‘‘Spirituous Consolation’’: Alcott’s Jokes on Drinking and Religion

The second book edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches eliminated jokes about drinking and religion. Although these were small changes, the edgy theme of drinking and religion as topics that could and sometimes should be taken lightly (even by a writer who also considered both topics as serious) interested Alcott throughout her career. Jokes on drinking and religion, although not a major element in any one of Alcott’s stories (and not present at all in Little Women, published the year before the reprint of Hospital Sketches and written while negotiations for the reprint were going on), were recurrent in her work generally and added up to a substantial element in her humorous attacks on pomposity.