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Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 15 on the orIgIn And progress of teMperAnce: bAsIl MontAgu’s Some enquirieS into the effectS of fermented LiquorS (1814) In context JAMes nIcholls Abstract. In 1814, the British lawyer Basil Montagu published a collection of writings on drink entitled Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. Montagu’s goal was to demonstrate that alcohol was harmful in all forms and his collection drew on a wide range of sources from classical myth to contemporary medical discourse. Although it was not widely read, Some Enquiries illustrates the extent to which alcohol use had been identified as a social problem and health risk by the early nineteenth century. It also contains fictional and confessional narratives that foreshadow later temperance literature. This paper argues that many of the ideas and principles conventionally ascribed to organised temperance are clearly set out by Montagu, and that this has important implications for conventional histories of the temperance movement. The early history of the British temperance movement has been well documented.1 According to standard accounts, organised temperance was brought from America via merchant ships in the late 1820s, leading to the establishment of the first anti-spirits societies in Ireland and Scotland in 1829. In 1832, teetotalism radicalised what had, until then, been a respectable movement dominated by clerics and doctors. Initiated by the Preston Temperance Society, and energised by its indefatigable leader Joseph Livesey, teetotalism drew its support from the industrial working class and turned the campaign for greater moderation in drinking into a radical, indeed utopian, movement that saw total abstinence as the mechanism for social transformation. Whereas temperance principles had originally migrated from America to Britain, teetotalism saw those ideas returned with a radical edge. In the 1840s the Washingtonians took the twin principles of total abstention and moral suasion to the forefront of American public debate, but were eclipsed by the rise of the more politically minded prohibition movement in the 1850s. A similar fate would befall British moral suasionists when, in the third wave of temperance thought to have rolled across the Atlantic, news of the Maine Law spread. James Nicholls is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath Spa University, Bath, UK SHAD (2011): 15-25 16 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011) In the light of recent scholarship, however, it is clear that the rise of organised temperance in 1829 did not represent an entirely new development in Britain; rather it marked a new phase in public debates over the regulation of drunkenness that had been pursued – sometimes vociferously – since the attempted suppression of alehouses in the early seventeenth century.2 The quasiprohibitionist Gin Act of 1736 may have been the high-water mark for those campaigns, but organised attempts to suppress drunkenness can be found both before and after the “gin craze.”3 This article draws attention to one, rather idiosyncratic but nevertheless important, illustration of how ideas usually associated with post-1829 temperance were circulating before this point. It looks at a collection of writing on drink compiled by the lawyer Basil Montagu and published in London in 1814. Montagu’s compendium, entitled Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors, gives an insight into the state of public discourse on drink in the years before 1829 because it contains such a wide collection of writing from both Montagu’s contemporaries and writers working in the century before the book was published. While it exhibits the obsession of one man, it also reveals the breadth of the debate in England at the time. Of particular interest is the importance of total abstinence to debates on alcohol in medical circles. Some Enquiries demonstrates it was an idea with far wider appeal than is often assumed, and that it had been discussed in relation to both principle and practicalities throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Secondly, Some Enquiries contains literary narratives that foreshadow the tropes and structure of later temperance literature. While these are mostly of interest as an illustration of the existence of such writing before the rise of organised temperance, in one instance they provide evidence that British pretemperance ideas had some influence on later American temperance literature. MontAgu’s enquirieS When he published Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors in 1814, Basil Montagu was a prominent figure in both legal and literary circles. An acknowledged expert in bankruptcy law, he was also close friends with many leading Romantic writers, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Lamb and William Godwin.4 Indeed, in 1810 Montagu had been at the heart of one of British Romanticism’s most conspicuous break-ups after clumsily revealing to Coleridge that Wordsworth had given up on his old friend’s ability to manage his drink and drug use.5 Despite his connections among the cultural vanguard, however, Some Enquiries failed to make a significant impact on the general public. Although a second edition was published four years later, and the book is mentioned in passing by some Victorian chroniclers of temperance such as Samuel Couling, it has failed to enter into the canon of texts identified by later temperance historians as significant or influential.6 Indeed, it has remained something of a curiosity: a novelty which occupies a marginal place in the otherwise orderly narrative of the spread of Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 17 temperance ideas from America to Britain in the early nineteenth century. However, Montagu’s book remains important because of what it reveals about the scale and scope of the debate on drink in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It shows that many features of the Victorian “drink question,” especially questions around moderation, abstinence and the nature of habitual drinking, were very much part of public discourse in Britain fifteen years before the rise of organised temperance. Some Enquiries is divided into twelve chapters set out as responses to specific queries: “Does the drinking of fermented liquors promote health?”; “Does the drinking of fermented liquors promote moral excellence?”; “Do fermented liquors contribute to conviviality?” and so forth. It consists of excerpts and fragments – “bricks and straw and stubble,” as Montagu puts it – culled mostly from medical writing, but also including literature, natural philosophy, theology, memoirs and classical myth.7 The medical authorities cited include George Cheyne, Thomas Trotter, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Garnett, Benjamin Rush and Montagu’s close friend, the London surgeon Anthony Carlisle. The effect, presumably intentional, is to demonstrate the breadth of debates over issues ranging from the effects of alcohol on health to the role of custom in shaping drinking behaviours. The questions addressed in Some Enquiries were those which would become central to Victorian temperance discourse: questions over moral responsibility, the relative values of abstinence and moderation, the ethics of the alcohol trade, and the role of the state in protecting drinkers from their own destructive desires. Some Enquiries is important, then, not because it was especially influential, but because it demonstrates the range and complexity of the debate on drink in the decades before the rise of temperance proper. totAl AbstInence In eArly nIneteenth-century brItAIn Montagu’s stated motivation in compiling Some Enquiries was to confront the culturally powerful idea that drinking was healthy, normal and inherently convivial. He insists, early in the book, that while the social power of alcohol rests on the commonsense assumption that it encourages conviviality, this is a misperception grounded in a weak adherence to tradition.8 His counterstrategy was to amass a preponderance of evidence that drinking diminishes sociability, weakens the intellect and harms the body. Furthermore, his target was not excessive drinking, but drinking in toto. Over more than 350 pages, Montagu’s Enquiries set out to establish a compelling argument for total abstinence. The bulk of Montagu’s excerpts come from medical writing, and his selections demonstrate that abstinence was not a concept limited to a handful of quacks. Some Enquiries includes, for instance, passages from the work of the celebrated Georgian physician, George Cheyne, whose widely-read Essay of Health and Long Life (1724) developed the principles of moderation in diet which would become key to his popular success.9 A sizable proportion of Cheyne’s original essay was dedicated to weighing up the relative value of 18 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011) various drinks, and he concluded that distilled spirits were “nearest arsenic” in their “deleterious and poisonous qualities,” while condemning punch-drinking and insisting that water was “the most natural and wholesome of all drinks.”10 Cheyne also wrote that withdrawal from spirituous liquors was not only beneficial, but should be sudden and complete – demonstrating that before the mid-eighteenth century there was already a debate among doctors not simply on the principle of abstinence but on the best method for achieving it. “Nothing is more ridiculous,” he wrote in a passage cited by Montagu, “than the common plea for continuing in drinking on, large quantities of spirituous liquors; viz., because they have been accustomed so to do and they think it dangerous to leave it off, all of a sudden.”11 This idea solicited some heated responses when it was first published, but only over the method, not the principle, of