Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (30 page)

The Gin Act discriminated between rich and poor. It drove a wedge deep into society. The
London Magazine
had warned what would happen right from the start. ‘The social virtue and liberty of the people,’ it declared, ‘must always depend upon a mutual confidence between the rich and the poor, between those in authority and those under authority … When a law is made for restraining the poor only, from being guilty of … a particular sort of drunkenness, which is equally heinous in the rich, what can the poor think of such a law?’ There was only one thing they could think. They had no choice but to opt out altogether. ‘It will introduce among them,’ the paper warned, ‘a total neglect for the public good and a regard for their own private interest only.’
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But it was the crimes of informers which would stick in the memory the longest. ‘We have, sir,’ concluded one critic in the 1738 parliamentary debates, ‘seen very little reformation in the manners and very little alteration in the constitutions of the common people since the law against retailing of spirituous liquors took place; but we have heard of many instances where the magistrates enforcing ’em has produced the most flagrant perjury, and brought many persons to utter ruin.’
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Whatever else the Gin Act achieved, it certainly didn’t end the problem of gin. Spirit production had briefly dipped when prohibition first came in, but from then on it soared ever higher. No
one pretended that Madam Geneva had gone away. ‘The walking dram-sellers,’ wrote the author of
A Short History of the Gin Act
in October 1738, ‘the itinerant vendors of liquors … infest not only every street, but almost every door … to say nothing of what is transacted upon the water; all the foot-paths, lanes and highways around the town are filled with them; and no less than seventy, eighty or a hundred of these have been counted at an execution, at a fair, and at several other places of like resort.’ His conclusion was simple. ‘’Tis notoriously known,’ he finished, ‘the excessive drinking of spirituous liquors … is little or nothing abated among the meaner sort of people.’

In the end there were only two real beneficiaries of the Gin Act. One was Thomas Wilson. The ambitious young cleric had met Sir Joseph Jekyll through the reform campaign, and it was Jekyll, in the end, who got him the job he wanted. In May 1737, Wilson heard ‘that Dr Watson of St Stephen’s Walbrook was very ill.’ He ‘ventured to ask the Master of the Rolls to beg that living of my Lord Chancellor for me;’
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Jekyll agreed. The only problem was that Dr Watson took a whole six months to die. On 13 September, ‘a message from town that Dr Watson was supposed to be dead carried me in some hurry to London,’ Wilson reported; but he added crossly: ‘found that he had been very ill, but not dead.’ Thomas Wilson spent most of the time camped out in the Master of the Rolls’ apartments. Dr Watson didn’t finally expire until the last day of November. Then Wilson ‘waited upon the Master of the Rolls who sent immediately to the Lord Chancellor, which gave me good hopes I shall succeed.’ It was almost the last entry in his diary. In spring 1738, as worried magistrates struggled to cope with the consequences of the Gin Act, he was installed in the lucrative living of St Stephen’s.

The only other winner was Madam Geneva herself. She never
did leave London during prohibition. There were plenty of places for her to hide – in back-alleys and poor men’s rooms, in tumbledown workshops and attics, in the hubbub of markets, or four flights up a Rag Fair tenement. She must have regarded the antics of MPs and magistrates with a faint amusement as they totted up the gin-sellers they had sent to Bridewell. She knew the only statistic which really mattered …

In the seven years the Gin Act was in force, spirit production rose by more than a third.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WOMEN

T
here is only one picture of Madam Geneva.

She is disguised as one of her devotees, sitting on some broken steps somewhere in St Giles’s. Around her is the chaos and despair of all slums everywhere: tumbledown buildings and pawnbrokers’ shops, crowds on the streets, beggars in the gutter. But Madam Geneva is too drunk to notice any of it. She is in a world of her own. Her fingers fumble for some snuff. She’s even forgotten about the child on her lap. It takes a moment to realise what’s going on: the child is falling off the steps onto the paving below. Not even maternal instinct has survived the ravages of gin.

