London

by Peter Ackroyd

  A tavern “is the onlely Rende-vous of boone company,” according to the Guls Horne-Booke of 1609 where it is important to know the bar staff or drawers and “to learn their names such as Jack, and Will, and Tom” to procure prompt service as well as credit. Then you may say to the waiter, “Boy, fetch me money from the barre.” The bill was known as “the reckoning” or “the shot.” Games of dice were played and travelling fiddlers went from establishment to establishment. We are allowed to peer closely into the rooms of an early seventeenth-century tavern, by using an inventory from the aptly named Mouthe in Bishopsgate Street. Here are listed the boarded partitions separating one room from another in that tavern, each chamber bearing a different name: the Percullis, the Pomgrannatt, the Three Tuns, the Vyne, and the King’s Head. So we have five different “barres” on the same premises, furnished with tables, benches and stools. In the Percullis, there was “one longe table of waynscote, with a fforme” as well as “one oyster table,” “one olde wyne-stoole” and “a payre of playinge tables”; in the King’s Head there was also an oyster table, as well as “a child’s stoole.” In one of the guests’ chambers, on the floor above, were listed down pillows, flaxen sheets and a tapestried coverlet as well as chests and cupboards.

  A poem of 1606 mentions “the Bores head, hard by London stone … the swan at Dowgat … The Myter in Cheape … the Castel in Fishstreet” and others “to make Noses red,” but it was not only drink and lodging which seventeenth-century tavern-keepers supplied. An advertisement from a landlord, moving from the Swan at Holborn Bridge to the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, mentioned that “He hath also a hearse, and all things convenient to carry a Corps to any part of England.” “There are endless inns,” Thomas Platter wrote in the early 1600s, “beer and wine shops for every imaginable growth, alicant, canary, muscatels, clarets, Spanish, Rhenish.” Endless, also, are the verses written upon the topic of London alehouses. Ned Ward’s Vade Mecum for Malt Worms and John Taylor’s Pilgrimage are only two examples of poems that list public houses and their locations as a kind of topography of the city, in which the nature and shape of London are known only in terms of intoxicated reverie:

  Hence to Cloak-lane, near Dowgate hill we steer

  And at Three Tuns cast Anchor for good Beer …

  Thereafter haste made waste, and sun was set

  Ere to the Shoreditch Flagon I could get.

  At ten I took my leave, and by the moon

  Reached the Bell Inn, and fell into a swoon.

  The words of the two poets are conflated here, in order to suggest the precision of their references to the city as a place where one must get drunk in order to survive.

  The excise tax imposed upon beer in 1643 testifies to the increasing popularity of that drink. Pepys noticed during the Great Fire that the women “would scold for drink and be drunk as devels”; there may of course have been some excuse for their behaviour during that inferno but a calm observer, Henry Peacham, writing The Art of Living in London in 1642, commands “above all things beware of beastly drunkenness … some are found sometimes so drunk, who, being fallen upon the ground or, which is worse, in the kennel, are not able to stir or move again. Drinking begets challenges and quarrels, and occasioneth the death of many, as is known by almost daily experience … Drunken men are apt to lose their hats, cloaks, or rapiers, nor to know what they have spent.” Pepys also recorded a lady, dining at the house of a mutual friend, who in one draught knocked back a pint and a half of white wine.

  Yet if the seventeenth century might rival any of its predecessors for the amount of alcohol flowing through the veins of London, it was overshadowed by the eighteenth century when drinking reached massive, even crisis, proportions. This was the period when Samuel Johnson, that great London luminary, declared that “a man is never happy in the present unless he is drunk.” A vast number of his fellow-citizens seemed to agree.

  There was a fashion for “brown ale,” a sweet beer, but a further duty upon malt made it important for breweries to introduce more hops into their drink. This became “bitter beer”—“so bitter that I could not drink it,” according to Casanova—which, when mixed with regular ale, became known as “half and half.” In the same period “pale ale” was produced, and became so popular that pale ale houses were established in the city. In the early 1720s a mellow beer, brewed for four or five months, was introduced; the “labouring people, porters etc found its utility” for drinking at breakfast or at dinner, and thus it became known as “porter.” It was a beer brewed only in the city, and led directly to that class of beers known as “stout”: brown stout, double stouts, Irish, entire, or heavy wet, or London particular.

