Since the emergence of the ‘Stage Irishman’ in early modern London, Ireland’s national character, both at home and abroad, has been associated with drunkenness. Today, this fondness for drink is marketed as a sign of Irish people’s irrepressible sociability, but historically it was read as evidence of an innate propensity for disorder. This book tracks depictions of drunkenness in Irish literature alongside international trends, such as the medicalisation of ‘habitual drunkenness’ in the late-eighteenth century, the rise of the Temperance Movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the dawn of the Age of Psychiatry in the later nineteenth century. As this book demonstrates, in Ireland these developments were filtered through a distinct political reality, one in which an insecure colonial elite sought to defend its position in the context of the vexed question of the country’s capacity for self-governance.
