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

by Dillon, Patrick

  Gin-drinking still produced its share of tragedies. ‘At a Christening at Beddington in Surrey,’ reported the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1748, ‘the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undressed the child, instead of laying it in the cradle she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examined before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood.’

  Alcohol abuse was endemic in prisons. Middlesex magistrates in 1741 investigated the shocking rate of deaths in custody and found that some prisoners spent their whole allowance on gin. ‘There have been no less than thirty gin-shops at one time in the King’s Bench,’ a reformer reported some time later, ‘and I have been credibly informed by very attentive observers, that upwards of … 120 gallons of gin, which they call by various names, as Vinegar, Gossip, Crank, Mexico, Sky-blue etc. [were] sold weekly.’2

  Nor was it only poor men and women who drank. The bookseller James Lackington had painful memories of his alcoholic father in 1750. ‘As soon as he found he was more at ease in his circumstances,’ he remembered, ‘he contracted a fatal habit of drinking, and of course his business was neglected; so that after several fruitless attempts of my grandfather to keep him in trade, he was … reduced to his old state of a journeyman shoemaker.’3 Even forty years later Lackington couldn’t hide his bitterness. ‘To our mother we are indebted for everything,’ he wrote. ‘Neither myself, my brother or sisters are indebted to a father scarcely for anything that can endear his memory, or cause us to reflect on him with pleasure.’

  It was still quite normal to drink at work. ‘Twenty years ago,’ Francis Place would recall, ‘few tailor shops were without a bottle of gin: the men drank as they liked: one kept the score, and the publican came at certain times to replenish the gin bottle.’4 And in the terrible conditions of the slums, gin was the only comforter. Holborn and St Giles’s were still a world of migrant labourers, of the destitute and hopeless and sick. Holborn’s High Constable described the filthy dosshouses of St Giles’s, ‘set apart for the reception of idle persons and vagabonds, who have their lodgings there for twopence a night … In these beds, several of which are in the same room, men and women, often strangers to each other, lie promiscuously; the price of a double bed being no more than threepence, as an encouragement to them to lie together; but as these places are thus adapted to whoredom, so they are no less provided for drunkenness, gin being sold in them all at a penny a quartern.’5

  This was where Madam Geneva had put down her deepest roots, in the tangled alleys off Holborn, in digs behind Smithfield market. It was the London which most Londoners avoided, the other side of the coin, the underworld hidden away behind the grand squares and glittering shop-fronts.

  But in 1751, at the height of the crime panic, this world would be opened to the shocked gaze of Londoners by a new witness. He described an afternoon in Shoreditch where the constables raided two small houses and counted seventy people living in them. When the houses’ inmates were told to turn out their pockets, they were found to have less than a shilling between them. He described a world where normal life seemed to have been suspended, where people lived in ‘excessive misery … oppressed with want, and sunk in every species of debauchery.’

  The writer was the new senior magistrate in Westminster. His name was Henry Fielding.

  Back in 1736, Henry Fielding had lampooned prohibition in shows at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. But the Stage Licensing Act had followed a year later, and that had been the end of his career as a playwright. Fielding never saved a penny from hits like Pasquin. By the late 1740s he was broke and ill, disappointed, nearing the end of his life. He had had a success with his novel Joseph Andrews, but the legal career he had resumed when the theatres closed down had never prospered. He was always in debt. In 1744 his adored wife, Charlotte, had died. Only old friends had pulled him through. At the Bedford Arms, just round the corner from Bow Street, he ran a card game with William Hogarth and his blind half-brother, John. In that company, Fielding could still be ‘a very merry fellow indeed,’6 the landlord remembered. But his health was failing. He was paying the price for a youth spent in the coffee-houses and theatres, too much drink and too much good food. ‘Fielding continues to be visited for his sins,’ reported the young poet Edward More after a visit in late 1749, ‘so as to be wheeled about from room to room … His disorder is the gout and intemperance the cause.’ Another visitor found him ‘a poor, emaciated, wornout rake.’7

  His friends came to the rescue. Henry Fielding had always been feared as a political writer and he had been a good servant to the opposition (there had been only one major falling-out, in 1741). When Carteret fell, in 1744, Fielding’s friends and patrons, Lyttelton and Bedford, came into the government; the next year he established his loyalty with searing attacks on the Jacobite rebellion in The True Patriot and The Jacobite’s Journal. In 1748 he finally received his reward. He was made a magistrate in Westminster.

