The press and the pledge: Father Theobald Mathew’s 1843 temperance tour of Britain

Beckingham, David

Abstract

This article examines Father Theobald Mathew’s temperance tour of Britain in 1843. Estimates vary, but by this point some 6 million people in Ireland may have made a personal pledge to abstain from consuming alcohol. This pledge involved more than individual transformation, however. Building on recent Mathew scholarship this article explores how through its methods of pledges, processions and meetings temperance offered a new mode of moral politics. It is widely appreciated that Mathew’s mission became entangled in the Repeal politics of Daniel O’Connell; using newspaper sources and other contemporary accounts, the paper argues that their campaigns instantiated differently drawn scalar moral visions, different ways of imaginatively connecting temperate bodies to broader social and political aims that were mobilised around the category of the ‘nation’.

Citation

Beckingham, D. (2014). The press and the pledge: Father Theobald Mathew’s 1843 temperance tour of Britain. Historical Geography, 42,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 15, 2014
• Publication Date: Dec 15, 2014
• Deposit Date: May 18, 2018
• Journal: Historical Geography
• Electronic ISSN: 2331-7523
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Series ISSN: 2331-7523
• Keywords: Temperance; Father Mathew; Moral regulation
• Public URL: https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/view/3357
• Publisher URL: https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/view/3357