withdrawal.12 Indeed, in the 1720s, the idea that “water alone is sufficient and effectual for all the purposes of human wants in drink” was relatively commonplace among medical writers.13 Cheyne was not the first, nor would he be the last, doctor to recommend total abstinence. Some Enquiries makes extensive use of an established body of medical literature dealing with abstinence as a treatment for the gout. Montagu quotes Thomas Garnett’s Popular lectures on Zoonomia (1804), describing abstinence “from everything that contains alcohol” as the “grand secret” in the cure of gout.14 Erasmus Darwin describes how a friend who abstained from all alcohol for sixteen years was free not only from gout, but from piles and “the gravel” as well.15 Montagu also cites William Temple’s “Essay upon the cure of the gout by moxa” (1677), in which Temple observes he has “known so great cures… by obstinate resolutions of drinking no wine at all, that I put more weight upon the part of temperance, than any other.”16 Montagu could equally have cited another seventeenth-century doctor, Thomas Sydenham, who, while noting that water-drinking alone was “crude and pernicious,” insisted that severe cases of gout could only be treated by “a total abstinence from all kinds of fermented liquors, how small and soft soever they may be” – though not suddenly, as this had “destroyed [an] abundance of people.”17 Indeed, gout – as opposed to morality, general health or social order – was the issue which did most to make the principle of total abstinence conceivable to seventeenth and eighteenth-century medical writers, since it appeared to cure the disease without harming the patient.18 Other medical figures discussed abstinence on different grounds. The philosopher and doctor David Hartley was particularly interested in the questions intoxication raised about the relationship between body and mind, and he discussed this question at some length in his influential work Observations on Man (1749). Montagu excludes Hartley’s speculations on the mechanisms by which “disorderly vibrations” could be propagated by alcohol into the brain via the nerves.19 However, he cites a passage from the same work stating that “all liquors, which have undergone vinous fermentation” should be “either totally avoided, or not… used, except in small quantities, and rarely.”20 Here, Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 19 Hartley’s argument is based on a quasi-scientific reading of scripture – specifically that “the Deluge did so alter the nature of vegetable juices as to render them first capable of producing an inflammable inebriating spirit.”21 The theological claim that intoxicants were unnatural had been used by other doctors: George Cheyne (whose work influenced Hartley) wrote that he was “fully convinced that the primary and original design of the Author of Nature for the solid food of animals was nothing but earthy particles… with water only for drink.”22 While much of the book is given over to medical justifications of total abstinence, Montagu sets out an extended moral argument in one of the few passages which he appears to have authored. In a lengthy critique of Samuel Clarkson’s Portraiture of Quakerism (1808), Montagu objects to the fact that whereas Quakers prohibited gambling and music, drinking remained permissible in moderation. Montagu’s critique rests on his claim that drinking was prey to exactly the same abuses as gambling and music. Why, Montagu asks, did the logic that stated gambling easily slid into recklessness not apply identically to drinking? Why was music’s tendency to weaken the sway of moral probity not equally, indeed more, true of drink? “Where a custom is simply liable to abuse,” Montagu observes, “[the Quakers] satisfy themselves with recommending moderation in the use of it. But where abuse of a custom is either in the first place necessarily, or, in the second, very generally connected with the use of it, they commonly consider the omission of it wise and prudent.”23 Underlying this was a simple, but powerful, claim: that drinking was not merely an activity that, in extreme cases, could create harms; instead, alcohol was, in its very essence, a dangerous substance. If the harm caused by alcohol was due to human weakness, rather than anything intrinsic to alcohol itself, then moderation was an acceptable practice for those who were not susceptible. However, if alcohol was – in all but the most unusual of instances – demonstrably harmful, then only total abstinence made sense. There was a further pragmatic dimension to this, which touched on a critical – and still unresolved – question around controlled drinking: “abstinence” Montagu bluntly states “is easier than temperance.”24 Alcohol, as depicted in Some Enquiries, is a dangerous substance which is tolerated socially only because of the dead weight of tradition, and moderate drinkers fail to recognise this as surely as habitual drunkards. It may have been a