Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze
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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.’28
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.’30 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.’31
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.’32
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!’1
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.’2 ‘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?’3 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.
Mostly of fascination. The reformer Jonas Hanway later reckoned that 5,000 people a year flocked into London from the country. They left behind them a world of certainties and limited opportunities, a world of fixed social classes dominated by an ancien régime of gentry and church. London was their magnet. What drew them to the capital was the chance of ‘betterment’. They were ‘weary of restraint,’ ‘weary of country business’; they had ‘an itching desire to see London.’4 When the newcomers came over the hill at Highgate and caught their first glimpse of that ‘vast mass of buildings,’ they were staring down at a jungle of opportunities – and risks. Setting down from the coach in Holborn or tramping in across the last fields to the north of Clerkenwell, they found themselves in a place abounding in new possibilities.
London offered country people its own special alchemy. The country servant had hardly arrived, Daniel Defoe would lament, before ‘her neat leathern shoes are … transformed into laced ones with light heels; her yarn stockings are turned into fine woollen ones … and her high wooden pattens are kicked away for leather clogs. She must have a hoop, too, as well as her mistress; and her poor scanty linsey-woolsey petticoat is changed into a good silk one … In short, plain country Joan is … turned into a fine London Madam, can drink tea, take snuff, and carry herself as high as the best.’5 It was the old Dick Whittington fable, but in the heady decades after the Glorious Revolution it seemed more likely than ever to come true. London could transform nature; the philosopher’s stone was hidden somewhere in its streets and alleys. The city had itself become a kind of still, and from a wash of half a million poor and struggling people, farm labourers, country girls, it distilled ersatz gentlemen and preening madams, gentlemen of the road, women of the town.
It may have been fool’s gold but it kept tempting new arrivals to the metropolis. No one in the country could fake the estates and carriages that meant wealth. But in town, everyone could have aspirations. ‘[In London,] people … are generally honoured according to their clothes,’ affirmed the satirist Bernard Mandeville in the 1720s. ‘From the richness of them we judge their wealth … It is this which encourages every body, who is conscious of his little merit, if he is any ways able, to wear clothes above his rank.’6 Clothes were easy enough to counterfeit; manners could be learnt. The important thing in London was to put on a show. And so one o’clock on a Saturday night saw ‘would-be gentlemen, naked in back-garrets, boiling water in earthen chamberpots … to wash their sham necks, ruffled sleeves, and worn-out roll-up stockings, that they may make a genteel appearance in the public streets and walks at noon.’7 Dolled up in their new finery, shopkeepers and apprentices headed out on their day off to preen and strut along St James’s Park or the Mall. Satirists mocked the pretensions of the promenaders, spotting different kinds of gait: the ‘Ludgate Hill Hobble’, the ‘Cheapside Swing’, or the ‘City Jolt and Wriggle’. Baron Pollnitz, visiting in 1733, was shocked that ‘their Majesties … permit all persons without distinction of rank or character to walk there at the same time with them.’8 ‘The worthy gentlemen who chiefly frequent this sanctuary,’ remarked the London Spy of the strollers on Duke Humphrey’s Walk, ‘would be very angry should you refuse to honour them with the title of Captain, though they never so much as trailed a pike towards the deserving it.’9 Class in the countryside was set in stone; in London it softened and blurred. Even the all-important title of gentleman lost value. ‘In our days,’ sighed Nathaniel Bailey’s Dictionary in 1730, ‘all are accounted Gentlemen that have money.’ Seeking a husband, Moll Flanders was ‘not averse to a tradesman, but then I would have a tradesman, forsooth, that was something of a gentleman too.’ Her target was ‘this amphibious creature, this land water thing, called a gentleman-tradesman.’
