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

Lock, Pam

Edinburgh University Press（2026/05発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 264 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399502221

Full Description

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 Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy. 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 understanding 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 how women and working-class drinkers were portrayed more harshly than their male and higher-class counterparts, reflecting wider religious and moral prejudices of the time. Pam Lock demonstrates the importance of studying literary drunkards both as evidence of Victorian attitudes to alcohol and as cautionary figures that remind us of the fragility and preciousness of life.

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Preface

Introduction: Defining and Reading the Drunkard

Part I: Anti-Drink Campaigners vs Agitation for Moderation
1. Monstrous and Broken: The Drunkard in Anti-Drink Literature
2. Fighting for the Right to Drink: Distancing the Convivial Drinker from the Drunken Monster

Part II: Gender
3. The Dangers of Drink: The Brontës' Drunken Men
4. The Monstrous Figure of the Drunken Woman in Dickens and Eliot

Part III: Social Mobility, Drunkenness and Sobriety: Anxieties about the Self-Made Man in Trollope and Hardy
5. '[B]etter able than most drunken men to steady himself': Melmotte's Catastrophic Binge Drinking in The Way We Live Now
6. 'I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come': Binge Drinking and Sobriety in Henchard's Rise and Fall in The Mayor of Casterbridge

Conclusion: What Do We Learn from These Drunkards?

Bibliography
Index