Marshalsea

Southwark

The Charles Dickens public house in Southwark is one of dozens that claims a link to the famous author. It still serves the kind of ale that Dickens famously drank at the tender age of 11 whilst washing down some scraps of dry bread. Penury brought about when his father was in Marshalsea Prison for debt. Dickens of course used this experience at the rough end of life to inform his early journalism but also his burgeoning publishing career. As our journalist Dickens would frequent pubs in the City and West End and in his "Sketches of Boz" gives us a glimpse of the type of drinking habits that Londoners continued to indulge. He regularly described scenes of riot and confusion increasing as the night wore on and the drinking frayed tempers. In one famous passage he described landlords struggling unsuccessfully to keep the peace before the Peelers arrived. You could probably find similar accounts in the local papers depicting a modern Friday or Saturday evening from Croydon to Hitchin! Of course Dickens was writing when religious revivalism had transformed social justice into a worthy political objective. The ills of alcoholism ("the demon Drink") were ascribed so much to the appalling social conditions the London working classes had to endure, as they were to character flaws. It was probably about this time that the popular myth that the middle classes drank to be sociable and the working classes drank to get drunk gained currency. None of this brought about dramatic regulation, however, despite Parliament discussing it endlessly through all these guises of insobriety. It wasn’t until alcohol fuelled munitions workers threatened to blow themselves up that drinking hours were introduced during the Great War.