History

Beer was big business in Victorian London. According to Charles Knight’s 1851 work London, the city produced 3,000,000 barrels of beer in 1836. Knight additionally reports that the population of the city at this time was just 1,500,000! Feeding this demand and the many pubs, inns, and gin palaces that sold this beverage were several large breweries, who were significant employers. Amputees and especially war veterans were often represented as drunks in nineteenth-century print culture while the catalogues of high-end prosthesis makers promised prospective clients that their devices could enable them to perform the kind of manual work required for working in an establishment such as a brewery.