Despite Victorian values of moderation and propriety, despite the attempts of temperance movements, and despite the cultural value placed on teetotaling, alcohol consumption became a popular pastime, and brewing and distillation grew to be thriving industries throughout the 19th century. Custom and habit, often combined with a hard, controlled, and monotonous life, led to excessive drinking of hard liquor. Spirits were distributed freely to anyone who could afford to buy-and no one was exempt; neither women, children, clergy nor the elite. By the 17th and 18th centuries, home distilleries had become popular, and thus by Victoria's reign, spirits had become the everyday drink for less wealthy people. Whereas the bourgeoisie was ostensibly striving for moderation, laborers commonly used spirits to flee from their desolate everyday lives.

    Victorians so valued controlled, propitious behavior that they imposed various techniques in order to encourage social enforcement of standards of behavior. The use of the pillory for drunks and other social deviants was used until it was abolished in 1837, the start of Victoria's reign. It was soon replaced, however, by blacklisting in local newspapers. By the mid 19th century local newspapers were widely published and read, and nearly all of them included a column on the events happening in the local police station. Public intoxication, regarded as anti-social behavior, appeared as the most common crime reported. Having one's inebriated behavior announced publicly was further exacerbated by that fact that drunkenness, and the related loss of self-control, was associated with the lower classes. Though the threat of having one's misdemeanors brought to the attention of the reading public was very real; it essentially failed to curb the consumption of alcohol.

     Victorian society did provide a space fo acceptable drinking of alcoholic beverages. Social drinking, in moderation of course, functioned as a typical activity for the middle and upper classes during meals and social engagements. Furthermore, alcohol, specifically beverages such beer, brandy, gin, and absinthe, gained legitimacy as medical treatments. Victorian physicians commonly prescribed these alcoholic beverages to alleviate a host of ailments, among them epilepsy, gout, kidney stones, colic, fever, and headaches.

     The participation of many Victorian intellectuals in a culture of drugs and alcohol shows that they were well aware that anesthetics could be used for exploring new kinds of aesthetic experience. Aestheticism itself derived much of its force from the daring claim to be turning the analysis of the experience of beauty into a kind of vivisection of oneself, as in Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.The darker side of this experimentation was brought out in science fiction depicting chemical and vivisectional exploration run amok, as in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Jekyll buys a house once belonging to a "celebrated surgeon" and, "his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical" turns the former dissecting rooms into a laboratory for self-experimentation (chapter 5). The effect of substance abuse also had an impact on the writings of the Brontė sisters who reacted to their brother Branwell's alcoholism. Emily's novel, Wuthering Heights presents new models of familial relationships, and Anne'snovel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall directly tackles the issue of alcohol abuse and the passage of such patterns of behavior within families. Similarly, Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge depicts the effects of alcoholism on the family.