A Man Walks into a Pub

摘要

It is the late nineteenth century and there is a "free and easy" on at the pub. Drinks are shared. Bits of sawdust soaked in spilled ale and porter stick to boots that keep moving to ballads. The pub during the celebratory "free and easy" was like thelate nineteenth century itself: full of strangers, electric with movement, and policed, in part, by the public nature of it all. Many in the pub would have been familiar with each other, but strangers would have been commonplace. The pub, at once an icon of community and familiarity, was also a respite on the road for travelers and merchants. As of the mid-nineteenth century, many of these strangers in fact had a formal status: bona fides.