Choice Selections

These selections are mainly organised around the chapters of The Pub in Literature.

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

The Falstaffian State: Falstaff and Hal in the Boar's Head: speeches; legislation; medical excerpts; sack

Wonderfull Yeares: 1580-1630: The perfect inn from Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle; the state of England's inns from William Harrison's Description of England (1587) and from Fynes Moryson. Osborn's 'A Character of an Host' (1659). Thomas Young's Englands Bane: or, the Description of Drunkennesse (1617) and a description of how the 'humours' relate to drunkenness.

Pepys Pissed: 'The Wine-Cooper's Delight' - C17 ballad; The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660-1669)- the various uses Pepys found for inns, taverns and alehouses - not all of them to do with drinking

'Jovial, Brutal, Vulgar, Graphic Ned Ward' : The London Spy (1698-1700); Canto IV of The Delights of the Bottle - 'The Tavern Tormentors' (1720)

Scene, An Inn? And horrible gin: Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem; Gay's The Beggar's Opera; Fielding's Journal to Lisbon; Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

Where did the Romantics drink?: Passages from Cowper's The Task and Crabbe's The Borough; Wordsworth's Benjamin the Waggoner; 'The Immortal Dinner Party' (Lamb, Keats, Wordsworth, Haydon etc); Lamb's Letters (Salutation and Cat)

The Liquor-Loving Laureates : from Dr Doran's Table Traits, with Something on Them (1854) - the tippling habits of the laureates from Jonson through to Tennyson.

Dickens: A cocktail