Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (35 page)

And among the causes of the crime wave, Henry Fielding found one that deserved special attention. A whole section of the pamphlet was dedicated to drunkenness.

He didn’t just mean booze in general. ‘The drunkenness I here intend,’ he wrote, ‘is that acquired by the strongest intoxicating liquors, and particularly by that poison called gin.’ Henry Fielding saw them dragged into his courtroom at Bow Street: brawlers picked up in doorways and down-and-outs who could hardly walk, prostitutes slurring insults at the bench. ‘Wretches are often brought before me,’ he related, ‘charged with theft and robbery, whom I am forced to confine before they are in a condition to be examined; and when they have afterwards become sober, I have plainly perceived … that the Gin alone was the cause of the transgression.’

Gin, Henry Fielding had ‘great reason to think,’ was ‘the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis. Many of these wretches there are who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours: the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too.’ Gin corroded all the bonds of normal life; it destroyed families; it ate into society. And Henry Fielding’s vision of the future could hardly have been more stark. ‘Should the drinking of this poison be continued in its present height during the next twenty years,’ he warned, ‘there will be by that time few of the common people left to drink it.’

Maybe Henry Fielding was breaking new ground in uncovering for Londoners the darker side of their town. But when it came to solutions, he fell back on all the old clichés of reform. Luxury was the root of all evil; the poor turned to gambling and drink because they were too well-off. Fielding targeted masquerades and gaming-houses, social climbing, conspicuous consumption. The former playwright even attacked the vice of theatres. His fears were the fears of Sir John Gonson. ‘What must become of the infant who is conceived in Gin,’ he asked, ‘with the poisonous distillations of which it is nourished both in the womb and at the
breast? Are these wretched infants … to become our future sailors, and our future grenadiers? … Doth not this polluted source, instead of producing servants for the husbandman or artificer, instead of providing recruits for the sea or the field, promise only to fill almshouses and hospitals, and to infect the streets with stench and diseases?’ The rich were let off the hook (‘I am not here to satirise the great, among who luxury is probably rather a moral than a political evil’). And when it came to solutions for the gin problem, there would be neither compromise nor pragmatism. Henry Fielding stood four-square with the zealots. Calling for a return to prohibition, he recommended Thomas Wilson’s tract from 1736. ‘Nor will anything less than absolute deletion serve on the present occasion,’ he insisted. ‘It is not making men pay £50 or £500 for a licence to poison; nor enlarging the quantity from two gallons to ten, which will extirpate so stubborn an evil.’

There were good reasons why Henry Fielding should take a hard line on gin and crime. It wasn’t just the horrors he lived with as a magistrate. He was keeping hardline company as well. In 1744, the year after repeal of the Gin Act, Henry Fielding had moved into Old Boswell Court, where his neighbour was Thomas Lane, member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and author of the Middlesex magistrates’ report of 1736. Lane was now Chair of Middlesex Sessions. When Henry Fielding became Chair in Westminster, in 1749, the two men had every opportunity to discuss the scourge of the London slums.

It might have been through his neighbour that Henry Fielding met another old enemy of Madam Geneva. On 13 December 1750, he had dinner with Thomas Wilson.

In his diary, Thomas Wilson recorded that the two men ‘talked over the affair of vice and immorality.’ The ‘3 great sources of our present enormities about this city,’ they decided, were ‘Gin, gaming and the infinite number of places of diversion which
ruin the Middling Tradesman.’ They talked over the problems of dealing with Madam Geneva. ‘As for gin,’ Thomas Wilson noted, ‘the government will never, ’tis feared, prohibit it in earnest while it brings in so prodigious a revenue, upwards of £200,000 a year.’ What they had to do was to link gin with the other problems of the time. And that was where the
Inquiry
came in. Fielding, Wilson noted excitedly, ‘thinks he has brought [it] into a system, and when it is called for by our Great Men will be ready for them. In the meantime he will publish a little pamphlet to introduce it.’

