Nineteenth-century Nottingham Drinking Behaviour, 1800–1900

Abstract

In this article, I use an eclectic data set that spans several data sets – Trade directories, newspaper articles, ordinance maps, and photographs, including sketches – to understand the discourses of alcohol provision in Nottinghamshire during the long nineteenth century. Thus, I show that alcohol provision in Nottingham and the influence of temperance ideology was a fraught battle between contrasting moralistic predilections regarding the behavioural and political notions of the lasting effects of alcohol consumption within nineteenth-century communities. Attitudes towards alcohol consumption were not a simple choice between teetotalism and drunkenness but a more nuanced debate that went to the core of societal norms and accepted cultural traditions that contradicted the governmental and moralising forces of the paternalistic reformists emerging in this period.