Drink

by Iain Gately

  Advances in medicine during the Enlightenment era resulted in a diminished role for alcohol in the field of health. The four great London teaching hospitals were established during the latter years of the gin craze, and much of their work involved curing people from booze rather than with it. The folk remedies that had relied on alcohol as a vehicle to distribute various herbal and animal essences through the bodies of patients were consigned to the dustbin of history. The hospitals, however, still considered both beer and wine to have useful therapeutic properties, and provided them to their patients in order to help them to rebuild their strength. Similarly, doctors still prescribed drink to patients for a variety of ailments. When, for instance, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had a nervous breakdown, the prognosis of his doctor was that he had “fairly got the Disease of the Learned,” and he was put on a diet of claret and told to take some exercise in order to cure himself.

  Medicine also peered into the state of drunkenness. Surely this condition was as susceptible to a scientific explanation as had been blindness or the circulation of the blood? A number of confident theses were advanced. The definition in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), which aimed to sum up all ancient and modern learning in two volumes, may be taken as typical of the efforts of the time: “DRUNKENNESS, physically consider’d, consists in a praeternatural Compression of the Brain, and a Discomposure of its Fibres, occasioned by the fumes, or spirituous Parts of Liquors.” The definition was followed by a description of the mechanics of intoxication: As soon as it had slid down the drinker’s throat, liquor underwent “a Kind of Effervescence” in the stomach, whereupon its “finer parts” shot “through the Veins to the Brain,” or were “convey’d through the Veins to the Heart,” and thereafter to the brain via the arteries. Moreover, not every kind of liquor was capable of making people drunk. Only those beverages with an excess of sulphur might discompose the drinker. Clearly, there was still progress to be made in unlocking the secrets of Bacchus.

  The issue of education attracted the attention of some of the finest minds of the Enlightenment. If children were not to be indoctrinated via catechism and similar forms of superstition and prejudice, then what should they learn and how should they be taught? Should they be allowed to drink? The last question was answered in the affirmative by John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), perhaps the most influential work on the subject for much of the eighteenth century. According to Locke, there was to be no platonic minimum drinking age. Children should be given small beer, but not between meals, indeed only with food, as soon as they could walk. Parents were, however, warned that their offspring should “seldom, if ever, taste any wine or strong drink . . . but when they need it as a cordial, and the doctor prescribes it.” They were also advised to watch their servants, for “those mean sort of people, placing a great part of their happiness in strong drink, are always forward to make court to my young master by offering him that which they love best themselves: and finding themselves made merry by it, they foolishly think ’twill do the child no harm. This you are carefully to have your eye upon, and restrain with all the skill and industry you can, there being nothing that lays a surer foundation of mischief, both to body and mind, than children’s being us’d to strong drink.”

  Whereas enlightened educational methods preserved the ancient British habit of giving alcohol to children, when the same spirit of improvement was applied to agriculture, it had a negative impact on traditional drinking practices. Nature was perceived of as a resource “for the being and service and contemplation of man,” and the Enlightened farmer was “like a god on earth” who “commands this species of animal to live and that to die.” Numerous technical manuals, such as The Gentleman Farmer; Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, by the Scottish Lord Kames (1776), were published, and with the assistance of the Enclosure Acts, vast quantities of common lands were rationalized and improved, displacing large numbers of common people. Many rural settlements were turned into pasture or sown with grain. Crofts and houses were abandoned, gardens and village greens were plowed under. With them went numerous rustic alehouses, some of which had existed since the days of Piers Plowman, and each of which had been the secular heart of its community. A variety of pastoral drinking practices perished with the alehouses, and the demise of both was lamented by Oliver Goldsmith in his poem “The Deserted Village” (1770). The village of the title had an alehouse, whose ruin Goldsmith brings back to life, in order to show what had been lost:

  Near yonder thorn, that lifts its head on high,

  Where once the sign-post caught the passing eye,

  Low lies that house where nut-brown draughts inspir’d,

  Where grey-beard mirth and smiling toil retir’d,

  Where village statesmen talk’d with looks profound,

  And news much older than their ale went round.

  Subsequent stanzas highlighted the social cost to the little community, and the local traditions that had perished with the building itself:

  Thither no more the peasant shall repair

  To sweet oblivion of his daily care;

  No more the farmer’s news, the barber’s tale,

  No more the wood-man’s ballad shall prevail;

  No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear,

  Relax his pond’rous strength, and lean to hear;

  The host himself no longer shall be found

  Careful to see the mantling bliss go round;

  Nor the coy maid, half willing to be press’d,

  Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.

