‘There is more food in a pennyworth of bread than in a gallon of ale’ (John Livesey, 1870)

‘I should say it would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober’ (Bishop of Peterborough, 1872)

Maligned as fussbudgets with a Vimto lilt, temperance gentlemen decant to their float for the Whitsun parade. In their display, alcohol distils evil and the working class with flat caps and empty pots of booze crowding hearths. Mucky shelves of sot set these liquor ornaments as prole dissolution. In the float’s other half, Temperance doth prolonge Lyfe Healthful to Heart and Look: mild kids clobber their white dollies, doilies soaked in abstention, the clean bourgeoisie curtained like a chine. But wait, not so fast: is there such a contrast? Piano mother stashes her hip flask under its keys; father scratches a silver itch, prays for mercury; their kids nick the same newts and thrash the Norseman’s Saturday bath. Livesey absorbed his pledge in Preston, sold cheese for radical topers until uncoupled from ardent spirits, gin shop arguments spliced into drawing rooms, two barrels on a ramp banning pub hubbub. He fires alcohol on his stage to warn, turns water into zero wine mutable with communion. Audiences desist from opening like a sepal to liquor. Separatist dentists unfetter the children corked with bottles as they leave a school boozed to the hilt. Now, the park reeds split for kids freed from percentage strength. The slake lake still delivers temperate light.
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