relatively lonely debate that Montagu was engaging in here, but it was also prescient. His logic was precisely that which would be applied to such dramatic effect by the teetotallers, and later the prohibitionists, of the Victorian temperance movement. Montagu’s extensive discussion of the subject shows that while abstinence on moral grounds was doubtless an unusual position to adopt, it was not so bizarre as to occupy a place beyond the more general discourse on drink. Rather, the legitimacy of total abstinence vis a vis other forms of moderation was already under discussion – twenty years before radical teetotalism revivified the temperance movement on both sides 20 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011) of the Atlantic. confessIons of A drunKArd Montagu’s collection marks one stage in the long historical process of working out what “habitual drunkenness” was, how it was caused, and how it should be treated. Developments in medical discourse were one strand of this, as were the emergence of moral arguments that posited abuse as an intrinsic, rather than exceptional, consequence of alcohol consumption. However, it is well understood that another critical influence in the shaping of modern conceptions of dependence was the appearance of confessional and recovery narratives. These both depicted the downward spiral of the “drunkards progress,” and delineated “the addict” as a recognisable cultural figure.25 Here, too, Montagu’s book is of interest. One of the most startling, and well-known, sections of Some Enquiries is a first-person narrative written by Montagu’s close friend Charles Lamb entitled “Confessions of a drunkard.” It was originally published in The Philanthropist (1813) and later reprinted as an Elia essay in the London Magazine (1822). It was unusual in being a first-person account of habitual drinking. Framed as a discussion of total abstinence, it depicts habitual drinking as an issue, not simply of weakness or sinfulness, but of profound self-transformation. Lamb writes “the drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals,” that “reason shall only visit him through intoxication,” and that – paraphrasing John Milton’s Satan – “Evil is so far his good.”26 Much as Thomas De Quincey would do a few years later, while detailing the horrors of addiction, Lamb also dramatises the experience – not least by the uses of Miltonic allusion. The Romantic idea that in the moment of intoxication “self-transcendence and self-abasement lie embedded in each other” has, arguably, left a deep cultural legacy.27 By depicting the craving for alcohol as both terrible and fascinating, Lamb contributed to a cultural construction of addiction that posited it not simply as a disease or a vice, but as a mark of the extraordinary. Although self-transformation is an interesting subject, we must be careful not to overstate the fascination it held for medical writers. Thomas Trotter, whose seminal Essay on Drunkenness is cited throughout Some Inquiries, sought to define habitual drunkenness as “a disease of the mind.”28 However, he attributed it to a kind of spiritual malaise which could be tackled through, among other things, the rousing of “particular passions, such as the parent’s love for their children, desire of fame, the pride of reputation, family pride etc.”29 Montagu’s friend Anthony Carlisle, also cited throughout Some Enquiries, repeatedly cautions against the misconception that drunkenness makes a man more interesting. Carlisle appears more interested in the everyday sustenance of an individual’s intellectual powers than their capacity to selfdestruct. However, Montagu somewhat offsets Carlisle’s sober insistence that “nothing contributes so much to moral equability of mind… as the total abandonment of strong liquors”30 by giving such prominence to Lamb’s melodra- Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 21 matic narrative in the same book. Lamb certainly purports to agree with the tenor of Carlisle’s position – “Confessions of a drunkard” is nothing if not a description of moral disequilibrium – but his depiction of the drinker as prey to almost inconceivable torments undermines the author’s own intent. Lamb’s drunkenness – grandiose, terrifying, dramatic – somewhat eclipses the moral soundness of Carlisle’s sobriety. The dramatic tone of Lamb’s confession would help establish its legacy. Not only was it reprinted in a number of British publications, but some years later it caught the attention of a young Walt Whitman. Whitman, working on his early temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842) quoted the following description of the fear of withdrawal from Lamb’s “Confessions of a drunkard” in its entirety:31 But what if the beginning be dreadful? The first steps, not like climbing a mountain, but going through fire? What if the whole system must undergo a change, violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? What if a process comparable