From Institute of Historical Research, London, "Reviews in History"

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>Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 14:27:35 +0100 (BST)
>From: Anne Shepherd <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Reviews in History - Hilton on Burnett's Liquid Pleasures
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>PLEASE NOTE: The author's response follows next.
>                                                        
>Reviews in History
>
>John Burnett
>Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain
>London: Routledge, 1999, pp. viii + 254.
>
>Reviewed by Matthew Hilton
>University of Birmingham
>
>Over the last thirty years, there has been a phenomenal rise in the number
>of soft drinks consumed in Britain. Although many commercial sugar-based
>beverages were first developed around the mid- to late-nineteenth century,
>it was not until the 1960s and the initial mass popularity of Coca Cola
>that cold, non-alcoholic, bottled drinks began to constitute a substantial
>proportion of the total number of drinks consumed.  By 1995, around 20 per
>cent of all drinks bought in this country were soft drinks. According to
>John Burnett, this trend represents a `cold drinks revolution', a
>transformation in our Liquid Pleasures comparable in scale to the `hot
>beverages revolution' of the late-seventeenth century. 
>     
>What becomes apparent throughout Burnett's welcome and authoritative
>volume is that Britain's drinking habits have always been subject to rapid
>change.  Over the last few centuries there has been nothing stable or
>traditional in the manner in which people have drunk. Beers and ales have
>undergone continual development, from the introduction of bitter-tasting
>hops in the fifteenth century to the popularity of commercially-brewed
>porter in the eighteenth century. The importation of the exotic
>caffeine-based drinks of tea and coffee in the seventeenth century marked,
>anticipated and perhaps even encouraged the profound social changes
>associated with the rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century.
>The industrial revolution brought about several changes, from the
>confirmation of cheap tea as a universal drink, to the decline of
>privately-brewed beer and the re-emergence of gin palaces in the 1830s, a
>hundred years after the spirit had first prompted Hogarth's famous prints. 
>At the same time urbanisation and declining living standards reduced the
>amount of milk consumed and folk recipes such as small beer were
>forgotten, replaced with the new commercial soft drinks manufactured by
>Robinsons and Schweppes.  Rising incomes at the turn of the twentieth
>century encouraged the growth of a leisure industry which forced the pub
>to compete with the music hall, the football ground and, eventually, the
>cinema, distractions which led to a long-term fall in beer sales. 
>Governments also intervened to follow up their purification of the water
>supply with an encouragement of milk consumption.  As John Burnett so
>convincingly emphasises, none of these drinks can be studied in isolation,
>the history of each demonstrating the fluctuating patterns of demand borne
>of the competition that has always existed between rival Liquid Pleasures. 
>
>Despite such an emphasis on the inter-related history of different drinks,
>Burnett's vast range of material has forced him to adopt a structure in
>which each drink is examined in a separate chapter, before a conspectus
>draws out the major themes.  Within each chapter there is sufficient
>material for a separate monograph, (1) as Burnett skilfully and
>entertainingly recounts the story of water, milk, tea, coffee, soft
>drinks, beer, wine and spirits from their early origins through to the
>present day. Each chapter is organised according to similar principles,
>with Burnett usually beginning by outlining the early history of the
>drink, before detailing its relationship to the `hot beverages revolution'
>of the late seventeenth century and the changed social structures of the
>eighteenth.  The industrial revolution always loom large in each narrative
>as does the question of adulteration and government intervention, issues
>present in Burnett's previous work.(2) The commercial changes of the new
>mass consumer society are then outlined, before each chapter finishes with
>a sketch of changing post-war patterns of consumption. 
