by Iain Gately
You are supposed to have the faith that “overcometh the world.” To you therefore it is not grievous: 1 To taste no spirituous liquor, nor dram of any kind, unless prescribed by a physician.
It is interesting that spirits were still permitted on doctor’s orders, and evidence that even disciplined evangelicals did not envisage banning them completely, despite the horrors of the gin craze. The distinction between acceptable forms of alcohol and liquid hellfire rested on the intention with which they were drunk.
However, the influences of the 1743 Gin Act and the Methodists were diluted by turmoil at home and abroad. A second Jacobite rebellion materialized in 1745 when the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, appeared in Scotland to claim his grandfather’s crown. He failed and fled, disguised as a “lady’s maid,” having got as close to London as Derby. Shortly after the rebellion had ended in Great Britain, and reprisals were over, peace arrived on the continent of Europe. Seventy thousand demobilized soldiers returned to Britain with no jobs to look forward to nor any arrangement for their support, beyond official permission to beg. Disorder returned, which once again was blamed on gin.
By 1750 London had been in the thrall of Madame Geneva for a quarter of a century. She had been legislated against five times, declared the enemy of religion and health, yet persisted nonetheless. Gin had been a constant in an age of change. However, London in 1750 was no longer the rowdy place it had been at the turn of the century. The threat of rebellion had been countered and suppressed, wars had been won in Europe and elsewhere. The best and cruelest work of the golden age of English satire had been written. The epic drinkers who had electrified Parliament with their drunken rhetoric had retired or died. The first half of the eighteenth century had been one of crazes— the South Sea Bubble, lotteries, mad and extravagant fashions, music, the revived theater, and latterly, preaching. By 1750 London had settled down a little. A full third of its population were described as being of the middling sort, i.e., middle class. These people had begun to develop an identity and, with it, an ideology. Their priorities may be gauged by the topics of conversation at their dinner parties, which, according to a contemporary observer, were “the fineness or dullness of the weather, beauty of their children, goodness of their husbands, and badness of their several trades and callings.”
The emergence of the middling sort, and their humbler relations the respectable poor, as distinct classes from the mass of common people, hitherto perceived of by their rulers as an amorphous mob, was accompanied by a sea change in public opinion toward gin. Gin drinking was no longer conceived of as a way of showing displeasure with government, and the social forces ranged against it combined together for one last push. They found eloquent and popular champions to represent their case in picture and print. Their advocate in prose was Henry Fielding, playwright, novelist, and onetime rake, who had reformed himself and become a magistrate and a fervent opponent of gin. In 1751 he published a pamphlet, an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, which was targeted at the pernicious liquid. It portrayed intoxication with that specific drink as a special kind of drunkenness that robbed people of their memories and their ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Gin fanatics seemed to get drunker than other drunks and to do worse things when under the influence. Fielding made a direct link between soaring crime rates in London and gin drinking. His position as magistrate gave his words authority, so that action against gin was also perceived of as action against crime in general.
Public opinion was also influenced by William Hogarth, who produced a pair of satirical etchings—Gin Lane and Beer Street—which depicted the misery gin drinkers suffered and contrasted them with the good health enjoyed by people who stuck to beer. Hogarth provided Jekyll and Hyde images of drinkers—fat and prosperous, in the case of beer tipplers, but skeletal and damned if they boozed on gin. It’s a sunny day in his Gin Lane, with plenty of exposed flesh on view—most of it belonging to the dead or dying. At the center of the panorama is Mother Gin herself, represented as a seminaked woman with syphilitic sores on her legs. She has just dropped her infant son, who hangs in midair, falling headfirst toward a gin shop in a cellar. The scene around her is raging and chaotic—bricks tumble from the buildings as if shaken loose by an earthquake, a child fights a dog for a bone, two little girls in the costume of the foundlings’ hospital toast each other with a dram, and a skipping lunatic with a pair of bellows in one hand and a baby on a skewer in the other dances past an open coffin in which an emaciated body is being placed.
In Beer Street, in contrast, even the men look pregnant, and happy to be so. The foaming pots of porter in their hands and by their sides are to scale. There is food all over the picture, and houses are being improved, rather than falling into ruin. The streets are clean, and flags fly from the buildings. These opposing visions of drinking, one of which depicts alcohol as poison, the other as the key to prosperity and good health, sum up the convictions of the age. Gin and beer were utterly different fluids, one malign, the other beneficial, and the evil type needed to be controlled.
The art of Fielding and Hogarth was supported by science. The medical arguments in favor of restraints on distilling and selling gin were compelling. Doctors queued up to give evidence. The physician of St. George’s Hospital confirmed that between 1734 and 1749 hospital admission had risen from 12,710 a year to 38,147 “from the melancholy consequences of gin drinking, principally.” The economic burden created by sick and dying gin addicts was calculated by Dean Josiah Tucker, who prepared the first estimates of the social costs of drinking and came up with an annual expense of £3,997,619, against a revenue for all forms of taxation on the production and sale of spirits of £676,125. The income was cash, the cost, conjecture, but the figures brought the notion that drinking entailed expenses as well as revenues, and that these might be quantified in monetary terms, to the attention of the public. Finally, a new spirit of humanity was abroad. People could be victims of circumstance and pitied as such, rather than simply being condemned as vicious by nature. Prostitutes, for example, began to attract sympathy for their plight instead of being characterized as impudent hussies. It was the environment that turned people into whores and listless drunks, rather than innate evil.
GIN LANE.
BEER STREET.
In 1751 a new and final Gin Act was introduced, which was both pragmatic and successful. It pushed up duty, controlled licensing, and banned the sale of spirits on credit. In 1751, approximately 7 million gallons of gin were taxed, the following year less than 4.5 million. The fall reflected declining demand, rather a shift from the official to the black market. Best of all, the common people responded positively to the new legislation, indeed, seemed to have lost the desire to debase themselves. Their improvement was commented on by foreign writers, including Giuseppe Baretti, who noted in A Journey from London to Genoa (1770) that “in the space of ten years, I have observed that the English populace have considerably mended their manners and am persuaded that in about twenty years more they will become quite as civil . . . as the French and Italians.”
14 PROGRESS
Drink success to philosophy and Trade!
—Erasmus Darwin, 1763
British travelers to the continent of Europe, in particular to France, confirmed that the manners of its common sort were indeed far better than those of their native land. Their praise, however, was heavily qualified. France, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, to British eyes, was an impoverished and antiquated place, swarming with well-mannered beggars and surly priests. A trip to the country was a voyage backward in time. Its roads were bad, much of French agricultural practice was medieval, the administration was corrupt, and the calendar was choked with papist feasts, processions, pilgrimages, and spectacles, all of which had vanished in England with the Reformation, but which provided, to the cynical British traveler, “a perpetual comedy.”
Perhaps the only feature of France that was more modern than Britain was i
ts police force, founded in 1699 and endowed with intrusive powers of search and arrest. Police spies frequented drinking places, and their presence, which made people guard their tongues when in their cups, together with a thirteenth-century system of guilds and licensing, which gave a monopoly on the retail of spirits to the master lemonade-makers of Paris, thus restricting supply, explains why the French poor did not succumb to a brandy craze. Indeed, the freedom their British counterparts enjoyed to drink themselves to death was indicative of their comparative liberty.
Travelers through this police state were astonished at the wretched quality of the food and drink available en route. As an exception to the general politesse of the people, the manners of innkeepers were execrable, and the fare they offered of a matching standard. According to the Scottish writer Tobias Smollett, en route to Nice in 1763, the food made him ill, and “the wine commonly used in Burgundy is so weak and thin, that you would not drink it in England. The very best which they sell at Dijon, the capital of the province, for three livres a bottle, is in strength, and even in flavor, greatly inferior to what I have drank in London. I believe all the first growth is either consumed in the houses of the noblesse, or sent abroad to foreign markets.”
