‘Uncorking Old Sherry’: Alcohol, the body, & political decline in visual culture.The case of Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Upcoming talk by Dr Callum D. Smith: 17 April, 4pm

Location: Rm C217, John Henry Newman Building, University College Dublin

Fig. 1. Gillray, James. Uncorking Old Sherry. Published by Hannah Humphrey, 10 March 1805. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Adele S. Gollin, 1976. Accession Number: 1976.602.39. Plate: 14 1/16 x 10 in. (35.7 x 25.4 cm). Public Domain.

Blurb: By the late eighteenth century, alcohol was integral to politics, notably among the Foxite Whigs, a political faction centred around their charismatic leader Charles James Fox. As a group, they were known for their tactical use of insular and porous sociability and for their notoriously excessive drinking. This paper will explore the relationship between alcohol, the body, morality, and politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the heaviest Foxite imbiber Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) during his political decline. Despite frequent contemporary references to Sheridan’s ‘Six-Bottle Man’ status, an in-depth study of alcohol’s role on his health, career and character is overdue. Sheridan’s relationship with alcohol is best summarised by his own retort: warned that alcohol would destroy the coat of his stomach, he replied, ‘well then my stomach might just digest in its waistcoat’. By the end of his career, Sheridan was commonly depicted in visual culture in the midst of vomiting, and this paper is concerned with how the physical effects of excessive consumption were used to illustrate a subject’s decline, illness, corruption and political unsuitability in caricature. Sheridan will serve as a case study to explore the wider significance of how excessive consumption was perceived by his contemporaries and the voting public; how it affected his political career and his health, how it became the subject of satirical culture and how these interrelated. 

Bio: Dr Callum D. Smith is an interdisciplinary historian of British politics and society post-1780, with a particular interest in visual culture, drinking studies, sociability, and radicalism. He is currently Head of Online Learning at Aberystwyth University, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the department of History at the University of Bristol. Callum has previously held a Lectureship in Modern History at the University of Bristol, and teaching and research positions at the Universities of Bath and Aberystwyth. Upcoming projects include a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan entitled:  Radical Sociability, The Foxite Whigs and Visual Culture, 1780-1810 (2025). Sheridan will also form the basis of an upcoming chapter for an edited Medical Humanities collection with Manchester University Press. ORCID: 0000-0002-7071-5998.