DSN Women and Alcohol Seminar: Female Offending and the Police Courts in Victorian Lancashire

DSN Women and Alcohol Seminar

Thursday 8 May 2025, online 

(e-mail us dsnwomencluster@gmail.com to register)

Craig Stafford, Female Offending and the Police Courts in Victorian Lancashire (book under contract)

Craig Stafford will discuss his forthcoming book, and the research behind it, in a flash talk designed to inspire conversation. His book explores the relationship between women, police and magistrates with a focus on Victorian Lancashire, using the boroughs of Salford, Rochdale and Bolton as case studies. It examines the relationship between female offenders and these provincial police courts, exploring how male attitudes towards femininity and respectability influenced sentencing at summary level. With a thematic approach, it explores both criminal drunkenness and offences linked to drink, such as violence and prostitution. Despite being close neighbours, the police in each borough had different approaches towards the policing of female drunkenness, often influenced by the concerns of local elites. The study uses microhistories of key actors, including policemen, magistrates, and the women who used, or were prosecuted in, these courts to explore how these approaches differed and what the implications of such gendered attitudes were for the women and their families.

The book is part of the Trailblazers scheme, a joint initiative between the Universities of Liverpool, Salford and Lancaster. More information can be found here:

https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2025/01/28/trailblazers-announces-first-two-contracted-books/

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New article in Addiction

 

We are delighted to announce a new article was pre-released on 22 December 2024 from the Women and Alcohol project in Addiction: 

Iain Smith and Pam Lock, How did investigations into spontaneous human combustion influence alcohol medicine? An examination of the medical and literary discussions that brought the two together

This interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatrist and historian Dr Smith, and literary scholar, Dr Lock, has resulted in an article for the humanities section of Addiction. We examined 57 'real' medical cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), and the representation of SHC in ten novels and a selection of short stories. We were intrigued by the fact that a large proportion of medical writings on alcohol in the 19th Century contained a chaper or section on SHC and that the majority of medical cases shared featured women as the victims. We concluded that the development of new theories about the action of alcohol on the body and mind appears to have been influenced by the now-discredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea that the phenomenon of human combustion, spontaneous or not, was linked to spirit drinking. As an extreme example of the consequences of heavy drinking, spontaneous human combustion was used to underpin early theories on the clinical chemistry of alcohol.

This article is open access and can be found at https://doi-org.bris.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/add.16739

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New article in Cultural and Social History

We are delighted to share the latest article to emerge from the Women and Alcohol project published in Cultural and Social History: 

Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Craig Stafford - Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Our aim was to show how in Victorian Britain and post-partition Poland, despite cultural, political and economic differences, there was a shared belief that women’s drinking was more harmful than men’s which prompted formal and informal methods of policing. In this article we show how control mechanisms emerged in different environments, what their motivations and effects were, and by which actors they were deployed. By cross-referencing public discourse with reformatories and courts records, we have distinguished models of policing women drinkers and show how disciplinary tools were used differently by both policers and the policed.

You can access free copies by clicking the link below:

Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century

or acces the Accepted Manuscript (AM) version here:

Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century - AM version

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