Nor has shame. Madam Geneva’s blouse hangs open. Sometimes she has to take to the streets to pay for her habit; her legs are covered with the sores of syphilis. She might have been a beauty once, but now her hair is filthy and dishevelled, her lips slack, her cheeks sunken. No one could gaze on that goggling, unfocused face with any feeling of tenderness.

There are other people on the steps as well, although the woman is too drunk to take any notice of them. Just behind her
right shoulder a carpenter is pawning the tools of his trade to buy gin. Below her, a ballad-seller has passed out. There are men in the background, too, but when Hogarth drew
Gin Lane
, in 1751, he was in no doubt who had to be its centrepiece. It had to be Madam Geneva herself. It had to be a woman.

Or what had once been a woman. What William Hogarth drew was the perversion of woman, the symbol of everything a woman ought not to be. She was the degeneration of mother into child-killer, beauty into something filthy, wife into shameless whore. A contemporary gloss on the print minced no words. ‘If a woman accustoms herself to dram-drinking,’ it warned, ‘she … becomes the most miserable as well as the most contemptible creature on earth.’ Looks went first but honour followed. ‘For so sure as she habituates herself to drinking, so sure it is she will never be satisfied without it, whatever means she uses to procure a supply … thro’ mere necessity [she] becomes a street-walker, and at last an abandon’d prostitute.’ As for her children, it was they who paid the heaviest price of all. ‘So indulgent are these tender mothers,’ the writer went on, ‘that to stop their little gaping mouths, they will pour down a spoonful of their own delightful cordial. What numbers of little creatures, who, had they grown up to maturity, might have proved useful members of society, are lost, murder’d, I may truly say, by these inhuman wretches, their mothers!’
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Hogarth didn’t draw just any woman; he drew Judith Defour. The woman on the steps in Gin Lane wasn’t a figure of pity but one to inspire fear and loathing. She wasn’t only destroying herself, she was spreading her foul disease among London’s men. She was turning the world’s greatest city into an object of disgust. She was robbing the nation of the workers who ought one day to enrich it, the soldiers and sailors who should protect its shores.

Madam Geneva, Mother Gin; from the moment she appeared on the streets, Londoners always recognised their new patron as a
woman. A hundred years later she would be Mother’s Ruin. Her followers were women as well. They were the
London Spy
’s ‘tattered assembly of fat motherly flat-caps … with every one her nipperkin of warm ale and brandy.’ Another satirist gave them names: Dorothy Addle-Brains and Sarah Suckwell, Jenny Pisspot and Rebecca Rag-Manners.

Beer was always a man’s drink. For a start, it needed John Bull’s stout frame to down a gallon of warm, sour liquid. But it was more than that. Beer was drunk in the alehouse, a male enclave whose windows were steamed up with the fug of male tradition. Women weren’t shut out, but when they crossed the threshold of an alehouse, they knew they were entering a man’s world. By contrast, gin was drunk in places where women went. ‘Almost at every herb-stall,’ wrote a 1751 commentator, ‘[women] will find a private room backwards, where they may take their glass in secret very comfortably.’
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It was sold on street corners, in the chandlers’ shops where women bought their everyday groceries. With the arrival of Madam Geneva, women suddenly had access to a drug which wasn’t loaded with male tradition, one which was easy for them to take, and which was available in the places they frequented.

Besides, women didn’t just drink gin; they sold it as well. When the 1738 clamp-down on gin began, three-quarters of the gin-sellers hauled up before the magistrates’ special sessions were women. A hundred years earlier, the bawdy alewife had been a stock character of comedy – as she had been for centuries. But ale-selling in the early eighteenth century was being taken over by large brewers and well-established victuallers. Tied houses, owned by big brewers, were appearing. Women were being squeezed out. Instead, the old alewife had turned into the market-woman with a gin bottle hidden in her petticoats. For many poor women and widows, selling gin was the only way they could scrape a living off the London streets.

