Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (4 page)

César de Saussure stumbled on one of those dram-shops when he visited London a decade later. By then, thirty years of unrestricted trade in spirits had had their effect. ‘These taverns,’ he reported, ‘are almost always full of men and women, and even sometimes of children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away, though these liquors are a sort of poison, and many people die from making too free a use of them.’
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But the poor, of course, weren’t the only ones drinking too much in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. If they found it difficult to walk at the end of the evening, they were only copying their betters. ‘It is not the lower populace alone that is addicted to drunkenness,’ Saussure confirmed. ‘Numbers of persons of high rank and even of distinction are over fond of liquor.’
²⁰
Gamblers steadied their nerves with punch; long evenings in the coffee-house were lubricated by booze; young rakes reeled out of Tom King’s into the Covent Garden dawn. To call the early eighteenth century a hard-drinking age would be something of an understatement.

* * *

Sir Robert Walpole learned to drink at his father’s table at Houghton. ‘Come, Robert,’ his father was reputed to say, ‘you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of the father.’
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The letter-writer Mrs Delaney recalled of Walpole’s Tory opponent that, ‘Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business.’ As for John Carteret, who would eventually replace Walpole, ‘The period of his ascendancy was known by the name of the Drunken Administration. His habits were extremely convivial; and champagne probably lent its aid to keep him in that state of joyous excitement in which his life was passed … Driven from office, he retired laughing to his books and his bottle.’
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Hard drinking was barely even a vice. Samuel Johnson would recall that ‘all the decent people of Litchfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.’
^23
*
Daniel Defoe, in 1702, thought that ‘an honest drunken fellow is a character in a man’s praise.’ It was part of the age’s clubbishness. All over London, men met in coffee-houses or rooms above pubs to drink, converse and do business. Drink was everywhere. Strike a business deal and you sealed it with a handshake and a dram. Go to the doctor and your medicine would be spiked with alcohol. Business meetings, magistrates’ sessions, gatherings of old friends or wedding feasts; all were likely to be held in inns or taverns. There was nowhere else
to congregate. Nor did Londoners only drink in their leisure time. Benjamin Franklin, apprenticed to a Lincoln’s Inn Fields printer on his first visit to London in 1725 – later he would return as agent for the state of Pennsylvania and advocate of American Independence – recalled how ‘my companion at press drank every day a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint in the afternoon about 6 o’clock, and another pint when he had done his day’s work.’
²⁴

And the thirsty Londoner with money in his pocket found he had an increasing range of drinks to choose from. Like so much else in London in the early decades of the eighteenth century, drink was being commercialised. The days of the independent alehouse-keeper brewing his own beer in the cellar were coming to an end. Robert Kirk, a Scot visiting London in 1690, remarked on the ‘many strange kinds of drinks and liquors on sale.’
²⁵
Not long afterwards there would be a craze for bottled beers: ‘Beer of Dorchester … Burton Ale, Lincoln Ale, Derby Ale, Litchfield Ale, Yorkshire Ale, Yorkshire Stingo, Doncaster Ale, Basingstoke Beer, October Beer, Nottingham Ale, Boston Ale, Abingdon Beer, Newberry Beer, Chesterfield Ale, Welch Ale, Norwich Nogg, Amber Beer, Sir John Parson’s Beer, Tamworth Ale, Dr Butler’s Ale, Devonshire Beer, Plymouth White Ale, Oxford Ale, Sussex Beer … Jobson’s Julep, or Lyon’s Blood … Twankam … Coal Heaver’s Cordial; and lastly plain humble Porter.’
²⁶
Londoners were going mad for alcoholic novelty. ‘The Ladies and gentlemen of quality and distinction,’ Daniel Defoe remarked, ‘not content with … French brandy, now treat with ratafia and citron, at a guinea a bottle. The punch drinkers of quality … not contented with French brandy in their bowls, must have Arrack at 16s to 18s per gallon. The wine drinkers of the better sort, not content with the Portugal and Barcelona Wines, must have high Country Margeaux, O Brian and Hermitage Clarets, at 5s to 6s per bottle; and after that Champagne and burgundy at 7s to 8s per bottle.’
²⁷
And it wasn’t just the range of drinks that was increasing, or the amount that Londoners poured down their throats. Strength was on the way up as well. ‘There has been for some years,’ Defoe noted in 1726, ‘a national gust or inclination to drinking stronger and higher priced liquors than formerly.’ The well-off drank port or sherry (‘and the Oporto and Lisbon whites, tho’ very strong, are turned out of doors, for the yet stronger Mountain Malaga’). In the gambling-dens and coffee-houses, meanwhile, wits shunned wine and instead honed their punch-lines with vast bowls of arrack cocktail.

So when the ordinary Londoner spent his penny on a dram of gin, rather than a pot of ale, he was only following fashion. He didn’t do it just to oblige English landowners and enrich the distilling industry. Thanks to Madam Geneva, he found that he, too, could afford a novelty drink; he, too, could buy something with a bit of kick to it. ‘It seems to me,’ as Defoe would point out, ‘[that the poor] have done … even what their superiors have seemed to lead them into just now, by a general example.’

