Recreating the drinks of the past is a satisfying means of time travel. The sherries, ports, and many of the other beverages recorded in the works of Charles Dickens still exist, though they have evolved over the last century and a half. Some of the other drinks are more historical, such as the negus, a drink created by an eighteenth-century colonel and a mixture of port, hot water, spices, and sugar, and the smoking bishop, a mulled wine served warm. It was with the purpose of reimagining Dickens's drinking habits that we recreated one of his favourite drinks, the sherry cobbler.

On his first visit to the United States in the 1840s, Dickens disliked the fledging country, as recorded in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). However, he eventually warmed to the States, first evidenced by his longstanding appreciation of the sherry cobbler, which was created in the US and associated with the invention of the straw:

Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop. … “This wonderful invention, sir,” said Mark [the bartender], tenderly patting the empty glass, “is called a cobbler. Sherry Cobbler when you name it long; cobbler, when you name it short.” (Ch. 17)

Dickens, the quintessential English novelist, was one of the first recorders of the American cocktail.

A sherry cobbler is, as the name suggests, a sherry-based cocktail. According to The Spruce, whose recipe we followed, one can choose an oloroso, for a richer cobbler, or a fino, for a lighter cobbler. 120ml of sherry is required, in a shaker filled with crushed ice and orange slices. Add some simple syrup (not necessary if you're using a sweeter style of sherry) and shake vigorously. Pour unstrained into a tall glass, garnish with seasonal berries, and slurp the cobbler through the straw - an essential aspect which Dickens perhaps found the most astonishing. A sherry cobbler is a very refreshing and fruity drink, although we were unable to imbibe it quite as quickly and ecstatically as Martin Chuzzlewit.

wine cocktails

Wine is not the easiest beverage to use in cocktails, usually working best in party cocktails such as sangria. Dickens recorded the smoking bishop, which is a type of mulled wine served warm. But, as Dickens learnt with the sherry cobbler, the best wines for cocktails are fortified and aromatised. Sherry is regaining fashion with bartenders for its use in cocktails, while vermouths have long been a key ingredient in classic cocktails such as the martini.

Reading Dickens's novels provides plenty of other drinking inspiration. Those students who drink along to Withnail & I could just as easily do so to Dickens’s debut work, The Pickwick Papers (1837). Alcoholic beverages are a source of social lubrication for many of the book’s characters, from convivial nights conversing, to morning gatherings of coachmen and lawyers over porter and rum, to drunken festivities in the debtors’ prison. Mr. Pickwick himself, the kindly and archetypal Englishman fond of an easy if inquisitive life, is never shy to partake: as he says towards the end of the book, “if you will give me another glass of wine I will satisfy your curiosity” (748).

The wines mentioned in The Pickwick Papers paint a portrait of the drinking culture in England in the 1820s and 30s. In The Pickwick Papers, drink is to be celebrated and very rarely refused: “The good lady began by protesting that she couldn’t touch a drop – then took a small drop – then a large drop – and then a great many drops” (601). At one point, “the bottled ale and the Madeira were promptly disposed of” (667); earlier, on Pickwick’s admission to the debtors’ prison, his new roommates suggest, “Let’s rinse our mouths with a drop of burnt sherry” (555), while a couple of days later Pickwick and his friends share “a bottle or two of very good wine …. The bottle or two, indeed, might be more properly described as a bottle or six …” (591). Before Pickwick’s obdurate stay in prison, a typical evening is finely depicted: “Mr Pickwick had dined, finished his second pint of particular port, pulled his silk handkerchief over his head, put his feet on the fender, and thrown himself back in an easy chair…” (346).

Alongside its evocations of drunken excesses, The Pickwick Papers contains an amusingly satirical account of a temperance meeting which ends in a brawl. A long speech is given, doused in hypocrisy and praising those who have been rescued from drink, including one

Henry Beller … for many years toast-master at various corporation dinners, during which time he drank a great deal of foreign wine; may sometimes have carried a bottle or two home with him; is not quite certain of that, but is sure if he did, that he drank the contents. Feels very low and melancholy, is very feverish, and has a constant thirst upon him; thinks it must be the wine he used to drink (cheers). Is out of employ now; and never touches a drop of foreign wine by any chance (tremendous plaudits). (441)

(Dickens was always at his best as a satirist than a moraliser: his story “The Drunkard’s Death” is in contrast maudlin and heavy-handed.)

*illustration to The Pickwick Papers by Phiz*

As Dickens’s work became darker so too did his evocations of drinking. The sinister solicitor of Bleak House (1853), Mr. Tulkinghorn, is described thus: “Though a hard-grained man, close, dry and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless binn of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets” (284). Whereas wine and other drinks are part of The Pickwick Papers’s celebration of life, wine here is much darker and more mysterious:

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were, in secrecy. (284)

Dickens uses wine as a powerful metaphor at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his quasi-historical account of the French Revolution. A cask of wine is spilt into the street and the local Parisians chase the wine with “a special companionship … which led … to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing …” (26). The wine brings the community together, temporarily lifting them out of the daily grind of work and poverty. But the spilt wine also acts as a harbinger of what is to come: “one tall joker … scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees – blood. The time was to come when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there” (26).

The pressures of Dickens’s final American tour in 1868 led to his early death two years later; unable to hold much solid food, he recorded his daily regimen: “at seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoons of rum. At 12, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At 3 (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to 8, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry” (quoted in Tomalin). In his life and in his novels from The Pickwick Papers to his final, unfinished book The Mystery of Edwin Drood, wine was a constant companion and vital part of life. As he puts it in his last work:

The support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit. (56)

Books Referenced

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life