Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

"Gin as a neat spirit, very much so. Gin and tonic as a cocktail is slightly different in that it has its roots in the colonial era, when they were mixing gin with quinine for the troops. But yes, the irony is that gin and oysters was the poor man’s dish. Like pie and ale shops, they would have gin shops that would also serve up oysters because it was considered poor people’s food. “ What people don’t really talk about with ‘Gin Lane’—this illustration of a debauched, broken society—is the fact that it was commissioned by the beer industry.” What Jessica’s book does really well is show that the gin craze wasn’t just about this sudden attraction to cheap spirit. It was about policing what the poor drank so that the gentry weren’t affected by it and keeping that debauchery away from the upper class. It wasn’t that they actually cared, they just didn’t want to see it on their doorstep. Yes. The Hogarth print is from 1751. Jessica presents the lead up to it. The gin craze is essentially over by the time that this famous depiction comes along. What people don’t really talk about with ‘Gin Lane’—this illustration of a debauched, broken society—is the fact that it was commissioned by the beer industry. It was part of a twin set: ‘Gin Lane’ and ‘Beer Street’. In ‘Beer Street’ there’s prosperous industry and everyone’s getting along, the streets are clean and everyone is looking a bit portly and well-fed. Whereas ‘Gin Lane’ has a baby being skewered in the corner. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It was propaganda. That’s not to say it wasn’t true at the time but it was about fear-mongering around this spirit so that it would shock the gentry of society into acting in favour of, basically, the beer breweries and farmers that supplied the breweries. Certainly in East London, one in four doors would have had some form of gin still. There were patches. In Whitechapel, and Holborn to a certain extent, and around Seven Dials, there would have been quite a lot. And I suppose around St Paul’s, going east. You can still see it in the street names. In Camden, there’s Juniper Crescent. So there are remnants in today’s London—even though there’s no hawker on the side of the street flinging gin at you as you walk past. Yes. It became incredibly cheap through various different acts of legislation. It didn’t happen overnight—it happened over 100 years. At the time, they thought of it as a way of raising money through taxes. They felt that by legislating it in specific ways, they could raise money for the war coffers against the French. So it developed and grew. The thirst developed not just through a natural thirst for it, but a flood in the market of widely available, relatively cheap, booze. I’ve never really seen any evidence to say that it was cheaper than beer, which was widely commented on at the time. Having said that, it was probably almost as cheap. “ People were literally drinking pints of gin because they thought that was okay and that’s how you drink alcohol, isn’t it?” As she explains very well in the book, even in the first couple of years, people just didn’t know how to deal with it. People were literally drinking pints of gin because they thought that was okay and that’s how you drink alcohol, isn’t it? And then falling over dead. It was much more akin to a crack cocaine epidemic than a drinking epidemic. People were being excused for crimes. I think one lady was excused for killing her husband and throwing him down the stairs because she had been made so senselessly drunk that it therefore incapacitated her ability to judge what was right and wrong. Ridiculous crimes were being attributed to being so drunk. It was an amazing time of discovery, not just of alcohol but the effects of alcohol in a pre-police society. There were no police and the only way that society was kept together was by everyone trying to force people into thinking that they had a very set class and were not allowed to move out of that. That was what got the gentry so upset—because if people don’t know their place, then we might get challenged. Jessica’s book is extremely well-researched. She articulates all these points and really delves into the facts of the matter. And, also, the human element. You hear these amazing statistics—of the birth-rate being lower than the death rate but also the human stories of these outrageous acts that were going on at the time. Some of them are senseless and some of them are just unbelievably shocking. The one depicted in ‘Gin Lane’ was an allusion to ‘mother’s ruin’ and Judith Dufour. She worked as a seamstress in one of the washhouses. She went out on a lunch break with her child, killed it, took his clothes, and sold them in order to buy gin. She then came back blind drunk to work later that evening. These human stories wouldn’t have emerged without Jessica’s research. Absolutely. She writes well and the best thing about it is that she doesn’t let the research or the academic side get in the way of the story. It clearly shows the references—if you want to look something up, you can—and there’s nice annexing and indexing. But it’s narrative-driven, as opposed to being just academic, although it is an academic project. She certainly alludes to it. There are the facts of the matter, who’s being impacted—and then there is who’s legislating against it. Those are two completely separate things. There’s a huge disconnect in understanding, a lot of the time. That’s probably the most potent of the parallels that she implies. I’ve seen her give a talk about this separately—today’s society versus theirs with specific claims. I think, in the book, she’s a little bit more generalistic in drawing those parallels."