In nineteenth-century Britain few cities could rival Liverpool for recorded drunkenness. Civic pride at Liverpool's imperial influence was undercut by anxieties about social problems that could all be connected to alcohol, from sectarian unrest and prostitution in the city's streets to child neglect and excess mortality in its slums. These dangers, heightened in Liverpool by the apparent connections between the drink trade and the city's civic elite, marked urban living and made alcohol a pressing political issue.

As a temperance movement emerged to tackle the dangers of drink,...