  Perhaps the most important influence on British drinking habits during the rush to modernize, secularize, and improve in general was the rise of a beverage that had been associated for millennia past with enlightenment, albeit in Asia. The drink in question was tea, which seemed to possess all the qualities European philosophers most admired: It was both refreshing and stimulating, yet too much of it did not render its drinker tongue-tied and insensible. Tea had been introducedto Europe by the Dutch, who had started drinking it in the 1660s, shortly after they had displaced the Portuguese from their Asian possessions. At first it was an expensive and exotic beverage, which only the very rich could drink. However, increasing trade with the Far East soon brought down the price sufficiently for its use to spread. Those who could afford tea drank it in prodigious quantities. They were urged on by their doctors, who blessed the infusion with medicinal properties. Dr. Cornelis Bontekoe of Amsterdam prescribed a minimum of eight to ten cups each day to his patients and advised them that if they wished to go further, “fifty to two hundred cups” were “perfectly reasonable.” Unsurprisingly, it earned the reputation of being a diuretic:

  Tea that helps our head and heart

  Tea medicates most every part

  Tea rejuvenates the very old

  Tea warms the piss of those who’re cold.

  The next European country to take to tea was France, where it was drunk by the aristocracy, and where Marie de Rabutin-Chantal is credited as being the first to take it mixed with milk. From France it came to England with the Restoration. Initially, it was ridiculously costly. In 1687 the cheapest sort was twenty-five shillings per pound— rather more than a barrel of beer. However, in that age, a high price was an incentive to the upper classes, and in the same decades that England’s poor were debasing themselves with drams of gin, a daily dish of tea became a ritual for its wealthy inhabitants. They devised ceremonies around its consumption, which were presided over by women, for tea drinking usually took place in private houses in mixed company, and just as women had acted as cupbearers and peace weavers in mead halls, so they played the same role with tea-pots and dishes of fragrant bohea. The rituals invented for tea were satirized by Alexander Pope in his mock-heroic poem the Rape of the Lock (1716):

  On shining Altars of Japan they raise

  The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze:

  From
silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,

  While China’s earth receives the smoking tide:

  At once they gratify their scent and taste,

  And frequent cups prolong the rich repast.

  After a fashion, tea provided a gateway for female entry into the British Enlightenment. In 1742, Eliza Haywood, best-selling novelist and social commentator, launched a periodical named The Tea-Table, which she followed up with The Female Spectator (1744-46). Both titles were intended for the expanding circle of educated women in London. Tea featured frequently in their pages, often ironically. According to the Female Spectator it was “the utter Destruction of all Oeconomy, the Bane of good Housewifry, and the Source of Idleness, by engrossing those Hours which ought to be employed in an honest and prudent Endeavour.”

  Tea drinking took some time to spread from the houses of the wealthy to the country at large. The official price of tea was kept at an artificial height by the East India Company, which held a monopoly on its importation, and by heavy duties. However, smugglers took up the slack, and most British tea lovers obtained their supplies on the black market. In contrast to the civilized image the leaf enjoyed among its aficionados, the men who smuggled it were notoriously brutal. In 1747, for instance, a group of Dorset tea contrabandistas known as the Hawkhurst Gang carried out an armed raid on the Poole customs house to reclaim sixty tons of confiscated tea, tortured to death two customs officials who had been sent to investigate them, and killed a poor laborer they suspected of stealing two small bags of tea from one of their caches. The high price of bohea created a market for fakes. Smuggled tea was often cut with leaves from other plants before being offered to the consumer. This problem was common enough to lead to legislation prohibiting the practice, and in 1777, concerned that England was losing its hedgerows, Parliament outlawed so-called British tea, the pseudonym for an amalgam of ash, hawthorne and elder leaves, and sheep dung that was sold throughout the nation as a patriotic alternative to the Chinese variety.

  Tea did not become acceptable without a struggle. Its detractors attacked both the infusion itself and the people who consumed it. “Were they the sons of tea-sippers who won the fields of Crécy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?” asked Joseph Hanway, a contemporary skeptic, in a 1756 pamphlet aimed at bringing Britons to their senses. Hanway, who pioneered the use of umbrellas in London, was of the opinion that tea would be the ruin of Great Britain. It had already destroyed people’s looks: “Men seem to have lost their stature and comeliness, and women their beauty. I am not young, but, methinks, there is not quite so much beauty in this land as there was. Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose, by sipping tea.” It was also a leading cause of infant mortality: “The careless spending of time among servants, who are charged with the care of infants, is often fatal: The nurse frequently destroys the child! the poor infant, being left neglected, expires whilst she is sipping her tea!”

  Hanway’s views were challenged in print by Dr. Samuel Johnson, representing the Enlightenment, who confessed to being a “hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals only with the infusion of this fascinating plant.” Johnson confined himself to tea drinking, as he felt he could not regulate his intake of anything stronger: “I can’t drink a little . . . therefore I never touch it.” He did, however, live in the Anchor Brewery in Southwark for a number of years and reckoned alcohol to be life’s “second greatest pleasure,” an opinion shared by James Boswell, his Scottish biographer. Boswell’s drinking habits were perhaps more typical of the age and are illustrated by the bottle count in his diary for an evening’s drinking with a handful of compatriots in Edinburgh, “the Athens of the North.” Together they managed thirty-three pints of Scotch claret, two bottles of old hock and two of port, with a few shots each of brandy and gin on the side. So much alcohol in one sitting had inevitable consequences for the Scotch philosophers, who, had they consulted Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), could have chosen between Fuddled, Fuzzled, Inebriated, Muddled, Tipsy, or plain Drunk to describe their condition.

