The Alehouse Act 1828 created regular annual licensing meetings for inns, alehouses, and victualling houses in England and Wales. It aimed to impose a more orderly system on premises selling drink for consumption on site. The act was part of a wider attempt to regulate a rapidly changing urban drinking economy.

Licensing shaped which public spaces were available for conversation, singing, political discussion, and informal literary exchange. It helps explain why the public house became a controlled but vital setting in Victorian fiction, broadside ballads, and dialect poetry.