The Victorian Era

What Was the Temperance Movement

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The British temperance movement began on 1 September 1831, when John Dunlop, a weaver and Primitive Methodist lay preacher, signed seven of his friends in the Cotton Tree tavern in Preston to a pledge to abstain from ardent spirits, and within twelve months more than 200 local societies were claiming some 200,000 members across the north of England. What had begun as a movement against the gin shop became, within a generation, a campaign against the drink trade as such; by 1833 the seven pledges of the Preston moderates had been replaced by the single all-or-nothing vow of the “teetotal” abstainer (a word whose first recorded use, in the Preston Temperance Advocate of 1833, almost certainly derived from the Preston dialect “t-total”), and by the 1870s the movement was demanding not merely abstinence by individuals but the prohibition of the liquor trade by Parliament. The temperance movement shaped the What was a Victorian pub like?, informed the legislation examined in Victorian Morality and Social Reform, and left a deep mark on the wider Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life of the period.

The Origins of the Movement

The temperance movement grew directly out of the Evangelical Revival. John Wesley, George Whitefield, and the preachers of the new Methodist and Nonconformist chapels had long preached against drunkenness, and the founding of the national temperance societies in the early 1830s was an attempt to give the old anti-drink sermons the discipline of an organisation and the leverage of a national platform. The first Preston society of 1831, with its seven original pledges to refrain from spirits, was soon followed by the British and Foreign Temperance Society (1831), founded in London to coordinate the local societies, the National Temperance Society (1842), and the League of Health (1852), an attempt to anchor the cause in medical science.

The decisive shift from moderation to total abstinence came in the early 1830s, and the centre of the new movement was Preston. Joseph Livesey (1794–1884), a Preston teetotaller and cheese-factor, became the chief propagandist of total abstinence and edited the Preston Temperance Advocate and the Stardrop; the Preston teetotallers’ rallying cry of 1833 is the earliest known use of the word “teetotal” itself. The cause spread rapidly through the industrial north, and the Irish temperance crusade of Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), a Capuchin friar of Cork, enrolled an estimated five million Irishmen and Irishwomen between 1838 and 1856. In the United States the comparable figure was Neal Dow (1804–1897), the “Father of Prohibition” of Maine, who in 1851 piloted the first state prohibition law, helped to frame the federal income tax of 1862, and saw the Maine law overturned and then re-enacted.

The Bands of Hope and the United Kingdom Alliance

The second generation of the movement institutionalised total abstinence in a way the first had not. In 1847 Jabez Tunnicliff, a Leeds temperance lecturer, founded the Band of Hope for the children of the working class, with its famous pledge, its temperance journals, and its programme of music, magic-lantern lectures, and annual festivals; by 1897 the Band of Hope claimed 3.4 million members, more than any other British temperance body, and many of the most important anti-drink activists of the 1880s and 1890s had been recruited through it as children.

For the adults, the United Kingdom Alliance, founded in Manchester in 1853 by Nathaniel Card, a Baptist minister, and a coalition of Nonconformist ministers, doctors, and philanthropists, was the chief political organ of the prohibitionist cause. The Alliance drafted the permissive prohibition bill of 1864, lobbied the licensing legislation of the 1870s, and was the chief organiser of the “local option” campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s. Alongside it stood the Church of England Temperance Society (1862), the Women’s Total Abstinence Union, the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, the Independent Order of Rechabites (1835), a friendly society with a teetotal rule of membership, the Independent Order of Good Templars (1868), which taught its 700,000 British members a ritual of temperance in lodges; and the Blue Ribbon movement of 1878, a single-summer craze that enrolled perhaps a million and a half working men and women in the gospel of the blue ribbon badge.

The Salvation Army, founded by William Booth and Catherine Booth in the East End of London in 1865, gave the cause a militant evangelical wing; the Army published a steady stream of temperance tracts, opened working-men’s hotels and coffee palaces, and used the brass band and the open-air meeting to reach drinkers who would not cross the threshold of a chapel.

The Drink Trade and the Campaign for Licensing Reform

The temperance campaigners were responding to a real change. By the 1850s England and Wales had some 100,000 licensed public houses and 200,000 smaller beer houses and grocers’ shops licensed to sell drink; the average adult consumed upwards of 30 gallons of beer a year, and the spirit duty, the gin-shop, and the dram-drinking of the great cities had become a byword in the novel and on the platform. The reformers were also drawing on contemporary sanitary science, and the linkage of drink to the overcrowding, the cholera, and the child mortality of the great industrial cities was a constant theme of the period. The Annual Reports of the Registrar-General, with their tables of deaths by intemperance, and Edwin Chadwick’s sanitary reports sat on the same shelf as the Alliance News and the Band of Hope Review.

The campaign’s greatest legislative success was the Licensing Act of 1872, which closed the loophole of the Beer Act of 1830, tightened the hours of sale, restricted the licensing of new premises, and placed the public house under closer magisterial supervision; it was followed by the Inland Revenue Act of 1880, which imposed new duties on the trade, the Licensing Act of 1902 (which restricted the renewal of licences), the Licensing Act of 1904, and the Licensing Act of 1910. By the 1890s the consumption of spirits per head had fallen by half from its mid-century peak, and the gross national bill for alcoholic drink had dropped sharply.

The High Noon and the Long Decline

The high point of the British temperance movement was the 1870s. The campaigners had the ear of the Commons, the platform of the chapels, the journalism of the Alliance News and the Temperance Record, and the firm support of the Liberal Party under the influence of Nonconformist members. The Education Act of 1870 brought rate-aided schooling within reach of the working class, the Band of Hope taught the pledge in the new board schools, and the Local Option bills, which would have allowed each county or borough to prohibit the sale of drink by a two-thirds majority of its ratepayers, were debated in five successive Parliaments between 1880 and 1893. None ever reached the statute book.

The decline of the movement was a long, slow process. The failure of prohibition in the United States, where the Eighteenth Amendment of 1919 was repealed in 1933, damaged the credibility of the cause. The rise of the new unionism of unskilled workers in the 1880s and 1890s, the rise of a secular socialism, and the rise of a Labour politics that owed nothing to the chapels, all drained the constituency of the old temperance bodies. The acceptance of moderate beer-drinking by the new working men’s clubs and the trade unions, the secularising drift of Edwardian culture, and the licensing legislation itself, which tamed rather than abolished the public house, all helped. The “trade” of the public-house manager, the brewer, and the distiller was reorganised as a national industry under the great combines of the 1890s, and the United Kingdom Alliance spent its last decades as a pressure group on the margins of Edwardian politics. The temperance tradition, however, lived on in the Band of Hope, the Rechabites, the Good Templars, and the Women’s Total Abstinence Union, and the public-health rhetoric of the new century owed as much to the old teetotal preachers as to the new school of state medicine.