Book Contents

This site was originally designed to complement the book The Pub in Literature: England's Altered State (Manchester University Press, 2000), details of which are below. It's obviously still a marvellous book and you should buy it if you haven't already.

1. Introduction: The connection between the English nation, its hostelries and its literature

2. Early Doors : The Tabard in Canterbury Tales; Betty's Alehouse in Piers the Plowman; 'The Ballad of John Barleycorn'; Skelton's The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng

3. The Falstaffian State: Falstaff and Hal in the Boar's Head

4. Wonderfull Yeares: Ben Jonson's The New Inn; Taming of the (and a) Shrew; Dekker

5. Pepys Pissed: Drinking songs (1640s-1700); The Diary of Samuel Pepys - the various uses Pepys found for inns, taverns and alehouses - not all of them to do with drinking

6. 'Jovial, Brutal, Vulgar, Graphic Ned Ward' : The London Spy and sundry pieces

7. Scene, An Inn? And Horrible Gin: Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem; Gay's The Beggar's Opera; Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon; Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

8. Where did the Romantics drink?: More Goldsmith; Cowper's The Task; Crabbe's The Borough; Wordsworth's Benjamin the Waggoner; 'The Immortal Dinner Party'; Lamb's Letters (Salutation and Cat)

9. Dickens: The Maypole in Barnaby Rudge and a riot of other hostelries

10. Of Rainbows and Fingers: Silas Marner, Felix Holt, The Mayor of Casterbridge

11. Our Mutual Wasteland : Arthur Morrison's 'The Red-Cow Group' (a short story in Mean Streets) ; T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square; A. E. Coppard's 'The Black Dog'; John Hampson's Saturday Night at the Greyhound

12. Kegged: George Orwell's 'Moon under Water'; Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; J. M. O'Neil's Duffy is Dead; Michael Curtin's The League Against Christmas; Martin Amis's London Fields