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Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 18:56:51 +0100
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From: Dave Postles <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: review: Gutzke's historical bibliography of alcohol
Comments: cc: Judith Bennett <[log in to unmask]>
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Alcoholic Drink in British History
Reviewed by David M. Fahey, Miami University (Ohio), for H-Albion
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David W. Gutzke, _Alcohol in the British Isles from Roman Times to
1996: An Annotated Bibliography_ [Bibliographies and Indexes in World
History, number 44] Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press,
1996. xvii, 266 pp. Author and Subject Indices. $69.50. (May be
ordered in the USA by credit card at 1- 800-225-5800)
Exhaustive research and well-informed annotations make this
fully-indexed bibliography of almost 2200 alcohol-related historical
studies an indispensable reference work for anybody interested in the
history of drink in Britain. Not counting forty-five pages of
biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, the brewing and retail
sale of beer take up over eighty pages of references, the temperance
movement another twenty pages. There are shorter sections on
whiskey, wine, and cider, science and technology, regulation, crime
and medicine, and other topics. The compiler, David W. Gutzke
(Southwest Missouri State University), published a book in 1989 on
the fight against prohibition waged by late Victorian and Edwardian
brewers and publicans and has two related books in progress, a social
history of the English publican and a monograph on the so-called
reformed public house in the early twentieth century. He has an
unrivaled knowledge of British drink bibliography and on the basis of
his sharply argued annotations appears to have sampled virtually all
the material that he lists. Since I am mentioned in his
acknowledgments, I should admit my relative ignorance: for every item
that I suggested to him I have found in the published volume another
twenty new to me. I am especially grateful to Gutzke for references
to articles in local and specialized periodicals and for informing
readers where rare items can be found.
Although this is an exceptional bibliography, it has its limitations.
Some readers may be disappointed that it excludes primary material. This is a
bibliography of historical studies. Nor does it encompass historical
works that include important sections on alcohol or temperance but
focus on something else. The compiler is human. There are typos
such as rendering Tom Honeyman's surname into Honeymoon and a few
other minor slips: for instance, a dissertation in progress listed as
completed, an entry in the _Biographical Dictionary of Modern British
Radicals_ assigned to the wrong author, and a biography of F. R. Lees
attributed to his son (who in fact wrote only the introduction).
None of these errors amount to much.
Gutzke cites the promotion of research as one rationale for his
bibliography. Despite what will appear to most readers to be a surprisingly
rich literature, most of it less than twenty-five years old, he criticizes
British alcohol history as fairly primitive, too often narrow in focus and
unimaginative in methodology. He complains that most research has
"ignored largely women, labor relations, the concept of class, and
oral history; focused on the nineteenth century and, to a much
smaller extent, the medieval era [to the neglect of other periods,
such as the twentieth century]; avoided exploring broad trends; and
borrowed remarkably little from the study of alcohol in other western
countries (notably the United States) or the social sciences." (xii)
Something that Gutzke does not mention I find curious. While a few
Americans, Australians, Canadians, and other outsiders have written
about the temperance movement in Britain, almost nobody except for
local people (and Gutzke) writes about the British drink trade. Perhaps the
explanation is that the historical profession in other
English-speaking countries pays little attention to the business of
the making and selling of alcoholic drink in their own national
histories. It is drink as a social problem and a political
controversy that interests historians in most Anglophone countries.
Since there is no bibliography comparable to Gutzke's for the United
States or Canada or Australia or New Zealand, I can't easily find
evidence to test the merits of my suspicion. Perhaps the absence of
such a bibliography says something.
My principal uncertainty concerns the audience for the book.
Who will use it, and how? Is there really a scholarly field of British alcohol
history that deserves Gutzke's careful and exhaustive work? At least on this
side of the Atlantic it is difficult to be sanguine. In Britain where more is
published much of it is antiquarian or nearly so. Most important,
many of the authors listed in the bibliography are indifferent to the
work of others also listed in it. Do business historians read
temperance history? Do enthusiasts for the Campaign for Real Ale
(CAMRA) who write about pubs read social history? Like Gutzke, I am
a longtime member of the Alcohol and Temperance History Group.
Reluctantly, I must confess that the ATHG's collective subject has
failed to achieve the coherence of, say, environmental history and
the status even less so. I realize that Gutzke intends his book to
promote new and more sophisticated research and so overcome some of
the problems that I have identified. I hope that my pessimism about audience
is unjustified, that historians and other social scientists will respond
to the challenges and opportunities presented by British alcohol
history. They can build on a first-rate bibliography.
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