and Wilson 10). As would be the case five years later
with the Beer Act,

this reduction of the spirits tax at least initially prompted a
significant increase in con
sumption. Whereas between 1821 and 1825 the annual quantity
of spirits consumed in
England fluctuated between 3.7 and 4.7 million gallons, the
average annual consumption
between 1826 and 1830 exceeded 7.4 million gallons (Harrison,
Drink 66-67).
Much of the blame for this upsurge in consumption fell on the
working class, who were
said to have abandoned their pot of beer for the much more
intoxicating dram of gin. Once
again, statistics are useful here in demonstrating the declining
popularity of beer. In the
early nineteenth century, when the population of England and
Wales was increasing by
slightly more than 15% per decade, beer sales were essentially
stagnant. Between 1818 and
1830, for instance, English brewers never produced more than
4.1 million nor less than 3.6
million barrels of beer in a given year. All told, in the decade
prior to the Beer Act, roughly
the same amount of beer was being consumed in England and
Wales as had been consumed
thirty years earlier, when the population was approximately
one-third smaller (Mathias
543).3

In the eyes of many, beer's declining popularity signified much
more than a simple
shift in taste. Rather, it represented the abandonment of a key
component of Englishness.
As George Evans Light has recently shown, since the sixteenth
century, when the English
began to cultivate hops on a large scale, beer had factored
prominently into the English
national identity. From a practical standpoint, beer was not only
safer than the cholera-in
fested water of many communities, but it was also widely seen
as a major source of
nutrition for the poor. Into the late Victorian age, laborers made
claims such as, "Beer's
made of corn as well as bread, and so it's stand to reason it's
nourishing." Others argued
that beer helped them "keep up their strength" during the long
workday (Humpherys
59-60). Over time, however, beer became much more than a
practical drink, but a means
by which the English distinguished themselves from the wine-
drinking French. In 1909,
Frederick Hackwood recollected how "at a recent Conference of
Brewers, Lord Burton
claimed that this country owed its high and proud position
among the nations of the earth
simply on account of its characteristic dietary, 'Beef and Beer.'
Whereupon some one
made the waggish comment, 'Why drag in the Beef?'" (94).
That the Beer Act of 1830 was at least in part designed to turn
English workers from gin

back to the national drink is evidenced in a commentary
appearing in the October 21,1830
issue of the Times. Written less than two weeks after the Act
went into effect, this brief arti
cle defends the new law primarily on the grounds that beer was
the lesser of two alcoholic
evils. The anonymous writer of the article contends, "Now if, as
is assumed (not proved) by
the cavillers, a greater number of people do indulge themselves
inordinately with the Eng
lish beverage of beer than formerly, it is plain to us, at least,
that the consumption of beer has
been increased at the expense of ardent spirits, and to their
positive diminution." After a
paragraph championing the free trade principles demonstrated
by the Act, the writer goes
on to point out that, compared to spirits, beer is "a far more
salubrious, or rather a far less
destructive liquor" and that "to commit excess in beer costs
considerably more money,
time, and trouble, than a similar performance with British gin,
or whisky."
///
With its promises of breaking up a monopoly, promoting free
trade, and converting
the poor away from the false religion of gin and back to the
orthodoxy of beer, the

Beer Bill received unusually bipartisan support in the House of
Commons, where it
passed on its second reading by a margin of 245 to 29 votes.
The only serious opponents
of the bill were publicans and brewers, who anticipated that the
new beer houses would
vastly diminish their market share, and High Tories, who
traditionally had allied them
selves with the brewing industry. Both of these groups,
however, lacked the numbers
in the House of Commons to seriously challenge the popular
measure, and thus it easily
passed to the House of Lords, where after further discussion and
a decision to add the
closing-time amendment, the bill became law on July 12, 1830
(Harrison, Drink 75-79).
Even evangelists and moral reformers, who were laying the
foundations of the Tem
perance Movement in 1830, voiced little objection to the new
law, holding out hope
that the spread of beer shops would put an end to the gin craze
of the late 1820s (Clark
336).
Over the years, historians have presented a wide range of views
on what the actual
legacy of the Beer Act turned out to be. Prior to the 1970s, the

standard interpretation was
what Brian Harrison has labeled the "debauchery theory." Most
famously promoted in
Sidney and Beatrice Webb's 1903 study, The History of Liquor
Licensing in England, this
theory holds that the Beer Act led to widespread degeneracy and
should thus be remem
bered as one of the great legislative blunders of British history.
For nearly three-quarters
of a century, the Webbs' reading of the Beer Act remained
largely unquestioned. Since
then, however, several of the most prominent historians of
England's drink industry have
raised doubts about just how large of an effect the Beer Act
actually had on English
culture. In his landmark study, Drink and the Victorians (1971),
Harrison concedes that
for some "working people the beerhouse helped to emancipate
their leisure from super
vision" (83). This said, however, he calls for restraint when
interpreting the long-term
effects of the Beer Act, arguing that the Webbs' strong feelings
about this law were less
the product of rigorous analysis than the couple's "taste for
discipline, their puritanism,
and their distance from popular culture" (84). Similarly, T. R.
Gourvish and R. G. Wilson
have recently argued that while the Beer Act certainly had a
short-term impact on English
society, by the 1840s the law's novelty had all but died out and
it ceased to have a

significant impact on daily life in England (16).
Although picking sides in this debate is not my goal here, it is
important to examine
at least briefly the evidence that has produced such varying
interpretations. As I alluded
to in the beginning of this paper, the statistics measuring the
Beer Act's influence can be
staggering. In the first six months after the law took effect, the
existing 51,000 licensed
public houses in England and Wales were joined by over 24,000
beer shops (Gourvish and
Wilson 3,16). According to some counts, Liverpool alone
supported eight hundred beer
shops within three weeks of the Act's implementation, a number
which only grew over the
next several months, when fifty new beer shops reportedly
opened in the city every week
(Gourvish and Wilson 16; Webb and Webb 116). As might be
expected, the steepest rise
in the number of beer shops occurred in late 1830 and early
1831, when the idea of vending
from one's own home remained something of a novelty.
Nevertheless, it wasn't until
nearly a decade later that the rate at which beer licenses were
issued began to decrease
significantly. By 1838 at least 40,000
?

