David Gutzke has made a major contribution to the study of English drinking and drinking places over many years with a series of important works beginning with Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance (1989). In The Mystique of Running the Public House in England: Quest for El Dorado, 1840–1939, he returns to a work which he began on completing his doctorate on the relations between brewers and publicans in England over a century. Its central thesis may be stated succinctly. It is that many thousands of often-inexperienced individuals were drawn into the business of running a pub by a vision of success and riches embodied in the illusory promise of El Dorado. In reality, it was a dream which for many was unlikely to be fulfilled, as poor returns or bankruptcy shattered their hopes. Those failures were rooted in the stark facts of their inexperience, in the power which brewers exercised over them, and in the excessive number of pubs as demand for alcohol fell, especially into the twentieth century.

For this study, Gutzke makes use of several hitherto unexplored sources. Notable among these are interviews with prospective publicans carried out by Tetley's, brewers of Leeds, during the interwar years and the in camera sessions held as part of the investigations of the Royal Commission on Licensing of 1929–1931. Other sources, which he cites as hitherto overlooked by historians, have in fact been used in several studies. These include, for example, the published evidence of that and other royal commissions and Parliamentary inquiries and also police records, which include registers of publicans, noting their character and recording details of any court proceedings brought against them. Both types of sources were used, for example, by David Beckingham in The Licensed City: Regulating Drink in Liverpool, 1830–1920 (2017), a work which Gutzke is aware of as it is cited in one footnote. Indeed, the voluminous records of parliamentary inquiries have been extensively mined since Brian Harrison's Drink and the Victorians (1971), a book of which Gutzke is rightly a great admirer. I, too, made use of them in The Local: A History of the English Pub (2007), although Gutzke chides me for not using much archival evidence in that work (2). Gutzke's apparent wish to be seen to have boldly gone where others have not in using hitherto neglected sources—and his similarly frequent insistence that no one has previously had his insights—does rather vitiate the work as a whole. On the latter, for example, he insists that scholars have not recognized or explored the voice of ill-treated publicans in their relations with brewers and have similarly largely ignored the trend of declining beerhouses after 1870. Neither of those statements is accurate, as historians of the subject are well aware of both.

There is much of interest in the book, especially the material on the type of individual tempted into the pub trade, for which those Tetley interviews are especially useful, and the central thesis is clearly argued. However, the book's approach may well limit its audience. It does take for granted a large degree of familiarity with the subject matter. Those readers approaching it from a wider interest in the economy and society from the mid-Victorian years to the outbreak of World War II will find it a difficult read. For them, his thesis is insufficiently set in the wider economic, social, and cultural context. While he does offer some comparison of the experience of publicans with those of fish and chip shop proprietors and Blackpool landladies, drawn from John Walton's Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1940 (1992) and The Blackpool Landlady: A Social History (1978), there is little attempt to locate them in the often-uncertain world of small businesses more generally or trends in the wider economy. Similarly, while he does note the importance of consciousness of status, or indeed a fondness for drink, as motives for prospective publicans, there is not much on other reasons why people are tempted into the precarious world of running one's own business.

As a specialist, there are a number of discussions with which I take issue, of which I have space to comment here on only two. Gutzke's clear preference for the so-called improved pub, which he locates in Progressivism, with its appeal to both women and men and its more refined décor and food offering (10), does lead him to accept the temperance view of the male-dominated, rough, drunken Victorian pub. In his view, the brewers were guilty of deliberately fostering drunkenness for profit. He seems to have little feeling for other key reasons for the popularity of the pub or whether that is in fact a wholly accurate picture, notably the perfectly understandable desire for relaxation and sociability after a hard working day. Nor was it wholly masculine, as there is plenty of evidence of the presence of women. Further, he does exaggerate the importance of the movement to improve the pub as part of some progressive philosophy. Pubs were indeed improved in the interwar years, but this consisted to a large extent of installing better toilet facilities and improved fixtures and fittings, as well as opening some new premises, in line with a generally rising standard of living.

Other specific points include his downplaying of the famous Mass Observation study of Bolton (1943) as an unrepresentative town, whereas it is in fact quite typical of many northern industrial cities and towns with their economic woes and preponderance of beerhouses (180). He presents a table of beerhouse keepers becoming publicans after 1840, which for the particular case of Bradford gives a figure of 0%, based apparently on directory evidence, but this is simply not the case, as other sources testify (40).

Gutzke's book then has much to offer the specialist, both in unearthing new evidence and offering a useful analysis of the world of the publican, but those same specialists may well find much with which to differ.