The joint history of drunks and lampposts goes back to the 18th century, when the modern street light was introduced in Paris and other European cities in the latter decades of this century: the réverbère, which used oil (rather than candles), improved wicks, and reflectors that gave it a much stronger illuminating power than that of the traditional street lanterns, from 20 m for 60 m (Cabantous, 2009). The main purpose of improving public lighting was to reduce street crime and prostitution: two humorous poems written in 1769, Plaintes des filoux et écumeurs de bourses contre nosseigneurs les réverbères and Les sultanes nocturnes purport to be complaints of thieves and prostitutes against those powerful new street lights (see Fournier, 1854). Whether the réverbères actually caused a decrease in crime is uncertain: their presence certainly encouraged more people - including drunkards returning from the tavern - to walk the streets at night, thus attracting robbers and prostitutes (Cabantous, 2009).

And then we get one of the first joke about drunks and street lights, courtesy of French polygraph writer Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret (1787):

The réverbères, which shine much stronger, no comparison needed, than the lanterns, but dazzle the view too much, gave rise to an even more pleasant error, on the part of another Drunkard. He was also returning from the guinguette, one fine winter night, abundantly filled with bacchanalian liquor; his path having led him to one of the superb quays which border the Seine, he went to imagine that the gleam of the streetlamps, which he saw on the pavement, was the water of the overflowing river. "Oh oh !" he said, stopping short, "let's take care of ourselves, let's not drink too much water, I who only like wine." So he climbed up on a bollard, and was beginning to think he was safe, when a gust of wind, causing a lamppost to sway, also made its light flicker, the brilliance of which went to his side. The drunkard is troubled, and thinks that the waves are rising up to him. "Peste! he said, this is getting serious: fortunately I know how to swim". At these words he threw himself on the ground, face down, and broke his nose. "Diable!" he exclaims, "I did not know that the river was frozen."

Two years later, the French Revolution gave a much darker meaning to the Parisian street lights: they were used as gallows, a cheap alternative to the guillotine that was readily available in the main arteries of the City. The Ça ira song of 1790 made clear that one purpose of the street lights was to hang aristocrats and other enemies of the people. For almost two decades, Revolutionary (also) and counter-Revolutionary propaganda made ample use of the réverbère, often called the fatal lamp-post in French and English texts, as a symbol of the Revolution.

The return of the lamp-post as a friend/foe of the staggering drunk can be traced back to the end of the Napoleonic period, once it was no longer used as an improvised gallows by those pesky French.

The following poem from an anonymous author ("Peter Pindar") in the Yorkshire newspaper The Hull Packet and East Riding Times in 1819 provides us with the first elements of the drunkard-vs-the-lamp-post trope:

The tuneful muse, oft erst, has told

Of belles so fair, of beaux so bold

Of war, and wounds, and woe;

Right willing, therefore, I relate

In rhyme, for prose, so dull, I hate,

A scene I lately saw.

Ned Soakhard, drunk, was reeling home,

And serpentinely did he roam

To this side, then to that;

At length a lamp-post cross'd his way,

Which Ned ne'er saw, until he lay

On mother earth so flat.

Sir, you're no gentleman, he cried,

But when I'm up, I'll tan your hide;

Hiccup, I will, don't fear.

With efforts mighty, the he rose, Threw off, Crib-like, his useless clothes,

And drew the foeman near.

The sullen post maintain'd his ground,

As if he meant to try a round

In pugilistic fray :

Ned hit him right and left, and then,

With bleeding fists, fell down again,

And snail-like, crept away.

Like the French drunk 30 years before, the English drunk also ends up bloodied and flat on the ground.

At that point (or before), the trope crossed the Atlantic. In 1822, the Charleston Daily Courier published the following Epigram on a Drunkard:

From his revels nocturnal, returning one night

The graceless Tom Rednose in Bacchanal plight

Ran foul of a lamp-post, clung fast and did bawl

"United we stand - divided I fall"

In this new variant, the lamp-post is a friend that offers both support - this is the first literary example (I could find) of the "drunk-leaning-on-a-lamp-post" imagery - and amicable conversation.

In 1828, the London newspaper The Observer published a lengthy article on the "the late fogs in the Metropolis" and the effect of the fog on the population.

We should mention occurrences of a perfectly ludicrous nature - such as ladies seizing each other men's arms instead of those of their husbands, who had stepped aside for an instant to pick up the youngster that had tumbled out of the bathway, and frightened dandies, who were clinging to lamp-posts with as much devotion as any Papist ever clang to the shrine of a favourite saint.

In this case, the clinging-to-lamp-posts persons are not drunk, only frightened, but this introduces an important variation of the trope: the inebriated wealthy man, who is not just a vulgar, working-class tramp.

In 1834, in its entry for "Drunkeness", the American Family Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge and General Literature included the following:

A drunken man has been known to whip a post, because it would not move out of his way ; and an old gentleman of eighty, when intoxicated, once took a lamp-post for a lady, and addressed her in all the impassioned and flattering language of love.

In 1838, a short story published in Charleston's Southern literary journal and monthly magazine included a even more precise description of this kind of scene, this time featuring a hat, another addition to the trope.

A few yards further, they came up with one of their party, who had drunk too freely . He was supporting himself by the lamp post with one hand, with the other pulling open his shirt collar. His cravat lay upon the pavement, his hat was trampled under his feet, crushed and covered with the punch and supper, which his stomach would no longer contain. He was muttering to himself, “ poos, poos, pooslanimous ! one hundred twentive, twenti vour. ” He was muttering about the winners, and the money he had lost. They took each an arm, and taking up his hat, which they restored as well as possible, led him homeward.

In this criticism of phrenology in an American magazine of 1840:

When a hillock in the forehead of one who felt plump upon the curb-stone, mistook a lamp post for a friend, and thought the watch-house was his own bed room, and all because he was drunk enough to confound all distinctions, resemblances, times, persons and places, a large development of comparison, or size, or form, or weight, or locality!

The same year, a French traveller reported on the drunks he had seen talking to lamp-posts in the streets of Saint-Petersburg, Russia:

Everything is safe with a drunken Russian, everything, even the lamppost against which he has hit his head, and whose good graces he then seeks to win by making the most pathetic speeches and lavishing the tenderest caresses on him.

So, by the 1840s, the trope of the staggering drunk man fighting or wooing a lamp-post, or just clinging to it, was pretty well established on both sides of the Atlantic.

But what about the images? -> Part 2