And for the poor, gin offered something else as well. A cheap and powerful new drug was suddenly available to provide solace for desperately hard lives. One market-woman who gave evidence at the magistrates’ Quarter Sessions in 1725 managed to put across something of what gin meant to her, and to other poor Londoners. ‘We market-women are up early and late, and work hard for what we have,’ she told the court. ‘We stand all weathers and go thro’ thick and thin. It’s well known, that I was never the woman that spar’d my carcase; and if I spend three farthings now and then, in such simple stuff as poor souls are glad to drink, it’s nothing but what’s my own. I get it honestly, and I don’t care who knows it; for if it were not for something to clear the spirits between whiles, and keep out the wet and cold; alackaday! it would never do! we
should never be able to hold it; we should never go thorow-stitch with it, so as to keep body and soul together.’
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In the slums of St Giles-in-the-Fields and Saffron Hill a drifting population took dosshouse lodgings for tuppence a night. Stability meant a garret for a shilling a week. Work was seasonal. There were jobs on building sites when the rich were out of town for the summer, jobs in the fields at harvest time. The only god in the slums was Saint Monday, the day off to recover from the weekend. It was hardly surprising that Londoners turned to gin. For the poor man, Francis Place would later say, ‘none but the animal sensations are left; to these his enjoyments are limited, and even these are frequently reduced to two – namely sexual intercourse and drinking.’
²⁹
Drink seemed the better option to many; it cost less and lasted longer.

Gin had become ubiquitous; it was destructive and it was frightening. But far from being prohibited, it was still being promoted by the government. Gin was sold on every street corner. A man couldn’t ‘enter a tavern or an alehouse in which [spirits] will be denied him,’ Earl Bathurst would complain during a later House of Lords debate on gin, ‘or walk along the streets without being incited to drink them at every corner … and whoever walks in this great city, will find his way very frequently obstructed by those who are selling these pernicious liquors to the greedy populace, or by those who have drunk them until they are unable to move.’
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Pushers soon added to the frenzy. ‘Among the doting admirers of this liquid poison,’ one reformer would soon warn, ‘many of the meanest rank, from a sincere affection to the commodity itself, become dealers in it, and take delight to help others to what they love themselves.’
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By the 1720s it was hard to keep out of Madam Geneva’s way. ‘In the fag-end and out-parts of the town, and all places of the vilest resort,’ the same writer went on, ‘it is sold in some part or other of almost every house, frequently in cellars, and sometimes in
the garret.’ Chandlers, ubiquitous corner-shops of the poor, had all taken to selling gin. They didn’t even need a licence to do it. The chandler, as Robert Campbell would explain in
The London Tradesman
, ‘is partly cheesemonger, oilman, grocer.’ His shop was where Londoners went to buy their staples. But it was the chandler’s sideline as petty distiller, for Campbell, that ‘brings him the greatest profit, and at the same time renders him the most obnoxious dealer in and about London. In these shops maid servants and the lower class of women learn the first rudiments of gin-drinking, a practice in which they soon become proficient, and load themselves with diseases, their families with poverty, and their posterity with want and infamy.’

Back in 1703, Charles Davenant had warned of trouble ahead. Three decades into William’s project for a British distilling industry and a free market in spirits, all his warnings seemed to be coming true. London seemed to be floating in a lake of gin. ‘Go along the streets,’ wrote one critic, ‘and you shall see every brandy shop swarming with scandalous wretches, swearing and drinking as if they had no notion of a future state. There they get drunk by daylight, and after that run up and down the streets swearing, cursing and talking beastliness like so many devils; setting ill examples and debauching our youth in general. Nay, to such a height are they arrived in their wickedness, that in a manner, they commit lewdness in the open streets. Young creatures, girls of 12 and 13 years of age, drink Geneva like fishes, and make themselves unfit to live in sober families; this damn’d bewitching liquor makes them shameless, and they talk enough to make a man shudder again; there is no passing the streets for ’em, so shameless are they grown … New oaths are coin’d every day; and little children swear before they can well speak … Geneva is now grown so general a liquor that there is not an ale-house … but can furnish you with a dram of Gin.’
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But it wasn’t happening only because gin was cheap and easily accessible. The lives of the poor had always been hard. When they dreamed up a new market for English corn, no one had pictured dram-shops in every basement and Londoners sprawled drunk in the streets. Something else was going on. Something had changed in the city where Madam Geneva had made her home. London, brash, sprawling and chaotic, was fertile ground for her. The Glorious Revolution hadn’t just shaken up the drinks trade. The changes which it triggered had created a chaotic and insecure city, vulnerable to a new drug, thirsty for gin.

CHAPTER TWO

LONDON

‘O
Molly! What shall I say of London?’ gasped Win Jones, Tabitha Bramble’s servant in Smollett’s
Humphrey Clinker
, of her first glimpse of London. ‘All the towns that ever I beheld in my born-days, are no more than Welsh barrows and crumlecks to this wonderful sitty! … One would think there’s no end of the streets but the land’s end. Then there’s such a power of people, going hurry skurry! Such a racket of coxes! Such a noise, and haliballoo! So many strange sites to be seen! O gracious! My poor Welsh brain has been spinning like a top ever since I came hither!’
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Even Londoners’ heads spun as they looked at their city and watched its boundaries spread ever further from the old walls, transforming fields into elegant squares, villages into sprawling slums. ‘If I stay here a fortnight, without going to town,’ Horace Walpole would claim, ‘I look about me to see if no new house is built since I went last.’
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‘When I speak of London, now in the modern acceptation,’ Daniel Defoe wrote in 1725, ‘you expect I shall take in all that vast mass of buildings, reaching
from Black-Wall in the east, to Tot-Hill Fields in the west; and extended in an unequal breadth, from the bridge, or river, in the south, to Islington north; and from Peterburgh House on the bank side in Westminster, to Cavendish Square.’ Regarding this ‘monstrous city,’ he finished, ‘how much further it may spread, who knows?’
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Only two other towns in England at the time could claim populations above 20,000, while the metropolis teemed with 600,000 souls. Monstrously swollen, London in the decades after the Glorious Revolution filled Englishmen with a mixture of fascination and horror.