  It was Thomas De Veil’s old role as ‘court justice’. In 1740 De Veil had moved to a house on the west side of Bow Street. Another magistrate, Thomas Burdus, had moved in after De Veil’s death in 1746, but two years later it was empty again. To the town, the sight of Henry Fielding installed as principal Westminster magistrate was the best joke of the year. It was hard to say which was better value: the clown of the Little Theatre transformed into pillar of the establishment, the scourge of ministerial corruption working as a trading justice, or the chair-bound old rake sorting out the vices of the town. The comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote, then doing shows at the Little Theatre, cast Fielding, forever unkempt, as ‘a dirty fellow, in shabby black cloths, a flux’d tye-wig, and a quid of tobacco in his jaws.’8 A satirical puppet show in Panton Street sent him up mercilessly. ‘A heavier load of scandal hath been cast upon me,’ Fielding sighed, ‘than I believe ever fell to the share of any single man.’ To the heartless wits of London, there was poetic justice in that. In his days as a hilarious young man about town, Henry Fielding had never pulled a punch on anyone.

  Quite apart from all the ribbing he had to put up with, being a Westminster magistrate was no easier now than it had been in Thomas De Veil’s day, particularly for a sick man in a wheelchair, particularly during a crime wave. ‘I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment,’ wrote Fielding’s cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘to be one of the staff officers that conduct nocturnal weddings.’9 James Boswell would visit the Bow Street courtroom a decade later and find it crowded with ‘whores and chairmen, and greasy blackguards of all denominations.’10 There was never any let-up in the work. ‘Upwards of fifty criminals were committed last week to prison by Justice Fielding,’ reported the Whitehall Evening Post in January 1751, ‘many of whom were for capital offences, and seven for street-robberies.’11 Fielding’s life would be threatened in January 1753 by a gang he had broken up. And all day long he was surrounded by the outcasts of the slums and the dregs of Newgate. In April 1750, defendants who had been held in the squalid prison brought ‘jail fever’ – typhus – to the courtroom at the City Quarter Sessions. The Lord Mayor would die, along with two judges, an alderman, and a number of court officials and lawyers. That was why most gentlemen refused to serve on the London bench.

  But Henry Fielding’s finances were in dire need of repair. The Duke of Bedford told him ‘that he could not say that acting as a principal justice of the peace in Westminster was on all accounts very desirable, but all the world knew it was a very lucrative office.’12 Lucrative for some; Henry Fielding couldn’t even bring himself to profit out of the post. After leaving England for the last time, he wrote that ‘by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about £500 a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than £300; a considerable proportion of which remained with my clerk.’13

  And his timing couldn’t have been worse. Henry Fiel
ding took his oaths as a Westminster magistrate in October 1748, and in May 1749 he was elected Chair of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. The soldiers were coming home. The crime wave was just gathering pace.

  By 1750 it was in full flood; God was sending monthly earthquakes; the town was in panic. Henry Fielding wasn’t only court justice by then; he was a celebrated novelist – Tom Jones had been published in winter 1749. It was hardly surprising that, maybe prompted by friends in the ministry, he should pick up his pen to address the troubles overwhelming London. His new tract, published in January 1751, was dedicated to the Lord Chancellor, and he called it An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. From his vantage-point in Bow Street, Henry Fielding knew more about crime than most of the armchair pamphleteers who pontificated about law and order that year. He looked at crime and he looked at the causes of crime. His tract ranged widely over the Poor Laws, pardons, executions and every aspect of the criminal justice system.

  And among the causes of the crime wave, Henry Fielding found one that deserved special attention. A whole section of the pamphlet was dedicated to drunkenness.

  He didn’t just mean booze in general. ‘The drunkenness I here intend,’ he wrote, ‘is that acquired by the strongest intoxicating liquors, and particularly by that poison called gin.’ Henry Fielding saw them dragged into his courtroom at Bow Street: brawlers picked up in doorways and down-and-outs who could hardly walk, prostitutes slurring insults at the bench. ‘Wretches are often brought before me,’ he related, ‘charged with theft and robbery, whom I am forced to confine before they are in a condition to be examined; and when they have afterwards become sober, I have plainly perceived … that the Gin alone was the cause of the transgression.’

