Emily MacPherson

Temperance, Industrialization, and Working Class Recreation in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centur y 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

Babel Volume XXI 23 an industrialized society. In contrast to Fielding and other temperance writers, Lovett recognizes that a number of different social and economic issues affected working class drinking, rather than blaming the weakness of working class morality for drunkenness. Prior to widespread industrialization, drinking was an integral part of daily work and recreation, especially for craftsmen, as shown by Lovett’s descriptions of his time as a cabinet-maker in the early nineteenth century. In The Life and Struggles of William Lovett he states that according to custom he was required to provide alcohol in order to call a shop meeting,1 as well as for “being shown the manner of doing any particular kind of work.”1 Drink functioned as a form of currency so that communal drinking, and therefore recreation, were intertwined with workplace affairs. This intertwining allowed for the existence of a drink-based exchange within the workplace in which Lovett was able to trade physical enjoyment for physical expertise, both cementing his place in the communal work environment and improving at his trade. In Drink and the Victorians, Harrison notes that prior to industrialization this type of exchange also existed between employers and employees, with drink aiding in strenuous work and providing a useful incentive, as “drunkenness and selfimprovement did not then necessarily conflict.”3 As seen in Lovett’s account, drinking in the workplace was not at odds with being a respectable member of a trade and due to the communal nature of the workplace it fostered improvement in that trade through the sharing of knowledge. Even if possessed of drunken habits a pre-industrial craftsman could hone his skills with time, establish himself within his trade, and earn a living. This work environment which was compatible with drinking and leisure was starkly different from that introduced with industrialization, which clashed with drunkenness rather than coexisting with it. In the industrialized workplace, as opposed to the preindustrialized workplace, employees needed to be accurate and

24 Babel Volume XXI efficient on the clock, meaning that drinking was no longer compatible with work. This incompatibility contributed to the moral protest against working class drinking, which would come to reflect the ideology of the factory system. The mechanical workplace devalued physical knowledge as “complex and costly machinery placed the employee’s precise and continuous labour at a higher premium than . . . his crude physical energy.”4 The employee was no longer an individual using their own experience and skill to create a product but part of a wider system of production, governed by its demands and relying on mechanical devices to meet them. In “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat”

Sibum emphasizes that the “‘companion of the bench’” became the representative of “absolute truth,”5 highlighting that workers were no longer self-reliant and confident in the truth of their own judgement, but dependent on “Instruments of precision”6 to correct their human weaknesses. This new work environment valuing precision was therefore incompatible with drinking, and as noted by Mason in “‘The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly

State’”, following the Beer Act of 1830 “one work day in six was reportedly being lost to drunken-ness (v)”7 and losses were

“estimated at little short of fifty millions sterling per annum (vi).”8 These kinds of financial losses doubtlessly played a part in the growth of protest against drinking, which became “a prominent symbol of working-class degeneracy.”9 Workers lost much of their agency in the workplace because they now relied upon outside sources of knowledge to overcome their failings, and drinking interfered with this new kind of work and its demands.

Both of these changes come to be reflected in the temperance condemnation of working class drinking. The temperance movement’s campaign to provide rational and virtuous alternatives to recreational drinking and the views temperance activists expressed about the poor reflect the ideology of the factory system. Harrison points out that “The nineteenth-century temperance debate was really an argument about

Babel Volume XXI 25 how leisure time should be spent,”10 highlighting that, despite the “excessive toil and misery”11 working men were subject to, it was their recreational activities which were most scrutinized by temperance activists. Lovett was among those who believed that making rational recreation accessible to the working class could save them from the moral corruption of drink and petitioned to have museums and other facilities open on Sundays12 to “divert and inform the mind.”13 While Lovett would form more nuanced temperance arguments later in life this view exemplifies middle class reform efforts of the time, in which the primary goal was to provide more wholesome distractions for the working class rather than addressing the systemic issues which caused the need for drink as a form of escape. This approach reflects the perception of the poor working class man as inherently unreliable and flawed and relying on more rational powers to correct him and allow him to perform his designated role. In the factory machinery guided and corrected the employee, and temperance workers seemed to believe his immorality and susceptibility to temptation could be similarly corrected through experiencing the virtue and reason of middle class activities. The idea that drinking was a result of poor moral fortitude which could be remedied with proper examples of virtue and reason is also found in temperance drama, which almost always blamed the poor for their own circumstances while failing to take systemic issues into account. In “The Drunkard’s Progress”, Booth states that in typical temperance dramas the working man is encouraged to drink by “the inevitable melodramatic villain with designs on wife and property,”14 while temperance propaganda promoted “happy pictures of the teetotal factory worker and the home of sobriety.”15 The creation of a fictional character with clear, unsavory motives allowed drunkenness to be portrayed as an indisputably immoral and selfish choice which jeopardized an otherwise happy career and home. Hard monotonous work and the fact that the working man’s home was “often cold,

26 Babel Volume XXI uncomfortable and noisy”16 are omitted as potential causes of drunkenness. In one temperance drama an innkeeper offers “the

