R ECOMENDACIONES

Chapter One identified the aims of this project as to examine how discourse on alcohol changed in the nineteenth century, before investigating the extent of both change and continuity within public attitudes and the regulation of alcohol since this period. Drawing on moral regulation theory, it has been decided that concentration will be focused on the regulation of behaviour and the qualitative symmetry between legal developments and public attitudes. Broadly speaking, the thesis will take the form of a historical discourse analysis but one that recognises a role for human agency in terms of the need to understand how people viewed the world. A variety of primary sources will be used to help achieve this brief.

3.1) Press Sources

The press is a crucial component of public discourse, It acts, firstly, as a record of events. Rowbotham and Stevenson have shown that Victorian newspapers were a generally reliable source of reportage of legal developments162 but, even in the absence of reliability, these reports are still likely to provide useful evidence on how certain events were contemporaneously depicted. Secondly, the press functions as a forum for the expression of opinion. These opinions may belong to journalists, editors or the owners of the newspaper, but the views of prominent public figures are often discussed and, particularly through letters sections, the position of members of the public are also to some extent evidenced. Thirdly, it is clear that certain

publications can take particular stances on issues; for example, in 2008 the Daily

162 _{Rowbotham and Stevenson, „Causing a Sensation: Media and Legal Representations of}

Bad Behaviour‟, in Behaving Badly, edited by Rowbotham, Judith and Stevenson, Kim (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp.33-46.

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Mirror launched a “Can It!” campaign which aimed to tackle anti-social behaviour by discouraging young people from binge drinking.163 The press can thus be discursive agents themselves as well as a source of information and a forum for debate. Given their potential partiality, it will be essential to follow Bryman‟s prescription that each newspaper article is scrutinised in terms of its origins, the accuracy of its content, whether its meaning is clear and comprehensible, and whether it is representative of its kind.164 Providing these analytic tasks are performed, newspaper sources should supply vital evidence on how public attitudes have changed over time.

A further crucial requirement is that the target audiences of publications are considered when their content is being analysed. To elaborate, the manner in which the populist Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported nineteenth events could well differ from the coverage of the same events by The Times, which had a generally

educated, more affluent readership.165 While reportage may vary between publications aimed at different readerships, this does not mean that newspaper sources can necessarily inform us about the attitudes, beliefs and values of the particular people or social groups who read them. Bingham, drawing on Stuart Hall, explains that while “newspaper articles, like any texts, usually contain a „preferred‟ meaning, this meaning can be negotiated, resisted, or ignored by the reader”.166

The media, therefore, neither completely reflects nor totally determines the attitudes of its audience. Notwithstanding scope for negotiation, resistance or ignorance, Bingham elaborates that newspapers do have some influence over the views of their readers

163 _{See: Payne, Will, „Mother of ASBO Twins Who Terrorised Estate Backs Daily Mirror Can}

It Campaign‟, Daily Mirror, 15 February 2008.

164 _{Bryman, Alan, Social Research Methods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.381.} 165 _{See: British Library, „British Newspapers 1800-1860‟, http://find.galegroup.com/bncn}

/page. do?page=/BNCN_researchguide.jsp (accessed 5 January 2012).

166 _{Bingham, Adrian, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press,}

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and “by circulating throughout the nation, they have an important role in the

formation of what Benedict Anderson famously called „an imagined community‟”.167 The press constructs an arena in which certain political, economic or moral issues are communicated to an audience and so, Bingham argues, is central to the creation of the “public sphere”.168

Rather than analysing certain historical newspapers in order to retrospectively poll the opinions of its readers, this project aims to

understand how alcohol was represented and debated in public forums through time. Section Five will discuss the type of press sources which will be used. Here it is necessary to specify that, through a qualitative study of the press, this thesis aims to capture the discursive landscape within which people lived their lives at various points in history.

3.2) Legal Sources

The law is a system of social controls which enshrines models of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Given this normative basis, an examination of how attitudes and regulations surrounding alcohol have changed over time must

necessarily consider legal sources. However, Thompson emphasises that the law is not a simple instrument of social control and that, often, it becomes a forum in which competing social groups and interests meet.169 Legislation may encapsulate a broad swathe of social relations, from the goals of social movements and the protection of hallowed ideals such as free trade to the criminalisation of other, problematised social groups or forms of conduct. Thompson further emphasises that legal systems require legitimacy in order to function170 and moral regulation theorists stress the

167 _Ibid. 168 _{Ibid., p.11.}

169 _{Thompson, E.P., Whigs and Hunters, (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), pp.259-269.} 170 _{Ibid, pp.263-264.}

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importance of the discursive or persuasive forms of power.171 Chapter One described how moral regulation reduces the need for the law to be coercively enforced by generating consent to particular forms of government and promoting acceptance of certain behavioural ideals. Specific Acts of Parliament will, therefore, contain normative stipulations that are animated by a particular moral ethos. It is the purpose of this analysis of statutory law to, in conjunction with the examination of press discourse, ascertain what precisely the moral ethos was at different points in time.