and, according to one count, closer to 46,000
?
beer shops were operating in England and Wales, a number
which neared the sum total
of other public houses, which had grown in number from 51,000
to 56,000 during the
decade (Inhabitant 8; Hamer 3; Gourvish and Wilson 16).
Not surprisingly, this exponential increase in the number of
retailers reflected a
corresponding rise in the amount of beer that was being
consumed during the 1830s. For
the years following the repeal of the beer tax, the most reliable
figures on beer con
sumption come from records on malt duties. These figures
indicate that between 1829
and 1831 there was a 40% increase in the amount of malt taxed
in England and Wales.
Tracking the shifts in malt consumption over a longer period,
one sees an increase from
an average of 26.5 million imperial bushels being taxed
annually in the 1820s to 33.5
million in the 1830s, a growth of 26% (Mitchell 402). Even
factoring in the 16% popu

lation increase that occurred in England and Wales between
1821 and 1831, the malt
duty figures still strongly suggest that the Beer Act led to
immediate increases in con
sumption. For the first time in the nineteenth century, beer
drinking was on the rise.
As Harrison and Gourvish and Wilson point out, however, it is
debatable whether the
beer house continued to have so significant an impact on the
English cultural landscape
beyond the 1830s. Technically, the number of beer houses in
England and Wales actually
increased between 1840 and 1869, the year in which the system
of magisterial licensing was
reinstituted. But, all told, the increase in the number of beer
shops was relatively small in
light of the population boom of the mid-nineteenth century.
Moreover, malt duty figures
suggest that after the significant upswing in beer drinking
during the 1830s, beer produc
tion fluctuated between 30 and 40 million imperial bushels per
year throughout the 1840s
and 1850s (Mitchell 402).
Statistics on drunkenness arrests in London show a similar trend
of peak years
coming on the heels of the Act of 1830 followed by a gradual

leveling out or decline.
During each of the first three years following the passage of the
Beer Act, the Met
ropolitan Police arrested approximately 20 people per 1,000
residents of London on
drunkenness charges. Between 1834 and 1839, drunkenness
arrests dipped slightly, but
continued at a rate of roughly 13 per 1,000 residents. In 1840,
however, the number of
drunkenness arrests dropped to 8 per 1,000 residents, beginning
a 35-year trend in which
arrests for intoxication never again exceeded 1% of the
population (Report from the
Select Committee of the House of Lords 1:342). At least part of
the decline in arrests
per capita, of course, may have resulted from changes in police
department policies or
the simple fact that the police force was overwhelmed by the
swelling population. It
seems at least as likely, however, that these statistics point to a
general trend also seen
in the figures for the licensing of beer houses and the taxing of
malt
?

namely, that
beer consumption surged in the aftermath of the Beer Act but
began to decline roughly
a decade later.
IV
EVEN USING THE BEST available statistics, tracing trends in
alcohol consumption or drunk
enness from a distance of more than a century and a half is at
best an inexact science.4 This
is particularly the case when dealing with England, given the
sheer number of recorded
binges in the country's past. Nearly every period of modern
history is replete with ac
counts of a soused English populace. During the sixteenth
century, Rabelais coined the
simile "as drunk as an Englishman" (Hackwood 154). A century
later, Shakespeare's lago
observed that the English were "most potent in potting" and that
"your Dane, your
German, and your swag-bellied Hollander
... are nothing to your English" in their ability

to imbibe (II.iii.77?79). During the first half of the eighteenth
century, several authors and
painters
? most notably Gay in The Beggar's Opera and Hogarth in Gin
Lane
?
depicted
what they saw as the general drunkenness of England's
underclass. Even during the
Romantic period, an era historians have often treated as a
moment of sobriety between
the alcohol sprees of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth
centuries, many Britons
described their age as one marked by excessive drinking. As
Anna Taylor has recently
shown, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
several physicians began
studying England's "crisis" of heavy drinking, and Coleridge
? far from a teetotaler
himself ? lamented, "'No Country in God's Earth labours under
the tremendous curse of
Drunkenness equally with England'" (qtd. in Taylor 13).
In light of commentaries such as these, it can be difficult when
reviewing English
history to tell when one binge ends and another begins. In the
case of the increased levels

of drunkenness in the 1830s, for example, it might be asked
whether this phenomenon was
merely a continuation of the gin craze of the late 1820s or a
distinctive consequence of the
Beer Act. Pushing the issue even further, in light of Taylor's
recent findings on drunken
ness in the Romantic era, it might even be argued that England
experienced one unbroken
spell of intoxication from the 1720s through the end of the
Victorian Age.
Considering the frequency of drunkenness in England's cultural
past, I would argue
that what ultimately makes the Beer Act of 1830 distinctive is
not the actual debauchery
it produced, but the degree to which for many Victorians it
came to symbolize a clear
turning point in the behavior of the laboring people. Whether in
Temperance tracts,
satirical poems, or Parliamentary reports, much of the Victorian
discourse on working
class drunkenness repeats a narrative in which the Act of 1830
almost instantly placed a
beer house in every neighborhood, thus exposing the poor to
temptations they were too
weak to resist. In the perception of many middle- and upper-
class Britons, after 1830 the
nation's poor were never the same. A working-class culture
previously centered around

