Drink (27 page)

This hopeful start was accompanied by encouraging signs that other forces were making headway against the sort of self-destructive spirit drinking that characterized British slums. From 1743 onward, John Wesley and a number of fellow-minded preachers who assumed the name of
Methodists
set out on a mission to convert and reform the urban poor. They found a sizable audience amid the disenfranchised. Wesley attracted crowds of thirty thousand people, which he addressed with no louder instrument than his voice. The crowds were silent and attentive. One of his early sermons,
The Use of Money
(1743), singled out gin selling as a cause of sin: “We may not sell any thing which tends to impair health. Such is eminently all that liquid fire, commonly called drams, or spirituous liquors. It is true these may have a place in medicine. . . . Therefore such as prepare and sell them only for this end, may keep their conscience clear. . . . But all who sell them in the common way, to any that will buy, are
poisoners-general
. They murder His Majesty’s subjects by wholesale, neither does their eye pity or spare.
They drive them to hell like sheep
.”

Converts to Methodism were expected to steer clear of drinking spirits, unless for medical reasons, as well as from making and selling them. They subscribed to rules that were similar in principle to the articles of the pirates, insofar as they were voluntary restrictions on conduct, and their rules said no to gin:

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

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 its 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.