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

by Dillon, Patrick

  For some, it was no longer good enough simply to rail against the times, as reactionaries had been doing ever since the Glorious Revolution, to talk wistfully about a golden past and demand the eradication of vice. It was no longer enough to lambast gin-drinkers, prostitutes and the idle poor, to string up petty criminals, and drag blasphemers off to court.

  In many areas of social concern, writers were starting to look for causes behind vice and immorality. When it examined prostitution in March 1751, The Rambler had no doubt ‘that numbers [of women] follow this dreadful course of life with shame, horror and regret.’ Prostitutes had always been the villains of London’s streets; now they were being turned into victims. ‘Where can they hope for refuge?’ the paper went on. ‘The bully and the bawd … fatten on their misery, and threaten them with want or a gaol, if they shew the least design of escaping.’34 Back in 1736 the Daily Post had attacked brutal conditions in the army, declaring that ‘if [soldiers] were treated in other respects with civility and humanity, the opportunities of being vicious would not only be taken from them, but they would insensibly grow ashamed of their vices, and endeavour to behave themselves.’35 The ‘spirit of humanity’ would be celebrated by the reformer John Brown in the mid-1750s. Even the traditional dependence on the noose to enforce law and order was starting to be questioned. ‘It is surely a vain attempt to put a stop to such crimes by the halter,’ the London Evening Post argued in June 1751. ‘If we would really prevent such intolerable disorders, we should, like skilful physicians, remove the cause of them, and not vainly fight against the effects.’36

  There was plenty of this new humanity in Henry Fielding’s novels, but in his Inquiry he seemed to have gone back to an older, harsher vision of the age. Dr Johnson, for one, attacked the Inquiry’s prescriptions for law and order, complaining that ‘all seem to think that … we can only be rescued from the talons of robbery by inflexible rigour, and sanguinary justice.’37 A writer who hadn’t forgotten prohibition criticised Fielding’s divisive focus on vice among the poor in the March London Magazine, querying whether ‘there is any pleasure, or any vice, in which the great are allowed to indulge themselves, that can effectually by law be denied to the little.’ When it came to gin, some writers, at least, were starting to go beyond shock and horror and wonder why people abused alcohol in the first place. ‘Poverty may not only be the effect, but the cause of dram-drinking,’ one suggested, ‘wherefore it is to be wished, that any attempt to prevent the latter, will be accompanied with a relief to the former.’38

  To commentators like that, the absolutist position adopted by Henry Fielding and the zealots looked more like a throwback to the Societies for Reformation of Manners than a practical solution to the problem. Prohibition, after all, had been tried once and it had failed disastrously. The pragmatic policy started in 1743, by contrast, had had visible results.

  There had been changes in Parliament’s attitude to prescriptive legislation as well. It had been a scarring experience to watch the Gin Act being ignored. To many, 1738 was a lesson that parliaments could not simply dictate popular behaviour and expect to be obeyed. ‘The good of the people,’ the Gloucester Journal had argued as prohibition fizzled out in 1738, ‘is the great end for which all government is established … When [government] discovers a riotous spirit in the people, it must not trust in … stifling the discontents of the subjects by a military force … The wisdom and goodness of a government ought to shew themselves, by looking … into the real causes of a riot, and using all possible means to redress all true grievances of the people.’39

  That kind of thinking, well mixed with cynicism and greed for revenue, had underpinned the Gin Act of 1743. The Act had been realistic about Parliament’s powers; it had accepted that the poor would go on drinking gin for as long as gin offered them any comfort. It had been a compromise. Henry Pelham’s aim, in the month after the Prince of Wales’s death, was to return to that compromise.