  It was particular to London, also, that alehouses were directly connected with commerce. For many trades the only employment agency was a specific public house or “house of call.” Bakers and tailors, plumbers and bookbinders, congregated in one place where masters arrived “to enquire when they want hands.” The landlord himself was often of the same trade, giving credit to those out of employ, chiefly in the medium of drink. The tradesmen paid their employees at pay tables in the same public houses, with obvious and predictable results, compounded by the fact that money was not exchanged until the hours of midnight and one on a Sunday morning.

  There were other working practices which demanded the consumption of liquor. “Entry money” for a new apprentice or journeyman was spent in the alehouse, and various fines for late or incomplete work were also paid in the same manner. According to one great historian, M. Dorothy George in London Life in the Eighteenth Century, “the consumption of strong drink was connected with every phase of life from apprenticeship”; we may also infer that the spirit of trade, so central to the life of London, thereby remained bright and fiery. Drink and fire go together, and distillers were accused of negligence whereby their stills “gave rise to frequent and terrible fires.”

  There are some singular vignettes of drunkenness in the city—Oliver Goldsmith putting on his wig back to front to amuse friends in his Temple Lodgings, Charles Lamb staggering home beside the New River where he had once bathed as a schoolboy, Joe Grimaldi being carried home every night on the back of the landlord of the Marquis of Cornwallis. There were, however, less happy episodes. The Restoration dramatist Nathaniel Lee drank himself into Bedlam where he declared: “They said I was mad: and I said they were mad: damn them, they outvoted me.” He was eventually released, but on the day of his death “he drank so hard, that he dropped down in the street, and was run over by a coach. His body was laid in a bulk at Trunkits, the perfumer’s at Temple Bar, till it was owned.” William Hickey, the early nineteenth-century memoirist, was found in a gutter along Parliament Street, “utterly incapable of giving any account of myself, or of even articulating … having no more recollection of a single circumstance that had occurred for the preceding twelve hours, than if I had been dead.” He awoke the following day “unable to move hand or foot, being most miserably bruised, cut and maimed in every part of my body.” Another London particular in the eighteenth century was Richard Porson, the first librarian of the London Institution, who was often seen in the morning staggering “from his old haunt, the Cider Cellars; in Maiden Lane.” The editor of Euripides, he was a renowned scholar who “could hiccup Greek like a Helot,” but preferred to boast that he could repeat from memory the whole of Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). “It was said of Porson,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “that he drank everything he could lay his hands upon, even to embrocation and spirits of wine intended for the lamp. Samuel Rogers described him returning to the dining room after the people had gone, and drinking all that was left in their glasses.” His usual and familiar exclamation, when surprised or perplexed, was “Whooe!” and, on the day of his death, he was heard quoting from the Greek Anthologia. A friend noticed that on this last occasion “he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English with painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally.” Revived by wine and jelly dissolv
ed in brandy and water, he was taken to a tavern in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, but later died in the London Institution on the stroke of midnight.

