Fiona Fisher

Presenting the Perfect Pint: Drink and Visual Pleasure in Late Nineteenth-Century London

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Londons public houses were transformed in response to a set of intersecting forces of modernization that shaped their spatial, material, and aesthetic development, their commercial organization, and the management and conduct of social life within them. Drawing on the evidence of photographs and descriptions of modernized businesses published in licensed trade journals of the 1890s and on contemporary beer advertisements within which an idealized image of the beer sparkling in its glass emerged, this article explores the ways in which the visual culture of the late nineteenth-century licensed trade communicated its modernity and shaped a new visual experience of consumption.