Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals: Conviction and Career by Annemarie McAllister (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals: Conviction and Career by Annemarie McAllister
• Emma Liggins (bio)

Annemarie McAllister, Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals: Conviction and Career ( London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 167, $160.00/£125.00 hardcover, $54.99/£39.99 paperback and e-book.

The temperance movement in the nineteenth century, and its advocates who championed total abstinence from alcohol for the purposes of social reform, have often been sidelined in the historical record. Yet, as this fascinating new study shows, the flourishing national network of journalists and lecturers in the UK needs to be more widely known in the context of its contributions to the development and diversity of the temperance press. Building on her tireless research into temperance history, Annemarie McAllister's Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals: Conviction and Career maps the careers of seven representative figures whose journalism, performances, and creativity put them at the forefront of radical campaigning against the evils of alcohol.

Temperance periodicals were widely read and circulated, with seventy titles in circulation by 1890. McAllister shows how content also drew from and reprinted material from other reform movements, such as animal rights and campaigns for antislavery and suffrage. The discourses of science, Christianity, slum clearance, and pacifism all found their way into temperance writing. The propagandist nature of this content cannot be underestimated, as McAllister argues: "The imperative to attract and retain readers required successful propaganda to be arresting and entertaining" (5). The book covers the 1840s to the 1930s, showing how the rise of New Journalism and the impact of the First World War affected the movement. It successfully builds on research into Victorian attitudes to alcohol and abstinence as well as representations of working-class culture by historians such as Brian Harrison, Peter Keating, and Brian Maidment. Working-class in its origins, the total abstinence movement continued to "represent personal, social and economic empowerment for many" (4). By examining the attractive aspects for both leaders and ordinary members of a movement that was sometimes misleadingly perceived as overtly [End Page 513] moralistic, this study has a lot to tell us about the social purposes of popular entertainment and how careers were forged in print culture.

The interest for periodical scholars lies in the careful analysis of a number of neglected publications in the temperance press, based on extensive archival research on a set of periodicals still not digitised. The widespread impact of the Band of Hope, a temperance organisation for working-class children founded in Leeds in 1847, is apparent in long-running monthlies such as the Band of Hope Review (1851–1937) and Onward (1865–1910), which are at the heart of this study. The Band of Hope Chronicle, founded in 1878, offered more in the way of instructing conductors and volunteers. This group certainly deserves to be more well known. Discussions of editorial personae and speculations about the authorship of unsigned articles and columns all add to the complex picture of a collaborative network of temperance writers. The lack of images in the study unfortunately means that the reader does not gain a full appreciation of the format and branding of these periodicals or the key differences between monthly and weekly papers. A little more discussion of the ways in which literary and editorial material was in dialogue with other contents, such as meeting reports, advertisements, and reviews, would have been interesting in terms of arguments about the other voices besides the writers raised in the introduction.

Shining a spotlight onto four men and three women, McAllister provides detailed biographies and evaluations of the varied careers of journalists and public speakers. Many were based in the north of England. The emphasis on "writing as political or social activism" and the link between speaking and writing are key to McAllister's approach, which often involves enumerating how many lectures the speakers delivered and how far they travelled on their lecture tours (1). Some of them juggled parallel careers, while others contributed steadily on a voluntary basis to the temperance press. How much writers were paid and how they developed their commercial reputations, sometimes in the fields of fiction, music, or science writing, is very...