Drunks

Some writers can't write unless they are drunk. Dylan Thomas for example, though he maintained that he didn't drink much while writing, only after finishing a poem.
Dickens liked a lot to drink according to Paul Johnson in an article in The Spectator, and there certainly is a lot of drinking going on in his novels. Johnson quotes Dickens in a letter to his daughter:
"At seven in the morning in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoons of rum. At 12 a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten with a glass of sherry..... At quarter past ten, soup, anything to drink I fancy."
I read his novel "Pickwick Papers" a few years ago and was struck by the amount of drinking that went on by Pickwick himself and his Pickwickians. There are whole passages where Pickwick is either dining and drinking immense amounts of liquor or falling down in a heap, drunk.
We were in Muswell Hill a year or so ago and went to have lunch in a pub called "The Spaniards". Much to my surprise there were notes on the menus to the effect that this pub was mentioned in "The Pickwick Papers"; this I already knew - what I didn't know was that the pub was a real one, not an invention of Dickens's.
In one of the scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" attention is drawn to the behaviour of boys from Westminster School, to the effect that the waiters were almost as badly behaved as those boys. I wondered if the present headmaster was aware of this reference in the novel so wrote a short note to apprise him of it. He sent me a postcard with the words: "Thank you for your letter. Yes, no doubt nothing changes."