the home, the church, and the work-site now quite clearly found
its focal point in the
neighborhood beer house.
Literally within hours of the Beer Act's passage, several
members of the privileged
classes believed they were witnessing unprecedented levels of
drunkenness among the
nation's laborers. In perhaps the most famous observation on the
Beer Act's immediate
effects, the Reverend Sydney Smith reported to John Murray,
"Everybody is drunk.
Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people
are in a beastly state"
(Holland 481). In another account, an observer at King's Lynn
recorded how October 10,
1830 "was kept as a jubilee by all the devotees of Sir John
Barleycorn," with drunken
workers spilling out of the town's forty-plus new beer houses
into the streets (Clark 336).
Three years later, William Holmes, a former mayor of Arundel,
recalled before a Select
Committee on the Sale of Beer, "T was obliged to get out of my
gig three times from
people coming along, waggoners drunk, when I was returning
from shooting on the very
day of the operation of this Bill'" {Report from the Select
Committee on the Sale of Beer

45-46). Even an ardent supporter of the Beer Act had to admit
in the October 21,1830
issue of the Times that "people have now and then, since the
Act was passed, been seen
'summot fresh' with beer."
Within a few years, a number of voices were calling for a repeal
of the new law. An
anonymous pamphlet from 1833, for instance, labels the statute
"one of the most mischie
vous measures, which a mistaking policy ever devised" and
claims that in a few short years
the law had "materially increased the domestic distress" of the
laboring poor (A Few
Remarks 4). To illustrate how the Beer Act had proven
particularly disastrous in the
provinces, the pamphleteer includes a "General Report of the
disturbed district of East
Sussex." After recounting how beer shops had immediately
become havens for prosti
tutes, thieves, and radicals, this report quotes an East Kent
magistrate who believes "'no
single measure ever caused so much mischief in so short a time,
in demoralizing the

labourers'" (23).
One of the best indicators of how widely discussed the Beer Act
was during the 1830s
is its appearance in satire. In the mid-1830s, for instance, the
parodist James Smith penned
an eight-line poem simply entitled "Beer Shops":
"These beer shops," quoth Barnabas, speaking in alt,
"Are ruinous
?
down with the growers of malt!"
"Too true," answers Ben, with a shake of the head,
"Wherever they congregate, honesty's dead.
That beer breeds dishonesty
causes no wonder,
'Tis nurtured in crime
?
'tis concocted in plunder;
In Kent, while surrounded by flourishing crops,
I saw a rogue picking a pocket of hops."
While the agricultural wordplay of the punch-line
? a "pocket" as used here is literally a
large bag used for harvesting hops
?
may be lost on most modern readers, the poem's

general idea remains fairly clear. Smith's target is not the beer
shop itself, but the debates
that have followed in its wake. Specifically, he lampoons the
frenzied morality of Temper
ance advocates, suggesting that detractors of the Beer Act have
seized upon the slightest
misdeeds of the working class to make sweeping statements
about the law's "ruinous"
effects.
By 1833 the types of complaints Smith parodies had become so
numerous that Parlia
ment saw fit to organize a Select Committee on the Sale of
Beer. This would be the first
in a long series of such bodies that summoned magistrates,
physicians, temperance work
ers, and other members of the privileged classes to testify
concerning the social problems
excessive drinking was causing among England's poor. Typical
of the testimonies given
before the 1833 committee is that of the chaplain of Reading
gaol, who estimated that
"'four-fifths of the offences committed by the agricultural
population are traceable to beer
houses'" (Report by the Select Committee on the Sale of Beer
86). Similarly, the chief

constable of Leeds reported that there had been three times as
many arrests for drunken
ness in his city in the thirty months since the Beer Act as in the
preceding three years.
Following up on the work of the 1833 committee, in 1834 the
Select Committee on
Inquiry into Drunkenness deposed witnesses from around the
country, who gave further
testimony about the general dissipation that had followed the
Beer Act. Edwin Chadwick,
a member of Parliamentary committees on factory labor and the
poor laws, reported how
"'the workman when he comes home from work, in passing
through the village where
there was formerly only one public-house, has now to run the
gauntlet of three or four
beer-shops, in each of which are fellow-labourers carousing,
who urge him to stay and
drink with them'" (Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry
into Drunkenness 31). At
the same session, the Temperance worker Joseph Livesey
related how he had long been

in the practice of visiting the poor on Sunday mornings, which
had given him occasion to
note the significant increase in levels of drunkenness since the
appearance of beer houses
(89-92).
Perhaps the most interesting trend in the 1834 testimonies,
however, is the number of
witnesses who suggested that the Beer Act had not only created
beer houses, but had also
precipitated the conversion of traditional pubs into "gin
palaces." Witness after witness
detailed a pattern in which competition from beer houses drove
publicans to remodel their
taverns or inns into extravagant gin palaces. The glamour of
these new establishments,
according to most accounts, lured in curious laborers, which led
to another wave of
gin-drinking. In the end, then, rather than turning workers away
from gin, the Beer Act
had only increased the amount of spirits being consumed by the
working class. The most
succinct testimony concerning this trend is that of Robert
Edwards Broughton, a London
barrister and magistrate, who explained,
"In the course of things, [beer houses] very much interfered
with the business of the regular
publicans, and the capital laid out by the original houses was
materially wasted and damaged,
and therefore the persons are driven, many of them as a matter

