In The Licensed City: Regulating Drink in Liverpool, 1830–1920, David Beckingham sets himself the task of explaining how the popular perception of Liverpool's reputation as the most drunken city in mid-Victorian Britain became replaced with a late-Victorian image as a national exemplar of progress. Catalysts for this transformation, he argues, owed little to outside developments, but instead arose from city reformers, policing, and licensing policy—these three agencies were “the bedrock for that change in the city's reputation” (186). What this conclusion underlines is that Beckingham studies Liverpool largely in isolation. It is hard to imagine that the city was unaffected by the outside world when there were so many relevant pressures that had nationwide implications, which I raise later in this review.

To a large extent, of course, the historical records Beckingham consults shape his thesis. Police reports, as well as minutes of the city council and licensing magistrates—all of these available at the Liverpool Record Office—together with some twenty newspapers published primarily in and around the city, make up the bulk of his research. These provide valuable information about attitudes, assumptions, and goals of local authorities, reformers, critics and other commentators.

With this archival focus, however, Beckingham is unable to place the city in any kind of meaningful comparative context. One might assume that he naturally compares drinking and licensing in his city with developments at another port: see, for instance, Philip Eley and R. C. Riley, Public Houses and Beerhouses in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth (1983) and The Demise of Demon Drink? Portsmouth Pubs, 1900–50 (1991). Beckingham, however, overlooks this opportunity for comparison. Slum clearance looms large as a critical explanatory factor in Liverpool's rehabilitation as a debauched drinking center. In these same years, Birmingham also had a much-publicized licensing surrender scheme to address overcrowding and drunkenness, a potentially revealing subject for comparison with Liverpool that receives no attention here. My own book, Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896–1960 (2006), demonstrated that it was not Birmingham's “fewer and better” scheme that shaped the “Carlisle Experiment” but the latter that had decisive impact on the former. Beckingham might have engaged profitably with the arguments there presented.

Beckingham's approach partly reflects his background as a geographer—he is a professor in culture and historical geography at the University of Nottingham—but his bibliography does suggest an awareness of the broader secondary literature, much of it historical in nature. When consulting these studies, he seems interested chiefly in unearthing facts or statistics, not in interpretative frameworks for broader analysis. Concepts such as national efficiency, town planning, the New Liberalism, and Progressivism, to name but four, never get integrated into his study to afford him a wider perspective for analyzing motivations, evolution of attitudes, and impacts of national developments at the local city level.

Failure to place his topic in a broader context is equally evident in Beckingham's discussion of women in chapter 6. For Beckingham, licensing as a form of public control inherently changed when magistrates moved beyond fixation with individual drunkenness and recognized that drinkers displayed differing group behaviors, which licensing authorities could modify. Though Beckingham does not use the term, city magistrates were embarking on a novel type of “social engineering” in which they saw altering pub interiors as vital to transforming public drinking behavior. This is indeed important, though his interpretation would be more compelling with further evidence of magistrates intervening in the licensing process not only to eliminate snugs and excessive numbers of entrances, but to dictate layout of licensed premises. Here also he misses an opportunity to link this strategy with environmentalism, a central feature of Progressivism that played a formative role in social reform in England, as in the United States. Central to the interwar improved pub movement was the overriding priority to promote a salubrious public house environment as an antidote to drunkenness and disreputable behavior. Finally, Beckingham entertains no idea that women became targets of authorities not simply because some practiced prostitution, but also because they were stepping outside strict gender boundaries during national crises, forming part of “moral panics.” Beginning in the 1890s and extending into World Wars I and II, women became demonized as “folk devils” for their unescorted presence in pubs and beerhouses.

Had Beckingham enlarged and broadened his focus, he could have made a more persuasive and broader case for the way Liverpool's pre-1914 licensing debates instrumentally influenced the policies and directions of the wartime Liquor Traffic Central Control Board, the subject of chapter 9. One key figure was Sir Edgar Sanders, long-serving magistrate's clerk for Liverpool. This background earned his pivotal appointment as the general manager of the Carlisle and District State Management Area in June 1916, a post he held until 1921. Beckingham says so little about him that Sanders gets no mention in the book's index. Yet, on 2 July 1926, in unpublished testimony to the Committee on the Disinterested Management of Public Houses (more commonly called the Southborough Committee), Sanders made a startling claim: “I propose to give the salient features of the so-called Carlisle Experiment … because I was the author of it” (1). Thus, placing Sanders at the center of these years would have demonstrated more clearly how his intimate familiarity with Liverpool's licensing issues prepared his formulating an entirely new regime for war-time controls. In addition, Beckingham could have addressed the extent to which Sanders promoted some of the control board's untested ideas: introducing food into licensed premises; sharply curtailing licensing hours with an afternoon closure period; and protecting respectable women who wanted to frequent pubs and beerhouses against reactionary male authorities, eager to reinstate the “masculine republic” of Edwardian licensed premises. Impetus for these reforms came in part we know from the control board's wartime Progressivism, but the relationship between them and Sanders is unexplored. It is a topic that might appeal to a specialist such as Beckingham when he comes to write another monograph.