Dead Drunk Tales of Intoxication and Demon Drinks

Suddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate body... he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out of the drunkard...

With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans’ perception of reality.

Featuring drink-fueled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.

Pam Lock is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol. Her monograph, based on her thesis, ‘Low Spirits: The Habitual Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture’ (2019) will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Pam is a co-Director of the Drinking Studies Network and co-Lead with Dr Dorota Dias-Lewandowska for the NCN funded project, ‘Between the drunken “mother of destruction” and the sober “angel of the house”’.

DEAD DRUNK CONTENTS
 
Introduction 7
A Note from the Publisher 13
 
The Body-Snatcher, Robert Louis Stevenson 15
 
The Spotted Dog, Anthony Trollope 41
 
Kitty’s Dream and Its Results, E. E. L. 101
 
The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children, George Cruikshank 109
 
The Ostler, Wilkie Collins 119
 
An Engineer’s Story, Amelia B. Edwards 149
 
Under the Cloak, Rhoda Broughton 173
 
How We Got Up the Glenmutchkin Railway, William Aytoun 187
 
The Barber’s Supper, James White 221
 
The Mark of the Beast, Rudyard Kipling 247
 
Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull, Lord Byron, 265