Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (34 page)

Horace Walpole reported ‘showers of sermons and exhortations.’ ‘The churches,’ Smollett later remembered, ‘were crowded with penitent sinners: the sons of riot and profligacy were overawed into sobriety and decorum. The streets no longer resounded with execrations, or the noise of brutal licentiousness; and the hand of charity was liberally opened.’
¹⁹
The final cataclysm was predicted for 8 April. When the Day of Judgement came, the streets out of town were crammed with carts and carriages as Londoners hurried to escape. ‘In after ages,’ Smollett recalled, ‘it will hardly be believed, that on the evening of the eighth day of April, the open fields, that skirt the metropolis, were filled with incredible numbers of people assembled in chairs, in chaises, and coaches, as well as on foot, who waited in the most fearful suspense until morning.’

They all knew what they had done to deserve this doom.
Thomas Sherlock, now Bishop of London, had written his diocese a letter to tell them. ‘You never read so imprudent, so absurd a piece,’ complained the sceptical Horace Walpole. ‘The earthquake which has done no hurt, in a country where no earthquakes ever did any, is sent, according to the Bishop, to punish bawdy books, gaming, drinking etc.’
²⁰
It sold 10,000 copies in two days. For Thomas Sherlock there was no doubt that the city was being warned. ‘It will be a blindness wilful and inexcusable,’ he told Londoners, ‘not to apply to ourselves this strong summons, from God, to repentance.’
²¹
Among the sins of the town, he stressed ‘the lewdness and debauchery that prevail amongst the lowest people, which keeps them idle, poor and miserable, and renders them incapable of getting an honest livelihood for themselves and their families.’

London contained too many beggars, buggers, boozers and fornicators. The town was being called to account. Madam Geneva was back in the frame again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GIN LANE

F
or the poor of St Giles’s, of course, for apprentices and journeymen, whores and market-women, for landlords and porters and watermen and chandlers, she had never been away.

One writer who cast his eye over London in 1752 described a world where gin-drinking was part of everyday life. In the small hours he watched ‘common whores telling their lamentable cases to watchmen on their stands, and treating them with Geneva and tobacco.’ At three in the morning the gin-shops were still full. At six, as the town woke up, ‘servant women in public houses, who have just got up, [run] about with their stockings about their legs, caps and petticoat half off, drinking of Gin, taking snuff … and playing with fellows who have been drinking, swearing, and playing at cards all the past night.’ By seven there were ‘poor devils of women, with empty bellies, naked backs, and heads intoxicated with Geneva, standing and gossiping with each other in the street.’ All day long Londoners drank, and at the end of the day, they ‘shut up their stalls, and joyfully retire[d] to the Geneva-shop.’
¹

Gin-drinking still produced its share of tragedies. ‘At a Christening at Beddington in Surrey,’ reported the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1748, ‘the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undressed the child, instead of laying it in the cradle she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examined before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood.’

Alcohol abuse was endemic in prisons. Middlesex magistrates in 1741 investigated the shocking rate of deaths in custody and found that some prisoners spent their whole allowance on gin. ‘There have been no less than thirty gin-shops at one time in the King’s Bench,’ a reformer reported some time later, ‘and I have been credibly informed by very attentive observers, that upwards of … 120 gallons of gin, which they call by various names, as Vinegar, Gossip, Crank, Mexico, Sky-blue etc. [were] sold weekly.’
²

Nor was it only poor men and women who drank. The bookseller James Lackington had painful memories of his alcoholic father in 1750. ‘As soon as he found he was more at ease in his circumstances,’ he remembered, ‘he contracted a fatal habit of drinking, and of course his business was neglected; so that after several fruitless attempts of my grandfather to keep him in trade, he was … reduced to his old state of a journeyman shoemaker.’
³
Even forty years later Lackington couldn’t hide his bitterness. ‘To our mother we are indebted for everything,’ he wrote. ‘Neither myself, my brother or sisters are indebted to a father scarcely for anything that can endear his memory, or cause us to reflect on him with pleasure.’

It was still quite normal to drink at work. ‘Twenty years ago,’ Francis Place would recall, ‘few tailor shops were without a bottle of gin: the men drank as they liked: one kept the score, and the publican came at certain times to replenish the gin bottle.’
⁴
And in the terrible conditions of the slums, gin was the only
comforter. Holborn and St Giles’s were still a world of migrant labourers, of the destitute and hopeless and sick. Holborn’s High Constable described the filthy dosshouses of St Giles’s, ‘set apart for the reception of idle persons and vagabonds, who have their lodgings there for twopence a night … In these beds, several of which are in the same room, men and women, often strangers to each other, lie promiscuously; the price of a double bed being no more than threepence, as an encouragement to them to lie together; but as these places are thus adapted to whoredom, so they are no less provided for drunkenness, gin being sold in them all at a penny a quartern.’
⁵

This was where Madam Geneva had put down her deepest roots, in the tangled alleys off Holborn, in digs behind Smithfield market. It was the London which most Londoners avoided, the other side of the coin, the underworld hidden away behind the grand squares and glittering shop-fronts.

