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The Smoking Bishop

The other day, while moving books from one room to another, I came across a battered bound volume of issues of Fun magazine for 1864. It was a rather gamier rival of Punch, full of waspish political comment, excruciating puns and rather good cartoons; more Private Eye than Punch perhaps. One article was a bit unexpected, given the popular view of the Victorians. It began:

Boulogne was blessed last Sunday with the presence of some fourteen hundred British excursionists . . . It was quite a psychological study to see them land (for many were drunk at that early stage of the day’s amusements); some skipping up the companion with the rollicking air which is characteristic of the Briton who is only occasionally drunk; others, and these the habitual topers, clambering up in a heavy, sodden sort of way, and others having to be carried on shore.

This is not quite the way the Victorians are supposed to have carried on, and it got me thinking about how drink and drinkers are dealt with in the novels of the greatest chronicler of the English in the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens.

In one way, Dickens was not a Victorian. He was born in 1812 and his formative years were spent under the Regency, then the reigns of George IV and William IV. By the time of Victoria’s coronation, many of the themes and obsessions of his creative work were formed and he retained a Regency exuberance in his early work that was not always to the taste of his more educated readers. One thing they did not care for in his early novels was his treatment of drink and drinkers.

It was true that the bawdy and generally drunken eighteenth century was dead and buried. By 1836, in his book The Anatomy of Drunkenness, Robert MacNish could say ‘the vice has certainly diminished among the

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The other day, while moving books from one room to another, I came across a battered bound volume of issues of Fun magazine for 1864. It was a rather gamier rival of Punch, full of waspish political comment, excruciating puns and rather good cartoons; more Private Eye than Punch perhaps. One article was a bit unexpected, given the popular view of the Victorians. It began:

Boulogne was blessed last Sunday with the presence of some fourteen hundred British excursionists . . . It was quite a psychological study to see them land (for many were drunk at that early stage of the day’s amusements); some skipping up the companion with the rollicking air which is characteristic of the Briton who is only occasionally drunk; others, and these the habitual topers, clambering up in a heavy, sodden sort of way, and others having to be carried on shore.
This is not quite the way the Victorians are supposed to have carried on, and it got me thinking about how drink and drinkers are dealt with in the novels of the greatest chronicler of the English in the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens. In one way, Dickens was not a Victorian. He was born in 1812 and his formative years were spent under the Regency, then the reigns of George IV and William IV. By the time of Victoria’s coronation, many of the themes and obsessions of his creative work were formed and he retained a Regency exuberance in his early work that was not always to the taste of his more educated readers. One thing they did not care for in his early novels was his treatment of drink and drinkers. It was true that the bawdy and generally drunken eighteenth century was dead and buried. By 1836, in his book The Anatomy of Drunkenness, Robert MacNish could say ‘the vice has certainly diminished among the higher orders of society, but there is every reason to fear that, of late, it has made fearful strides among the lower . . . Thirty or forty years ago, a host did not conceive he had done justice to his guests unless he sent them from the table in a state of intoxication.’ There were some who suspected that young Dickens dwelt too much on such matters, but Dickens himself had little time for those who lectured the lower orders; to one correspondent who wrote complaining of the amount of drinking that went on in his work, he replied:
I am certain that if I had been at Mr Fezziwig’s ball, I should have taken a little negus – and possibly not a little beer – and been none the worse for it, in heart or head. I am very sure that the working people of this country have not too many household enjoyments, and I could not, in my fancy or in actual deed, deprive them of this one when it is so innocently shared.
In the first short pieces written in his early twenties and published in Sketches by Boz (1836), there are three that deal directly with drink. ‘Making a Night of It’ recounts the drunken misadventures of two clerks, who go out to spend their quarterly wages. Many ‘goes’ of whisky and brandy end in a punch-up, a night in the cells, and a penitent and hung-over morning. The story is told with such verve and humour that Dickens’s attempt at drawing a moral is a little forced. ‘Gin-shops’ describes the ‘epidemic’ of ‘knocking down all the old public houses, and depositing splendid mansions, stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and illuminated clocks, at the corner of every street’. Dickens contrasts the squalid and overcrowded dwellings clustered around these new gin palaces, and acknowledges their attraction: ‘the interior is even gayer than the exterior’, with mahogany bars, brass rails, leather seats and barrels of spirits labelled ‘The Cream of the Valley’ and ‘The Out and Out’ and ‘The Real Knock-me-Down’. More sentimental and melodramatic, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’ is the tale of an alcoholic who neglects and ill-treats his family and finally commits suicide by drowning in the Thames. Even this early on in his career, Dickens was treating drink as he was to do for the rest of his life, depicting the convivial, the satirical or the moralistic. In his youth he knew the Thames-side dives, the country and seaside pubs in Essex and Kent, and the handsome London inns (of which The George at Southwark is the best surviving example). As a very young political journalist he travelled the length and breadth of the country and must have known most of the major inns in most of the towns of England, and a good many lesser and lower establishments. His early years of hard travelling gave him an unrivalled knowledge of these places and the human types that inhabited them. In 1996, Peter M. Morris produced a fascinating statistical breakdown of Dickens’s novels (A Survey of Dickens’ Employments). Under the heading of ‘Inn Personnel’ he gives a total of 17 landladies and 35 landlords of inns, 49 waiters, 8 barmaids and assorted others, making a total of 155. Quite a high percentage of these are encountered in Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Literary critics find Pickwick problematic, mainly because it is radiantly funny and the most they can do with it is to mutter about its presaging of the later and darker Dickens in some of its pages about prison life. It was published in 1837, the year that Victoria came to the throne, and in its way it is the last picaresque novel of the eighteenth century. In it, drink and drinkers perform a number of comic roles. Pickwick’s manservant, Sam Weller, has a splendid father, Tony, married to the landlady of The Marquis of Granby pub. This is a second home to the Reverend Mr Stiggins, bane of Tony Weller’s life, an evangelical lay preacher constantly canting about the evils of drink and with a nose that periodically glows due to the infusion of medicinal drams of grog and hot water. This thin, red-nosed, rum-tippling hypocrite is exposed at the Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, the case histories of whose members sound oddly like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting refracted through Dickens’s almost surreal humour:
Betsy Martin, widow, one child, one eye . . . never had more than one eye, but knows her mother drank bottled stout, and shouldn’t wonder if that caused it (immense cheering). Thinks it not impossible that if she had always refrained from spirits, she might have had two eyesby this time (tremendous applause).
But, despite the sad case of Betsy Martin, and a drunken chaplain in prison, the drinking in Pickwick is generally jovial and harmless. The book is full of breakfasts and lunches and dinners, all washed down with beer or punch, served in a score of different inns. Dickens’s next novel, Oliver Twist, presents, in the bully and pimp Bill Sikes, a much darker and more threatening aspect of drunkenness. Sikes is a man who lives most of his life half-drunk, an alcoholic or near enough as to make no difference. The modern concept of alcoholism was hardly recognized at the time this book was written. The Scottish physician, Thomas Trotter, had stated in 1804, ‘In medical language, I consider drunkenness, strictly speaking, to be a disease . . . The habit of drunkenness is a disorder of the mind,’ but his conclusion had been largely ignored. His fellow doctors at that time had no idea how to treat a disease they scarcely acknowledged; to them and to the more influential sages of the time, the clerics, drunkenness was a form of immorality and weakness. Dickens presents few of what we would recognize as alcoholics in the modern definition: Sikes, probably; poor Mr Wickfield, plied with drink by the obnoxious Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, certainly. But mostly Dickens wants us to think of drink as a convivial mover of men (one of his few female drunks is the wife of Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times). And, as we have seen, in Pickwick, he used drink as a superb comic device. