“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893)

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is a detailed investigation into one of Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1893/1894). “To Bow Bridge” describes a short tram journey late at night as drinkers move from the closing pubs of metropolitan Essex to fit in a last hour’s drinking “over the border” in the County of London. The story shows not only the disorder of the drinkers heading towards town to squeeze in the extra drinking, but also the shift workers and families heading westwards towards home at the end of a long day. Morrison is painting a picture of more than one type of suburbanite inhabiting the public space. In just five pages the story raises questions of gender, class, respectability and local identity, without apparent judgement on one side of a moral argument or another, all situated in a real – and recognisable – part of east London. This sort of realist fiction had an ambiguous place in the contemporary debates about alcohol consumption, and exists within the broader journalistic, medical and local aut...