of necessity, to try those
schemes which should retrieve them, or prevent them from
failing, and that is the cause of
a great number of what are called in the newspapers gin-
palaces. The old public-houses,
where a man could have his steak dressed, and sit down and
take his ale, are extinct; they
are obliged to convert them into splendid houses, and sell gin at
the bar." {Report from the
Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness 14-15)
As Broughton implied, whereas the only enticements of the beer
house tended to
be the company and the drink, the gin palace offered workers an
escape from reality,
complete with hired musicians, comfortable surroundings, and
strong drink. Observing
the rapid proliferation of gin palaces following the Beer Act, in
1835 Dickens wrote
"Gin Shops," an essay he eventually included in Sketches by
Boz. In this piece, Dickens
describes how the fashion for ostentatiously decorating one's
shop had begun with the
haberdashers and drapers of London but had recently spread
"with tenfold violence"
to the city's publicans. Trying to build the most extravagant gin
palace yet, publicans
had taken to "knocking down all the old public houses, and
depositing splendid man
sions, stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and
illuminated clocks, at
the corner of every street" (182). The allure of such edifices for
workers is perhaps

best captured in another commentary from 1835, Cruikshank's
The Gin Juggarnath,
Or, the Worship of the Great Spirit of the Age (Figure 1). With
dark clouds gathering
ominously in the background, Cruikshank's gaudy gin palace
stands as a beacon for
the drunken masses, who throng forward to partake of its
splendors. As if the scene
weren't already self-explanatory, Cruikshank includes a caption,
warning that the Gin
Juggarnath's "Devotees destroy themselves
? It's progress is marked with desolation,
misery and crime."
Concluding that the Beer Act was at least partially responsible
for the rise of the gin
palace and a number of other social ills, the Select Committee
on Drunkenness issued a
report in 1834 calling for a major crackdown on beer houses.
This report demonstrates the
extent to which the new beer law was already being recognized
as a turning point in the
behavior of English laborers. Rather than condemning
drunkenness as a vice prevalent
Figure 1. George Cruikshank, "The Gin Juggarnath," 1835.
Etching, from William Bates, George

Cruikshank: The Artist, the Humorist, and the Man (London:
Houlston and Sons, 1879). Between
56-57.
among all ranks of society, the Committee's report focuses
explicitly on the working class,
going so far as to maintain that "the vice of Intoxication has
been for some years past on
the decline in the higher and middle ranks of society; but has
increased within the same
period among the labouring classes" (Report from the Select
Committee on Inquiry into
Drunkenness iii). In the Committee's assessment, the crisis of
working-class drunkenness
had reached such a point that it now constituted a distinct threat
to the nation's economic
well-being. Across the country, one work day in six was
reportedly being lost to drunken
ness (v), and, all told, the Committee concluded that "the
retardation of improvement
caused by the excessive use of Intoxicating Drinks, may be
fairly estimated at little short
of fifty millions sterling per annum" (vi).
Based on findings such as these, in 1834 Parliament conceded
that "much Evil" had
arisen from the creation of beer houses and determined to make
amends by revising the

Act of 1830 ("An Act to amend an Act"). The new law increased
the annual beer-shop
licensing fee from two to three guineas, granted police
unlimited rights to inspect beer
shops for fugitives, and required beer-sellers to obtain a
"Certificate of Good Character"
signed by six rate-payers in their district.5 The most radical
aspect of the 1834 Act,
however, came in its division of beer shops into two types:
those that could serve drinks
on-site and those that could only sell "take-out" beer.
According to the dictates of the new law, beer-sellers with an
on-site license were to
post a sign above their door declaring "To be drunk on the
Premises." The potential
ambiguity in this wording provoked Richard Polwhele to write
"Beershops," another
satirical poem from the era that suggests the extent to which the
Beer Act had become a
favorite subject of popular discourse:
Whether Beershops encourage or not inebriety,
Of opinions, it seems, there has been a variety.
But, unless he would fly in the face of an Act,

(The product, too true, of the crazy or crackt)
The Lord or the villein, will hail kidliwinks,
An honester subject the deeper he drinks;
And a sot tho' he be, who can fancy the blame is his,
Required by the law "to be drunk on the premises?"
Unlike James Smith, who in the previously quoted poem mocks
the doomsday rhetoric of
the Temperance crowd, Polwhele sees the nation's lawmakers as
being the most deserving
target of ridicule. Suggesting that the Beer Act of 1834 could
only have proceeded from
the "crazy or crackt," Polwhele questions the competence of a
legislative body that
attempts to curb drunkenness by posting signs in beer shops
advising laborers "to be drunk
on the premises." Cruikshank also noticed the potential humor
in the new signs, drawing
a caricature of workers who had become "'Drunk' ? according to
Act of Parliament"
(Figure 2).
Considering Polwhele's and Cruikshank's mockery of the Act of
1834, it comes as
little surprise that the new law ultimately did little to calm the
storm over beer shops. That
the original Beer Act of 1830 continued to be viewed as a
pivotal event in English cultural
life even after the Act of 1834 is manifest in an 1838
Manchester pamphlet debate. The