  There was plenty of lobbying going on as well. This time it wasn’t coming from the Company of Distillers. The clique who ran the Company were beyond effective action. A Quarterly Assembly in 1748 had been cancelled because members ‘thro’ age, infirmity or otherwise do seldom attend.’ When they tried to put together a lobbying committee in 1751, those ‘who were [nominated] to be of the … Committee declaring their unwillingness to attend … the Court did not think fit to … proceed any further thereon.’40 Among the malt distillers, though, there was no such defeatism. In mid-March they were reported to be hampering City magistrates’ attempt at a clamp-down on gin-shops. They worked hard behind the scenes. The line they pushed throughout 1751 was that the renewed prohibition campaign was a political ambush dreamed up by the opposition ‘calculated rather to serve the purposes of a party … determined to distress the administration, than that any material benefits were expected from it.’41

  With the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the opposition had lost their figurehead and raison d’être. Whether that was the cause, or whether it was the malt distillers’ string-pulling, Henry Pelham’s need for revenue or Parliament’s sobering memories of prohibition, the Gin Bill which the Prime Minister himself laid before the House on 23 April looked very different from the one Thomas Potter had first proposed. There was no sign of any two shilling-a-gallon duty. The spirit duty would now go up by a modest fourpence halfpenny, to one shilling a gallon. There would be limited increases in duties on low wines, but it was a long way from a ban on gin. The proposals, as even Horace Walpole commented, were ‘slight ones indeed for so enormous an evil!’42 They fell far short of what Henry Fielding and Isaac Maddox had called for. There would be no return to prohibition.

  The 1751 Gin Act was a defeat for the zealots, and a victory for the pragmatic policy of 1743. Seven years before, as the Westminster Journal recalled in summer 1751, the 1743 Act ‘was asserted … to be [a] first necessary tax, which, tho’ it might produce no great effects in itself, would at least make way for a second, that would be more sensibly felt; till, at length, these fatal spirits should be raised to a price at which few would be able, and none willing, to purchase them.’43 Events had borne the policy out. The black market had gone. Nearly 30,000 retail licences were now being taken out every year. With its modest increase in duties, following the course set out in 1743, the 1751 Gin Act represented the triumph of realism over principle, restriction over prohibition.

  The 1751 Act was realistic in more than its modest duties. Maybe the work of the reform committee was spilling over into the way Parliament looked at all its legislation. The 1751 Gin Act showed a new concern with detail, a new professionalism. The committee charged with drafting the Act took a month over it, and their time was well spent. There was proper consultation, for a start. Within a week of starting work, they sent a draft to the Commissioners of Excise for their comment, and asked to see a draft of the Commissioners’ own suggestions. One measure was obvious enough. The 1747 Act which had allowed distillers to sell spirits would be repealed. There would be a push to squeeze small traders out of the industry. The retail licence would be doubled to £2. Licences would be available only to inns, alehouses and taverns – and only to such of those as were prosperous and well-established. Grocers and chandlers’ shops were specifically excluded. Penalties for unlicensed gin-sellers would go up.

  For the first time, legislators were getting to grips with the whole supply-chain for gin. It had long been complained that gin-sellers sold spirits on credit, allowing workers to run up huge tabs by the end of each week. Under the new Act, spirit-sellers would no longer be able to go to court to recover small debts for spirit sales. Any dealer who sold gin up to the value of a pound did so at his own risk. From now on, unlicensed retailers would themselves be able to inform on the distillers who supplied them. They wouldn’t only be able to claim their reward; they would be given immunity from prosecution as well. It would be a foolhardy distiller who sold gin to an unlicensed shop, when the gin-seller had only to hand in his
name to avoid prosecution, make £5 and walk away scot-free. Spirits would be banned from gaols. Payments to informers would be speeded up. There were detailed provisions to reduce licensing fraud and fraud by distillers.

  The new duties in the 1751 Gin Act were small enough. But its effects, and its significance, would go much further than those modest duties implied. For the first time legislators had actually made an effort to understand how the gin industry worked.

  By the time the new Gin Act received royal assent, on 25 June, a clamp-down on gin-shops was already under way. At the beginning of March, the Whitehall Evening Post reported that ‘upwards of 50 licensed distillers were convicted before the Commissioners of Excise, for suffering tippling in their shops, and fined in the penalty of £10 each.’44 Another forty would be convicted in April, and there would be even bigger sweeps in May and June. Middlesex magistrates joined the clamp-down as well, with a move against unlicensed dealers in Bagnell’s Marsh and other slum areas.