to flaying alive, have to be endured?32 While “Confessions of a drunkard” might be seen as a mere novelty, occupying a similarly idiosyncratic place as Some Enquiries itself, Whitman’s borrowing of this passage points to a more palpable influence. Indeed, this very passage has been presented as evidence that Whitman was “on the cutting edge of addiction theory” when he wrote Franklin Evans in 1842.33 In fact, he was citing Lamb writing nearly thirty years earlier. Whitman’s source appears not to have been Some Enquiries: it is ascribed to Elia in Franklin Evans, so it is more likely Whitman found it in the London Magazine. Nevertheless his brief citation is an important one. It occupies an important place in Franklin Evans itself, and given the popularity of Whitman’s book it shows that Lamb was part of the literary mix out of which the American “dark temperance” tale – an immensely popular and influential genre – emerged.34 The ideas of writers such as Lamb are important because they remind us that total abstinence was not simply an exercise in moral improvement, but also an experiment in the possibility of self-transformation. Just as alcohol could turn a man into a fiend, so sobriety could turn a fiend into an upright citizen. In this process, the relationship between the fundamental and the accidental elements of individual identity blurs enormously. Moderation, implied stability of identity since drinking was only ever a cultural practice; total abstinence, by contrast, suggested identity was fluid since reform was matter of complete transformation: the construction of a new self rather than merely improving the old. on the orIgIns And progress ofdrunKenness “Confessions of a Drunkard” is not the only narrative in Some Enquiries that prefigures the contours of later temperance literature. A second, anonymous, story entitled “On the origin and progress of drunkenness, in a letter to a young gentleman” reads like many standard temperance tales of the later nineteenth 22 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011) century. In brief, a forty year-old narrator recounts how as a child he copied his father’s drinking. At university he is accounted the “prince of fine fellows” for his ability to drink hard, but the years of convivial excess take their toll and he is shunned by his more studious friends. He tries and fails to abstain, finally being excluded from Cambridge and losing all his money at a gaming house. Shortly thereafter, his mother dies from a broken heart and his family are left penniless. He finally gives up drink, but despite rebuilding his life as a respectable barrister he is now dying: a “martyr of InebrIety!”35 Cautionary narratives against drinking were not unknown before the nineteenth century. Indeed, they were commonplace among the popular ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.36 However, “On the origin and progress of drunkenness” prefigures the structure of the temperance narratives that began to appear in America from the 1830s in a number of key respects. The narrator begins as a bright, sociable individual but is laid low by the unshakeable proximity of male socialisation and alcohol; his drunkenness leads to both social and economic disaster; the repercussions are felt most keenly by his family (especially the women); and recovery is ultimately initiated by tragedy. Countless stories would follow this rubric as the cautionary temperance tale became a staple of Victorian popular fiction in the mid-nineteenth century.37 An important difference, however, between “On the origin and progress of drunkenness” and conventional American temperance tales is the extent to which it depicts a distinctly elite transgression. American temperance tales were often, by contrast, determinedly middle-class affairs: indeed, the ideological backdrop to American temperance literature was precisely the risk to middle-class prosperity posed by intemperance and the possibility of middle-class respectability presented by sobriety. Some Enquiries adopts a rather different class position: one nicely illustrated by Montagu’s own snobbish distinction between drinking to overcome the “timidity of merit” (that is, the shyness of the refined, sensitive individual) and the “timidity of ignorance” (that is the proper reticence of the uneducated). “Deprive ignorance of its timidity,” Montagu quips, “and you bereave it of its best quality.”38 Drinking may have been a universal ill, but its effects were class specific: what could lay low the most educated minds could also, by contrast, simply reveal the bestiality of the mob.39 It was not an uncommon view. In his Essay on Drunkenness, Thomas Trotter had insisted that while the “cultivated mind… commits no outrage” when drunk, drunkenness among the “ignorant and illiterate” was “human nature in its vilest garb, and madness in its worst form.”40 Some Enquiries does nothing to challenge this perspective; instead, it depicts elite drunkenness