Drink (26 page)

The town became plagued by thieves, and the roads leading into it were overrun with highwaymen. Members of this latter class of bandit were treated as folk heroes by the poor. In the popular fancy they were all capes and coal-black steeds and “Damn your handsome eyes” spoken through the window of a stagecoach with a pistol pointed at the pounding heart of a beautiful debutante. They were also expected to die well if caught and would dress up for their own executions in white satin. The journey from prison to the scaffold was turned into a procession, during which the condemned man would pause for a few drams of
kill-me-quick
²²
at various gin shops en route. Some even managed a swift one on the gallows itself, where the hangman, quite possibly, also would be drunk. On one notorious occasion a drunken executioner tried to hang the priest who was present on the scaffold to give the condemned the last rites.

Highwaymen were famous both high and low and were the inspiration behind the musical
The Beggar’s Opera
(1728) by John Gay, which used a cast of robbers, harlots, and fences as mouthpieces to satirize high society, including the country’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. The play oozes gin, whose use is characterized as a feminine trait. Some women drink it on the sly as a pretended cure for turbulent digestion, others are open in their affection for the fluid and do not use their bowels to justify their drams. The following exchange of greetings, between Peachum, a fence and police informer, and Mrs. Trapes, a middle-aged receiver of stolen goods, illustrates the attitude of the shameless kind:

As the gin craze gathered momentum, the drink itself acquired a feminine identity and became known as
Madame Geneva,
or
Mother Gin.
The sexing can be accounted for by the fact that gin shops were far more unisexual than taverns, alehouses, and other traditional drinking places, and hence people associated gin drinking with the presence of women. However, the true explanation for the feminization of the spirit is more likely to be sardonic. The gin craze coincided with the golden age of English satire. Addison and Steele at
The Spectator,
Arbuthnot, Gay, Dr. Swift, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and many others heaped their abuse on religion, politics, and the human condition. Mother Gin was mother in the sense of a Mama San—the madam of a brothel, a procuress, a deceiver, a female Mephistopheles— but no Gaia.

A year after the first performance of
The Beggar’s Opera,
Parliament decided to take action against gin. While the poor were not expected to be perfect, just submissive, their declining standards of behavior had finally caught the attention of their rulers. Madame Geneva was held to blame. It was she who rendered the inferior sorts unfit for useful labor and service and who drove them “into all manner of vices and wickedness.” She was attacked with the 1729 Gin Act, which restrictedretail sales of gin to licensed premises and set a high price on licenses. These measures were by and large ignored. People still distilled and sold at home, and on street corners, and from under their skirts in the markets. They continued to rob, to prostitute themselves, and to get drunk instead of work. The failure of the ’29 Act was recognized in 1733 when Parliament revisited gin. This time, it took a decidedly liberal attitude toward the problem. There was a grain surplus once again. Taxes on distillation were reduced, and provisions were made for export subsidies. As a sop to those in the grip of a gin panic, various petty restrictions on unlicensed gin sellers were introduced.

The ’33 Act stimulated supply, and Londoners debased themselves with fresh abandon. The press took up the story. Daily and weekly newspapers were proliferating in London—new titles appeared every few weeks. In the main they were slight compositions—two or four pages interspersed with advertisements—which relied upon scandal or sensation to win readers. Gin horror stories were a favorite stock-in-trade. In 1734, for example, the reading public were gripped by the case of Judith Defour, accused of murdering her own child, with the assistance of a gypsy women named Sukey, then pawning its clothes to buy more gin. Her testimony was printed verbatim: “On Sunday night we took the child into the fields and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a ditch. And after that, we went together, and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of Gin.” Moreover, gin drinkers, like 2-Rabbits, were notoriously accident prone, and their misadventures always made good copy. Tales such as that of a housewife who “came home so much intoxicated with Geneva that she fell on the fire, and was burned in so miserable a Manner, that she immediately died and her bowels came out” captivated an increasingly literate London.

The gin dramas in the press generated sympathy as well as thrills. In 1734, Dr. Stephen Hales published a pamphlet entitled
A Friendly admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy, and other distilled spiritous Liquors
. Hales warned his readers that spirits “coagulate and thicken the Blood, [and] also contract and narrow the Blood Vessels,” causing “Obstructions and stoppages in the Liver; whence the Jaundice, Dropsy, and many other fatal Diseases.” His Friendly Admonition was based on observation: Hospitals and graveyards were filling up with gin drinkers. Worse still, teenaged gin moms were breeding sickly infants, who looked “shrivel’d and old as though they had numbered many years.” Not only did the wretched creatures look old, they died young. In 1736 the gutter press found a new infanticide with which to stimulate its readers in the form of Mary Estwick, who came home “quite intoxicated with Gin, sate down before the fire, and it is supposed, had [her] child in her lap. Which fell out of it on the hearth, and the fire catched hold of the child’s clothes and burnt it to death.” Mary, meanwhile slept on without noticing anything was amiss.

In addition to provoking people into fatal errors, gin was discovered to be lethal in its own right. Novices who tried to knock it back like porter sometimes died in their cups. In March 1736, for example,
The London Daily Post
reported the case of Joss the Glazier, who set to drinking half-pints of gin with a bricklayer and a carman “to so great an excess, that Joss the Glazier fell backwards with the eleventh half pint in his hand and died on the spot.” Death by sudden drinking was back in the news. Not since it had perplexed the Greeks and led them to conclude it was caused by Bacchic possession had Europeans been so puzzled by an alcohol-related phenomenon. Even doctors were reluctant to admit that drinking alone could cause death instantaneously. Hitherto, it had been thought to need years to work any harm. However, the evidence of their eyes led people to conclude that alcohol could be deadly in what seemed to them to be small quantities—less than a quart of gin could be enough to kill someone. This realization led to a new way of thinking about alcohol. Strong waters, once believed to be composed of the quintessence, the stuff of heaven itself, were clearly nothing of the sort.

