Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  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.’7

  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.’8 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.’9 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.’10 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.’11

  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,’12 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.’13

  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.’14 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.’15 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.’16

  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?’17 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.’18 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,’19 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!’20 (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,

  ’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 notoriou
s 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,