participants in this dispute were two local citizens: "An
Inhabitant of Manchester," who
not-so-artfully attempts to disguise his actual identity as a
publican, and John Hamer, one
of the new class of beer-sellers. The first shot in the battle came
from the Inhabitant, who
begins his pamphlet with the sweeping claim that "if ever public
opinion was unanimous
upon a parliamentary measure, it is in its condemnation" of the
Beer Act of 1830 (3). He
proceeds to suggest that publicans and beer-sellers alike were
on the verge of financial
collapse as a result of the competition the Beer Act had
introduced. Furthermore, he
argues that beer shops had quickly established themselves as
hubs for England's under
world. In the pamphlet's most agitated passage, the Inhabitant
maintains, "The Beer Act
has planted the source of vice at every man's door. As if
drunkenness was not before
sufficiently prevalent, that Act has sent for 40,000 missionaries
to inculcate it. Under its
influence, the most odious exhibitions of indecency have
acquired a locomotive power, by
which they have penetrated every lane, alley, and street" (9).
Hamer's relatively polished reply to the Inhabitant's "malignant

and scurrilous at
tack" addresses his antagonist's arguments point by point. From
Hamer's perspective, by
ending the tyranny of magistrates and brewers, lowering prices,
and improving the quality
Figure 2. George Cruikshank, "To Be Drunk
on the Premises," c. 1834. Illustration, from George
Cruikshank, Four Hundred Humorous Illustrations (London:
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, 1895),
of England's beer, the Act of 1830 had accomplished all of its
original purposes (5).
Significantly, though, the only point from the Inhabitant's
pamphlet that Hamer sidesteps
is the link between the rise of beer shops and the increase in
levels of working-class
drunkenness. Perhaps perceiving that public opinion on this
matter was firmly set, Hamer
chooses first to express how strongly he "deplores" the "great
national evil" of drunken
ness and then to deflect a portion of the blame away from beer
houses and toward "those
public-houses which are regularly the scenes of midnight
revelry and dissipation" (16). In
the end, Hamer's inability to dissociate the beer house from

working-class drunkenness
suggests that in the late 1830s even a beer-seller had little hope
of disproving what most
middle- and upper-class Britons had come to accept as an
established fact
? that the
Beer Act of 1830 had had a disastrous impact on the behavior of
England's laborers.
V
While the conversations from the 1830s about the Beer Act's
effects are certainly
important, the Act's real legacy comes through the continued
prominence it held in the
discourse on working-class drunkenness for decades to come.
Even after the growth rate
of beer shops began to decline in the early 1840s, the beer shop
remained a prominent
symbol of working-class degeneracy in the discourse of the
privileged classes. For several
generations to come, middle- and upper-class Britons would
remember how seemingly
overnight the beer house went from being non-existent to being
conspicuously present on

nearly every block of the average English town. Given this
memorable explosion of
drinking establishments, 1830 seemed an obvious (and
conveniently round) date for the
beginning of the most recent phase in working-class history.
In surveying the plight of England's poor during the 1840s, both
Friedrich Engels and
Henry Mayhew devoted a significant amount of space to what
they saw as the trail of
drunkenness that followed the Beer Act. In The Condition of the
Working Class in
England (1844), Engels notes how beer shops had become the
hubs of Manchester's slums.
This was not due to the elegance of these houses or the comforts
they provided, but
because the poor "are deprived of all enjoyments except sexual
indulgence and drunken
ness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion
of their mental and
physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the
maddest excess in the only two
enjoyments at their command" (129). While Engels assures his
readers that he advocates
neither promiscuity nor intoxication, he also makes it clear that
the blame for working
class drunkenness lay not with the workers themselves, but with
the nation's leaders and
the system they had created. In ratifying the Beer Act, he

argues, Parliament "facilitated
the spread of intemperance by bringing a beerhouse, so to say,
to everybody's door" (152).
Although he stops short of arguing, as some Temperance
workers were wont to do, that
the Beer Act was little more than a conspiracy of the rich to
subjugate the poor (Harrison,
"Pubs" 183), Engels insists that the poor should not be held
accountable for conditions
over which they have no control.7
In this era's other monumental survey of working-class life,
London Labour and the
London Poor (1849-52), Mayhew records numerous tales of
families on the brink of
starvation because of the ever-present appeal of the local beer
shop. The typical pattern
is for a husband to receive his wages on Saturday night and to
have spent them all on
drink by Sunday morning (423-24). One working-class woman
observes that in post-Beer
Act London, "a shilling goes further with a poor couple that's
sober than two shillings
does with a drunkard" (127). Overall, Mayhew describes a
potentially catastrophic trend
among the poor of beer shops leading to drunkenness,
drunkenness leading to poverty,
poverty leading to children on the streets, and children on the
streets leading to robbery,
prostitution, and the general decay of English society (162).
Whereas Engels sees a
proletarian revolution as the only solution to the cycles of

poverty, Mayhew suggests
that the most effectual means of reducing the poor rates would
be providing "wholesome
amusements" as alternatives to drink (41-42). In Mayhew's
thinking, if working people
have alternatives to "the conversation, warmth, and merriment
of the beer-shop" (17),
they will be able to save their wages and rise from the squalor
into which they have
sunk.8
To the extent that Mayhew's comments on the evils of
drunkenness derive from his
participation in the Temperance Movement, London Labour and
the London Poor be
longs to a large body of Temperance literature designed to
counteract or overturn the
Beer Act. Perhaps the figure most responsible for the
dissemination of the Temperance
message during the mid-nineteenth century was Cruikshank,
whose Gin Juggernath was
just one of many images he created to convince the nation of the
dangers of drink.
Cruikshank's extremely popular series The Bottle (1847), which
tells of a father's addiction
to drink and how it reduces his family from relative comfort to
misery, murder, and

