ABSTRACT

The rapidly expanding city of Manchester was the focus of an emergent sociological discourse in the 1830s and 1840s. Carol Margaret Davison reveals the ways in which working-class substance abuse was proposed by proto-sociological observers and novelists alike as key to understanding the city’s perennial imbrication of industrial development and social disorder. Juxtaposing statistically grounded pamphlets by James Phillips Kay and Peter Gaskell with later social analyses by William Cooke Taylor and Friedrich Engels, Davison uses their common preoccupation with working-class alcoholism and opiate addiction as a point of entry into Elizabeth Gaskell’s contrasting sociological portrait of Manchester society in Mary Barton (1848).