Drink was, for agricultural and industrial labourers in 19th-century England, a cheap escape from the relentless misery of their working lives, as well as a source of companionship – the public house being a warm and sociable refuge from crowded and insanitary living conditions. At the same time, it was portrayed as the source of many social evils, some of which were graphically illustrated in William Hogarth’s 1751 engraving that depicts infanticide, starvation, madness, decay, and suicide among the miserably addicted inhabitants of Gin Lane.
In Beer Street, the companion piece to Gin Lane, Hogarth portrayed a healthy community, nourished by small beer and ale: ‘happy produce of our Isle… balmy juice… rival to the cup of Jove’. It was the destructive practice of drinking cheap spirits, rather than wine or beer, that was the initial target of the social reformers who, in 1826, set up the first Temperance Society in Boston, USA. Influenced by this rapidly growing American movement, similar societies were set up in Ireland and Scotland in 1829, and in England – specifically, in Warrington, Salford, Manchester, and Bradford – in 1830.
Initially, British efforts were uncoordinated, but a national movement began to take shape in 1831 when the London-based British and Foreign Temperance Society was formed with the Bishop of London as its President and several other bishops as Vice-Presidents. Its agents travelled all over England, calling meetings and encouraging the formation of new local societies, which were often sponsored by prominent industrialists. They would close their textile factories early so that their workers could attend evening meetings, at which speakers described the evils of intemperance in graphic and emotion-laden detail.
