On the history of temperance in Britain, a good place to start is Alcohol and Moral Regulation: Public Attitudes, Spirited Measures and Victorian Hangovers, by Henry Yeomans. It will help readers better understand ongoing anxieties over alcohol consumption and the historical roots of attempts at regulation. Gutzke’s edited collection Britain and Transnational Progressivism considers how a number of social and political changes, particularly those relating to temperance efforts, were driven by Progressive reformers. Annemarie McAllister’s Demon Drink? Temperance and the Working Class is an interesting volume that originated as a public history exhibition. Both the exhibition and the book explore how and why so many working-class people embraced temperance.
Two volumes by this author are also useful. To learn about the leaders of the temperance movement, readers should consult Forgotten Temperance Reformers; to understand the societies that brought together working-class and middle-class individuals in the name of abstention from alcohol, there is Temperance Societies in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. In a similar vein, Annemarie McAllister’s Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals introduces the writers who were committed to temperance, examining their literary outputs and their lives.
For a site-specific study, David Beckingham’s The Licensed City: Regulating Drink in Liverpool, 1830–1920 is a helpful assessment of temperance in a city that was known especially for the drunkenness of its residents.
Two volumes are notable for their examinations of temperance in Ireland and the Franciscan friar, Father Theobald Mathew, who led the movement there. These include John F. Quinn’s Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America and Paul A. Townend’s Father Mathew, Temperance, and Irish Identity.
Temperance societies in late Victorian and Edwardian England by 
Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals by 
