Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (7 page)

Approach the ‘Change in Coaches,

To fool away the Gold they gain

By their obscene Debauches.

Exchange Alley was filled with coaches, messengers and investors. Many had come just to watch the frenzy. A secure world was being turned upside-down before Londoners’ eyes.
Mist’s Journal
described ‘rich farmers … upon the roads from several parts of the Kingdom; all expecting no less than to ride home again, every man of them, in his coach and six.’
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A Dutch paper reported more than a hundred ships for sale because ‘the owners of capital prefer to speculate on shares than to work at their normal business.’
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‘Our South-Sea equipages increase every day,’
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal
marvelled in August. ‘The City ladies buy South-Sea jewels, hire South-Sea maids; and take new country South-Sea houses; the gentlemen set up South-Sea coaches, and buy South-Sea estates.’
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Rumours swept through the City. In Jonathan’s and Garraway’s coffee-houses, stock-jobbers crowded round tables to fight for deals. Prices were scrawled on scraps of paper, deals sealed with quick handshakes. At the height of the craze, Craggs, Secretary to the South Sea Company, wrote to Stanhope, junior Treasury Secretary, ‘it is impossible to tell you what a rage prevails here for South Sea subscriptions at any price. The crowd … is so great that the Bank … has been forced to set tables with clerks in the street.’
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By autumn there were no tables out in the streets. When the crash came it swept away rich and poor alike. ‘This town is in a very shattered condition,’ wrote one sorry observer. ‘Eleven out of the twelve judges are dipped in South Sea: Bishops, Deans and Doctors, in short everybody that had money. Some of the quality are quite broke. Coaches and equipages are laying down every day and ’tis expected that the Christmas Holidays will be very melancholy.’
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More than a third of the banks in London were to go under. The millionaire Duke of Chandos lost £700,000. The South Sea Crash would leave a long shadow. As one onlooker put it, ‘the fire of London or the plague ruin’d not the number that are now undone.’
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By 1 October, South Sea Stock was down to £290, and still falling. ‘Exchange Alley sounds no longer of thousands got in an instant,’ reported the
Weekly Journal
, ‘but, on the contrary, all corners of the town are filled with the groans of the afflicted.’
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Daniel Defoe described South Sea investors as ‘walking ghosts … [as if they] were all infected with the Plague.’ ‘Never men looked so wretchedly,’ he went on. ‘I shall remember a man with a South Sea face as long as I live.’
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A febrile atmosphere gripped London in the aftermath of the disaster. All winter the newspapers were full of rumours and recriminations. There were so many reports of investors taking their own lives that
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal
suggested, in January 1721, that South Sea suicides ought to be marked separately
in the Bills of Mortality ‘viz. Drowned herself (in the South Sea) at St Paul’s Shadwell, one; Killed by a (South Sea) sword at St Margaret’s Westminster, one; … Killed by excessive drinking of (South Sea) Geneva, five.’ New terrors were imagined everywhere. In the spring a Royal Order in Council was issued, claiming that London was infested with ‘scandalous clubs or societies of young persons who meet together and in the most impious and blasphemous manner insult the most sacred principles of our holy Religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the mind and morals of one another,’
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and the magistrates of the County of Middlesex were charged to investigate.

But Londoners soon had more to worry about than scandalous societies. Early in autumn 1721, bubonic plague was reported in Marseilles. Old men could still remember 1665, and plague carts rumbling down the streets carrying the bodies of 70,000 Londoners. To zealots and fundamentalists – maybe to everybody, during that neurotic autumn – the South Sea Crash had demonstrated the folly of the age. For three decades, London had been the new Sodom, abandoned to pleasure, heedless of the future. Now it was reaping its reward; divine retribution was on the way. On 2 October, the
Daily Courant
published quarantine restrictions. Newspapers were full of adverts for patent plague medicines. ‘The town was never known to be so thin within the memory of man,’ commented the
Weekly Journal
. ‘Not half of the members are come up, and we see a bill upon almost every door.’ The court proclaimed ‘a general fast, to be observed throughout Great Britain, in order to put up prayers to Almighty God to avert that dreadful calamity … from us.’
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Asked to look into ‘scandalous clubs’ back in April, the Middlesex magistrates had appointed a three-man committee to investigate. It was in the middle of the plague panic, on 13 October, that the committee delivered its report. The magistrates hadn’t found any evidence of scandalous clubs. But under the shadow
of the plague and divine wrath, they did take the opportunity to point out to the Lord Chancellor everything else that was wrong with the sprawling, vicious new metropolis.