>
>Such a history lends itself to anecdote and Burnett nicely blends the
>illuminating example with his clear descriptions of the economic data of
>demand. Thus, in his discussion of small beer we learn that nettle beer
>was popular in Lancashire and bog wortle in Yorkshire; that beer drinkers
>used to prefer a mixture of a sweet heavy ale, a lighter hopped beer and a
>weaker table beer, a blend which encouraged the commercial development of
>porter which to some degree matched the taste of the three combined;  that
>Samuel Pepys variously drank ale, wine, claret, orange juice and champagne
>for breakfast; that `taking the waters', or visiting a spa town, usually
>meant drinking water rather than bathing in it; that foundrymen and
>forgemen working in temperatures of 90-140øF could get through from 8 to
>24 pints of weak homebrew per shift;  and that Georgian physicians held
>that `saline waters had valuable purgative effects, chalybeate waters
>containing iron had tonic and restorative properties, sulphur waters were
>good for the skin and complexion, while others were claimed to cure gout,
>stone and rheumatism' (p. 10). Such close attention to detail is matched
>by a broad understanding of historical context which makes for some
>excellent interpretative speculations. For instance, in discussing the
>falling rates of milk consumption in the early nineteenth century, Burnett
>sees fit to mention that the protective Corn Laws encouraged the
>cultivation of land rather than the grazing of dairy cattle, thus reducing
>the milk supply. More imaginatively, he argues persuasively for an
>attention to physical environment in explaining demand. While here we
>might all be familiar with the argument that poor quality housing
>encouraged many men to stay in the public house, Burnett also argues that
>the land enclosures reduced the supply of free wood available to
>working-class homes with the consequence that both home baking and home
>brewing were discouraged. 
>
>The strength of Burnett's work lies in its authoritative account of the
>separate histories of water, milk, tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer, wine
>and spirits. He manages to condense a wealth of information into clear,
>engaging essays which, by examining drink throughout the `modern' period
>of history (1650 to the present), identify the more important trends and
>fluctuations in consumption. He has combined an extensive knowledge of the
>secondary literature with much archival research, producing, in his
>chapter on beer drinking at least, a much needed history of a central
>aspect of British popular culture which has been long overdue.  He
>combines economic, social and cultural history and stresses throughout the
>importance of political factors to this history as well. He thus follows a
>recent trend in the study of consumer society which has looked to the role
>of the state in influencing demand, though his previous work on
>adulteration and government legislation might be seen to have preceded
>this type of analysis.(3) For instance, in his chapter on milk, he emphasis
>the importance of fears over physical degeneration which prompted the
>Edwardian governments to form Infant Welfare Centres and Milk Depots where
>mothers could obtain bottles of sterilised milk at 2d. for a day's supply.
>Such intervention in consumption set important precedents for the role of
>the welfare state which would be followed by the establishment of the Milk
>Marketing Boards in 1933 and the provision of free school milk from 1946.
>In other chapters, too, Burnett describes the role of government in, for
>example, the retail licensing of tea, in the setting of high excise duties
>for coffee, in the regulation of drinking hours in pubs and in the
>municipalisation of the water supply following a series of cholera
>epidemics in the mid-nineteenth century. 
>
>The stated approach of Burnett is to examine the history of drinks beyond
>any purely realist notions of physiological need or innate desire. He
>claims that he wishes to give attention to economic considerations while
>accepting that economic historians have looked too much at supply.
>Instead, referring to the sociological and anthropological literature of
>Grant McCracken and Mary Douglas, he argues for a study of drinks that
>accepts that consumption is a consequence of society as well as being
>constitutive of it. This is hardly a novel argument within material
>cultural studies, but Burnett deserves considerable praise for offering a
>history in which a rich economic narrative of demand statistics is located
>within a broad social, if not always cultural, context.  Thus, in his
>chapter on spirits, he is able to argue that the three most important
>factors in understanding their role in the nineteenth century are firstly,
>that whisky (in Scotland) and gin (in England) were antidotes to the
>psychological and physical pressures of industrial life; secondly, that
>spirits came under moral and religious attack from the temperance campaign
>from as early as 1828;  and, thirdly, that consumption was, and must
>always be, determined by price. 
