Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (8 page)

’Ere masquerades debauch’d, excise oppress’d,

Or English honour grew a standing jest.
²¹

Dr Thomas Short, analysing London’s death rate in 1750, would still see the rural life as ‘the first state of mankind, and … the healthiest … For there … still remains such vestiges of virtue, sobriety, regularity, plainness, and simplicity of diet, &c. as bears some small image or resemblance of the primeval state.’
²²

London, for these romantic conservatives, was unnatural and destructive. Its values were corroding the country’s traditional virtues. The terrible example was ancient Rome, where a free republic had sacrificed freedom to tyranny, strength to luxury, and all had ended in ruin.

Adapting this vision to their own circumstances, the Tories
and independent Whigs who adopted this viewpoint recast the Hanoverian succession as the start of tyranny and the beginning of England’s decline and fall. England, the ‘happy seat of liberty,’ was ‘yet running perhaps, the same course, which Rome itself had run before it; from virtuous industry to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals; till, by a total degeneracy and loss of virtue … it falls a prey … to some hardy oppressor, and, with the loss of liberty … sinks gradually again into its original barbarism.’
²³

This ‘country’ vision deplored the vices of the town and the corruption of the court. It looked back to a time before speculation; a time when power was vested in landowners, not in ‘usurers and stockjobbers,’ and land was owned by those who were born to it; a time of tradition not novelty, frugality not luxury. ‘Luxury and the love of riches came into Rome,’ warned the
Craftsman
, the newspaper which gave strongest voice to this idea, ‘and that poverty and temperance, which had form’d so many great captains, fell into contempt.’
²⁴
Luxury, of course, meant shop windows and the leisure industry. It meant gentlemen-tradesmen. It meant the poor coveting goods and clothes above their station.

Speculation had long been a target of these conservatives, and the South Sea disaster confirmed all their worst fears. ‘What advantage,’ asked the authors of
Cato’s Letters
, a prolonged ‘country’ attack on the government in the years after the bubble burst, ‘ever has, or ever can, accrue to the publick by raising stocks to an imaginary value, beyond what they are really worth? … It enriches the worst men, and ruins the innocent … It has changed honest commerce into bubbling; our traders into projectors, industry into tricking, and applause is earned, when the pillory is deserved.’
²⁵

William Hogarth’s satirical print of the South Sea Bubble showed speculators on a merry-go-round. To Christians and conservatives, that was how the whole of London seemed: a top
spinning out of control, with disaster the only possible outcome. When the South Sea Bubble burst, that disaster had finally arrived. Speculation had ended in ruin; fortunes had been lost; the crowds who flocked into Jonathan’s had been clutching at fool’s gold. The state would be dragged down as well, for the whole mad scheme of the South Sea Company was supposed to finance government loans and the wrong-headed new idea that a state should live on credit and borrow to pay for standing armies and foreign wars. Honest tradesmen would be bankrupt when their bills went unpaid. London stared ruin in the face.

God stayed his hand; the plague stopped at Marseilles. But the atmosphere of panic remained.

Panic at the financial collapse (and the corruption it uncovered) and panic about the plague were followed by a panic about crime. ‘So many … robberies happen daily that ’tis almost incredible,’ declared
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal
in February 1722. The
Weekly Journal
reported highway robberies on the Clapham road ten nights in a row. As the panic spread, the carts rumbling towards Tyburn became ever more heavily laden. One court recorder opposed pardons for highwaymen ‘especially at this juncture when so many notorious offenders are daily and nightly robbing the open streets in a most flagrant manner with violence and arms and terrifying His Majesty’s innocent subjects.’
²⁶
But neither executions nor rewards seemed to solve the problem. ‘Footpads are met with especially in and around London,’ worried Saussure soon afterwards. ‘Should they meet any well-dressed person at night in some unfrequented spot they will collar him, put the muzzle of a pistol to his throat and threaten to kill him if he makes the slightest movement or calls for help … Pickpockets are legion.’
²⁷

The newspapers didn’t help. ‘The apparent increase of thieves,’ the
Daily Journal
scaremongered, ‘has not been known in the
memory of man, or within the reach of history.’
²⁸
The papers fostered the idea that the crime wave was the work of organised gangs. ‘There are advertisements in the Gazette of Saturday last,’ reported the
London Journal
, ‘of no less than twenty robberies, which have been committed within these three months … by a gang of highwaymen, who are at present in Newgate.’ Egged on by lurid reports, Londoners became obsessed with crime. They queued for the publications of the Newgate ‘Ordinaries’ which described hangings, confessions, and the final hours of condemned men. They followed the exploits of Jack Sheppard, who broke his apprentice’s bonds and went on the road in spring 1723. After he was hanged, on 16 November, they shivered at the name of the man who took him, Jonathan Wild, self-proclaimed ‘Thief-taker General’, who took rewards for the thieves he managed himself, sending them to the gallows after he had profited from their crimes.

But it wasn’t only crimes in the streets they worried about. There was crime in the corridors of power as well. The South Sea Bubble had uncovered massive corruption among ministers. Then, within months of Jack Sheppard’s execution, Lord Macclesfield, the Lord Chancellor, was impeached for selling Masterships in Chancery. The court seemed to be rotten to the very core. ‘Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,’ Pope would write,

That ‘Not to be corrupted is the Shame.’ …

See, all our Nobles begging to be Slaves!

See, all our Fools aspiring to be Knaves!