‘wholesome, pure, refreshing draught from nature's crystal spring’”17 rather than alcohol, although beer was in fact “safer than the cholera-infested water of many communities”18 and

Lovett observed that “The water at the public house we lodged at . . . had all kinds of impurities in it.”19 By ignoring these types of issues temperance drama presented sobriety as a simple and moral choice in which the drunkard is saved by “a symbol of high seriousness and the virtuous life”20 rather than any kind of social change. Temperance drama echoes the idea of the weak and morally corrupt working class being rescued by rational middle class recreation. Furthermore, it supports the factory system by emphasizing the economic duty of men to their families, and suggesting that a contented and comfortable life is possible for the diligent and sober employee, which was often untrue. William Lovett and Henry Fielding express similar opinions on the extreme moral degradation of the poor due to drink, though they end up coming to very different conclusions about the necessity of temperance. In An Enquiry Fielding is concerned that the damage done to the poor by alcohol will disrupt England’s military and economic stability, because “the infant conceived in Gin”21 will result in a future generation unable to fulfill its designated roles, and the poor are “the most useful part”22 of the people. As a magistrate he wishes to stop the gin crisis by using legal authority to prevent it from being sold.23 His response to the problems created by drunkenness focuses on punishment and regulation, and he does not take into consideration the myriad other factors which might cause people to turn to alcohol.

Lovett, having a working class background, argues that temperance is necessary because drinking prevents the poor from progressing and advocating social change, and he proposes excluding drunkards from Working Men’s Associations.24 In contrast to

Fielding and other temperance writers, he discusses drinking as a

Babel Volume XXI 27 consequence of the economic and legal system of the time. He emphasizes that the large amounts of money being spent on war could be used to increase wages and improve the lives of the poor,25 and points out that it is the current laws which cause women to be trapped in poverty and suffering if they are married to a drunkard.26 Rather than ensuring the usefulness of the poor, Lovett critiques the laws and economic actions of his country in the hopes of creating real improvement in their lives. Fielding condemns drink for its damage to the pre-existing economic and political structures of society, while Lovett explores how these structures propagate the evils of drink. He acknowledges the complexity of working class drinking and the various economic, social, and political systems which contributed to it, which sets him apart from other temperance advocates of his time. In conclusion, the industrialization of the workplace affected perceptions of working class drinking by limiting the agency of workers and causing them to be seen as inherently weak and reliant on higher powers of rationality to correct their flaws. The factory setting was no longer compatible with drink, and while drinking had once been an accepted part of the workplace and the interpersonal relations within it, it came to be perceived as a vice caused by the immorality and weakness of the working class. Both of these altered perceptions are reflected in temperance ideas of the time, with the middle class believing that allowing the working class to experience virtuous and rational middle class recreation could correct the moral failings which led to drinking. Temperance drama also demonstrates this perception of the working class by portraying the helpless drunkard as being saved by an exaggerated symbol of virtue and reason and idealizing the life of the sober factory worker in an unrealistic manner. In both of these approaches, as well as Fielding’s attack on gin, the causes behind drinking are not properly examined, and solutions offered do not address the systemic issues the working class faced. Lovett, informed by his own experience as a member of

28 Babel Volume XXI the working class, acknowledges that various economic, social, and political systems affect working class drinking, unlike many other temperance activists of his time. He explores these issues with the goal of not only preventing working class drinking, but of improving the lives of the poor in meaningful ways.

Notes 1 William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (London: Trubner & co., 1876), 31. 2 Lovett 31. 3 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994), 40. 4 Harrison 41. 5 Heinz Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1994): 95. 6 Sibum 92. 7 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 29, no. 1 (2001): 118. 8 Mason 118. 9 Mason 112. 10 Harrison 34. 11 Lovett 95. 12 Lovett 57. 13 Lovett 58. 14 Booth, Michael R. “The Drunkard’s Progress: Nineteenth Century Temperance Drama.” The Dalhousie Review 44, no. 2 (1964): 206. 15 Booth 206. 16 Harrison 46. 17 Booth 211. 18 Mason 112. 19 Lovett 25. 20 Booth 210. 21 Henry Fielding, An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1818), 30. 22 Fielding 31. 23 Fielding 33. 24 Lovett 92-95. 25 Lovett 418-19. 26 Lovett 430.

Bibliography Booth, Michael R. “The Drunkard’s Progress: Nineteenth Century Temperance Drama.” The Dalhousie Review 44, no. 2 (1964): 205-12.

Babel Volume XXI 29 Fielding, Henry. An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1818. Harrison, Brian. Drink and the Victorians: the Temperance Question in England, 1815 -1872. Keele: Keele University Press, 1994. Lovett, William. The Life and Struggles of William Lovett. London: Trubner & co., 1876. Mason, Nicholas. “‘The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State’: The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 1 (2001): 109–127. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25058542. Accessed 16 July 2021. Sibum, Heinz. “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1994): 73-106.