  And when the new régime came in on 1 July, it was strictly enforced. Middlesex magistrates got wind that dram-shops were trying to reclassify themselves as alehouses so as to make themselves eligible for spirits licences. In response, Quarter Sessions recommended JPs ‘not to licence any house which hath not been heretofore a publick house, has not been so within the space of three years last past, or which hath been converted into a private house since the same was a publick one.’ In some Westminster parishes, anyone who applied for a licence was required to ‘bring four substantial housekeepers to vouch for his honesty and sobriety.’ At a City of London licensing sessions, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that ‘only 27 licences, viz. 25 for former victualling houses and two for new coffee-houses, were granted.’45 Forty alehouses were suppressed in St James’s, Westminster in late September, and another forty in Tower Hamlets a month later.

  The clamp-down certainly gave the impression of a government getting to grips with gin. For some gin-drinkers, it was all too much. ‘A few days since,’ reported the London Morning Penny Post on 29 July, ‘a poor man who lives in Long Ditch, Westminster, having got together near two bottles of gin to serve him when the Act took place, laid a wager with a neighbour that he and his wife could between them drink it off, fasting; which they accordingly did … and both continued well for some hours, but the next morning were both found dead in their bed.’ There was a certain amount of griping about Excise. One 1752 print showed Excise men staving in the casks of an unlicensed gin-seller. ‘If this be Angleterre,’ commented a bystander, ‘me go to France.’

  No one, though, could carp at the Act’s results. In 1751, just over seven million gallons of English spirits paid duty. The figure hadn’t changed substantially since 1744. In 1752, the quantity of spirits produced dropped below four and a half million gallons for the first time in twenty years. There had been no change in corn prices, no new war, no other obvious influence coming into play. Spirit production would remain more or less steady for the next six years.

  If the tide had turned in 1743, then the Gin Act of 1751 saw gin visibly ebbing out of London. Even reformers could see the achievement in that. Whatever they had called for at the time, they were quick to claim the 1751 Gin Act as their own. In his Inquiry, Henry Fielding had ruled out anything ‘less than absolute deletion’ of the spirits industry. But in the pages of the Covent Garden Journal, a year on, he would assign credit to Isaac Maddox for the success of a law, ‘which, if it hath not abolished, hath very considerably lessened the pernicious practice of gin-drinking.’46 Six years later, the reformer George Burrington would report that ‘the lower people in late years have not drunk spirituous liquors so freely, as they did before the good regulations … settled by Parliament … We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the streets.’47 Credit was widely given to the new Gin Act. ‘The custom,’ Jonas Hanway would recall at the end of the decade, ‘of the common people’s drinking great quantities of a most inflammatory and poisonous liquor, certainly created an incredible devastation amongst the children of the poor, till the hand of providence interposed, by the instrumentality of His Majesty’s ministers, to arrest the dreadful progress of it.’48

  But if Madam Geneva had lost her power over Londoners, it wasn’t all down to His Majesty’s ministers. The times were changing as well. She had made her home in a chaotic city of gamblers and speculators, a city of danger and opportunity, a city of risk. By the mid-point of the century, London could seem a very different place. ‘The people themselves,’ as Jonas Hanway put it, ‘seem at length to have discovered, that health and pleasure, food and raiment, are better than sickness and pain, want and wretchedness.’49 The decades since the Glorious Revolution had been a gin-fuelled adventure, a rollercoaster ride. For many, by 1751, it was time to get off.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE MIDDLE CLASSES

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, spirits weren’t the only kind of transformation on offer in London. Those who wanted it could try out a drug far more potent even than gin.

  It all started in May 1738, just after the acquittal of Roger Allen, the Thrift Street rioter. On Wednesday 24 May, a young cleric was attending a religious meeting in Aldersgate Street. Listening to Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, at ‘about a quarter before nine’ in the evening, he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed.’ That was all there was to it; in his diary he sounded a bit disappointed there were no angels or trumpets. But 24 May 1738 was the transfiguring day of John Wesley’s life.

  Everyone had to hear the good news. In London that autumn Wesley threw himself into his new ministry. He preached in prisons and workhouses. He rode the cart to Tyburn with the condemned. Even that wasn’t enough. On 2 April 1739 ‘at four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking … to about three thousand people.’ Wesley’s fellow ‘enthusiast’, George Whitefield, followed his lead the same month. On 29 April Whitefield preached to 20,000 (by his own estimate) on Kennington Common. Thousands more flocked to hear Wesley at Blackheath and Kennington. On 6 May, at one of Whitefield’s meetings, ‘some supposed there were above 30 or 40,000 people, and near fourscore coaches … and there was … an awful silence among them.’

  The evangelists didn’t silence their congregations with dry commentaries on church matters. Theirs was faith distilled into its purest spirit, a heady draught which intoxicated the crowds. Garrick said he would give £1,000 to be able to utter ‘Oh!’ like Mr Wesley. Of William Romaine, another charismatic who began his ministry in 1738, it was said that visitors came to London ‘to see Garrick act and Romaine preach.’1 And the message was as intoxicating as the delivery. Religion was a transfiguring experience. There was more to it than dutiful church attendance. It could alter your whole life.

  The establishment hated it, of course. Transformations were exactly what they wanted to avoid. ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth,’ the Duchess of Buckingham exclaimed. ‘This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’2

  The establishment was missing the point. Methodism and Madam Geneva may have seemed equally addictive, equally intoxicating, and equally dangerous in their effect on the people (‘Piety as well as gin helps to fill up their leisure moments,’ was one dismissive verdict).3 But religious zealots had one big advantage over gin-drinkers. They may have been insufferable, but they didn’t dodge work, abandon their families or pass out on the pavement. In turning from bottle to Bible, people were taking a step towards responsibility. For some, at least – the thousands who craned on tiptoe and shushed their neighbours to hear John Wesley preach – conspicuous consumption, drink, gambling and whores were out. A more sober future beckoned.

  Religion was only part of it. Sometime in the 1740s, the middle classes came out of their shell. They had always existed, of course, although no one knew quite what to call the th
ird of Londoners who earned something between £50 and £400 a year. There had always been attorneys and wealthy shopkeepers, curates and apothecaries. But the eighteenth-century town opened up a whole range of new opportunities for them. It offered new ways to use what wealth and leisure time they had, new ways to express themselves. By 1750, Londoners could find better places to spend their money than the dram-shop or gambling-table. ‘Every clerk, apprentice, and … waiter,’ Smollett exaggerated, ‘maintains a gelding by himself, or in partnership.’4 They could spend money on their homes. ‘What is an article of necessity in England,’ Grosley noticed on his visit, ‘is mere extravagance in France. The houses in London are all wainscotted with deal; the stairs and the floors are composed of the same materials.’5 An English commentator reckoned that ‘peasants and mechanics … freeholders, tradesmen and manufacturers in middling life, wholesale dealers, [and] merchants … have better conveniences in their houses and … more in quantity of clean, neat furniture, and a greater variety [of] carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc., (things hardly known abroad among persons of such rank) than are to be found in any country of Europe.’6

  The middling tradesman saving up for new carpets and curtains was not going to spend his time crashed out at the local dram-shop. From his comfortably furnished home, perhaps in one of the new terraces springing up all over London, he set out to explore a more orderly way of life. One writer in 1752 took the measure of London on a hot June Sunday. He noticed the gin-drinkers, of course, but other Londoners now caught his eye as well. He saw ‘citizens who have pieces of gardens in the adjacent villages, walking to them with their wives and children, in order to drink tea … after which they load themselves with … roots, salads and other vegetables to bring home to supper.’ Old women fed the ducks in St James’s Park; children thronged the railings in the middle of London Bridge. In the summer sunshine, anyone with a flat roof, ‘especially such as have prospects of the river Thames,’ could be seen ‘taking the advantage of the fineness of the weather, and drinking tea, beer, punch, and smoking tobacco there, till the dusk of the evening.’ On Westminster Bridge he saw ‘hundreds of people, mostly women and children, walking backward and forward … looking at the boats going up and down the river; and sitting on the resting benches to pick up new acquaintance.’7