  · · ·

  When the phrase “spirituous liquor” is applied to the city’s drinking habits, however, the spirit is generally that of gin. It was denounced by the magistrate Sir John Fielding as “this liquid fire by which men drink their hell beforehand.” The demon of London for half a century, it was held responsible for the deaths of many thousands of men, women and children. Whatever the truth of mortality rates, and they are open to question, there is no doubting the popularity of gin (concocted from grain, sloe or juniper). It has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 “gin-houses.” The slogan, copied by Hogarth for his portrayal of Gin Lane, ran “Drunk for 1d, dead drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing.” These “geneva shops” were located in cellars or in converted ground-floor workshops; they multiplied in poorer quarters, making the more familiar and traditional alehouses of the city seem respectable in contrast. Hogarth himself said of his portrait that “In gin lane every circumstance of its horrid effects are brought to view, in terorem, nothing but Poverty misery and ruin are to be seen Distress even to madnes and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.” In that famous study, an infant is seen falling to its certain death from the emaciated arms of its drunken mother; she is sitting upon wooden stairs, with ulcerated legs, her countenance expressive only of oblivion beyond despair. It may seem melodramatic, but it is a pictorial variant upon a salient truth. One Judith Defour took her two-year-old daughter from a workhouse, for example, and then strangled her in order to strip her of the new clothes with which she had been dressed. She sold the baby’s clothes and spent the money, 1s 4d, on gin.

  “A new kind of drunkenness,” Henry Fielding wrote in 1751, “unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us, and which if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here intend is … by this Poison called Gin … the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand People in this Metropolis.” There had been attempts to put a “stop” to this trade, most notably by the Gin Act of 1736 which was greeted only by “the execrations of the mob.” The Act was ridiculed and evaded, with gin being sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift, or King Theodore of Corsica. The gin-shops were still filled with men and women “and even sometimes of children” who drank so much that “they find it difficult to walk on going away.” The corn distillers of London claimed that they produced “upward of eleven twelfths of the whole distillery of England” and a contemporary, Lord Lansdowne, recognised in 1743 that “the excessive use of gin hath hitherto been pretty much confined to the Cities of London and Westminster.” It offered the comfort of forgetfulness to prisoners and vagrants; it provided oblivion to the poor of St. Giles, where one house in four was a gin-shop.

  Distilling was highly profitable. The trade was “thrown open” and protected from excessive excise; so the great destroyer of the poor and disadvantaged was actually created by those who wished to make a quick and easy profit. Only belatedly did the authorities respond to crimes of violence against property, fuelled by the demand for gin, and to the number of “weak and sickly” children who were proving a burden upon the parish authorities. Some gin-shops were suppressed in 1751. This measure seemed to work. Improvements in the distilleries, closer inspection of gin-shops and increase in taxes eventually resulted in the observation of 1757 that “We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the street since the said qualifications.” The fever passed. The rage for gin subsided as quickly as it had arisen, leading to the surmise that it was some climacteric of the city’s history as if London itself had been seized by sudden frenzy and burning thirst.

  Yet gin and ale were not considered to be the only addictive and dangerous liquids. There was also tea.

  The grocer Daniel Rowlinson was the first man to sell a pound of tea, in the 1650s; fifty years later Congreve described the “auxiliaries to the tea-table” as “orange brandy, aniseed, cinnamon, citron, and Barbadoes water.” J. Ilive, author of A New and Compleat Survey of London in 1762, also blamed the “excessive drinking of Tea” for enervating “the Stomachs of the Populace, as to render them incapable of performing the offices of Digestion; whereby the Appetite is so much deprav’d.” A pamphleteer in 1758 declared tea-drinking to be “very hurtful to those who work hard and live low” and condemned it as “one of the worst of habits, rendering you lost to yourselves, and unfit for the comforts you were first designed for.” William Hazlitt was popularly supposed to have died in Frith Street, Soho, in 1830 from the excessive drinking of that plant infusion. The emphasis once again is on the tendency of Londoners—even imported citizens such as Hazlitt—to obsession and excess, so that an apparently harmless cordial can become dangerous. That is also why London tea gardens soon acquired a dubious reputation. Suburban retreats with agreeable names such as White Conduite House, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Cuper’s Gardens, Montpelier and Bagnigge Wells, devoted to the drinking of tea and other pleasant pastimes, became associated “with loose women and with boys whose morals are depraved, and their constitutions ruined” and were well known “for the encouragement of luxury, extravagance, idleness and other wicked illegal purposes.” It is as if the opportunity for pleasure, or leisure, in London was immediately transformed into excess, viciousness and immorality; the city can never be at peace.