One of the committee’s members had known for a long time what was wrong with London. Sir John Gonson would turn out to be one of Madam Geneva’s most implacable enemies. He was an enemy of sin in all its guises, a Christian zealot who would be at the heart of the growing evangelism of the 1730s. Only two pictures of Sir John Gonson survive. When Moll Hackabout is arrested by constables in Hogarth’s
Harlot’s Progress
, the magistrate creeping into her room to direct operations is Sir John Gonson. (Gonson never did have any time for whores; when Mother Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper, was arrested in 1731, he had her pilloried and the crowd treated her so harshly that she died.) The other picture of Sir John Gonson is scrawled on a prison wall in another Hogarth print. This time he is pictured the way prisoners wanted to see him – as a stick figure with a noose around his neck.

The town was out of control, so Sir John Gonson and his Middlesex colleagues thought. Middlesex meant London outside the walls of the old City and north of the river. It meant the sprawling alleys and tenements of St Giles, dosshouses and drinking dens, whores on the Strand, Holborn and Clerkenwell. It meant rural parishes which had suddenly turned into urban jungles. It meant Irish migrant labourers, poor people from the country, epidemics and street crime. It meant gin.

For men like Sir John Gonson, it meant everything that had gone wrong with London since the Glorious Revolution. His report thundered against masquerades and gaming-houses, playhouses and public houses – all the symbols of the new age. But one kind of public house was singled out for special attention. ‘Your committee,’ he advised, ‘are to take notice of the great destruction made by Brandy and Geneva shops whose owners retail their liquors to
the poorer sort of people and do suffer them to sit tippling in their shops, by which practice they are … rendered incapable of labour to get an honest living.’
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In St Giles, one building in seven was said to house a gin-seller.

Madam Geneva had had her own way in the slums for thirty years. Now, under the shadow of the plague, she was in the frame for all the evils of the age. If the Gin Craze, as disapproving later historians would dub it, started in 1690 with William III’s deregulation of the distilling industry, then the South Sea Crash marked the start of its alter ego, the Gin Panic. From then on, Gin Craze and Gin Panic would be Siamese twins, joined at the neck. We know about the Gin Craze, of course, mainly through the voices of those who were panicking about it. The poor of St Giles left few records. We have to reconstruct London’s gutters mostly through the shocked expressions on the faces of passers-by.

Newspapers leapt on the bandwagon. The
London Journal
started running stories of gin-drinking alongside its usual fare of robberies, curiosities, child abuse and highwaymen. On Wednesday 29 November, ‘an unhappy accident happened in the passage from Petty-France to Bedlam, where a poor woman was burnt in her chamber. Some attribute her inability to save herself to Geneva.’ A couple of weeks later, ‘one of the keepers of Bridewell at Dartford in Kent, killed himself on the spot with drinking Geneva, and some of his infantry have been in the like danger, by drinking the same liquor in solemn festival for his death.’ The same issue carried a report that ‘a porter that plied near Chequer-Inn in Holborn, drank so plentifully of Geneva, with his wife, that he died upon the spot, and she is like to follow him; ’tis said that they drank three pints apiece, in a little more than an hour.’

