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This chapter explores the drinking cultures of the working classes through analysis of oral history interviews conducted in the 1970s on surviving Victorians and Edwardians. These interviews reveal another side to working class drinking, where alcohol consumption revolved around family life, work and leisure. This stands in contrast to the way in which working class drinking was often portrayed as either ‘carnivalesque’ or ‘teetotal’ in political discourse. In fact, everyday working class drinking was much more humdrum and routine.

This chapter considers drinking cultures of the middle- and upper-classes where there was a desire to consume alcohol in a conspicuous manner in order to reflect and promote social status. One of the key ways of achieving this was to consume the ‘right’ sorts of drinks in the ‘right’ kind of places. The chapter considers the way that men and women consumed alcohol within private spaces: in the home and within gentlemen’s clubs. The domestic context of alcohol consumption was governed by rules of social etiquette, which both demonstrated and reinforced social class and gender values. The chapter provides a case study of alcohol consumption within two of London’s top gentlemen’s clubs: The Athenaeum and The Reform Club. The wine committees within gentlemen’s clubs were tasked with cultivating and upholding particular standards of taste in alcoholic drinks. The men who drank in the clubs had the freedom and finances that allowed them to do so and therefore they expected to be served only the finest quality alcoholic drinks. As guardians of taste, the wine committees ensured that the alcohol consumed in gentlemen’s clubs reflected the class and gender status of club members.

Drunkenness was only one of many outcomes or reasons that Victorian and Edwardian consumers had for drinking. The desire for intoxication, the multitude of ways to seek intoxication and the range of intoxicated behaviour was infinitely more complex because it was deeply entangled within the social and cultural context in which alcohol was produced and consumed. Questions about alcohol consumption drove parliamentary enquiries, shaped the commercial practices of alcohol producers and sparked debates within the medical profession. The Victorians knew that the problems of alcohol co-existed with the pleasures of drinking and that if alcohol remained a legal intoxicant then the freedom to drink ultimately rested with consumers. While consumer agency existed, people’s reasons for drinking alcohol varied and were influenced by broader political, commercial, medical and cultural factors.