FIVE: The Industrial Revolution, Beer, and Liquor

In the 1840s the young Friedrich Engels reported from the industrial areas of England: "It is not surprising that the workers should drink heavily. Sheriff Alison asserts that 30,000 workers are drunk in Glasgow every Saturday night. And this is certainly no underestimate. . . . It is particularly on Saturday evenings that intoxication can be seen in all its bestiality, for it is then that the workers have just received their wages and go out for enjoyment at rather earlier hours than on other days of the week. On Saturday evenings the whole working class streams from the slums into the main streets of the towns. On such an evening in Manchester I have seldom gone home without seeing many drunkards staggering in the road or lying helpless in the gutter. On Sunday the same sort of things happen, but with less noisy disturbances. And when the revellers have no money left they go to the nearest pawnshop with whatever they have. . . . When we consider the vast extent of drunkenness among the English workers, Lord Ashley's assertion that the workers spend 25,000,000 pounds sterling a year on spiritous liquor can be readily accepted. It is easy to see the consequences of widespread drunkenness—the deterioration in personal circumstances, the catastrophic decline in health and morals, the breaking up of homes." If one compares this depiction of proletarian drunkenness in the nineteenth century with similar complaints from the sixteenth century, little enough seems to have changed. The texts agree down to their very wording. Again we have the vision of drunkards reeling and wallowing in the gutter, as distressing to observers of drunkenness in the age of the Reformation as in that of industrialization.