as a tragedy, and lower class drunkenness as a threat. Here, perhaps, is the critical difference between the conceptions of compulsion and abstinence that drove the likes of Basil Montagu and the radical world-view of teetotallers such as Joseph Livesey in the 1830s. For the working class teetotallers who followed the lead set by Livesey’s Preston Temper- Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 23 ance Society in the 1830s, habitual drinking was an issue of economic exploitation and social marginalisation. Abstinence was indeed transformative, but the transformation was political as well as personal. Where Montagu espoused no wider social vision in his Enquiries, teetotalism was driven by a notion of social renewal and by the firm belief that alcohol was the cardinal barrier to human progress. To abandon drink was not to better secure the status quo, but to reveal the hypocrisy of the wealthy through the moral example of the poor. Montagu, therefore, may have differed from the early anti-spirits movement in his dismissal of moderate drinking, but he also differed from later teetotalism in both his own class position and his inability to see alcohol – and its abandonment – as part of a wider socio-political landscape. conclusIon The purpose of these observations is not to claim special status for Some Enquiries, but to illustrate the relatively advanced stage that debates on habitual drinking had reached in Britain by 1814. As Brian Harrison pointed out long ago, the creation of local reform organisations solely concerned with reducing the consumption of alcohol was an American invention.41 However, when that novelty appeared in Britain in 1829, it entered an environment where the drink question was already on many people’s lips. Furthermore, total abstinence was not only well-established as a therapeutic principle by this point, but debates were already underway as to its validity as a moral programme. From this perspective, the adoption of total abstinence by radical British temperance groups in the 1830s was the application of an existing idea to an emerging social reform movement. As with Lamb’s influence on Whitman, the influence of the British teetotalism on the spread of organised total abstinence in America (for example, via letters written by the temperance MP James Silk-Buckingham to the American Temperance Society)42 has tended to be overlooked. For its part, Montagu’s book may not have provided a direct transatlantic influence, but it can stand as testament to the fact that many key temperance beliefs were in place before organised temperance landed in the ports of Ireland and Scotland. Montagu’s obscure book, then, provides an important perspective on the discourse of drink on the eve of temperance proper. Although odd, it was not sui generis; rather it was part of a far wider debate on the politics, anthropology and science of alcohol which had emerged over two centuries earlier and which had become firmly established over the course of the eighteenth century. Organised temperance may have turned that debate into a national obsession, but Montagu’s book confirms that, in some circles at least, the discussion was already underway. Bath Spa University j.nicholls@bathspa.ac.uk 24 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011) 1. Key book-length studies include N. Longmate, The Waterdrinkers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968); B. Harrison Drink and the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 1971); L. L. Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) and, more recently, J. Greenaway, Drink and British Politics Since 1830: A Study in Policymaking (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). I discuss these arguments in further detail in The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 2. See, for example, J. Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason (London: Profile, 2003); P. Dillon, The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva (London: J. M. Dent, 2003); A. Smythe, ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). 3. Nicholls, Politics of Alcohol, 5-78. 4. Montagu also had a reputation for hosting parties at Cambridge where plenty of wine was available – one friend later reminisced “No-one would then have imagined he would ever be the author of a work ‘Against the use of Fermented Liquors,’” see H. Gunning, “Reminiscences of Cambridge,” in Gentlemen’s Magazine, October 1854, 344. 5. R. Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Flamingo, 1999), 213-5. 6. It does, however, receive passing mentions in Victorian writing temperance on both sides of the Atlantic. See, “Temperance Societies,” The Eclectic Review, Vol. X (London: Jackson and Walford, 1841), 319; S. Couling, History of the Temperance Movement (London: William Tweedie, 1862), 42. It is listed in the catalogue of the Library of Philadelphia for 1815, Library Company of Philadelphia, Supplement to Vol II Part I of the Catalogue of Books (Philadelphia: M Carey, 1815), 25 7. B. Montagu, Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors (London: J. Johnson, 1814). Pagination will be taken from this edition throughout. 