And so, sipping gin in shops or dispensing it from barrows, women became the public face of the Gin Craze. When reformers had attacked drinking in the past, women had been victims. For Thomas Dekker, back in 1603, ale-drinkers left ‘their wives … starving at home and their ragged children begging abroad.’
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With the arrival of spirits all that changed. Women became villains instead. If more women than men were swept into Bridewell during the 1738 clamp-down, it wasn’t only because most gin-sellers were women, or that women were easier targets than men for the informers. For magistrates, the gin-swilling, gin-selling woman was far more of a threat than her male counterpart. It was frightening enough to watch poor men abandon their roles as labourers and soldiers. Even worse was the thought of what a drunken woman might do when Madam Geneva dissolved her shame and loosened her morals. Knocking back drams outside the pawnbroker’s shop, a woman discarded all the standards of behaviour which society had set out for her: her obedience, her humility, even her chastity.

Her chastity most of all. Sex had always been top of the reformers’ agenda. ‘It has been a common thing,’ the Royal Proclamation lamented in 1738, ‘to see men and women lie under … bulks, even in the daytime, so drunk, as not to be capable of standing … Women have been seen exposing their sex in such a condition, that ’twas an offence to every modest eye.’ Every gin-shop, Thomas Secker added a few years later, ‘had a back shop or cellar, strewed every morning with fresh straw, where those that got drunk were thrown, men and women promiscuously together: here they might commit what wickedness they pleased.’ It was drunken women, of course, who cursed the town with the sexual health scourge of the early eighteenth century: syphilis. In the minds of reformers, sex, vice and retribution were inextricably linked.

Reformers’ fears were inspired by transformations: the servant metamorphosed into master, the poor man into gentleman. The idea that women might abandon their natural station was the most frightening of all. But suddenly women were reeling drunkenly out of chandlers’ shops, and selling drams on street corners. Frightened reformers could see women embracing all too many of the age’s changes. They turned up in Exchange Alley to speculate on the markets. Thirty-five of the eighty-eight investors in the South Sea Company’s second money subscription were women (speculation, after all, was one of the few ways women could make money; like gin, it was new; there were no traditional barriers to keep them out). When Hogarth drew his Lottery print in 1724, it was the figures of women who presided, and women – one dressed unnaturally in men’s clothing – who pulled the tickets from the wheels.

It was all part of a pattern. Reformers were scared of the changes of the age, and the most frightening possibility of all was a change in women. They wasted no time in slamming shut the lid of Pandora’s box. Increasingly, women were to be confined to a smaller, safer world. As the eighteenth century progressed, fewer and fewer women went to work. And a vapourish, delicate creature was born, obsessed with her virtue, pious, unadventurous and chaste. Moll Flanders was consigned to the unruly past. The future belonged to Pamela.

In all of their campaigns, it wasn’t only poor women that reformers were concerned about – the market-women and servants, or the bedraggled prostitute on the steps in St Giles’s. They were also worried about virtue closer to home.

Daniel Defoe started it. ‘I was infinitely satisfied with my wife,’ wrote his Colonel Jack, ‘who was, indeed, the best-humoured woman in the world, and a most accomplished beautiful creature – indeed, perfectly well bred, and had not one ill quality about
her.’
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That was until Colonel Jack’s wife fell ill. But the medicine she took, like most eighteenth-century medicines, contained spirits. Addiction to prescribed drugs had arrived. ‘During her illness and weakness,’ the Colonel went on, ‘her nurse pressed her, whenever she found herself faint … to take this cordial, and that dram, till it became necessary to keep her alive, and gradually increased to a habit, so that it was no longer her physic but her food … She came at last to a dreadful height, that … she would be drunk in her dressing-room before eleven o’clock in the morning … In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife, grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table, nay, in her own closet by herself, till she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue.’ Eighteen months later she was dead.