Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pjpqr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-16T05:16:52.247Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

DIVERTING THE DRUNKARD'S PATH: CHARTIST TEMPERANCE NARRATIVES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2013

Rob Breton
Rob Breton*
Affiliation:
Nipissing University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the anonymous “The Charter and the Land” (1847), a story about the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, William Wright's drunkard's path is remarkably short and his subsequent journey to teetotalism is astonishingly easy. Displaced in urban London and without sustainable work, Wright slowly and somewhat predictably takes to the bottle. The lack of detail the author gives regarding Wright's waywardness suggests that the narrative was common enough to be truncated. Unemployment, poverty, and forced idleness receive a good deal more attention than the ensuing moral downfall. Still, Wright's wife grows increasingly worried as the small amount of money she brings home is cruelly taken from her and spent by her husband in the alehouse, and not on food for the children. After witnessing familial conflicts over spending, readers familiar with the drunkard trope might expect spousal abuse, crime, and death. But one day, out of the blue, Wright says he has for weeks given up drink, instead using the family money to purchase lottery tickets for a stake in the Land Co-operative Society, what was to become the National Land Company in 1846. Feargus O'Connor founded the Company in 1845 in part to allow urban working classes to return to a more rural and stable way of life and in part to create working-class landowners who could subsequently qualify for the franchise. Wright wins a few acres of land outside of London and though the work promises to be challenging, he is happy to have it. The Wright family settles happily in their new home and has nothing but the possibility of more unmitigated happiness to celebrate. Pleasing his wife to no end, Wright promises total abstinence and the story comes to an abrupt conclusion.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 139 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.Google Scholar
Balfour, Clara. Toil and Trust; or, The Life-Story of Patty, the Workhouse Girl. New York: M. W. Dodd, 1865.Google Scholar
Burne, Peter. The Teetotaler's Companion; or, A Plea for Temperance. London: Arthur Hall, 1847.Google Scholar
“The Charter and the Land.” The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Ed. Haywood, Ian. Aldershot: Scolar, 1995. 191–94.Google Scholar
Claybaugh, Amanda. “Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37.1–2 (2003/2004): 45–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Thomas. “The Lad who Felt Like a Fish Out of Water.” Wise Saws and Modern Instances. Vol. 2. London: Jeremiah How, 1845. 42–59.Google Scholar
Cooper, Thomas. “Sam Simkins, the Runaway; or Villainy as a Refuge from the Tortures of Sour-godliness.” Wise Saws and Modern Instances. Vol. 1. London: Jeremiah How, 1845. 234–58.Google Scholar
Cooper, Thomas. “Seth Thompson, the Stockinger; or ‘When Things are at the Worst, they Begin to Mend.’” Wise Saws and Modern Instances. Vol. 1. London: Jeremiah How, 1845. 218–34. English Chartist Circular and Temperance Record. Reprint of Economic Classics. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Greenaway, John. Drink and British Politics since 1830: A Study in Policy-Making. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadfield, Alice Mary. The Chartist Land Company. Devon: David and Charles, 1970.Google Scholar
Harrison, Brian. “Religion and Recreation in Nineteenth-Century England.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967). 98–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People, 1790–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Jones, Ernest. “The Working Man's Wife.” Chartist Fiction. Volume 2: Woman's Wrongs. Ed. Haywood, Ian. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 2–39.Google Scholar
Keating, P. J.The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.Google Scholar
Martineau, Harriet. “A Manchester Strike.” Illustrations of Political Economy: Selected Tales. Ed. Anna Logan, Deborah. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004.Google Scholar
McCalman, Iain. “Ultra-Radicalism and Convivial Debating-Clubs in London, 1795–1838.” English Historical Review 102.403 (April 1987): 309–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Shiman, Lilian Lewis. Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Miles. Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819–1869. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Dorothy. The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. New York: Pantheon, 1984.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P.The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1980.Google Scholar
Twycross-Martin, Henrietta. “The Drunkard, the Brute and the Paterfamilias: The Temperance Fiction of the Early Victorian Writer Sarah Stickney Ellis.” Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House. Ed. Hogan, Anne and Bradstock, Andrew. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. 6–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vincent, J. R.The Formation of the Liberal Party: 1857–1868. London: Constable, 1966.Google Scholar
“The Water Drinker.” English Chartist Circular 2.125.Google Scholar
“Will Harper: A Poor-Law Tale.” The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Ed. Haywood, Ian. Aldershot: Scolar, 1995. 26–32.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. “Forms of English Fiction in 1848.” Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference. Ed. Barker, Francis, et al.London: Methuen, 1986. 1–16.Google Scholar
Wright, Thomas. Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes by a Journeyman Engineer. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967.Google Scholar