Drink Maps in Victorian Britain

Drink maps were compiled “with an agenda that was adamantly hostile to drinking alcohol,” notes map enthusiast and author Kris Butler. They were tools of the temperance movement, designed to demonstrate the ubiquity of access to a vice which was seen to threaten the social order and create misery: one man claimed to have joined the temperance movement because he had been forced to step over a drunken child to enter a pub.

Maps were almost always locally produced for major cities and thus took various forms; some distinguished between the types of alcohol being sold, others had charts revealing the density of establishments in different neighborhoods

Butler’s discussion of these maps places them clearly within a wider social context of increasing urbanization, efforts to document social ills, and increasing political engagement among an expanding middle class, all of which is part of a readable discussion which is likely to spur further interest in social movements of the times.

Hardcover. Maps. Black-and-white and color illustrations.

You can view an 1874 American book supporting the temperance movement in our out-of-print collection: Fifty Years History of the Temperance Cause