  Tea and gin are still with us, but one eighteenth-century drink has utterly disappeared. Saloop was a hot, sweet beverage made from a decoction of sassafras wood, milk and sugar, and sold for three halfpence a bowl; the name is supposed to have been derived from the slopping sound of those drinking it in the street. Coffee and tea were expensive, so stalls selling saloop were found in the poorer areas of London. In summer saloop was sold from an open table on wheels; in winter from a kind of tent made from a screen and an old umbrella. It was considered to be the best possible cure for a hangover, and Charles Lamb recalled the artisan and the chimney-sweep mingling with “the rake” at dawn around the saloopian stalls; “being penniless,” the young sweeps “will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steams, to gratify one sense if possible.” The spectacle prompted Lamb to reflection upon a city where “extremes meet.”

  In the same period as Lamb wrote his reflections, designed for the London Magazine, the young Charles Dickens entered a public house in Parliament Street and ordered “your very best—the VERY best—ale.” It was called the Genuine Stunning and the twelve-year-old boy said, “Just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.” The spectacle of children drinking in the streets and alehouses was familiar, if not common, in the early years of the nineteenth century. “The girls, I am told,” wrote Henry Mayhew as late as the 1850s, “are generally fonder of gin than the boys.” They took it “to keep the cold out.”

  Verlaine (1873) considered Londoners to be “noisy as ducks, eternally drunk,” while Dostoevsky (1862) noted that “everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.” A German journalist, Max Schlesinger (1853), saw the inhabitants of a public house “standing, staggering, crouching, or lying down, groaning, and cursing, drink and forget.” An observer closer to home, Charles Booth, noticed that drinking among women in the 1890s had materially increased. “One drunken woman in a street will set all the women in it drinking,” he quotes one male inhabitant of the East End as saying. Nearly all women “get drunk of Monday. They say “we have our fling; we like to have a little fuddle on Monday.’” All classes of London women seem to have been drinking, largely because it was no longer considered wrong for a female to enter a public house for a “nip.” In the evening, children of the poorer classes were sent around to the local public house to have a jug filled with ale; as Booth reported, “it was constant come and go, one moment to go in
and get the jug filled, and out again the next; none of the children waited to talk or play with one another, but at once hurried home.”

  Gentlemen drank as deeply and freely as the poor. Thackeray noted those “who glory in drinking bouts” with “bottle-noses” and “pimpled faces.” “I was so cut last night” is one of the phrases he recalled.

  In each year of the nineteenth century, approximately 25,000 people were arrested for drunkenness in the streets. Yet the conditions of life often drove poorer Londoners into their condition. One of them, a collector of “pure” (dog excrement) told Mayhew that he had often been drunk “for three months together”—he had “bent his head down to his cup to drink, being utterly incapable of raising it to his lips.”

  So even though the gin fever had subsided, and its shops closed down, its spirit—we might say—was continued in the “gin palaces” of the nineteenth century. These large establishments, clad in shining plate-glass windows with stucco rosettes and gilt cornices, were resplendent with advertisements lit by gas-lamps announcing “the only real brandy in London” or “the famous cordial, medicated gin, which is so strongly recommended by the faculty.” The fine lettering reveals the attractions of “The Out and Out!,” “The No Mistake,” “The Good for Mixing” and “The real Knock-me-down.” Yet the exterior brightness was generally deceptive; the scene within these “palaces” was a dismal one, almost reminiscent of the old gin-shops. There was characteristically a long bar of mahogany, behind which were casks painted green and gold, with the customers standing—or sitting on old barrels—along a narrow and dirty area beside it. It might be noted here, too, that social observers believed drink to be “at the root of all the poverty and distress with which they came into contact.” Again the emphasis is upon the unhappy conditions of the city itself, literally driving men and women to drink with its relentless speed, urgency and oppression. Of the skeletons investigated in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard, “just under 10 per cent had at least one fracture.” It is also revealed, in the fascinating London Bodies compiled by Alex Werner, that “almost half of these were rib fractures, commonly caused by stumbling or brawling.”