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

by Dillon, Patrick

  Indoors, the middle classes hurried to dinner parties, boring each other with ‘a great deal of insignificant discourse among people who are strangers to each other, and have met casually at some friend’s house to dinner, about the fineness or dullness of the weather, beauty of their children, goodness of their husbands, and badness of their several trades and callings.’

  The anonymity of the town had been one of its dangers. Now it was being softened by clubs. ‘Bodies of men (known by the name of rural societies)’ were seen on that June Sunday, ‘straggling about the fields, cracking merry jokes, making ludicrous remarks on the places they go to, and settling where to dine, and what to spend at dinner.’ There were picnics on the river, ‘young people … taking spells of the oar to relieve each other, while they refresh themselves with the tongue, ham, bread, butter, wine and punch which they took on board.’ There was sport. The bloodthirsty spectacles of combat and animal-baiting at Clerkenwell were giving way to organised games. The ‘healthful and manly exercise of rowing on the river Thames’ was certainly a change from the brandy-shop. Saussure remarked, in 1728, that ‘the English are very fond of a game they call cricket.’ (‘For this purpose,’ he explained, ‘they go into a large open field, and knock a small ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe this game to you; it is too complicated … Sometimes one county plays against another county.’)8* By the mid-1730s cricket matches were being publicised and the press reported them enthusiastically. On 20 September 1736 the papers announced ‘on Kennington Common, the greatest match at cricket, that has been known for many years, between the gentlemen of Kent and those of Surrey.’ Surrey won by two wickets. Formal rules of cricket arrived in 1744. There were new rules for boxing as well; thuggery was being transformed into noble science. The champion of England, Jack Broughton, opened a boxing academy in the Haymarket in 1743, offering ‘muffles … that will effectively secure [participants] from the inconveniency of black eyes, broken jaws, and bloody noses.’

  Suddenly, there was more for middle-class townsfolk to do in their leisure hours than strut along the Strand, aping the languid habits of their superiors. At work, meanwhile, even the hazards of business were starting to be tamed. A 1739 commentator remarked on the ‘box and tradesmen’s clubs which … meet at taverns, inns, coffee and alehouses … whereby … a good correspondence [is] cultivated, for the mutual improvement of their respective business.’9 Being middle class became something to be celebrated for its security, its freedom from ups and downs. ‘The calamities of life,’ Robinson Crusoe’s father advised him, ‘were always shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but … the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes … The middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of virtues and all kinds of enjoyments … Peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune … Temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; [and] this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it.’10 In a life of temperance, moderation, quietness and health, there was no room for Madam Geneva.

  The middle classes were starting to become conscious of their own virtues. There was a growing self-help literature to guide them through their new world. Their dinner parties might be planned from Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, or The Family Magazine, Containing Useful Directions in All the Branches of House-keeping and Cookery, which appeared from 1741. They no longer had to keep referring to those above or below them to define who they were. A new kind of sentimental patriotism emerged around the middle of the century as well. Its appeal was no longer just to duty, but to something emotional, a sense of belonging. Britain was a club which anyone could join, and tub-thumping songs were composed to celebrate membership. Thomas Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’ would be written in 1740; ‘God Save the King’ would become a popular anthem at the time of the 1745 rebellion. In John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners of the Times, written in 1757, he would see Britain’s strength as based not only on ‘the national capacity’ and ‘the national spirit of defence’, but on ‘the national spirit of union.’

  He saw other new developments as well. One was ‘the spirit of humanity.’ There was a new mood in the air. In February 1751, Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty appeared alongside Gin Lane and Beer Street. Concern for the humane treatment of animals was already becoming more widespread. The Eton tradition of ‘hunting the ram’ (not just hunting it; clubbing it to death) was banned in 1747. Nor was it only animals that were being seen in a new sentimental light; attitudes to children were changing as well. Children’s books started to appear. John Newbury’s Pretty Little Pocket Book would be a runaway success in 1742, and many others would follow. Writers cast a sentimental eye on children. One, walking round London at dusk, noticed – as if they had never been there before – children sitting ‘in back-alleys and narrow passages, very busy at their several doors, shelling peas and beans for supper, and making boats, as they call them, with bean shells and deal matches.’11 Tom Jones’ landlady described a little girl nursing her mother: ‘Molly … is but thirteen years old, and yet, in my life, I never saw a better nurse … what is wonderful in a creature so young, she shows all the cheerfulness in the world to her mother; and yet I saw her – I saw the poor child … turn about, and privately wipe the tears from her eyes.’12

  Sentiment had arrived. In literature, Swift and Pope had both died during the 1740s, and with them had passed away the harsh wit and vitriol of the Augustan coffee-house. Biting verse satire was replaced by sentimental prose. Middle-class readers of the 1740s sobbed for Pamela and wept buckets over Clarissa. Even sensible Sophia Western, in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, couldn’t resist a good novel. ‘“There appears to me a great deal of human nature in it,”’ she protested when her aunt caught her reading David Simple, ‘“and in many parts, so much true tenderness and delicacy, that it hath cost me many a tear.” “Ay, and do you love to cry then?” says the aunt. “I love a tender sensation,” answered the niece, “and would pay the price of a tear for it any time.”’13

  The world of Moll Flanders – the world of Jonathan Wild and the South Sea Bubble, Madam Geneva’s world – suddenly seemed very far away. The party, or nightmare, of the Age of Risk was coming to an end. If anyone still needed intoxication, they were as likely to turn to John Wesley’s new religion as to fall into the arms of Madam Geneva. The Gin Craze had been born from an age of highs and lows, opportunities and risks. It reflected the euphoria of boom, the despair of bust. By the middle of the century, though, the middle classes were promoting new virtues of stability and responsibility.

