In Paisley, Scotland, May Donoghue sued manufacturer David Stevenson after she found a decomposed snail in a bottle of ginger beer consumed at a café, allegedly suffering gastric illness and shock. The House of Lords ruled in Donoghue's favor, establishing the modern legal principle of duty of care in negligence law—that manufacturers owe a duty of care to consumers who will use their products. The case transformed product liability law across the common law world.

The absurd image of the snail in the bottle became an unlikely literary reference point, symbolizing the hidden dangers lurking in everyday objects. The case influenced the tradition of Scottish poetry that finds the extraordinary within the mundane, and its legal principle of duty of care was adopted by poets and critics as a metaphor for the responsibilities of the writer to the reader, a concept explored in the critical poetry and prose of figures like W.H. Auden.