insanity, was priced at a shilling so that, as Cruikshank
explained, "'it might be within the
reach of the working classes'" (qtd. in Evans and Evans 127).
A year after the remarkable success of The Bottle, Cruikshank
produced a sequel
entitled The Drunkard's Children. As had been the case with
The Bottle, The Drunkard's
Children was accompanied by a Charles Mackay poem that
added details to the story
found in Cruikshank's drawings. One scene from The Drunkard's
Children that Mackay
develops at some length is how the drunkard's son, Edward,
receives lessons in debauch
ery amid "the 'Beer-shop's' wild uproarious throng." Mackay's
poem invokes all of the
increasingly stereotypical images of beer-shop culture, as is
evidenced in the fourth stanza
of Part III:
There Ben, half-drunken, bounets drunken Hal,
There Jack, that swept the crossing all the day,
Calls for his pipe and pot: there joyous Sal
Takes from her prostrate Joe his "yard of clay";
Places her bonnet, decked in ribbons gay,
Upon his head, and sports his fantail hat;
And Costermonger Dick attempts a lay
From the "Flash Songster," dull, obscene, and flat

All noises mixed in one, songs, laughter, shrieks, and chat.
For most middle- and upper-class Victorians, for whom beer
shops were socially
off-limits, images such as these provided the only access they
had to beer-shop society. Not
surprisingly, then, beer shops increasingly became favorite
symbols of the moral depths to
which the English working class had sunk. Typical of the mid-
nineteenth-century rhetoric
surrounding beer shops and the Beer Act is the Reverend J. M.
Calvert's 1852 sermon The
Impropriety of Religious Characters Keeping Beer-Houses. As
his title suggests, Calvert's
general message is that, no matter how religiously inclined,
Christians who sell beer from
their homes inevitably fall under condemnation for bringing
drunkenness to their commu
nities and, more deplorably, vice into their homes. When
addressing the specific effects of
the Beer Act, Calvert falls back on what had by 1852 become
the conventional ways of
assessing the law's effects. Near the beginning of his sermon, he
reflects, "I am just old

enough to remember the law being passed which gave leave to
open houses of an inferior
character for the sale of beer and porter; and well do I recollect
the change for the worse
which took place in the village where I then resided, after the
opening of two or three of
these Beerhouses" (4).
By 1864 public distress over the Act of 1830's ruinous effects
had become so wide
spread that a group of concerned citizens organized the "Special
Committee of Temper
ance Reformers for Procuring the Repeal of the Beer Act of
1830." Five years later, the
Convocation of Canterbury published a Report by the
Committee on Intemperance, which
demonstrates the extent to which the discourse surrounding the
Beer Act remained
virtually unchanged since the Select Committee hearings of the
early 1830s. For example,
one clergyman quoted in this report maintains,
"If I am asked to point out the great cause and encouragement
of Intemperance, I have no

hesitation in ascribing it in a great measure to that most
disastrous Act of Parliament which
set Beer-Shops on foot. It has inflicted
a terrible curse on this country. I would sooner see a
dozen Public-Houses in a parish than
one Beer-Shop. I believe no greater boon could be
conferred on the working classes than to repeal that Act." (23)
Another veteran minister recollected, '"Many families in which
the wives and children
were formerly well clad and apparently well fed have since the
introduction of the
Beer-Shops been in rags and poverty-stricken'" (25).
Records from the numerous Parliamentary hearings on
drunkenness held during the
1870s are filled with similar claims about the Beer Act of 1830.
In 1872, for instance,
several magistrates, constables, and physicians told the Select
Committee on Habitual
Drunkards that the simple solution to England's drunkenness
problem would be reducing
or altogether eliminating beer houses (12-13,136,176). Similar
testimonies occur through
out the three reports issued in 1877 by the Select Committee of
the House of Lords on the
Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance. Speaking before this
committee, Henry William

Schneider, the Mayor of Burrow-in-Furness, called the beer
shop "the very worst style of
house that is licensed in England; it is impossible to have
anything so bad" (2: 333).
Another witness, the Reverend Canon Ellison, a former
chairman of the Church of
England Temperance Society, conceded that the original
intentions of the Beer Act were
"essentially and thoroughly good" (3: 84). The Act's results,
however, had been nothing
short of disastrous in his estimation. According to a statistical
report Ellison prepared for
the Committee, between 1824 and 1874 there was an 88%
increase in England's popula
tion but a 92% increase in the consumption of beer, a 237%
increase in the consumption
of British spirits, a 152% increase in the consumption of foreign
spirits, and a 250%
increase in the consumption of wine {Reports from the Select
Committee of the House of
Lords on the Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance 3:85). From
Ellison's perspective, the
Beer Act of 1830 had sparked a general revolution in the way
all alcoholic beverages were
marketed and distributed in England. Simply put, the single
most significant cause of
England's drunkenness problem in 1877, as Ellison saw it, was
the Beer Act that had been

passed forty-seven years earlier.
Although Ellison doesn't appear to have noticed, by 1877 what
he had long been
campaigning for
? the demise of the English beer house
? was already underway.
The first major blow to the common beer house came in 1869,
when Parliament placed
the licensing of beer-sellers under the control of magistrates,
effectively reversing one
of the most radical elements of the Act of 1830. At
approximately the same time, the
country's major brewers began aggressively purchasing beer
shops and pubs and ex
panding their distribution networks. Under the watchful eye of
both the magistrate and
the large brewer, the distinctively working-class character of
the beer house gradually
disappeared (Clark 338, Gourvish and Wilson 19-20). Because
of this, historians of
British brewing have traditionally defined the "beer shop era" as
stretching from 1830
until roughly 1870.
During this forty-year span, the beer shop undeniably had a