  It was only a matter of time before such habits, such fashions in behaviour, should spread further across society. Reformers soon spotted that the key to changing manners wasn’t dragging the cursing poor off to prison; it was persuading them to be more middle class. ‘Household economy,’ one complained, ‘has not the least appearance among these wretched people. Mutual affection and tenderness between husband and wife, the chief comfort and happiness of a family, is turned into brawls, strife, perpetual wranglings and everlasting jars. Parental love for their natural offspring is converted into a cruel neglect and careless disregard.’14 Good housekeeping, marriage and the family, love for children: these were all middle-class virtues, and that was where the future lay. The same writer thought that the poor were not so far gone in vice, ‘but that they may be reclaim’d … if the better sort of people … will but every man begin the work … The generality, the vulgar … will soon follow their example.’15

  Signs of change were noted approvingly. The tireless chronicler who wandered round London on a June weekend in 1752 noticed ‘careful old mothers of families, whose pangs and infirmities prevent their taking natural rest, lying in bed, considering how their circumstances are, and what method is best to take for the future
… Wives and servant-girls … who live in courts and alleys, where one cock supplies the whole neighbourhood with water, taking the advantage before other people are up, to fill their tubs and pans, with a sufficiency to serve them the ensuing seven days … Poor people that lodge in low-rented houses, going to each other, and after paying their awkward compliments, borrowing saucepans and stewpans, for the dressing peas, beans, bacon and mackerel for dinner.’ One of Walpole’s agents told him, in 1736, that ‘most of the common people of what rank or denomination soever … are linked together in clubs for the mutual subsistence and support of one another.’16 Though ‘the rabble, or those who compose the mob,’ were ‘still very insolent and abusive’, thought A Brief Description of London in 1776, they were ‘much mended in this respect within the last fifty years.’17 Its author even credited them with ‘good nature and humour.’ Baretti, writing in August 1760, found that ‘in the space of ten years, I have observed that the English populace have considerably mended their manners [in their attitude to strangers] and am persuaded that in about twenty years more they will become quite as civil … as the French and Italians.’18

  There were sticks as well as carrots to the change in London manners. Most important was the economy. Living standards had been high all through the decades of good harvests and cheap food – all through the gin-drinking years. By the mid-century that boom had come to an end. Real wages had climbed all through the 1740s, but they went into steep decline when food prices rose and the population began growing. The peak probably came sometime around 1743, the year the Gin Craze reached its zenith. During the 1750s, the real wages of London bricklayers, to take one example, fell by almost ten per cent, and there were worse times ahead. One modern index of real wages has spending power in 1760 slumping back past the level of the early 1720s – the years when the Gin Craze, and the panic about gin, both took off in earnest.19 For decades it had been a standard lament about the poor that they would work only until they had enough to live; then they would head off to the dram-shop. If life was getting dearer all through the 1750s, it was hardly surprising that they would abandon Saint Monday and seek thriftier gods to worship.

  It wasn’t just a large sector of the population who were yearning for security and stability. London was changing as well. The city where Madam Geneva had made her home sixty years before had been a chaotic place, the battleground of entrepreneurs and con-men, pick-pockets and whores (or so, at least, it chose to represent itself). By the middle of the century, that image was changing. When Canaletto arrived in 1746, he and his imitators painted London as a city of politeness and civility rather than squalor and danger; Londoners suddenly seemed to look about themselves with new eyes. Public-spirited types were shocked to notice that ‘a city famous for its wealth, commerce, and plenty, and for every other kind of civility and politeness,’ should have streets ‘which abound with such heaps of filth, as a savage would look on with amazement.’20

  Back in the 1720s they either hadn’t noticed the filth, or hadn’t known what to do about it. Now they took action. It started with street lighting. A Lighting Act was passed for the City of London in 1736. Spitalfields followed suit two years later, Shoreditch in 1749. Foreign visitors would be amazed by London’s brilliance. ‘In Oxford Street alone,’ Archenholz would exclaim, ‘there are more lights than in all Paris.’21 Lighting wasn’t the only improvement. The Fleet River, symbol of a sordid past, would be covered over in 1747. The Thames was bridged at Westminster, embanked above London Bridge. Public building projects transformed the centre of town. Parliament Street, a new ceremonial approach from St James’s to the Palace of Westminster, was begun in 1738. William Kent’s new Treasury had been completed in 1736; his Horse Guards would follow in 1753.