The zealots were back in action again, and prohibition was back on the agenda. With Thomas Wilson taking an interest, the campaign would be as skilfully co-ordinated as ever. After that evening with Henry Fielding, Wilson ‘wrote an account of the conversation to the Bishop of Worcester … who is going to print his excellent … sermon preached last year at St Bride’s with an appendix relating to Gin etc.’ (‘Dr Hales,’ he added, ‘Myself, and Mr Tucker of Bristol to be assisting in this.’) The Bishop of Worcester was Isaac Maddox, a member of the SPCK since 1736. It was Isaac Maddox who had reignited the gin campaign the year before with an Easter Day sermon in which he unburdened himself of all the frustration and anger he had felt since the afternoon in 1743 when he sat in the House of Lords and watched the ministry sign its pact with the devil. For Isaac Maddox, pragmatism had always been a betrayal of principle. ‘To say, “What can be done? Alas, the people
will
have this liquid poison,”’ he proclaimed in his sermon, ‘is one of the most dreadful and most fatal declarations that can possibly be made … It is contrary to the fundamental principles upon which communities subsist.’
¹⁴

Thomas Wilson had been in the congregation that day and thought it ‘an admirable sermon.’
¹⁵
Just a fortnight after Fielding’s
Inquiry
came out, its text was published as
The Expediency of Preventative Wisdom
, with a dedication in the form of a letter about
spirits to the Lord Mayor. It was even arranged that a copy should be sent to every member of the Court of Common Council.
¹⁶
The strategy was to tie gin-drinking in with the crime wave. ‘I appeal … to your Lordship,’ Isaac Maddox wrote, ‘whether by far the greatest part of all the atrocious crimes that come in judgement before you … be not committed by persons … enraged by these inflammatory spirits; whether the criminals themselves … do not bear in their countenance, and their whole manner and appearance, the plainest and most shocking proofs that their blood is enflamed by the habitual drinking of gin.’

To push the new campaign against gin still further, those twisted countenances were about to be brought vividly to life before the eyes of Londoners. Henry Fielding was a close friend of William Hogarth, and just a month after his own
Inquiry
was published, Hogarth joined the attack on gin. His contribution took the form of a pair of satirical prints. The first was called
Beer Street
, the second,
Gin Lane
.

Gin Lane
was set in the heart of St Giles’s. In the background was the spire of St George’s, Bloomsbury. Hawksmoor’s church may have symbolised London’s elegance, but in its shadow was an urban hell. ‘Nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin are to be seen,’ Hogarth recorded in his
Autobiographical Notes
. ‘Distress even to madness and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but pawnbrokers and the gin-shop.’ Behind the woman slumped on the steps, drunkards brawled and ruined buildings decayed; children made themselves senseless with the ubiquitous drug. Above a cellar door was engraved the familiar sign, ‘Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for twopence, Clean straw for nothing.’ Housewives pawned their cooking pots for gin; workmen handed over the tools of their trade. A man gnawed on one end of a bone and a dog on the other. A cook carried a baby impaled on a stick. High up in a ruined house, a bankrupt hanged himself from a beam. Outside
the shop of Kilman, the distiller, a mother tipped gin down her baby’s throat. The only prosperous house in the alley belonged to the undertaker.

It wasn’t High Art, and it wasn’t photo-journalism.
Gin Lane
and its companion were polemic. Together they were a tract in pictures instead of words. ‘Neither great correctness of drawing or fine engraving were at all necessary,’ Hogarth wrote, ‘but on the contrary would set the price of them out of the reach of those for whom they were chiefly intended.’
¹⁷
Hogarth had always had an interest in reform. Back in 1729 he had drawn James Oglethorpe’s Prisons Committee investigating the horrors of the Fleet. There was a special interest there; Hogarth’s own father had been in a debtors’ prison. And he might have carried a personal grudge against Madam Geneva as well. His mother had died ‘of a fright’ in June 1735 after a fire started in a brandy-shop in Cecil Court.
¹⁸

The point of
Gin Lane
wasn’t just to shock. Like Henry Fielding in his
Inquiry
, like the reformers of the 1730s, Hogarth was attacking all the evils of the age. In his composition, he drew St George’s church spire lowest in a trinity of symbols. Above it came the crown, represented by the statue of George I, and highest of all a pawnbroker’s sign. In the new world of early eighteenth-century London, all proper values had been inverted. Religion was debased below the power of the court. Money – in the form of credit – ruled over everything. When he turned to
Beer Street
, the proper order of things was restored. In Beer Street, the crucifix on a church spire rose above a decorous royal standard flying for the King’s birthday. Far, far below came a drooping pawnbroker’s sign. In Beer Street, things were as they should be. ‘
Beer Street
,’ as Hogarth recalled, ‘was given as a contrast, w[h]ere the invigorating liquor is recommend[ed] in order [to] drive the other out of vogue. Here all is joyous and thriving[.] Industry and jollity go hand in hand[;] the pawnbroker in this happy place is the only house going to
ruin.’
¹⁹
Buildings were going up, not down. A healthy blacksmith brandished a leg of lamb (in the first version, it had been a terrified Frenchman). In Beer Street, as William Hogarth drew it, the only thin man was the artist.

