Consuming Anxieties

In this valuable and engaging study of both canonical and less-studied Restoration and early eighteenth-century satires on wine, beer, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff, Dayne Riley examines the influences—both good and ill—of global commerce and trade upon national character, social class, manners, and morality. You will never look at a glass of wine or a dram of gin in a literary text the same way. Linda Troost, coeditor of Jane Austen in Hollywood

A fascinating examination of the ways in which Restoration and early-eighteenth-century satirists used wine, gin, and tobacco to attack the evils of the day, from the unequivocal sins of lust and gluttony to the murky dangers of foreign trade and consumer culture. Surveying a wide range of genres and their contexts, Riley ably demonstrates how alcohol and tobacco became central to this period's concerns over the health of the body natural and the body politic. Noelle Gallagher, author of Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

A fascinating history of alcohol and tobacco as commercial enterprises through the lens of satire. Riley advances insightful readings while tracing a development in the way that writers understood addictive substances, and provides compelling evidence of the role of satire in shaping consumer culture. Ian Newman, coeditor of Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture

An engaging study on a significant topic that tracks the cultural anxieties of eighteenth-century Britain. It weaves together political, literary, economic, and cultural history with fine close readings contextualized within broader, theoretical discourse, and constitutes a distinguished contribution to thematic studies of eighteenth-century popular culture, consumption, and satire. Barbara M. Benedict, author of Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry