Boire aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles

Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries


Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Editors)


Pickering & Chatto
February 2014
978 1 84893 436

These essays cover the representation and practice of drinking a variety of beverages across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. A crucial period for the development of modern drinking culture, this period saw the emergence of urban public places connecting drinking and sociability. Divisions across class were particularly stark, with the London coffeehouse at one end and the low tavern or inn at the other. Similarly, certain drinks – chocolate and tea, for instance – had strong gender connotations, which became fixed over time. The case studies in this volume cover drinking culture from a variety of perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology and the history of medicine.

Introduction – Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp

Part I: Ritual and Material Culture
1 Politics by Design: Consumption, Identity and Allegiance – Karen Harvey
2 Drinks, Domesticity and the Forging of an American Identity in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) – Caroline Rosenthal

Part II: Institutions and Social Class
3 Café or Coffeehouse? Transnational Histories of Coffee and Sociability – Brian Cowan
4 Claret at a Premium: Ned Ward, the True Tory Defender of Fine Wines? – Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann
5 Eighteenth-Century Travellers and the Country Inn – Susanne Schmid
6 Drinking, Fighting and Working-Class Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Britain – John Carter Wood

Part III: Temperance and the Misery of Alcohol
7 Romantic Radicalism and the Temperance Movement – Rolf Lessenich
8 The Myth of ‘Misery Alcoholism’ in Early Industrial England: The Example of Manchester – Gunther Hirschfelder

Part IV: Intoxication and Therapy
9 Alcohol, Sympathy and Ideology in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and The Odd Women (1893) – Anja Müller-Wood
10 Legends of Infernal Drinkers: Representations of Alcohol in Thomas Hardy and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction – Norbert Lennartz
11 The Spirit of Medicine: The Use of Alcohol in Nineteenth-Century Medical Practice – Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter

Part V: Case Studies: Rum, Cocoa and Magical Potions
12 ‘Been to Barbados’: Rum(bullion), Race, the Gaspée and the American Revolution – Eva-Sabine Zehelein
13 A Beverage for the Masses: The Democratization of Cocoa in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction – Monika Elbert
14 The Power of the Potion: From Gothic Horror to Health Drink, or, How the Elixir became a Commodity – Elmar Schenkel