The pub in literature: England's altered state

Abstract

Introduction - the connection between the English nation, its hostelries and its literature. 2. Early doors :The Tabard in Canterbury Tales Betty's Alehouse in Piers the Plowman Ballad of John Barleycorn Skelton's Tunning of Elynour Rummyng. 3. The Falstaffian state: Falstaff and Hal in the Boar's Head. 4. Wonderfull Yeares: Ben Jonson's New Inn Taming of the (and a) Shrew Dekker. 5. Pepys pissed: drinking songs (1640s-1700) Diary of Samuel Pepys - the various uses Pepys found for inns, taverns and alehouses - not all of them to do with drinking. 6. Jovial, Brutal, Vulgar, Graphic Ned Ward: Spy and sundry pieces. 7. Scene, an inn? and horrible gin: Farquhar's Beaux Stratagem Gay's Beggar's Opera Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. 8. Where did the Romantics drink?: more Goldsmith Cowper's Task Crabbe's Borough Wordsworth's Benjamin the Waggoner Immortal Dinner Party Lamb's Letters (Salutation and Cat). 9. Dickens: Maypole in Barnaby Rudge and a riot of other hostelries. 10. Of rainbows and fingers: Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Mayor of Casterbridge. 11. Our mutual wasteland: Arthur Morrison's Red-Cow Group (a short story in Mean Streets) T.S. Eliot's Waste Land Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square A.E. Coppard's Black Dog John Hampson's Saturday Night at the Greyhound. 12. Kegged: George Orwell's Moon under Water Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning J.M. O'Neil's Duffy is Dead Michael Curtin's League Against Christmas Martin Amis's London Fields.