For Sir John Gonson, evangelist, Madam Geneva had more than a couple of dead porters on her conscience. If the plague came back, he had no doubt that it would be her fault. All through the
report, it was unclear whether he was talking about infection or sin. The plague ran through every line, weaving and mingling with the evils of the age. By sitting in gin-shops, drinkers didn’t just make themselves unable to work, ‘but (by their bodies being kept in a continued heat) are thereby more liable to receive infection.’ He turned his fire on beggars (‘loose idle people … with distorted limbs or otherwise distempered … [who] may conduce to the spreading of infection among us …’), on the crowded, insanitary gaols, on the animals kept in filthy sheds in back alleys (‘the great number of hogs … kept by brewers, distillers, starch-makers and other persons … must be very dangerous if God Almighty should visit us with any contagious distemper’). He shone a first light on the filthy dosshouses of Holborn and St Giles (‘where ’tis frequent for fifteen, twenty or more to lie in a small room, where it sometimes happens that poor wretches are found dead, and the corps have lain many days among the living before the parish officers have been prevailed on to put them into the ground’).

Sir John Gonson had lifted the curtain on life in the slums, and found nothing but depravity and vice. He wasn’t the only one to blame that depravity for all London’s woes. There were many who thought the city reeling down from the South Sea Mountain was paying the price for its theatres and pleasure gardens, its dram-shops and brothels, for its obsession with display, its hunger for wealth.

Not everyone, after all, had spent the last thirty years gambling, drinking and speculating on the stock market. Some had tried to cling on to old values. For them, the changes associated with the Glorious Revolution were a catastrophe and a sin, an affront to God, a threat to the very survival of society.

Just two years after William III signed his 1690 Act ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’, the court issued a proclamation against blasphemy, profane swearing, cursing,
drunkenness, lewdness, Sabbath-breaking, and ‘any other dissolute, immoral or disorderly practice.’
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The decade that witnessed stockmarket boom and bust, national lotteries and White’s gaming-house also saw the emergence of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners.

Josiah Woodward, one of their pioneers, traced the roots of the Societies back ‘about two and thirty years,’ which would link them to fire, plague, and the puritan generation of Praise-God Barebones. Their first meeting took place a year after the Glorious Revolution, when a pious group in Tower Hamlets agreed to meet monthly to ‘resolve upon the best methods for putting the laws in execution against houses of lewdness and debauchery and also against drunkenness, swearing and cursing, and profanation of the Lord’s day.’
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The best method, they decided, was to use informers. Neighbours, servants and apprentices, London’s moral majority, would point the finger at sinners and have them dragged off to the courts for punishment. Right-thinking citizens were exhorted by reformers like Woodward to ‘do all that you regularly can, towards the suppression of abounding vice, and the reviving of languishing religion, that this our good [country] may not be as Sodom, first in sin, and then in desolation … Will you be discouraged from this,’ he asked them, ‘because some vain people will call it fanaticism?’
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They wouldn’t. By 1725,90,000 sinners had been informed against, taken to court by the Societies and prosecuted.

Sex came top of the Societies’ agenda, then Sabbath-breaking, then swearing. Drink, back at the turn of the century, hadn’t yet been tagged as the root of all evil. But the Societies for Reformation of Manners weren’t short of targets. It wasn’t only one sin they were attacking; it was the whole new order of things in London. Wherever they looked they saw nothing but ‘delight in idleness, excessive vanity, revellings, luxury, wantonness, lasciviousness,
whoredoms.’
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They were shocked by clothes, shocked by theatres, shocked by all the novelties of the times. In an age whose ‘deplorable distinction … is an avowed scorn of religion in some and a growing disregard of it in the generality,’
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the Societies clung to pungent Old Testament fundamentalism. The age was rushing forward into risk and change. The Societies preached a return to dry land.

Fundamentalists weren’t the only ones to shake their heads over stock-jobbers, gamblers and preening servants. But others found different ground on which to launch their assault. Writers like Swift and Pope fled from Exchange Alley and Covent Garden into the timeless pastoral idyll of Vergil and Horace. The past was a Golden Age, the town a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with it. For the Augustans, the wise man had only one option: to wish the ‘dear, damn’d, distracting Town, farewell!’
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(as most of them didn’t) and bury himself in country solitude. Dr Johnson, who reached London in 1737, would castigate town life as Juvenal had, and look back to the golden reigns of Alfred and Elizabeth,