| Serving as both a retail business and a neighborhood center, the pub was both private and a public concern, whose duality in function allowed the pub to adapt to changing economic, social, and cultural needs. Organized around two sections, this study brings us closer to appreciating working-class life on its own terms and not those of the middle class. The first part examines the pub as a site for working-class sociability. Tracing the evolution in the use of interior space, the first chapter analyzes the innovations in design and reflected a growing retail revolution designed to increase efficiency and to prevent crime. Examination of architectural plans and design information, arrest reports, and licensing data reveals that the two most significant changes were an increase in space assigned to public use and the inclusion of a bar counter. The next two chapters use newspaper accounts, trial testimony, temperance tracts, and autobiographical material to reconstruct a day in the pub, delineating the various services, activities, and entertainments that contributed to the pub's role as a social and leisure center.; The shared experience of the pub and its leisure helped shape and define the working class, both their sociability and their own ideas of respectability. The second part analyzes the meaning of ‘respectable’ drinking as it pertained to men and women and their social standing. The story of working-class patronage is more than an account of a drunken lower order, it is the story of working-class leisure with clear lines of proper etiquette with respect to drinking behavior. Examination of working-class stories, revealed in court transcripts, suggest that these men and women constructed and defined respectability somewhat apart from the definitions clung to by the middle class. Here, the categories of analysis most often applied to the middle class, such as private/public, separate spheres and/or gender ideology, and respectability, are redefined and utilized as analytical frames for describing the working classes and the lifestyles they chose to enjoy. Through this study, we come to appreciate working-class drinking as a legitimate and respectable part of working-class life and leisure in nineteenth-century London. |
