‘Baneful to Public and to Private Good’: Hours of Illness and Idleness in the Long Eighteenth Century
Keyword(s):
The Real
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Chapter 3 retains focus on the moral aspects of a hangover but links them specifically to debates in the long eighteenth century about work and idleness. It maintains that the hangover undermined Britain’s identity as an industrious trading nation. Hangovers disclosed social anxieties about civic duty, the real level of industriousness of the British workforce and the moral status of the unoccupied man and woman of means in the long eighteenth century. The chapter makes this argument through analysis of the propaganda of the ‘gin craze’, depictions of marital tensions in poetry, drama and prose and in a study of the figures of the bachelor and the socialite.