Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics : Four Case Studies from the Victorian Period

The article considers four examples from the nineteenth century when the stereotype of the habitual drunkard appears to give way to a figure that bears closer resemblance to the twentieth century’s “Existential drinker.” These case studies offer different illustrations of a newly emerging metaphysical landscape around heavy drinking. First, in the 1872 Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards, the panel cannot understand why a repeat offender would choose to drink rather than be cared for. Second, the heroine of George Eliot’s tale “Janet’s Repentance” encounters a spiritual “despair” through her drinking habit. Third, a group of pictures by the artist Honoré Daumier features two drinkers in what are here interpreted as Existential tableaux. Fourth, Émile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir is read as one of the first sustained accounts of excessive drinking that is both a visceral response to conditions under industrial capitalism, while also latching onto a type of metaphysical unsettling prompted by such drinking.