Even in Paris, a foreigner without connections found it hard to eat or drink well. While the French aristocracy were taking the art of dining to new heights in their palaces, the traiteurs, or cook shops, of the city sold plain fare, and the wine served in its traditional cabarets and taverns was “very thin.” Cheap weak wine was likewise the standard fare at a new class of watering holes—guinguettes—that had been established on the outskirts of the town to avoid the heavy Parisian sales taxes. These were large utilitarian places, which offered dancing as well as drinking, and which were patronized by the working poor. Perhaps the only places in Paris where a stranger might get a decent glass of wine were its cafés, whose numbers had multiplied considerably since the now-venerable Procope had introduced coffee to the French capital. These had since assumed a role akin to the coffee shops in London, and served as forums where intellectuals gathered to discuss the news and matters that the royal censors prevented from appearing in print. They offered tea, coffee, chocolate, cordials, wine, and various eaux-de-vie to their clientele and competed with each other for customers with increasingly elaborate interiors. By the date of Smollett’s visit some were positively palatial and sported floor-to-ceiling mirrors, gilded cornices, marble counters, and chandeliers. Such splendor, however, was often to no avail, for the Parisians chose where they drank not merely on the grounds of decor but also, and more importantly, on whether or not a café was à la mode.
Parisians were obsessed with novelty. The obsession was a side effect of living under an absolute monarch whose whims counted for more in the formation of public policy than the laws by which he was, by definition, above. Moreover, the medieval notions of showing rank through magnificence in dress persisted, and the French aristocracy distinguished themselves with theatrical and constantly changing costumes and hairstyles. Smollett found such modishness repellent and compared the Parisian ladies of quality, with their painted faces and hair stiffened by “an abominable paste of hog’s grease, tallow, and white powder,” unfavorably with the Indian chiefs of America, whose makeup he justified on the basis that it was worn to make them look frightening, instead of beautiful. The royal court was the fountainhead of every new trend, including fashions in drinking. Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian man of letters now best remembered for his philandering, provided an example of one such fad in his memoirs:
The king was hunting, and found himself at the Neuilly Bridge; being thirsty, he wanted a glass of ratafia. He stopped at the door of a drinking-booth, and by the most lucky chance the poor keeper of the place happened to have a bottle of that liquor. The king, after he had drunk a small glass, fancied a second one, and said that he had never tasted such delicious ratafia in his life. That was enough to give the ratafia of the good man of Neuilly the reputation of being the best in Europe: the king had said so. The consequence was that the most brilliant society frequented the tavern of the delighted publican, who is now a very wealthy man.
While Parisians might choose, depending on what was in fashion, between ratafia, a toxic spirit flavored with the kernels of cherries, other species of eau-de-vie, “very good small beer,” and brandy, wine was the mainstay of French drinking culture. Notwithstanding the handicaps of being weak and bad, it was plentiful and cheap. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, a “fury of planting” had taken place all over France, with more and more land being laid out to vines. The consequent surge in production had alarmed the court, which feared there would be a corresponding shortage in grain, and in 1731 the king decreed that no one could plant new vines in France without his express permission. His motive was not merely to prevent famine but also to protect the value of his own and his courtiers’ vineyards. The decree was unevenly enforced. In some regions new vines were uprooted; in others, where they had been set in the soil under the protection of the aristocracy, they were allowed to flourish, as was the case in Bordeaux.