There was no chance of such metamorphoses in the country. When, in Tom Jones, humble Molly Seagrim was seen in church in a cast-off lady’s gown, ‘such sneering, giggling, tittering, and laughing, ensued among the women, that Mr Allworthy was obliged to exert his authority to preserve any decency among them.’10 But London was different. In ‘large and populous cities,’ as Bernard Mandeville put it, ‘obscure men may hourly meet with fifty strangers to one acquaintance, and consequently have the pleasure of being esteemed by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be.’ London became a town of transformations, and its spas and parks, its theatres and coffee-houses, offered any number of opportunities for such alchemy to take effect. Its pleasure gardens were ‘great scenes of rendezvous, where the nobleman and his tailor, the lady of quality and her tirewoman, meet together and form one common assembly.’11 In Ranelagh, Horace Walpole reported that ‘the company is universal … from his Grace the Duke of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital – from my Lady Townshend to the kitten.’12
A city of transformations was a city of insecurities, and insecurity was reason enough for any Londoner to turn to a new drug. But gin suited the mood of early eighteenth-century London in an even closer way. It offered an instant, heady transformation of its own. For a penny a dram, the poor man could fill his head with his own dreams; the market-woman could blank out the wet corner she sat on and fancy herself well-dressed, dry, and feasting at Vauxhall pleasure gardens.
Not all of London’s transformations were illusory. There was real gold to go along with the dreams. Storms of change were not only raging across the surface; the very foundations of the city were being shaken as well.
A wave of speculative booms accompanied the Glorious Revolution. London, as Defoe put it, was gripped by a ‘projecting humour’. Dozens of new patents were registered. In the traditional view of things, wealth was supposed to be inherited or earned by honest toil. But fortunes were soon being made in the City that dwarfed the estates of country squires, and which couldn’t have been earned in a lifetime of hard work. Londoners of all ranks flocked to Exchange Alley. ‘People have been drawn in and abused,’ moaned one conservative after the crash of 1695, ‘of all qualities, gentle and simple, wise and otherwise … being allured with the hopes of gaining vast riches by this means.’13 Speculation turned the dream of social metamorphosis into a reality, and traditionalists, of course, were appalled. ‘We have seen a great part of the nation’s money,’ complained Jonathan Swift, ‘got into the hands of those, who by their birth, education and merit, could pretend no higher than to wear our liveries.’14
But the new age was making new men who had no interest in wearing livery. ‘’Tis the principle of us Modern Whigs to get what we can, no matter how,’ bragged Tom Double, Charles Davenant’s ‘got-rich-quick’ satirical monster of the 1690s. ‘Thanks to my industry I am now worth fifty thousand pound, and 14 years ago I had not shoes to my feet … I can name fifty of our friends who have got much better fortunes since the Revolution, and from as poor beginnings … I have my country-hou
se, where I keep my whore as fine as an Empress … I have my French cook and wax-candles; I drink nothing but Hermitage, Champagne and Burgundy; Cahors wine has hardly admittance to my side-board; my very footmen scorn French claret.’15
What was worse for traditionalists, the new government seemed intent on dragging England even further into the stormy seas of risk and uncertainty. Spiralling government debt was financed by City loans. The South Sea Bubble would originate in an attempt to convert £31m of public debt into South Sea stock. The government introduced public lotteries as well; a lottery office was built next to the Banqueting House, at the heart of Whitehall. A lottery win in 1712 gave £20,000 to a St Bride’s widow who previously might have reckoned herself comfortable on a couple of hundred a year.16
‘Stock-jobbing is play,’ Daniel Defoe warned. ‘A box and dice may be less dangerous, the nature of them are alike, a hazard.’ But in the decades after the Glorious Revolution, London threw itself into a new age of risk. The mathematics of risk were newly discovered, and the language of risk was everywhere – at Lloyd’s coffee-house, in the new insurance offices, even in the pulpit, where Isaac Barrow preached that through charity ‘We … lend our money to God, who repays with vast usury; an hundred to one is the rate he allows us at present, and about a hundred million to one he will render hereafter.’17