This thesis concentrates mainly on the study of statutory law due to the overriding concern with, as Rose and Miller (quoted in Chapter One) put it, the “will to govern”. The formulation and modification of legislation can illustrate a heightened perception that a certain national problem needs to be dealt with and so demonstrate the existence and the particular character of this “will to govern”. As the primary object of study is attitudes, whether laws are implemented and prove effective or not in reforming behaviour is not directly relevant. The actions of the police, courts and other agencies are focused on incidences of the problem behaviour and, as the previous chapter found, the simple existence of a social problem is not sufficient explanation for why that problem is singled out at certain points in time as a particularly virile threat to society. A thorough examination of attitudes is therefore needed to understand why the careers of social problems “ebb and flow”, to borrow Reinarman‟s phraseology, in the manner they do. The use of mainly statutory legal sources is therefore justified theoretically as well as practically, given constraints on time. That said, the manner in which legislation is enforced can be revealing with

171 _{Hunt, „Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!‟, p.593; Ruonavaara, „Moral}

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regard to the attitudes of the public, the police, the courts and other groups.

Furthermore, in English common law the courts can also function as law-makers and it is quite feasible that certain events, such as judicial decisions, will be reported in the press and thus form part of the discourse here studied. It is clear, therefore, that enforcement and case law cannot and should not be ignored. Hence, although statutory law receives more specific analytic attention (for practical reasons), enforcement and case law do form part of this research.

3.3) Temperance Sources

The temperance movement was identified in Chapter One as particularly significant to this inquiry. It is important to understand how temperance adherents viewed alcohol, why they sought to change society in the manner they did and in what ways they reasoned their goals could be best achieved. Temperance societies were voracious publishers who produced voluminous quantities of records, tracts and other publications, so there is no shortage of temperance sources. But as this thesis aims to map out general discursive landscapes throughout history rather than the particular details of internal temperance discussions, it will draw primarily on examples of temperance views which appeared in formats not oriented toward a largely temperance audience. To elaborate, temperance activists such as Samuel Pope and Dawson Burns (who will be discussed further in Chapters Three and Four) wrote numerous letters to national newspapers in an attempt to access a non-

temperance audience and win converts to their cause. These evangelical writings, as well as press reports of public meetings and other activities, will be extensively and systematically utilised in order to facilitate an understanding of both temperance views and the the reactions of non-temperance persons.

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The focus on general press sources may not always shed adequate light on the views of temperance activists. Temperance sources drawn from, amongst other resources, the British Library‟s (BL) Evanion Catalogue of Victorian Ephemera, the British Cartoons Archive, the Royal Mail Archive and the Preston Guardian, which was established by teetotal pioneer Joseph Livesey, will be used in certain instances to illuminate the historical analysis. Equally, it will be necessary at some points to draw on examples of health promotion campaigns, advertising and works of art which have been identified as relevant in either other primary sources or secondary literature in this subject area. This approach will ensure that the important views of temperance groups and other significant agencies are both presented and accurately contextualised within broader public debates about alcohol.

3.4) Caveat on Sources

It is worth making a few comments on some historical sources which will not be extensively used, such as the Hansard reports on proceedings in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Much of the information contained within

Hansard, such as the proceedings of debates on various licensing reforms, would be relevant to this enquiry, although much of it has already been studied in depth by Greenaway, Harrison and others.172 Moreover, parliamentary discourse is separate to public discourse and, when the two overlap, newspapers tend to report political developments closely. This was certainly the case in the nineteenth century when many newspapers printed detailed, often verbatim reports of parliamentary debates on licensing and, in the present day, the controversy surrounding the Licensing Act 2003 led to extensive media coverage of political issues. It is this press coverage, these public representations and understandings of attempts to govern behaviour,

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which are of primary concern to this thesis. This thesis does not, therefore, engage in a systematic study of parliamentary debates or, for that matter, examine auto- biographical materials such as the personal diaries or memoirs of notable historical figures. Undoubtedly such sources may contain interesting opinions, but the extent to which the author voiced or acted upon these opinions in public may well remain unclear. A mixture of existing literature and the primary focus on public attitudes has thus narrowed the number of potential source materials required for this research project. Concentrating on the press, legal materials and temperance sources will provide an abundance of relevant evidence for analysis.

4) Timeframe

4.1) Longitudinal Design

The central questions which occupy this thesis necessitate the examination of contemporary and historical discourse on alcohol, with a particular concern for

nineteenth century developments. The need to understand the long-term development of attitudes to alcohol excludes the possibility of a straightforward comparison and the Victorian and contemporary periods. Such a project would afford ample opportunity to draw parallels between the two periods but neglecting the intervening years would mean that the comparisons would probably be based on separate conclusions about two particular periods. The capacity to reliably make direct developmental connections between attitudes and regulation past and present needs to be prioritised in order to ensure change and continuity can be consistently addressed.173 Additionally, a study of historical change needs to consider the before as well as the after. It is therefore necessary to research debates on alcohol from the eighteenth century onwards. But herein lies a significant obstacle: how can change

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and continuity over approximately three hundred years be studied in sufficient depth to provide reliable conclusions?

