Drink and Working-Class Living Standards in Britain, 1870-1914.

This article examines the changing level of drink consumption and expenditure between 1870 and 1914, and an attempt to assess the extent to which this expenditure inhibited any improvement in working-class living standards, which might be expected to follow from rising real wages. In order to gauge the impact of drink expenditure on the family budget, the fact that wife and children are abstainers is irrelevant as they are still affected to the extent that some part of the family budget is spent on drink by the wage earner. Of greater value would be data on the number of adult male abstainers who were heads of households, but even the temperance movement, with its penchant for collecting statistics, failed on this score. Personal expenditure on drink can give only an imperfect indication of the economic effect of drink consumption unless it can be related in some way to income. While the growth, in consumer demand was not positively retarded by rising drink expenditure, neither was it positively assisted by an absolute reduction in this expenditure until after 1900. This suggests that while levels of drink consumption were partially determined by relative price changes of competing commodities, there was also a significant degree of autonomous consumption.