profound effect on the
English cultural landscape. For the poor, the rise of the beer
house impacted where they
congregated, what they drank, and how much beer they
consumed. At the same time, the
Beer Act also influenced the drinking customs of the middle and
upper classes. In the
years following 1830, the social codes for what respectable
Englishmen could drink and
where they could drink it changed dramatically. Whereas in the
early nineteenth century
beer was a common form of refreshment for the wealthy, from
roughly 1830 forward, tea,
spirits, and wine increasingly replaced beer in the homes of the
well-to-do (Davidoff and
Hall 385, Pool 212). Moreover, during this same era London
gentlemen began to do their
drinking at home, establishing a trend that would eventually
spread to the provinces. As
Harrison documents, "By the late 1830s the village inn, where
all classes drank together,
had become a nostalgic memory

? even if it had never been as widespread as its
admirers imagined. By the 1850s no respectable urban
Englishman entered an ordinary
public-house" (Drink 46).9
In the end, the Beer Act of 1830, a law initially designed to ease
class tensions, only
exacerbated the rifts between the various ranks of society. On
one level, the Beer Act
literally isolated the rich from the poor, replacing the public
house of the eighteenth
century
? which in many ways had been the embodiment of the
Habermasian public
sphere
? with the exclusively working-class beer house. Although no
laws prohibited the
rich from frequenting a beer house or the poor from drinking at
an inn, the Beer Act
intentionally made the beer house the most convenient and
inexpensive place for the poor
to do their drinking. In addition to increasing the actual space
between the rich and the
poor, the Beer Act also widened the imaginary gap separating
the classes. Cumulatively,
the myriad attacks on the Beer Act and the beer shops it
produced only reinforced

stereotypes of the poor. During an era when wealthy Britons
increasingly prided them
selves on their domestic virtues, the discourse surrounding the
Beer Act suggested that
the working poor were moving in the opposite direction,
abandoning the simple comforts
of the home for the revelry of the beer shop. The ultimate
legacy of this law, then, was
much more than the beer binge of the 1830s. In significant
ways, the Beer Act of 1830
helped shape how the rich viewed the poor and, undoubtedly,
how the poor came to view
themselves.
Brigham Young University
NOTES
1. At this early point in my argument, I should clarify some of
the terms I will be using
frequently. Technically speaking,
a
"publican" is anyone who operates
a
"public house." A
"public house," in the term's broadest sense, could be any site

where alcohol is legally
consumed on the premises. In the debates surrounding the Beer
Act, however, the term
"public house"
was narrowed to refer primarily to the old-style establishments,
such
as
taverns and inns. In contrast to beer houses, which were
generally quite spartan and
were
only licensed to sell beer, public houses tended to be more
comfortably furnished and could
sell all types of alcoholic beverages. Another distinction which
grew out of the Beer Act was
between the publican, who operated
a public house, and the beer-seller, who operated
a beer
shop. Occasionally the generic meanings of public house and
publican were still used after
1830, but for the sake of clarity, in this essay I follow the
tradition of speaking of public
houses and beer houses, and publicans and beer-sellers,
as mutually exclusive categories.
Two terms I will use interchangeably are "beer shop" and "beer
house," since in the

nineteenth century there was generally
no distinction between the two. In various regions of
the country, unique nicknames developed for beer-only
establishments. In the Midlands, for
instance, beer shops were often called "Tom and Jerries," while
in the West they were
commonly known as "kiddle-a-winks" or "kidliwinks" (Clark
336).
2. While nearly every historical account of the Beer Act of 1830
discusses the role theories of
free trade played in the law's passage, Gourvish and Wilson and
Harrison provide particu
larly detailed narratives of the principal figures involved in the
debates and the history
behind the issues at hand. See Gourvish and Wilson 3-22 and
Harrison, Drink 64-86.
3. According to census figures, 8,893,000 people lived in
England and Wales in 1801. By 1831,
the total population had risen to 13,897,000, a 64% increase
(Mitchell 9).
4. In an 1834 pamphlet on the Improvement of the Working
People, Francis Place implies that
many crusaders against working-class drunkenness manipulate

statistics to support their
arguments. According to Place, if statisticians were to study
patterns of consumption among
the different classes, they might discover that the incidences of
drunkenness per capita were
just as high among the rich as the poor. "When a man in easy
circumstances gets drunk," he
argues,
it is either at his own house or at the house of a friend, whence
he goes home in
a coach and is not exposed to the public gaze. A working man
gets drunk at a
public-house and staggers along the streets; here he is seen by
every body, and is
inconsiderately taken as a fair example of his class; and thus,
through the occa
sional drunkard, or the drunken vagabond, the whole body are
stigmatized and
condemned as drunkards, when in fact the number of those who
are really
drunkards is, when compared with the whole body, a very small
number. (21)
5. Supposedly to compensate for these new restrictions, the
Beer Act of 1834 allowed beer-sell
ers to remain open until 11 P.M. upon approval from the local
magistrate. As beer-sellers
later complained, however, the magistrates, still stinging from