>
>Burnett's preference for the economic or materialist interpretation really
>comes through in his conspectus.  The vast majority of his overall
>explanation for the changing history of drinks is devoted to `material
>reasons':  that supply had to be there in the first place; that demand had
>to be affordable; that physical conditions were important to consumption; 
>that environmental factors influenced both demand and supply;  and that
>the role of the state was crucial.  These are all extremely important
>considerations and need to be stressed in any history of consumption, but
>the emphasis he places on them makes it disappointing that the
>`non-material reasons' are not explored further.  These cultural issues
>are summarised in just one paragraph: 
>
>    Drinks  are  consumed  not only,  or  even  mainly,
>    because  they  are  available and affordable:  they
>    have  to desired and enjoyed. Alcoholic drinks have
>    always  contributed  to  conviviality,  celebration
>    and  festivity,  and through their varying  rituals
>    confirmed membership and fellowship within  groups:
>    beer  and  wine represented differences  in  social
>    status   but   shared   the   common   element   of
>    sociability,  `the framework and  introduction  for
>    conversation  and conviviality'. While  alcohol  in
>    moderation  liberated  the  drinker  from   mundane
>    restraints  and  anxieties,  the  adoption  of  the
>    caffeine  drinks  depended on a  different  set  of
>    social attributes. It was initially important  that
>    they   were  expensive  novelties,  which   thereby
>    defined  the  social  superiority  of  users:  they
>    announced  status  publicly,  and  were   `in   the
>    fashion' as markers of modernity at a time  of  new
>    thought  in  art,  science  and  politics.  It  was
>    probably  not so important in the first place  that
>    these drinks were immediately enjoyed as they  were
>    seen  to  be  consumed.  The  reason  why  caffeine
>    drinks   were  adopted  by  the  bourgeoisie   were
>    somewhat  different. Social emulation was doubtless
>    important  for some people, but tea and coffee  for
>    this class carried other meanings, of sobriety  and
>    seriousness,  increasing  mental  activity  without
>    the  impairing effects of alcohol. In  the  Age  of
>    Enlightenment  it was a rational use  of  time  for
>    men  to  drink these beverages, for women  part  of
>    `the  civilising  process' that was  bringing  more
>    polite  manners  and  gentler  relationships   into
>    domestic  life. Louis Lewin believed that  caffeine
>    could   `sterilise  nature  and  extinguish  carnal
>    desires':  certainly, it did not  stimulate  sexual
>    virility  of  physical passion. As tea later  moved
>    into   mass   consumption  it  lost  its   original
>    associations  with  novelty and luxury  to  become,
>    above    all,    the   drink   of   morality    and
>    respectability,  firmly linked with  the  religious
>    revival  and  the  temperance  movement  and,  more
>    generally,  with Victorian values of  work,  thrift
>    and sobriety.[188-9]
>
>While the material explanations offered in his conspectus are a summary of
>the excellent accounts provided in the separate chapters these
>non-material factors were not explored by any means as thoroughly; a
>cultural studies scholar would be able to conjure up a book from every one
>of the above sentences. 
>
>Liquid Pleasures fulfils its primary task of presenting an entertaining,
>general, informative and authoritative history of drinks in Britain. 
>Where further research might be conducted is on these more cultural
>issues, though one might suggest that Burnett himself ought to have
>incorporated them more thoroughly if he really is committed to emphasising
>the cultural context of the economic act of consumption.  One explanation
>for the lack of an overarching culturalist interpretation is that
>Burnett's subject matter is defined purely by it physical properties:
>water, milk, tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer, wines and spirits appear
>together purely because they are liquids. They are not linked according to
>some psychological or cultural property such as that found in Goodman,
>Lovejoy and Sherrat's history of drugs, or what they crucially term,
>`psychoative substances' (including caffeine), which then lends itself to
>an analysis of the centrality of a particular type of consumption to
>everyday life.(4)
>
>Of the general interpretative frameworks that are employed, the importance
>of the physical environment might warrant further attention. For instance,
>Burnett does make use of the material collected by Mass-Observation, but
>much more might be made of this organisation's anthropology of behaviour
>in pubs, especially in regard to the preferences for particular types of
>beer, the social and cultural dynamics involved in the different rooms of
>the pub (the vaults, snug, bar and saloon), and the weekly rhythms of
>drinking rituals according to the day of the week.(5) Similarly, Burnett
>does make mention of the coffee houses of the eighteenth century but,
>given the reference to rationality and `the Age of Enlightenment', it is
>surprising that no mention is made of civil society and the public sphere,
>even if they were only included to dismiss some of the more exaggerated
>claims of Habermas' analysis of the coffee house.(6) Finally, in his
>description of the milk bars of the 1930s and the espresso bars of the