The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,

Are what ten thousand envy and adore.
²⁹

John Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
, the satire which broke all records at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728, would liken Robert Walpole, the manipulative Prime Minister, to a common gang leader.

In the panicky 1720s, the streets seemed to be infested with footpads, the ministries with thieves. Your lifetime’s savings could disappear overnight; your walk home could end in robbery and murder. Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
, a publishing sensation on its appearance in 1722, exactly caught the mood of the moment with its tale of a random life driven through highs and lows by every whim of fortune. Panic was in the air. The same year brought a Jacobite scare with the revelation of a plot led by Bishop Atterbury. And with panic came panic reactions. The Atterbury plot was followed by the suspension of habeas corpus, troops in Hyde Park and fines for Catholics. 1722 saw prosecutions by the Societies for Reformation of Manners peak at over 7,000. The Workhouse Test Acts allowed parishes to refuse poor relief if the poor wouldn’t work. The Black Act of 1723 came up with yet more hanging offences to send petty criminals on the grim journey to Tyburn.

Madam Geneva was caught up in the flood. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that in this wave of recrimination and soul-searching reformers of all stamps should round on her. After all, she had had her own way in the slums for thirty years. She was bound to attract attention sooner or later.

For Christians, Josiah Woodward had sounded the key note back in 1711 in his
Dissuasive from the Sin of Drunkenness
. ‘When the dog turns to his vomit,’ he sorrowed, ‘or the swine wallows in the mire, they do but act according to their nature. But for the noble creature, man, that is made after the image of God … for this wise and noble creature to part with his reason, his conscience, his Heaven, his God, for a little drink more than he needs … is a most desperate pitch of sin and folly.’ For reformers of the ‘country’ school, the Golden, Age wasn’t just a time before speculation and corruption, it was a time before gin. In the good old days, ‘the labourer perform[ed] an honest day’s work for his wages, and his
wife and children would be fed at home with wholesome meat and drink; the butcher, the baker, and the brewer would take his money instead of the distiller, his family would be decently cloathed, his landlord have his rent duly paid; the man would enjoy his health, his strength and his senses, his wife a good husband, himself a plentiful issue, with strong and healthful children; and his prince reap the fruits of their labours, in the increase of his subjects, as well as the riches of his people.’
³⁰

And when they did, at last, focus their sights on gin, reformers found plenty to worry about. It wasn’t just vice and immorality; Madam Geneva was ruining the economy. One reform publication,
The Occasional Monitor
, would complain of tradesmen ‘not daring to employ dram-drinkers, because they have not half the strength and capacity they ought to have to do their business; besides the many fatal instances we meet with of day-labourers falling off houses, and other the like accidents thro’ drunkenness.’ Drinkers lost their strength. They shirked hard work. And for early eighteenth-century economists, that wasn’t just their funeral; it spelled ruin for everyone. Conventional economic wisdom said that the more a nation produced, the more it could sell. Economic activity depended on supply, not demand. ‘The trade of this or any other country,’ as the
London Magazine
would later explain, ‘depends chiefly upon the number of natural born subjects employed in producing, manufacturing, conveying, or transporting any commodity.’
³¹
So every active working man had a value to the nation (Braddon, a solicitor to the wine Excise board, reckoned a poor child at £15 a year).
³²
But if the working man was slumped in the doorway of a dram-shop, the whole system went wrong. Reformers produced streams of complaints about the idleness of the labouring classes. ‘If a person can get sufficient in four days, to support himself for seven days,’ one commentator sighed, ‘he will keep holiday the other three, that is he will live in riot and debauchery.’
³³
‘Labour,’ Bishop
Sherlock proclaimed, ‘is the business and employment of the poor: it is the work which God has given him to do.’
³⁴
Unfortunately, in St Giles-in-the-Fields, God came a poor third after Madam Geneva and Saint Monday.

In the aftermath of the South Sea Crash, everything became clear to reformers. Sir John Gonson had found his scapegoat. Gin suddenly crystallised as the root cause of all London’s woes. For the poor, it was the start of the slippery slope. In brandy-shops, warned one magistrate, servants and apprentices ‘learn gaming; lose their money; then rob and pilfer from their masters and parents to recruit; and by quick progressions, at last come to the gallows.’
³⁵
When they attacked gin, reformers wanted to halt not just the chemistry of the still, but the stockmarket’s alchemy which transformed poor into rich, the masquerade that turned your serving maid into a sexual equal, a whole town which could magic highwaymen into heroes, country girls into preening sluts. But when it came to the poor, gin was the key. In an age whose nerve-ends always jangled at the threat of disrespect, Madam Geneva was the siren voice leading the poor away from their duty. She was, as the Middlesex magistrates put it, ‘the principal cause … of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people, as well as of the felonies & other disorders committed in & about this town.’
³⁶

Even after thirty years, Madam Geneva still had the reek of the alchemist’s laboratory about her. A dangerous magic had been unleashed; something unholy and unnatural was at large in the slums. Madam Geneva was the unacceptable face of the Age of Risk. She had corrupted London, and reformers wanted her out of town.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MAGISTRATES

T
he Middlesex magistrates may have identified Madam Geneva as the villain and handed out wanted posters. They may have warned that ‘in some of the larger parishes’ – they meant St Giles – ‘every seventh house at least sells one sort or other of these liquors.’
¹
There still remained the question of how to deal with it all. Distilling was a privileged industry, after all. Madam Geneva had friends in high places and a string of Acts to protect her.