Hogarth’s prints, Henry Fielding’s tract and Isaac Maddox’s sermon had all been timed to follow the start of the 1751 parliamentary session on 17 January. Other attacks followed. On 12 March the reformer Corbyn Morris published a detailed study of the London death rate. It focused on the enormous deficit between births and deaths in London – the city’s population only remained stable because of the immigrants flooding in from outside. He blamed the deficit in particular on ‘the enormous use of spirituous liquors.’
^20
*
The birth rate had been dropping (according to the Bills of Mortality) since the early 1720s – just when the authorities had taken notice of gin. Since then, ‘as [gin] consumption hath been constantly increasing … the amount of the births hath likewise been continually diminishing.’ As for the death rate, ‘inquire from the several hospitals in this city,’ Corbyn Morris suggested, ‘whether any increase of patients, and of what sort, are daily brought under their care? They will all declare, increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from the effects of spirituous liquors.’

Meanwhile, another reformer, Josiah Tucker of Bristol, set about linking gin-drinking to the decline of the economy. Josiah Tucker had been sent Thomas Wilson’s memo of his conversation with Henry Fielding, and his argument followed the line Wilson had taken fifteen years before in
Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation
. His results were even more startling. Every year, Josiah Tucker concluded after pages of calculations, Madam Geneva cost
the economy three million, nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand, six hundred and nineteen pounds, and eleven pence halfpenny.
²¹
(The people of Bristol didn’t thank him for this insight. In April that year, as the
Gentleman’s Magazine
recorded, they ‘patrolled the streets with several effigies, one of which was … designed for the Rev Mr Tucker, rector of St Stephen, who had wrote … a pamphlet on the pernicious use of spirituous liquors.’ The effigies were later ‘committed to the flames with all the marks of detestation and contempt.’
²²
)

It all added up to a powerful attack on Madam Geneva. The tracts of 1751 brought a new kind of professionalism to the reform camp. As Josiah Tucker put it, they went beyond ‘pathetical description of the miseries and destructive consequences occasioned by spirituous liquors.’ The leading magistrate in Westminster had blamed Madam Geneva for the crime wave. A detailed analysis of the death rate had pinned London’s mortality on her. When trade was subjected to careful scrutiny, it appeared that gin was crippling the economy as well. And up in his pulpit, the Bishop of Worcester had described in graphic detail the damage gin-drinking was doing to the nation’s moral balance sheet.

Once again, Madam Geneva was the talk of the town. ‘The fatal and destructive effects of the excessive use of spirituous liquors, especially Gin,’ noted a letter in the
London Magazine
, ‘[are] at present a general subject of conversation.’
²³
Henry Fielding’s
Inquiry
attracted widespread publicity, with long extracts published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
and
London Magazine
. The
Monthly Review
thought that if Fielding had ‘been heretofore admired for his wit and humour, he now merits equal applause as a good magistrate, a useful and active member and a true friend to his country.’ Newspapers headlined the more shocking statistics. Since 1725, 84,000 children had died as result of gin-drinking. Spirit revenues in the 1740s had been more than £100,000 a year higher than
in the previous decade. By now they were said to be running – licences, low wines and all – at £676,125 a year. ‘According to a list delivered in of private gin-shops,’ gasped the
Whitehall Evening Post
, ‘on the best calculation, they amount to upwards of 17,000 in the Bills of Mortality.’
²⁴
The temperature was starting to rise. ‘O my unhappy country!’ wailed a ‘Gentleman in the Country’. ‘What ruin must come upon thee if thou dost not quickly wake from the luxurious dream of pleasure, which locks up thy sense … Who, without grief, can behold England … laid waste by gin, and hastening fast to desolation and ruin?’
²⁵
Read’s Weekly Journal
drafted the first public health warning: