Introduction: cultural representations of intoxication

Historian Phil Withington's introduction to the special issue of Past & Present on 'Cultures of Intoxication' (co-edited with Angela McShane in 2014) begins with a consideration of George Orwell's Animal Farm.1 In the parabolic novel, drunkenness both precipitates the revolution, and ultimately poisons it, as humans and animals alike prove unresisting to the charms of various intoxicants, including beer, whisky and tobacco. Indeed, in the final 'tragic denouement' of the book, it is the pigs' emulation of the humans' culture of intoxication that means the other farmyard creatures 'looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which'.2 For Withington, 'Orwell's beautifully told fable' captured many of the concerns of his and McShane’s collection in interrogating the idea 'that intoxication is a universal and essential feature of the human condition – as quintessentially human as dwelling houses, clothing, money, trade, and inequality'.