  Although tea affected the daily drinking habits of Britons far more than coffee had—indeed, it came to replace beer for breakfast—its similar failure to inspire, in the sense of intoxicate, meant that the poetick juice of former ages remained the stimulant of choice for enlightened minds. This preference was not limited to the literati who shaped the movement but was also apparent in the middle classes. London was graced with a number of tea gardens, where its population repaired on evenings and weekends to listen to music, enjoy the walks, and to eat and drink. According to an early practitioner of the science of statistics, these entertainment complexes sold more alcohol than infusions. He calculated that on an average Sunday, nearly 200,000 Londoners visited its tea gardens, and “the returning situation of those persons [was] as follows: sober, 50,000; in high glee, 90,000; drunkish, 30,000; staggering tipsy 10,000, muzzy, 15,000, dead drunk, 5,000.”

  The national penchant for at least mild inebriation during their leisure hours was, after all, consistent with the core philosophy of the British Enlightenment—the pursuit of happiness. As Locke had phrased it in 1717: “The business of men is to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure, and by the comfortable hopes of another life when this is ended.”

  15 REVOLUTION

  IV. However peaceably your Colonies have submitted

  to your Government, shewn their Affection to your

  Interest, and patiently borne their Grievances, you

  are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and

  treat them accordingly. Quarter Troops among them,

  who by their Insolence may provoke the rising of

  Mobs, and by their Bullets and Bayonets suppress

  them. By this Means, like the Husband who uses his

  Wife ill from Suspicion, you may in Time convert your

  Suspicions into Realities.

  —Benjamin Franklin, “Rules by Which a

  Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,”

  London Public Advertiser, September 11, 1773

  In 1762, Benjamin Franklin returned to Pennsylvania after a five-year stay in London. In contrast to his first visit, when he had worked as a jobbing printer and had been teased for being a water-drinking American, this time he had traveled as the official representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly to petition the king on its behalf. He was, moreover, a celebrated Enlightenment figure, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society, whose experiments with electricity had won him fame throughout Europe. The petition he had been appointed to present related to taxes imposed on Pennsylvania to support the cost of the Seven Years’ War, which were considered by the Pennsylvania Assembly to be inequitable.

  This was not the only point of difference between Britain and its American settlements to have emerged during the French and Indian War, as it was known in the colonies, whose prosecution had also aggravated preexisting disagreements. One of the principal causes of friction arose from the rum and molasses trade between New England and the French sugar islands. In 1731, an import duty had been imposed by the British on both substances. Despite the volume of the trade, very little duty was collected prior to the outbreak of the war, and during the initial years of the conflict, both French and British colonists kept up their mutually profitable, but doubly illegal, 25 commerce. Rather, however, than continuing their business in a clandestine manner, they took advantage of a wartime convention that allowed combatants to communicate with each other via flags of truce. The convention was intended to facilitate, among other matters, the exchange of prisoners of war. Any ship traveling under a flag of truce was deemed inviolable. A single prisoner of war was enough to earn a flag, and some “prisoners” made a good living voyaging to and fro between the French Caribbean and British mainland colonies. Permits to wear flags of truce were granted by colonial governors, who either
sold them by auction or at a fixed price. Only Virginia paid any respect to the sanctity of the institution—indeed, caused a scandal among other colonies when its governor refused a bribe of four hundred pounds to grant a questionable permit.

  So successful was this trade that basic foodstuffs from New England were cheaper and easier to find in French Haiti than British Jamaica. Faced with a dearth of rations, the Royal Navy elected to enforce the spirit of the law by breaking it. They sailed into Monte Christi, nominally a neutral port in the Spanish part of Hispaniola, and carried away as prizes all the ships that it contained, including a number of colonial vessels. Although the Admiralty court in London later ordered that some owners be compensated, the raid signaled a change in policy: Royal Naval ships took over the flags-of-truce trade, and smugglers had their vessels sunk or confiscated. In Salem alone, in the last three years of the war, over two hundred boats were taken by the British. These measures had the twin consequences of alienating the owners of the ships and the merchants who traded in them, and of causing a shortage of rum in the colonies, thus pushing up the price of this popular fluid.

  There was worse to come after the war had ended. Global domination, and the defense of America, had been an expensive exercise. The wise heads in Parliament decided that the grateful colonists would leap at the chance to contribute via duty on imported goods. To this end, they introduced a Sugar Act in 1764, which lowered the rate of duty on molasses, but raised the standards of enforcement by entrusting them to the Royal Navy. Any vessel of less than fifty tons “loitering” within six miles of the coast was deemed to be smuggling and therefore fair game for British warships. Moreover, if the charge could be made to stick in a British Admiralty court, shares in the value of the vessel and its contents were awarded to the officers and crew of its captor. This final provision was considered by the colonists as an invitation to Royal Navy captains to arrest any boat they came across, on the off chance that it carried contraband and so constituted a serious threat to their maritime trade.