Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (31 page)

If drinking among the poor was the main target of the Gin Panic, drinking among middle-class women came a close second. ‘Wherever the tea-kettle is, there must the dram-bottle be,’ warned the
Tavern Scuffle
in 1726. ‘One succeeds the other as naturally as the night does the day; when a woman once takes to drinking, I give her over for lost, she then neglects husband, children, family, and all for her darling liquor.’ Thomas Wilson would follow the same line in
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
. He turned to middle-class women in his second edition, not without qualms. ‘My mind is wounded but to think of imputing any share of this depravity to them,’ he fluttered. ‘The subject [is] too delicate to be insisted upon.’ Not that that stopped Thomas Wilson. ‘I must, however, just observe, that it is always attended with the most terrible consequences, to their posterity, as well as to themselves. That most excellent part of the human species, whose principal glory is their affection to their innocent infants, would do well to reflect upon the shockingness of a fault, which entails misery upon their harmless progeny as long as they live.’

Thomas Wilson gave examples, and they weren’t poor women. One was ‘a lady of good fortune, whose family and husband a friend of mine intimately knows.’ She ‘began with Barbados waters.’
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But when her husband locked the drinks cupboard, ‘she sunk into a taste for the lowest English spirits she could procure.’ This lady had only one child, ‘and [she] was determined, by a well-intended tenderness, to suckle this herself.’ The result was a warning to all mothers. ‘The poison it had sucked in before and after its birth, from its unhappy mother, was so prevalent, that all the art of physic, all the care of its nurse, could not recover the mischief, and clothe its little half-dried bones, with aught but a shrivelled sallow skin. It has now the look of an old withered baby, its skin loose and wrinkled … [It] lives, if we may say lives, by the help of art, a miserable memento of its mother’s unnatural habit.’ The mother, as Thomas Wilson sorrowfully told his readers, was now dying of consumption.

The middle-class wife drinking at home had joined the gallery of reformers’ villains. In January 1737 the
Grub Street Journal
even suggested a ban on selling spirits to women.
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Later that year, the
Universal Spectator
ran an exposé of dram-drinking in women. ‘When I behold the woman … who still is the delight of my heart,’ wailed one wretched witness, ‘degraded into the most infamous habit of drinking; when I view those eyes that were wont to sparkle with inviting lustre, with awkward goggling betray an unmeaning look; when I see deadness in her features, folly in her behaviour, her tongue faltering, her breath tainted, her health impaired, my concern, like her debasement, is inexpressible.’
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By 1751, when the Gin Panic next flared up, the stereotype of the middle-class female dram-drinker was everywhere. ‘The wives of genteel mechanicks,’ noted one author, describing a day in the life of London, ‘under pretence of going to prayers in their
apartments, take a nap and a dram, after which they chew lemon peel to prevent being smelt.’
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‘How does she behave in her family?’ asked another tract on these secret tipplers. ‘The poor children are kicked and tumbl’d about like so many footballs … She gets rid on them as soon as she can, by packing them away to school with a bit of bread and butter in their hands.’
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In 1750 Eliza Haywood even produced
A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking, adapted to all the different stations in life, from a Lady of Quality to a Common Servant
. ‘The prodigious progress made by this vice of female drinking within these few years,’ she protested, ‘is so incontestibly notorious, that the propriety and usefulness of the treatise cannot be disputed.’ Eliza Haywood knew exactly whom she was trying to save. Her examples included ‘a young woman of quality … a gentleman’s daughter … a young gentlewoman of small fortune … daughter of a middling tradesman … the wife of a clergyman … the dreadful effects of this vice in a married Lady of Quality.’ For each, she provide advice and a terrible example. The gentleman’s daughter would be tyrannised by servants who discover her habit. The ‘married Lady of Quality’ (‘Lady Lucy’) ‘was the daughter of a very great man, and the sister of a greater, but her vices made her odious, and at the same time, ridiculous. She sought at last to take shelter in what had brought her misfortunes upon her; she drank to drive away thought; she did it effectually, she drank herself to death.’