  By the 1750s tracts were appearing thick and fast to condemn the city’s defects – from open cellars and projecting steps to broken pavements and dilapidated houses – and to suggest improvements. ‘A greater degree of true public spirit,’ wrote the MP Charles Gray, one of the members of the 1751 parliamentary committee on crime, ‘seems to be very happily rising among us, and more attention to be paid than formerly to matters upon which the real welfare of the nation depends.’22 There was a growing belief that things could be improved. Corbyn Morris’s Observations on London mortality ended with ‘proposals for a better regulation of the police* of this metropolis.’ His models were the aqueducts and viaducts of ancient Rome. Rome’s monuments, he pointed out, were ‘all built at the public expense for public convenience.’ A generation before, no one had believed either in public expense or public convenience. But a generation before, change itself had been regarded with suspicion. Change belonged to the gamblers, to the speculators and social climbers, to Madam Geneva. Reformers didn’t look forwards; they looked back – back to an old England of social certainties and unchanging order. By the 1750s, that attitude was wearing thin. ‘To rail at the times at large,’ wrote the reformer John Brown in 1757, ‘can serve no good purpose. There never was an age or nation that had not virtues and vices peculiar to itself: And in some respects, perhaps, there is no time nor country delivered down to us in [hi]story, in which a wise man would so much wish to have lived, as in our own.’23 No wise reformer of the 1720s would have chosen to live in his own vicious age; he would have chosen Vergil’s Rome, or the reign of Alfred. But some had started looking for ways to improve the present, rather than dreaming about the past. They had begun to embrace change. They had invented progress.

  Captain Thomas Coram had dreamed ever since 1722 of opening a hospital to care for London’s foundling children. Walking to and from the City at night had ‘afforded him frequent occasions of seeing young children exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying.’24 Back in 1722, no one had listened. It wasn’t until 1741 that the Foundling Hospital finally opened its doors in Hatton Garden. It would be the high-profile charity success of the 1740s. It became fashionable to visit the hospital and give your name to a Foundling Hospital child. Handel conducted his first benefit concert in the unconsecrated chapel in May 1749. Many reformers would be involved with it (including many from the campaign against gin). Hogarth donated his own portrait of Coram at the opening of the chapel; Commons Speaker Arthur Onslow gave a prayer book. The chapel would be consecrated with an inaugural sermon by Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester. (Thomas Coram, sadly, would miss out on all this triumph. He fell out with the General Committee in 1742; his wife died; he ran into financial difficulties. He would be remembered at the end of his life sitting in the hospital arcade in a shabby red coat, handing out gingerbread to the children.)

  The Foundling Hospital wasn’t just a new institution for London. It was a whole new way of looking at charity. Back in 1709, Atterbury had written that ‘the value of our gift depends not on the success of it.’25 Charity, in his view, was there to benefit giver as much as recipient (‘Our part is to chuse out the most deserving objects … and when that is done, all is done, that lies in our power: the rest must be left to Providence’). But the Foundling Hospital had a specific social purpose, and it would be judged by its results. To achieve them it would bring to the business of charity a new efficiency of organisation and fund-raising. Instead of railing against the institutions of the new age – marketing, subscription, the joint-stock company – it would use them to achieve its ends. There was no coincidence in that. Aristocratic support had been needed to get the project off the ground, but the huge majority of the hospital’s active supporters were untitled, and the biggest group were merchants. By the 1750s a new kind of reformer was emerging. Jonas Hanway embodied the type. Tireless and professional, grounded in business, he brought to reform an unquenchable thirst for improvement, promoting church, trade and empire through projects from foundlings to fallen women, poor boys to sailors.*

  The Foundling Hospital broke ground in another way. Its end was to help that very embodiment of the Age of Risk, the foundling. Foundlings had always been vilified. They overturned the tradi
tional idea that you were defined by your birth and must bear the consequences of it. Without known parents, foundlings had no place in traditional society and were punished for it. They carried their mothers’ sin on their shoulders. Now reformers set out to help them. Many foundations followed the Foundling Hospital’s lead. The Lock Hospital for women with sexually transmitted diseases opened in 1746, and two smallpox hospitals in the same year. The Lying-in Hospital for Poor Married Women would open in Covent Garden in 1749, and Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for Unmarried Mothers in 1752. Many of them broke taboos, as the Foundling Hospital did. The Magdalen Hospital, opened in 1758, aimed to reclaim prostitutes. It wasn’t long since the fallen woman had been held up as the cause of the age’s vices, not as its victim.

  Through such institutions, the risks of the age were being tamed. Its villains – whores, foundlings and bankrupts – started to attract society’s pity as well as its fear and loathing; they were offered help rather than curses. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. But a new mood emerged in the middle of the century, one which promoted stability above risk, public spirit over private gain. Out of doors, reformers worked busily to improve the city; indoors, families were discovering the docile pleasures of middle-class life. There were no gin-drinkers in the paintings of Canaletto. The frenetic world which had created Madam Geneva was passing. ‘Were the same persons who made a full tour of England thirty years ago,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in 1754, ‘to make a fresh one now they would find themselves in a land of enchantment. England is no more like to what England was than it resembles Borneo or Madagascar.’26