8. Ibid., xx-xxxi. 9. Ibid., 8-10 and 254-5. 10. Ibid., 59; 74. 11. Ibid., 45. This passage also appears in Some Enquiries, 244-45. 12. Anon, A Letter to George Cheyne M.D.F.R.S., Shewing the Danger of Laying Down General Rules to Those Who are Not Acquainted with the Animal Oeconomy etc. (London: J. Graves, 1724), 15-20. 13. Cheyne, An Essay of Long Life, 43; T. Short, A Rational Discourse on the Inward Uses of Water (London: Samuel Chandler, 1725), v; T. Short, Vinum Britannicum, or an Essay upon the Properties and Effects of Malt Liquor (London: D. Midwinter, 1727), 51. See also J. Nicholls, “Vinum Britannicum: The ‘Drink Question’ in Early Modern England,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 22 (2008), 190-208. 14. T. Garnett, Popular Lectures on Zoonomia, or the Laws of Animal Life in Health and Disease (London: Royal Institution, 1804), 279; Montagu, Some Enquiries, 56. 16. W. Temple, “An essay upon the cure of the gout by moxa,” in Miscellenea, the First Part (London: Jacob Tonson, 1691), p. 231; Montagu, Some Enquiries, 101. 17. T. Sydenham, The Entire Works of Dr Thomas Sydenham (London: Edward Cave, 1742), 246; 447; 449. 18. See also W. Cadogan, A Dissertation on the Gout (London: J. Dodsley, 1771), 40-41; 60-61 and its relationship to B. Rush Sermons to the Rich and Studious on Temperance and Exercise (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1772) discussed in Nicholls, “Vinum Britannicum,” 201-3. 19. Ibid., 393. 20. D. Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty and his Expectations (London: S. Richardson, 1749), 220; Montagu, Some Enquiries, 23. 21. Hartley, Observations on Man, 221. 22. Ibid., 69. 23. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 345. 24. Ibid., 346. 25. See, D. Reynolds, and D. Rosenthal eds., The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American endnotes 15. Ibid., 60-61. Nicholls: On the Origin and Progress of Temperance 25 Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); J. Crowley ed., The Drunkard’s Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); A. Frederico, “‘I must have drink’: Addiction, angst and Victorian realism,” Dionysos 2, no. 2 (1990): 11-25 26. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 212. See A. Taylor, Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830 (London: Macmillan, 1999) for an extended discussion of this. 27. M. Cooke, “De Quincey, Coleridge, and the formal uses of intoxication,” Yale French Studies, 50 (1974), 27-8. 28. T. Trotter, An Essay Medical, Philosophical and Chemical on Drunkenness and its Effects on the Human Body (London: Routledge, 1988), 172. 29. Ibid., 188. 30. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 182. 31. W. Whitman, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, in Walt Whitman: The Early Poems and Fiction, ed. T. Bresher (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 179. 32. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 202. 33. M. Warner, “Whitman drunk,” in Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. B. Erkkila and J. Grossman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 31-43. 34. Whitman joked that he had written the novel “in three days for money under the influence of alcohol,” see D. Reynolds, “Black cats and delirium tremens” in Reynolds and Rosenthal, The Serpent in the Cup, 50. 35. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 229. 36. See for example John Wade, Tis money makes a man, or, The good fellows folly (London: 1660s; repr. 1680s); Anonymous, The good fellow (London: Jennings, Water-lane, Fleet-street, between 1790 and 1840). Thanks to Angela McShane for these references. 37. See, for example, the narratives collected in Crowley, The Drunkard’s Progress, the earliest of which date from the 1840s. 38. Montagu, Some Enquiries, 310. 39. Three years earlier, Coleridge had written that the “quantity of stimulus, which taken by a man of education, surely as it will hasten his decay of powers, would yet, for the time, only call them into full energy… renders an uneducated man, of undisciplined habits, a frantic wild beast,” see T. Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courier II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 175. 40. Trotter, Essay… on Drunkenness, 23. 41. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 101. 42. The pro-temperance MP the temperance MP James Silk-Buckingham wrote to the American Temperance Society in 1835 extolling the achievement s of the British teetotal movement – some years before ATS adopted total abstinence as its favoured approach. See American Temperance Society, Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society (Boston: Seth Bliss and Perkins, Marvin, and Co, 1835), 475-86.