Eliza Haywood was more sensitive than most reformers. She worried about how to draw drinkers’ attention to her tract. It was easy enough with servants, harder with genteel boozers; still, ‘a method may be found of dropping it in a closet, or a toilet.’ She offered advice on how to kick the habit, which was more than the Societies for Reformation of Manners had ever done. Eliza Haywood ‘knew a gentleman that cured his sister by furnishing her with romances.’ For other ‘sipping misses’ she suggested ‘painting,
japanning, colouring of prints, or whatever else will fix the attention, and take off that inclination for indolence which made way for the other vice.’

With a role-model like Pamela and a life of japanning and colouring in prints, any sane woman would take to the bottle sooner or later. Middle-class women were on the way towards a vicious spiral. Debilitating role-models created debilitating habits. Laudanum, Mother’s Ruin and the teapot full of sherry were only just around the corner.

The woman drinker was a threat. She was a threat to society, to her family, and to herself. She was a threat to her husband and children. Fallen onto the streets and infected with syphilis, she was a threat to other women, for the whore infected the rakish husband, who carried the poison back to his family. The middle-class woman who drank endangered her own servants by encouraging them to take up the habit themselves. In turn, gossiping in the chandler’s shop, the servant ruined her mistress by spreading the secrets of the household around the neighbourhood. Reformers weren’t short of reasons to castigate Madam Geneva and the women who followed her. Religion, morality, patriotism and regard for society all recoiled in horror from that slack-lipped, goggling figure on the steps in St Giles’s.

But as if that wasn’t enough, the doctors were ready to weigh in as well. It wasn’t just immoral for women to drink spirits. It was unhealthy and dangerous as well.

The theory of humours still dominated medicine. It held that everything was made up of earth, water, fire and air, and had a corresponding mixture of qualities, dry or wet, hot or cold. And that explained human nature as well. People were choleric (hot and dry), sanguine (hot and moist), phlegmatic (moist and cold), or melancholic (cold and dry). Fevers and ailments were imbalances
of the natural elements. They were cured by diet. And all foods, in detailed and complex ways, were combinations of qualities. Pepper was hot in the third degree and dry in the fourth. Fruit was cold, moist and bad for you.

Spirits were fiery, hot and dry. That explained why people in northern climates turned to spirit-drinking. ‘[People] cannot live without it,’ one tract pointed out, ‘through the intemperance of the air, viz. coldness and moisture in these northern countries … Our bodies would become like bogs, or pools, if we did not drain them … by the frequent use of hot spirits and cordial drams.’
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For women, though, spirits were dangerous. Heat and dryness were male attributes. Their disposition – anger – was the most masculine of qualities, the most unladylike. Women were generically cold and moist; spirits were anathema to their natures.

Hence Stephen Hales’ advice against drinking spirits during pregnancy. Wet nurses were usually told to eat light herb soups and salads, wet and cold foods – the opposite of fiery spirits. It was no surprise to eighteenth-century campaigners that the child of a gin-drinker should have ‘half-dried bones … [a skin] all shrivelled and black;’ nor that such a baby should came out ‘half burnt and shrivelled into the world.’

And that, too, was the risk which awaited gin-drinkers themselves. Terrible stories began to circulate in the years of the Gin Craze. If women drinkers didn’t kill themselves by gin itself, by syphilis or by exposure, a still more dreadful fate awaited them. Death by fire.

