ABSTRACT
Getting drunk could simply follow in the ordinary course of drinking events, whether it is a routine social occasion or a more special celebration. A study of London's East End at the close of the nineteenth century, a period of widespread anti-drink sentiment, noted rather the amused sympathy which drunkenness aroused in the general public. The vocabulary of drunkenness richly conveys the ubiquity of the experience over time, its physical consequences and its degrees. The criminal-justice system usually took a view of drunkenness as at the more extreme end of the spectrum. At various times contemporaries and subsequent historians have identified what they saw as the emergence of a new kind of drunkenness in England. In the mid sixteenth century it was attributed to the adoption by the English of foreign habits, as for the writer and adventurer George Gascoigne, viewing it as a monstrous plant, lately crept into the pleasant orchards of England.