  Gin, Henry Fielding had ‘great reason to think,’ was ‘the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis. Many of these wretches there are who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours: the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too.’ Gin corroded all the bonds of normal life; it destroyed families; it ate into society. And Henry Fielding’s vision of the future could hardly have been more stark. ‘Should the drinking of this poison be continued in its present height during the next twenty years,’ he warned, ‘there will be by that time few of the common people left to drink it.’

  Maybe Henry Fielding was breaking new ground in uncovering for Londoners the darker side of their town. But when it came to solutions, he fell back on all the old clichés of reform. Luxury was the root of all evil; the poor turned to gambling and drink because they were too well-off. Fielding targeted masquerades and gaming-houses, social climbing, conspicuous consumption. The former playwright even attacked the vice of theatres. His fears were the fears of Sir John Gonson. ‘What must become of the infant who is conceived in Gin,’ he asked, ‘with the poisonous distillations of which it is nourished both in the womb and at the breast? Are these wretched infants … to become our future sailors, and our future grenadiers? … Doth not this polluted source, instead of producing servants for the husbandman or artificer, instead of providing recruits for the sea or the field, promise only to fill almshouses and hospitals, and to infect the streets with stench and diseases?’ The rich were let off the hook (‘I am not here to satirise the great, among who luxury is probably rather a moral than a political evil’). And when it came to solutions for the gin problem, there would be neither compromise nor pragmatism. Henry Fielding stood four-square with the zealots. Calling for a return to prohibition, he recommended Thomas Wilson’s tract from 1736. ‘Nor will anything less than absolute deletion serve on the present occasion,’ he insisted. ‘It is not making men pay £50 or £500 for a licence to poison; nor enlarging the quantity from two gallons to ten, which will extirpate so stubborn an evil.’

  There were good reasons why Henry Fielding should take a hard line on gin and crime. It wasn’t just the horrors he lived with as a magistrate. He was keeping hardline company as well. In 1744, the year after repeal of the Gin Act, Henry Fielding had moved into Old Boswell Court, where his neighbour was Thomas Lane, member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and author of the Middlesex magistrates’ report of 1736. Lane was now Chair of Middlesex Sessions. When Henry Fielding became Chair in Westminster, in 1749, the two men had every opportunity to discuss the scourge of the London slums.

  It might have been through his neighbour that Henry Fielding met another old enemy of Madam Geneva. On 13 December 1750, he had dinner with Thomas Wilson.

  In his diary, Thomas Wilson recorded that the two men ‘talked over the affair of vice and immorality.’ The ‘3 great sources of our present enormities about this city,’ they decided, were ‘Gin, gaming and the infinite number of places of diversion which ruin the Middling Tradesman.’ They talked over the problems of dealing with Madam Geneva. ‘As for gin,’ Thomas Wilson noted, ‘the government will never, ’tis feared, prohibit it in earnest while it brings in so prodigious a revenue, upwards of £200,000 a year.’ What they had to do was to link gin with the other problems of the time. And that was where the Inquiry came in. Fielding, Wilson noted excitedly, ‘thinks he has brought [it] into a system, and when it is called for by our Great Men will be ready for them. In the meantime he will publish a little pamphlet to introduce it.’

  The zealots were back in action again, and prohibition was back on the agenda. With Thomas Wilson taking an interest, the campaign would be as skilfully co-ordinated as ever. After that evening with Henry Fielding, Wilson ‘wrote an account of the conversation to the Bishop of Worcester … who is going to print his excellent … sermon preached last year at St Bride’s with an appendix relating to Gin etc.’ (‘Dr Hales,’ he added, ‘Myself, and Mr Tucker of Bristol to be assisting in this.’) The Bishop of Worcester was Isaac Maddox, a member of the SPCK since 1736. It was Isaac Maddox who had reignited the gin campaign the year before with an Easter Day sermon in which he unburdened himself of all the frustration and anger he had felt since the afternoon in 1743 when he sat in the House of Lords and watched the ministry sign its pact with the devil. For Isaac Maddox, pragmatism had always been a betrayal of principle. ‘To say, “What can be done? Alas, the people will have this liquid poison,”’ he proclaimed in his sermon, ‘is one of the most dreadful and most fatal declarations that can possibly be made … It is contrary to the fundamental principles upon which communities subsist.’14

