ABSTRACT
I. It is certainly a commonplace of cultural criticism to maintain that the nineteenth century was wary of most bodily pleasures. e Victorians’ eating habits and their extreme reactions to food have been well documented,1 but what tends to escape critical notice is the fact that representations of drinking were no less ambivalent at that time. A history of drinking in the nineteenth century, which still has to be written, should surely start with John Keats’s sensual references to drinking as a source of inspiration in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819). What, with its /b/-alliterations, looks like a eulogy of sparkling southern wine and, with its manifold synaesthetic implications, is only meant to serve the poet as a trajectory to leave the world, his body and all sensational stimuli behind:
Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth, at I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee [the nightingale] fade away into the forest dim –2
No sooner has Keats conjured up the image of red wine and its associations with Pegasus and the Muses than he discards it in the subsequent stanza and decides to replace Bacchus, the ‘pards’ and their connotations of riotous drinking with the promises of ‘the viewless wings of Poesy’.3 Keats’s poem is thus an interesting case in point, since it sets the tone for many other nineteenth-century literary representations of drinking that unfold a variety of contradictory meanings: whereas drinking is a way to escape the corporeality of life with bird-like levity,
116 Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
the ‘purple-stainèd mouth’ (l. 18) also suggests traces of blood and symptoms of consumption. at these ambivalent associations are also closely linked up with grotesque horses (hippoi), ferocious leopards and many other beasts which artists imagined as being in Bacchus’s retinue is certainly another indication of Keats’s con icting ideas about drink. For Keats, who enjoyed claret and was not averse to drinking whisky when in Scotland in 1818,4 but in 1819 was severely su ering from the limitations of his human condition, drinking alcohol, more than anything else, re ects man’s liminality and is more than conducive to revealing his earthbound, anarchic and bestial sides.