In Bordeaux, the fury of planting was concentrated in the Médoc, whose terroir had a similar composition to that of established vineyards in Graves. The similarity, it was hoped, would enable the production of wines of comparable quality, which might command equal prices overseas. In the event, the hope was borne out, as is apparent in the comments of Nicolas Bidet (later cellarer to Marie Antionette), writing in 1759: “The Médoc is a canton in favor: The wine which is gathered there is very much in fashion and to the English taste. The proprietors in our Graves have looked with jealousy at the favor the Médoc wines have enjoyed during the last thirty or forty years.” The opinion of the English was all-important to the quality producers in Bordeaux. While the bulk of the region’s wines still went to Holland, the prestige vintages were aimed at the British market, whose significance was acknowledged by the French commercial council, as was its insistence on excellence and its indifference to price: “It is a generally recognized truth that in all places where the British land they make a great many purchases, raising the price of goods and merchandise and seeking out those which are the most expensive and most perfect. This method is in contrast to that of the Dutch, who spend frugally . . . and are less attentive to the quality of what they buy than to its low price.” The vintners of Bordeaux continued to shape their product to British tastes even during the numerous eighteenth-century wars with Britain, and the British continued to buy despite often punitive import duties.
The demand for Bordeaux wine in Britain derived not just from the cellars of its aristocracy and politicians, and the taverns of London, but also from Scotland, where claret was considered the patriotic drink, more so than whisky. When Jacobite rebels, in the first half of the eighteenth century, toasted “The king o’er the water,”23 their cups were usually filled with claret. This preference was celebrated in verse. Whereas, according to William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, whisky was a “duff-draff drink” that made him liable to “bark and yowff,” claret gave wings to his muse. The elevating qualities of claret were likewise applauded by the poet Allan Ramsay:
Gude claret best keeps out the cold,
And drives away the winter soon;
It makes a man baith gash and bold
And heaves his soul beyond the moon.
A love of Bordeaux wines and a penchant for fighting Englishmen were not the only links between Scotland and France in the eighteenth century. Both made substantial contributions to the Enlightenment, a coherent cultural movement, whose aim was to provide secular explanations, and scientific solutions, to issues ranging from the place of man in creation to the efficient manufacture of needles. It had been born in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the space of forty years the English had killed one king, dethroned another, and experimented with republicanism, before settling on a constitutional monarchy with an impartial legal system and a free press
. The various forms of government, and interim anarchy, had resulted in a secular reformation. British thinkers examined the nature of the pact between rulers and their subjects and, while they were at it, the relationship between humanity and God. They concluded that the universe was governed by mechanical principles, and that society should be run on rational ones.
The practical influence of the Enlightenment movement was evident in science, health, education, and agriculture. In all four areas there were consequences for the production of alcoholic drinks and for the culture of drinking. Science was of obvious benefit to the art of brewing, caveat that brewers were a superstitious lot and slow to take advantage of innovations that might assist them in their trade. Although control of temperature is vital to the brewing process, few manufacturers used the newly invented thermometer to help them to improve the consistency of their product. When, for example, an enlightened Hampshire brewer advised Samuel Whitbread, the largest brewer in London, that thermometers were useful, and Whitbread suggested to his directors that they invest in one, he was told to “go home and not engage in such visionary pursuits.” However, and despite their disdain for science, the brewers were natural aficionados of Adam Smith and his new discipline of oeconomics, and when their technical competitors gained market share with better and more reliable brews, they reconfigured their breweries and their methods.
Breweries also served as laboratories for those in love with progress. In 1771, the philosopher, chemist, and dissenting clergyman Joseph Priestley conducted experiments in a brewhouse in Leeds, whose aim was to isolate the gas given off in fermentation. He succeeded and called it fixed air.24 Further research revealed that the gas was soluble in water, to which it imparted fizz and a faintly acidic taste. After testing the resulting beverage on his friends, who declared themselves enchanted, he wrote a paper, Impregnating Water with Fixed Air (1772), which set out a process for making soda water, and suggested that it might be used onboard ships to fight scurvy. Priestley also noted that other liquors might likewise be improved by impregnation with fixed air, thus establishing the basis for artificially carbonated drinks.