Grace Pitt was ‘about fifty’, the wife of an Ipswich fishmonger. She had always been fond of a dram, and enjoyed her pipe as well. Every night she would go downstairs and have a last pipe before she went to bed. On the morning of 10 April 1744, her daughter, who slept with her, woke up to find her mother’s side of the bed empty. She called, but there was no answer. So she ‘put on her
clothes,’ it was later reported, ‘and [went] down into the kitchen.’ A terrible sight met her eyes. Her mother was ‘stretched out on the right side, with her head near the grate; the body extended on the hearth, with the legs on the floor.’ But it took her a moment to realise that the thing on the hearth was indeed her mother. Grace Pitt’s body seemed to have been consumed by fire. It had ‘the appearance of a log of wood, consumed by a fire without apparent flame … The trunk was in some measure incinerated, and resembled a heap of coals covered with white ashes. The head, the arms, the legs, and the thighs had also participated in the burning.’
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All that was noted in painstaking detail by Pierre Aimé Lair, who collected examples of ‘the combustion of the human body, produced by the long immoderate use of spirituous liquors.’

The first case of spontaneous combustion had been reported in England in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in June 1731. It was taken seriously enough for the Royal Society to debate the phenomenon in 1745. Both for them and for Pierre Aimé Lair, there were obvious links between the various cases. All the victims were women. All of them were old – the theory of humours dictated that everyone dried up as they aged. And, most important of all, ‘the persons who experienced the effects of this combustion, had for a long time made an immoderate use of spirituous liquors.’ Grace Pitt had been celebrating because another daughter had just come back from overseas.

Reformers hated women who drank because they threatened social order. But maybe older memories and fears lingered in the background. Crouched over her market barrow, the old basket-woman with a bottle in her hand evoked the memory of other old women who had dispensed magic potions. She, too, transgressed social norms; she held the power of transformation and her end was death by fire. In the same year it passed the Gin Act, Parliament finally outlawed the burning of witches. But
it was easier to erase witches from the statute book than to pluck them from the popular imagination. Grace Pitt, charred to ash on her own hearth-stone, had met the fate of all her kind. Spontaneous combustion had become the threatened end for women who turned to spirits. They carried their own stake and flames within them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

REPEAL

S
even years into prohibition, in 1743, production of British spirits hit more than eight million gallons a year. Gin was supposed to have been outlawed, but every man, woman and child in London was drinking two pints of the stuff every week.

The Gin Act was a dead letter. In 1741–2, only two of the £50 licences were taken out. Even more depressing than that, Excise men managed to collect the twenty-shilling duty on just forty gallons of spirits. The special sessions of magistrates were long over. For Madam Geneva, it was business as usual. For politicians, it was time for a new approach.

There was one reason in particular why they needed a new approach in 1743. Sir Robert Walpole was gone, ousted the year before by the same combination of patriot Whigs and Tories, City opposition and excited public opinion which had driven him into the war he never wanted. And that war was now spreading. In summer 1742, England had been drawn into active support for Maria Theresa, the new ruler of Austria and Hungary. Hanoverian and English armies were committed on the Continent for the first
time in thirty years. Now Carteret, Secretary of State and dominant figure in the new ministry, had to find a way of paying for them.

For reformers, the problem gin presented was how to stop people drinking it; for Londoners, how to get hold of a steady supply. For politicians, the difficulty with gin had always been how to make money out of it.

It should have been easy. Vast quantities of spirits were being distilled and drunk. There had never been any trouble in transforming beer into hard cash. But so far both government attempts to raise substantial revenue out of the Gin Craze had ended in disaster. The Gin Acts of 1729 and 1736 had both been ignored.

This time, when they turned their attention to Madam Geneva, the government was going to play safe. Way back in 1729, everyone had known that the obvious answer to controlling gin was through still-head duties and licensing controls. The 1743 Act, repealing and replacing prohibition, would bring in both, but at rates so low as to render them harmless. The volume of spirits being made was now so great that even a small duty could throw up healthy revenues. The 1743 Act would double the duty on low wines made from corn to twopence, and the duty on most spirits to sixpence. On the most recent figures Carteret had in front of him, those modest increases would produce an additional revenue of nearly £140,000 a year. Retail licences had been a dead letter under prohibition. With their cost reduced from £50 to £1 a year, there was every hope that London’s thousands of gin-shops might at last turn out to be some benefit to the country.