  Thomas Wilson had been in the congregation that day and thought it ‘an admirable sermon.’15 Just a fortnight after Fielding’s Inquiry came out, its text was published as The Expediency of Preventative Wisdom, with a dedication in the form of a letter about spirits to the Lord Mayor. It was even arranged that a copy should be sent to every member of the Court of Common Council.16 The strategy was to tie gin-drinking in with the crime wave. ‘I appeal … to your Lordship,’ Isaac Maddox wrote, ‘whether by far the greatest part of all the atrocious crimes that come in judgement before you … be not committed by persons … enraged by these inflammatory spirits; whether the criminals themselves … do not bear in their countenance, and their whole manner and appearance, the plainest and most shocking proofs that their blood is enflamed by the habitual drinking of gin.’

  To push the new campaign against gin still further, those twisted countenances were about to be brought vividly to life before the eyes of Londoners. Henry Fielding was a close friend of William Hogarth, and just a month after his own Inquiry was published, Hogarth joined the attack on gin. His contribution took the form of a pair of satirical prints. The first was called Beer Street, the second, Gin Lane.

  Gin Lane was set in the heart of St Giles’s. In the background was the spire of St George’s, Bloomsbury. Hawksmoor’s church may have symbolised London’s elegance, but in its shadow was an urban hell. ‘Nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin are to be seen,’ Hogarth recorded in his Autobiographical Notes. ‘Distress even to madness and death,
and not a house in tolerable condition but pawnbrokers and the gin-shop.’ Behind the woman slumped on the steps, drunkards brawled and ruined buildings decayed; children made themselves senseless with the ubiquitous drug. Above a cellar door was engraved the familiar sign, ‘Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for twopence, Clean straw for nothing.’ Housewives pawned their cooking pots for gin; workmen handed over the tools of their trade. A man gnawed on one end of a bone and a dog on the other. A cook carried a baby impaled on a stick. High up in a ruined house, a bankrupt hanged himself from a beam. Outside the shop of Kilman, the distiller, a mother tipped gin down her baby’s throat. The only prosperous house in the alley belonged to the undertaker.

  It wasn’t High Art, and it wasn’t photo-journalism. Gin Lane and its companion were polemic. Together they were a tract in pictures instead of words. ‘Neither great correctness of drawing or fine engraving were at all necessary,’ Hogarth wrote, ‘but on the contrary would set the price of them out of the reach of those for whom they were chiefly intended.’17 Hogarth had always had an interest in reform. Back in 1729 he had drawn James Oglethorpe’s Prisons Committee investigating the horrors of the Fleet. There was a special interest there; Hogarth’s own father had been in a debtors’ prison. And he might have carried a personal grudge against Madam Geneva as well. His mother had died ‘of a fright’ in June 1735 after a fire started in a brandy-shop in Cecil Court.18

  The point of Gin Lane wasn’t just to shock. Like Henry Fielding in his Inquiry, like the reformers of the 1730s, Hogarth was attacking all the evils of the age. In his composition, he drew St George’s church spire lowest in a trinity of symbols. Above it came the crown, represented by the statue of George I, and highest of all a pawnbroker’s sign. In the new world of early eighteenth-century London, all proper values had been inverted. Religion was debased below the power of the court. Money – in the form of credit – ruled over everything. When he turned to Beer Street, the proper order of things was restored. In Beer Street, the crucifix on a church spire rose above a decorous royal standard flying for the King’s birthday. Far, far below came a drooping pawnbroker’s sign. In Beer Street, things were as they should be. ‘Beer Street,’ as Hogarth recalled, ‘was given as a contrast, w[h]ere the invigorating liquor is recommend[ed] in order [to] drive the other out of vogue. Here all is joyous and thriving[.] Industry and jollity go hand in hand[;] the pawnbroker in this happy place is the only house going to ruin.’19 Buildings were going up, not down. A healthy blacksmith brandished a leg of lamb (in the first version, it had been a terrified Frenchman). In Beer Street, as William Hogarth drew it, the only thin man was the artist.