the limits the original Beer
Act had placed on their authority, often abused this new power,
forcing some beer shops to
close as early as 9 P.M., an hour before the closing time
mandated in the Act of 1830. Of the
1834 Act, James Bishop complained in 1838,
These circumstances left the Beerseller in a position much
worse than that in
which he was previously. He has to pay an additional price for
his license, and to
give additional guarantee for good behaviour
....
[T]he very hour, for the
attainment of which he had agreed to pay an increase of fifty
per cent, upon the
price of his license, was made subject to the control and caprice
of those, by
whom he is looked upon as an innovator, and who cannot be
unbiassed [sic]
thereby. (16)
6. See note 1 on alternative names for beer shops.
7. To corroborate his opinion that working-class drunkenness is
the direct result of poverty and
is thus morally excusable, Engels later cites two physicians, a
Dr. Hawkins and a Dr. Kay,
who subscribe to the same theory (178,193).
8. However convinced Mayhew may have been that the
increased availability of "whole amuse

ments" would solve the drink problem, he did acknowledge that
on occasion the squalor of
working-class dwellings left them little alternative but to escape
through drink. At one point
he records a conversation with a tenant of a particularly run-
down boarding house who
claims that drinking is the only way to tolerate life amid such
conditions. This poor man
insists, '"You must get half-drunk, or your money for your bed
is wasted. There's so much
rest owing to you, after a hard day; and bugs and bad air'll
prevent its being paid, if you don't
lay in some stock of beer, or liquor of some sort, to sleep on'"
(115). Such a pragmatic
approach to drink echoes the sentiment expressed in
an
oft-repeated working-class maxim
of this era: "Drink is the quickest way out of Manchester"
(Shiman 3).
9. The penalties for transgressing the
new class-based drinking codes
are laid out in several
literary texts of this era. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for

instance,
we learn exactly how taboo
it was for a member of the privileged classes to drink working-
class beverages in
a
working
class setting. In the process of attempting to secure his place in
the will of his wealthy aunt,
James Crawley makes the unpardonable blunder of getting
drunk at a lowly tavern. As
expected, Miss Crawley subsequently disinherits him, leading
the narrator to explain, "Had
he drunk a dozen bottles of claret, the old spinster could have
pardoned him. Mr. Fox and
Mr. Sheridan drank claret. Gentlemen drank claret. But eighteen
glasses of gin consumed
among boxers in an ignoble pothouse
?
it was an odious crime and not to be pardoned
readily" (377).
By the time Hardy published Far From the Madding Crowd in
1874, the doctrine of
separate drinks for separate classes had become unmistakably
clear. At the harvest home
celebration in Chapter XXXVI of this novel, the reckless
Sergeant Troy decides to treat his

laborers to brandy instead of their usual beer. Realizing the
danger in this, Bathsheba
implores her husband, "No
? don't give it to them
?
pray don't Frank. It will only do
them harm" (252, ch.36). Troy persists, however, and, before
long, all have passed out from
too much brandy. After describing this scene, the narrator
explains, "Having from their
youth up been entirely unaccustomed
to any liquor stronger than cider
or mild ale, it was no
wonder that they had succumbed one and all with extraordinary
uniformity after the lapse
of about an hour" (256, ch. 36).
WORKS CITED
"An Act to amend an Act passed in the First Year of His present
Majesty, to permit the general
Sale of Beer and Cide by Retail in England." 1834.
Bishop, James. A Defence of the New Beer Trade. London:
Dean and Munday, 1838.
Calvert, J. M. The Impropriety of Religious Characters Keeping
Beer-Houses. Sheffield: J. Blurton,

1852.
Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-
1830. London: Longman, 1983.
Cobbett, William. The Political Register. 27 March 1830.
Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men
and Women of the English Middle
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Article Contentsp. 109p. 110p. 111p. 112p. 113p. 114p. 115p.
116p. 117p. 118p. 119p. 120p. 121p. 122p. 123p. 124p. 125p.
126p. 127Issue Table of ContentsVictorian Literature and
Culture, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2001), pp. i-viii, 1-240Front
MatterErratum [p. vi-vi]Editors' Topic: Constructions of
Victorian Classes [Part II]The Smell of Class: British Novels of
the 1860s [pp. 1-19]Down among the Dead: Edwin Chadwick's
Burial Reform Discourse in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
[pp. 21-38]The Importance of Being an Earnest Improver: Class,
Caste, and "Self-Help" in Mid-Victorian England [pp. 39-
50]Charles Kingsley, the Romantic Legacy, and the Unmaking

of the Working-Class Intellectual [pp. 51-65]Thomas Carlyle,
"Chartism", and the Irish in Early Victorian England [pp. 67-
83]Instructive Sufficiency: Re-Reading the Governess through
"Agnes Grey" [pp. 85-108]"The Sovereign People Are in a
Beastly State": The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse
on Working-Class Drunkenness [pp. 109-127]Performing the
Voyage out: Victorian Female Emigration and the Class
Dynamics of Displacement [pp. 129-146]Review EssaysReview:
Victorian Art History: Rap 2 Unwrapped [pp. 149-158]Review:
Millennial Victoria [pp. 159-170]Works in ProgressMaking
What Will Suffice: Carlyle's Fetishism [pp. 173-193]Wilde's
"Salomé" and the Ambiguous Fetish [pp. 195-218]Ethnographic
Collecting and Travel: Blurring Boundaries, Forming a
Discipline [pp. 219-239]Back Matter
The Beer Act and Industrialization
Please read: Nicholas Mason, "The Sovereign People Are in a
Beastly State: The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on
Working-Class Drunkenness,” Victorian Literature and Culture,
Vol. 29, No. 1 (2001), pp. 109-127, available in the Readings
Folder on JSTOR at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058542
And discuss: Begin by selecting one of the sources Mason lists
in his ‘Works Cited’ bibliography and:
A) Discuss how it fits into his history of the Beer Acts.
B) State whether this is a primary or secondary source and why.
C) Discuss what this tells us about industrialization.

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