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Gamp, ‘for reasons of delicacy’, as Dickens puts it, keeps her gin in the teapot, and the tea party she gives for Betsy Prig, her colleague in the dark arts of midwifery, nursing the sick and the laying out of corpses, ends in a terrible row inflamed by the contents of the pot. Martin Chuzzlewit also contains the most wonderfully hypocritical of Dickens’s hypocrites, the architect Seth Pecksniff. Pecksniff is normally possessed of a weasel-like cunning, but he gets hopelessly drunk at Mrs Todgers’s boarding-house on a visit to London. He has been sitting beside Mrs Todgers, talking in a maudlin wandering way, and suddenly leans heavily against her. She is alarmed and cries out:
Mr Pecksniff straightened himself by a surprising effort, as every one turned hastily towards him; and standing on his feet, regarded the assembly with a look of ineffable wisdom. Gradually it gave way to a smile; a feeble, helpless, melancholy smile; bland, almost to sickliness. ‘Do not repine, my friends,’ said Mr Pecksniff, tenderly. ‘Do not weep for me. It is chronic.’ And with these words, after making a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the fireplace.
It is impossible in a short survey to give all the important passages relating to drinking in Dickens’s novels. The range of drinking places is all-embracing; from the lowest grog shop to huge and splendid coaching inns; that of drinkers, from the ‘Infant Phenomenon’ of Nicholas Nickleby, kept on gin to stunt her growth (an interesting forerunner of poor Judy Garland, put on slimming drugs by her studio to achieve much the same effect), to old spirit-sodden Krook self-combusting in his room in Bleak House. After the publication of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens became and remained a famous author who moved in the highest Victorian society. But the world he had absorbed when young was largely the world in which his fiction remained. Although the huge number of drinking establishments in a picaresque novel such as Pickwick was not repeated in the later and more ‘serious’ novels, nevertheless the inn and drink remained an important part of the worlds he created. So, what were Dickens’s own drinking habits? Certainly, judging from the tales of the drunken nights out of young clerks and medical students, Dickens must have experienced a few such nights on the town, and in David Copperfield, the boozy dinner young Copperfield enjoys with his friend Steerforth and the subsequent hangover are described by someone who certainly knew the progress from elation to nausea. But he was a professional author producing an almost incredible volume of work. If he could write about the excesses of his contemporaries it was because he largely set himself apart from them. Despite the wildness of his imagination and the brilliance and originality of his major works, there was nothing of the bohemian artist in Dickens. His letters contain few references to fellow authors; none to his famous contemporaries in Europe. Dickens was addicted to his work – and always feared losing his powers. He kept them by a strict self-discipline. He drank wine with meals and brandy after them and for many years could be described as a moderate drinker. But as he grew older his very vitality threatened to devour him, he ate sparingly and his body was partly fuelled by alcohol. To his already heavy workload he added enormously popular reading tours in Britain and America. The readings he gave were extremely strenuous, and it is strange to think that if the young Dickens had not been sick one day and failed to attend an audition at Covent Garden, he might well have become a professional actor rather than a writer. As it was, he often acted out parts of his novels while writing them, and when he came in later life to read publicly the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes he threw himself into it with such terrifying energy that friends thought he might have a seizure. Indeed, the original script Dickens prepared for this particular reading contains stage directions to himself. By the time of his second tour of America in 1868 these readings were taking a serious toll, and to fortify himself he relied increasingly on drink. Una Pope-Hennessy’s biography describes his regime on tour: ‘He took a tumbler of new cream with two tablespoonfuls of rum before rising: at twelve he had a sherry-cobbler [an American concoction of sherry, sugar, lemon, and pounded ice] and a biscuit: at three a pint of champagne. Just before the reading . . . an egg beaten up in sherry. For supper he was given soup, wine, and often, before turning in, a dose of laudanum.’ Two years later, after an apoplectic seizure, the ‘Inimitable’, the great ‘Boz’ was dead. And what, finally, of the ‘Smoking Bishop’? This drink appears at the end of A Christmas Carol, in the scene in which a transformed and penitent Scrooge gives an astonished Bob Cratchit a raise in salary, promises to help his family, and says that they will discuss his future ‘this very afternoon over a bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!’ Cedric Dickens, the great-grandson of the novelist, gives the recipe for the drink in his book Drinking with Dickens, a highly entertaining anthology of extracts drawn from the novels and from recipes noted down by Georgina Hogarth, the sister of Dickens’s wife Kate, of the various punches and other mixtures drunk by the Dickens family. Here is the recipe for ‘Smoking Bishop’:
Take six Seville oranges and bake in a moderate oven until pale brown . . . Prick each of the oranges with five whole cloves and place in a warmed ceramic or glass vessel with one quarter-pound of sugar and a bottle of red wine, cover . . . and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Then take the oranges out of the mixture, cut in half and squeeze the juice, pouring the juice back into the wine. Pour the mixture through a sieve into a saucepan, add a bottle of port, heat (without boiling) and serve in warmed glasses.
I have seen other versions of this, where the one bottle of wine is increased to two, and sometimes the mixture is boiled a second time, and a bottle of brandy and more sugar and orange juice added. It all depends on the taste and fortitude of the intended drinkers. But just the thing perhaps for a suitably frosty Christmas morning after a walk?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © William Palmer 2007


About the contributor

William Palmer’s book, The Island Rescue, was published in 2007. He is at present writing one about twentieth-century writers and alcohol in their work and lives.

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