22 Babel Volume XXI
Temperance, Industrialization, and Working Class Recreation in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England Emily MacPherson As described in Lovett’s The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, drinking in the pre-industrial workplace was compatible with work, functioning both as currency and a key aspect of community. However, the nineteenth century industrialization of the workplace made drinking incompatible with work by requiring workers to be efficient and accurate instruments of production, a change which is reflected in temperance ideas of the time. Drinking was condemned as a vice of the working class due to its interference with production and profit, while the conception of the worker created by the factory setting was reflected in the moral arguments against drink. The influence of the industrialized workplace on moral perceptions of drink is evident in the temperance effort to provide alternative recreation for the working classes and middle class ideas of working men’s complicitness in their own circumstances. This moral approach also features heavily in temperance drama, which blamed the poor for their own weakness to drink and ignored the systemic issues that encouraged drunkenness. The difference between this type of view and the working class perspective is brought out by comparing Lovett’s temperance remarks to those in Henry Fielding’s An Enquiry. Their contrasting arguments for the temperance movement are developed from very different experiences and highlight different perspectives on the problem of working class drinking in
