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The debate about problem drinking and how to stop it nowadays centres most on the working-class young.(1)____ They are highly visible-and inaudible-as they clog city centres on Saturday nights.(2)____ But a chapter in a forthcoming book, Intoxication and Society, by Philip Withington, a Cambridge historian, argues that it was the educated elite whom taught Britons how to drink to excess.(3)____
In the 17th century, England experienced a rise in educational enrolment unsurpassedly until the early 20th century. literacy inclined and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the Inns of Court and Chancery where barristers leamed their craft, brimming with affluent young men.(4)____(5)____ This was the crucial period which modern drinking culture was formed. Mr Withington's description of 17th-century drinking practices will sound familiar to anybody who has been within a few miles of a British university. It was characterised by two conflicting aims. Men were to consume large qualities of alcohol in keeping with conventions of excess.(7)____ Yet they also supposed to remain in control of their faculties, bantering and displaying wit.(8)____ Students and would-be lawyers formed drinking societies, where they leamed the social-and drinking-skills required of gentlemen.
A market in instruction quickly emerged. Collections filled with jokes, quotes and fun facts proliferated, promised to teach, as John Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter put it, "the art of drinking, by a most learned method".(9)____ Mirroring the standardisation of language after the invention of the printing press, codes of intoxication were disseminated to many a wider audience as society became more literate and censorship declined.(10)____