One possible solution to this problem might be to concentrate extensively on legal sources and only one or two press sources which span the whole timeframe. The Times archive, for example, is searchable from 1785 onwards and so would provide a significant amount of information of how views of drinking have changed. However, the material studied would be very narrow and, as Bingham stresses in his study of how long-term change in the representation of sex and private lives in the media, “it is more useful to compare and contrast the approaches of a range of popular newspapers than to provide a more comprehensive coverage of just one or two publications”.174

Another solution to this problem would be to produce a series of separate analyses of public discourse on alcohol at various points within the

chronological period studied. In social science, this type of approach is called

longitudinal and notable examples include the British Crime Survey and the General Household Survey. These surveys are sometimes annual but a continual

concentration on the sample of sources is not necessary, meaning that, as in the example of the National Child Development Study, data collection can occur at intervals of several years. 175 The individual surveys provide useful cross-sectional data on selected variables in specific years but, more importantly, the recurrent nature of longitudinal research facilitates comparison of the same variable in

previous and future versions of the same survey. Longitudinal research would allow for a variety of sources to be studied at certain intervals of time, thus enabling a detailed, developmental study of change and continuity over time.

174 _{Bingham, Family Newspapers, p.7.}

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This research design is consistent with the theoretical approach followed by this thesis. Critcher‟s synthesis of moral panic and moral regulation theory

(discussed in Chapter One) positions short-term episodes of heightened anxiety within long-term processes of moralisation. The study of these discursive high points, irregularly spaced within currents of moral regulation, would permit a longitudinal examination of change and continuity. Moreover, these episodes of intense alarm should provide revealing data; Ben-Yehuda describes how moral panics vividly demonstrate certain attitudes and values by helping to “draw the moral boundaries between different symbolic-moral universes”.176

The mobilisation of moral rhetoric, indicative of a moral panic, may also bring some clarity to the issue of agency. Those “manning the moral barricades” will be more active during these episodes and so it is quite feasible that they will be more clearly discernible. Who is drawing the normative line between acceptability and unacceptability, as well as how that line is discursively drawn, can therefore be studied through this longitudinal approach. These discursive, chronological cross-sections can then be compared to each other and assessments made about the extent of historical change and continuity.

A longitudinal research design in which the timeframe is separated into more manageable chronological chunks provides a viable, practical means through which evidence on discourse on alcohol can be collected and studied in a developmental, historical fashion. There is a danger in this methodology that the cross-sections of discourse become isolated from one other and so the project is reduced to being simply a documentation of change and continuity rather than an explanation. However, this danger is mitigated by a study of legal sources which is not bounded by chronological limits and spans the whole period from the eighteenth century

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onwards. Extensive consideration of secondary literature also reduces the potential for a disjointed historical account and further efforts to address this issue (through particular keyword searches) will be described shortly. But the more immediate question arising from the decision to concentrate the collection of newspaper sources within specific historical episodes is which chronological periods should be focused on?

4.2) Finding the Episodes within the Processes

Law and morality are central to the concerns of this thesis. Following moral regulation theory, particular preoccupations relate to the manner in which the law compels people to behave, the normative judgments inherent in legal developments, and the moral ethos which animates changes in the governance of alcohol. It is therefore reasonable to concentrate analysis on several historical periods in which major legal developments occurred. Usefully, the major developments tended to coincide with periods of heightened discursive anxiety, which usually functioned as a reaction to, a justification of, or a factor contributing towards new legal regulations. Focusing on periods of significant legal change will therefore enable analysis of the attitudes, beliefs and values which construct understandings of alcohol. This section will briefly explore the legal history of alcohol in order to delineate chronological periods for intensive study (although legal issues will be examined in more depth later in the thesis).

Given that this thesis coalesces around a study of the temperance

movement‟s legal and attitudinal impacts, it is necessary to consider the period prior to the emergence of organised temperance in the late 1820s. This project will

therefore begin by examining the eighteenth century partly in order to foster an appreciation of what legally and attitudinally preceded this era. But additionally, and

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as noted in Chapter One, the prevalence of public concerns about drinking,

especially gin-drinking, in the first half of the eighteenth century makes the period of special relevance to this project. Warner describes how the „gin craze‟ was an early version of the modern “drug scare”177 _{and Borsay claims it was “perhaps the first} drink-related 'moral panic'”.178

Some licensing laws already existed but, mirroring public disquiet, a succession of Gin Acts, notably in 1729, 1736 and 1751, attempted further restrictions on the trade in spirituous liquors through the imposition of licence requirements, licence fees and duty. Due to both intense levels of public anxiety and increasing legal regulation of alcoholic spirits, the eighteenth century clearly merits attention.

The „gin craze‟ will not, however, receive extensive empirical attention in this thesis. This is partly due to the wealth of academic literature on the subject already in existence, including articles by both Borsay and Critcher which explicitly compare the controversy over gin-drinking in the eighteenth century with contemporary concerns about binge drinking. 179 But the reduced focus on the Georgian period is also connected to the particular preoccupation with the Victorian temperance

movement. This concentration dictates that it is not necessary to study the „gin craze‟ and other contemporaneous events for their own sake; it is, however, essential to understand the similarities and differences between public discourse on alcohol