“Happily, inebriety is not the vice of the age”

Abstract

In 1835, Charles James Apperley, known only to his legions of readers as Nimrod, published a biography of a recently deceased friend, Squire John Mytton of Halston Hall, Shropshire. Mytton’s fame, indeed infamy, derived from the fact that he was a hard-fighting, hard-gambling, fox-hunting, womanizing squire, who drank between four and eight bottles of port per day. He began drinking in the morning with a bottle of port on his toilet as he shaved, and proceeded from there, a glass or two at a time, until he had completed what Nimrod called the “Herculean task.”¹ According to one of Mytton’s friends, who signed an affidavit regarding the matter, Mytton was drunk without interruption for the last 12 years of his life.² He drove his carriage at high speeds, foxhunted nearly naked, rode a bear into the drawing room at Halston Hall, and at one point he was so occluded by drink that he lit his shirt on fire to scare away the hiccups. He died penniless and insane in a Southwark debtors’ prison in 1833 at the age of 38.