Review: Illustrating Britain’s Victorian Booze Restrictions

In an effort to discourage alcohol consumption during the late 19th century, British temperance groups produced and circulated “drink maps” showing where people in particular cities could buy booze. That counterintuitive strategy reflected the conviction that easy access to alcohol was patently scandalous—a threat to public morals and health that could be mitigated by local licensing authorities once they knew exactly how easy it was to get drunk.

As Kris Butler explains in his copiously illustrated Drink Maps in Victorian Britain, those magistrates were empowered by a judicial determination that pubs and other alcohol vendors had no legally cognizable interest in continuing to do business. The courts also held that magistrates, in deciding whether to award or renew annual licenses, could consider local needs as they saw them. The maps aimed to show that existing options exceeded those needs.

Butler finds little evidence that officials took much advantage of that open-ended authority. Temperance activists argued that “the people” should have a say in how many alcohol sellers could serve a given neighborhood. But those merchants understandably thought that test already had been met by their ability to turn a profit in the crowded marketplace reflected in the activists’ maps.

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