Work is the curse of the drinking classes

Purely for my own curiosity this one - anyone know the origin (Oscar Wilde?) presumably a corruption of something much more worthy..
Pat.

More recent than Wilde.

"work is the curse of the drinking classes." A catchphrase pun on the cliché (untrue since WW2 and grossly exaggerated since WW1), 'drink is the curse of the working classes': since the late or, at earliest, the middle 1940s [Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Catch Phrases: American and British, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, 1977].

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
H. Pearson _Life of Oscar Wilde_ ch. 12
From _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fifth Edition_