Gin was attacked from a new angle in 1736 when Thomas Wilson, an Anglican clergyman, published
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation.
This made the novel accusation that gin drinkers were bad consumers—they ate less, and they pawned their clothes instead of buying new ones. Indeed, their failure to purchase the produce of landowners and merchants put the rest of society at risk. The bad consumer argument was further advanced by the parliamentarian Sir Joseph Jeckyll, who noted in his pamphlet
The Trial of the Spirits
that gin was causing the English to neglect their beef: “Why, the miserable creatures, in such a situation, rather than purchase the coarser Joynts of Meat, which the Butchers used to sell at a very easy rate . . . repair to the Gin-Shops, upon whose destructive commodities they will freely lay out all they can rap or rend, till the Parish Work-Houses are filled with their poor, starv’d families, Trade and Country depriv’d of their Manufactures and Labors, while the butchers cannot so much as give these Joynts to the common People . . . but are forc’d, either to bury ’em, or to give ’em to the dogs.”

It was evident that a new Gin Act was needed, and in 1736 Parliament voted to clamp down on “strip-me-naked” and its ilk. The act of ’36 introduced new and onerous fines for home distilling and raised the license fee for retailing spirits to the huge sum of fifty pounds. It relied on informers for enforcement. These were to be paid a reward of five pounds—as much as a maid might earn in a year—to reveal the identity of miscreants. It was heralded as the end of mother gin—mock funerals for the wicked old lady were staged in London and various other towns, and obituaries were published, including an “Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of the most Excellent, the most Truly-Beloved, and Universally admired Lady, Madam Gineva.” A similar pamphlet published the same year painted a desolate picture of the once-thriving gin shops, now “hush’d as death” while the “shrieks of desponding matrons” deprived of their morning tipple rent the air in the streets outside.

In the event, the new act had as little effect as its predecessors. Street traders resumed their business and took the alternative penalty of a few months in the workhouse, rather than paying a fine, if caught. Moreover, a certain rebelliousness had crept into gin drinking. The king, George II, was unpopular, ditto the government, which was perceived as being intent on suppressing the poor. Gin drinking became not only a pleasure but also a political act. Crowds in London chanted, “No gin, no king”—in reference to the fact that the king had gone to visit his relatives in Germany when the act became law, and implying that in the absence of gin, they would not welcome him back.

A struggle between rulers and ruled ensued. There was fresh legislation in 1737 (under the cover of an amendment to the Sweets Act), which tightened the penalties for street sellers—if they could not pay their fines they would not only be sent to the workhouse but whipped until bloody before they were discharged. The ’37 Act also made it easier for informers to get their rewards. Informers were a hated species, but the money was good, so many were prepared to risk opprobrium and sell their fellows to the law. For this they were beaten and sometimes killed by gin-drinking mobs. In 1738 another Gin Act appeared, which made it a felony to assault informers, punishable by transportation to the American colonies. The attacks, however, continued, as did the damage attributed to gin. Between 1730 and 1749, 75 percent of all children christened in London died before they reached the age of five, and London parish records from the same period “show twice as many burials as baptisms.”

There followed seven years of mayhem, characterized by the familiar levels of excess, before another Gin Act was contemplated. By 1743, the problem was so acute that pamphleteers were predicting an apocalypse for London if gin drinking wasn’t reined in: An underground army of zombies with the cadaverous flesh thought typical of gin addicts might “pour forth unexpectedly from their gloomy cells, as from the body of the Trojan Horse, with design to lay the city in flames, that they might share in the plunder.”

This time, Parliament was committed to enacting a law that would be obeyed. Lord Lonsdale pointed out during a debate on the matter that the discriminatory nature of prior legislation had made the people “more fond of dram drinking than ever; because they then began to look upon it as an insult upon the rich.” Throughout the course of the gin craze, no restrictions had been imposed or even contemplated on the wines and brandy that the upper classes drank in phenomenal quantities. Why should the common people be victimized for their boozing, when their leaders were heroic drinkers, and not merely of spirits? Sir Robert Walpole, for instance, in one year, “paid over £1,000 to one of his five wine merchants for his vintage clarets and Burgundies, and after some months of entertaining at his country estate, returned to the same wine merchant 540 dozen empty wine bottles”—and this was only a fraction of his household consumption, as most of his wine came in barrels, and much of his time was spent in London. The problem was compounded by an urgent need to raise revenues to pay for a new war in Europe. Some voices in Parliament called for a light, patriotic excise on gin. By all means let the poor drink all they desired, so long as they contributed to the support of the nation’s armies. Both those in favor of a permissive attitude and their opponents who wanted gin banned accused each other of double standards. It would be hypocrisy to let the rich drink without interference, while the poor were denied their kill-me-quick; and equally, encouraging them to drink for Britain was morally inadmissible.

The case against the tax-and-drink approach was summed up by Lord Hervey:

Parliament settled on a compromise—a strict licensing system, with affordable licenses and an excise paid at the still-head. Its aims were to restrict demand with high prices, yet not so high as to encourage black market distillation. It also set a precedent by introducing the concept that the taxation of alcoholic beverages should be on a sliding scale and rise in direct proportion to their strength. The 1743 Gin Act was a qualified success. Taverns and other traditional drinking places could afford the new twenty-shilling licenses, and by 1744, one thousand had been taken out in London and twenty thousand nationwide.