>1950s, more might have been made of the studies of youth culture,
>particularly those on the use of drinks and commercial commodities within
>various post-war subcultures.(7) Such close attention to the context of
>consumption has proved particularly useful in drawing out the relationship
>between masculinity and femininity in relation to material culture, but
>these gender issues are also given little attention in Liquid Pleasures.(8)
>
>At times, Burnett stresses the importance of advertising in stimulating
>demand, especially with regard to soft drinks and beer, and he is
>particularly good at tracing the collective advertising slogans such as
>`Drink More Milk' (1922), `Pinta Milka Day' (1958) and `Beer is Best'
>(1933). The literature on advertising in Britain is by no means as
>comprehensive as that which has recently appeared on America, and it would
>have been useful for Burnett to have extended his brief analyses to
>respond to the problematic interpretations so far developed by Loeb and
>Richards.(9) However, apart from the four postcards which appear on the
>front cover, there is no presentation of the visual evidence of Liquid
>Pleasures. Had the imagery of drink been studied in more depth then again
>issues of masculinity and femininity might have been more thoroughly
>explored as well as the more general issue of identity. Burnett does deal
>very well with the issue of social status, but drinks have also been used
>to explore individual identity and to present images of the self to others
>within one's socio-cultural environment. 
>
>Many of these issues may seem peripheral to the author's concerns and he
>should not be criticised too much for what he has not included, since the
>socio-economic approach he does offer is largely convincing and a useful
>corrective to the overtly culturalist turn of many recent studies.
>However, his realist or material approach does detract from his analysis
>in a number of ways. One final point that should be mentioned here is the
>history of health and medicine offered in the book. While Burnett is very
>good in outlining the medical properties ascribed to the various drinks in
>the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeing such health claims as
>products of their time, he does not pursue the theme, except with a brief
>mention of advertising.  Instead, he too readily accepts the medical
>evidence of more recent decades and he offers the notion of addiction as
>an explanation for the growth in coffee consumption [p.91].  It might be
>argued that coffee is merely habit forming and that the authority of the
>claim that it is addictive is dependent on the nature and position of
>scientific knowledge over the last 150 years. 
>
>While this point is an incredibly minor one, what I hope it does is
>emphasise the fact that many of the interpretations which Burnett offers
>as real or material, may in fact be the products of historical
>circumstance. This should not detract from the excellent approach and
>analysis provided in Liquid Pleasures, an approach I think he has been
>largely correct to adopt. It is mentioned merely to highlight the ways in
>which the history of drink might be extended.  As Burnett himself argues
>in the introduction: `"needs" came to be determined not by physiological
>requirements but in terms of cultural "wants"'[p.4]. However, in his
>subsequent and definitive focus on price, supply, environment and the
>state, his analysis of the `non material reasons' is by no means as
>complete. 
>
>April 2000
>
>_______________________________
>1 Indeed, Burnett's work probably anticipates some more
>detailed studies: W. Gutzke, Drink in British Popular
>Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
>forthcoming).
>2 J. Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in
>England from 1815 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin
>edn., 1968).
>3 S. Strasser, C. McGovern & M. Judt, Getting and Spending:
>European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth
>Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998); M. Daunton & M.
>Hilton (eds), Material Politics: States, Consumers and
>Political Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
>4 J. Goodman, P. E. Lovejoy & A. Sherrat (eds.), Consuming
>Habits: Drugs in Historyand Anthropology (London: Routledge,
>1995).
>5 Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study
>(London: Cresset, 1987).
>6 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
>Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
>(trans. by Thomas Burger, Oxford: Polity Press, 1992).
>7 D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London:
>Routledge, 1979).
>8 See, for example, C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer:
>Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 (Manchester:
>Manchester University Press, 1999); V. De Grazia with E.
>Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in
>Historical Perspective (Los Angeles: University of
>California Press, 1996);
>M. Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800-2000
>(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
>9 L. A. Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian
>Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
>1994); T. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian
>England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London:
>Verso, 1991).
>     
>
>
>
>
>
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>|"Reviews in History"                              |
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