'Victims of Intemperance': status politics and clerical drunkenness in the second-wave temperance societies of colonial Sydney

Some historians have argued that the teetotal societies active in Sydney in the 1830s and 1840s performed a function that was primarily symbolic, serving more to display the respectability of the movement’s already sober adherents than to promote the reform of habitual drunkards. One phenomenon that runs counter to this characterisation of the societies is the close personal experiences that several of the movement’s most prominent clerical leaders and supporters in this period had with the dynamics of alcohol addiction. In this article I trace the impact of those experiences on the teetotal movement. While the precise nature of the experiences differed from person to person, their cumulative impact helps to explain the enthusiasm with which these clerical leaders embraced the teetotal societies of the temperance movement’s second wave, the strategies that they advocated and the rhetoric with which they promoted them.