But in 1751, at the height of the crime panic, this world would be opened to the shocked gaze of Londoners by a new witness. He described an afternoon in Shoreditch where the constables raided two small houses and counted seventy people living in them. When the houses’ inmates were told to turn out their pockets, they were found to have less than a shilling between them. He described a world where normal life seemed to have been suspended, where people lived in ‘excessive misery … oppressed with want, and sunk in every species of debauchery.’

The writer was the new senior magistrate in Westminster. His name was Henry Fielding.

Back in 1736, Henry Fielding had lampooned prohibition in shows at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. But the Stage Licensing Act had followed a year later, and that had been the end of his career as a playwright. Fielding never saved a penny from hits
like
Pasquin
. By the late 1740s he was broke and ill, disappointed, nearing the end of his life. He had had a success with his novel
Joseph Andrews
, but the legal career he had resumed when the theatres closed down had never prospered. He was always in debt. In 1744 his adored wife, Charlotte, had died. Only old friends had pulled him through. At the Bedford Arms, just round the corner from Bow Street, he ran a card game with William Hogarth and his blind half-brother, John. In that company, Fielding could still be ‘a very merry fellow indeed,’
⁶
the landlord remembered. But his health was failing. He was paying the price for a youth spent in the coffee-houses and theatres, too much drink and too much good food. ‘Fielding continues to be visited for his sins,’ reported the young poet Edward More after a visit in late 1749, ‘so as to be wheeled about from room to room … His disorder is the gout and intemperance the cause.’ Another visitor found him ‘a poor, emaciated, wornout rake.’
⁷

His friends came to the rescue. Henry Fielding had always been feared as a political writer and he had been a good servant to the opposition (there had been only one major falling-out, in 1741). When Carteret fell, in 1744, Fielding’s friends and patrons, Lyttelton and Bedford, came into the government; the next year he established his loyalty with searing attacks on the Jacobite rebellion in
The True Patriot
and
The Jacobite’s Journal
. In 1748 he finally received his reward. He was made a magistrate in Westminster.

It was Thomas De Veil’s old role as ‘court justice’. In 1740 De Veil had moved to a house on the west side of Bow Street. Another magistrate, Thomas Burdus, had moved in after De Veil’s death in 1746, but two years later it was empty again. To the town, the sight of Henry Fielding installed as principal Westminster magistrate was the best joke of the year. It was hard to say which was better value: the clown of the Little Theatre transformed into pillar of the establishment, the scourge of ministerial corruption working as a
trading justice, or the chair-bound old rake sorting out the vices of the town. The comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote, then doing shows at the Little Theatre, cast Fielding, forever unkempt, as ‘a dirty fellow, in shabby black cloths, a flux’d tye-wig, and a quid of tobacco in his jaws.’
⁸
A satirical puppet show in Panton Street sent him up mercilessly. ‘A heavier load of scandal hath been cast upon me,’ Fielding sighed, ‘than I believe ever fell to the share of any single man.’ To the heartless wits of London, there was poetic justice in that. In his days as a hilarious young man about town, Henry Fielding had never pulled a punch on anyone.

Quite apart from all the ribbing he had to put up with, being a Westminster magistrate was no easier now than it had been in Thomas De Veil’s day, particularly for a sick man in a wheelchair, particularly during a crime wave. ‘I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment,’ wrote Fielding’s cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘to be one of the staff officers that conduct nocturnal weddings.’
⁹
James Boswell would visit the Bow Street courtroom a decade later and find it crowded with ‘whores and chairmen, and greasy blackguards of all denominations.’
¹⁰
There was never any let-up in the work. ‘Upwards of fifty criminals were committed last week to prison by Justice Fielding,’ reported the
Whitehall Evening Post
in January 1751, ‘many of whom were for capital offences, and seven for street-robberies.’
¹¹
Fielding’s life would be threatened in January 1753 by a gang he had broken up. And all day long he was surrounded by the outcasts of the slums and the dregs of Newgate. In April 1750, defendants who had been held in the squalid prison brought ‘jail fever’ – typhus – to the courtroom at the City Quarter Sessions. The Lord Mayor would die, along with two judges, an alderman, and a number of court officials and lawyers. That was why most gentlemen refused to serve on the London bench.

But Henry Fielding’s finances were in dire need of repair. The
Duke of Bedford told him ‘that he could not say that acting as a principal justice of the peace in Westminster was on all accounts very desirable, but all the world knew it was a very lucrative office.’
¹²
Lucrative for some; Henry Fielding couldn’t even bring himself to profit out of the post. After leaving England for the last time, he wrote that ‘by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about £500 a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than £300; a considerable proportion of which remained with my clerk.’
¹³

And his timing couldn’t have been worse. Henry Fielding took his oaths as a Westminster magistrate in October 1748, and in May 1749 he was elected Chair of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. The soldiers were coming home. The crime wave was just gathering pace.

By 1750 it was in full flood; God was sending monthly earthquakes; the town was in panic. Henry Fielding wasn’t only court justice by then; he was a celebrated novelist –
Tom Jones
had been published in winter 1749. It was hardly surprising that, maybe prompted by friends in the ministry, he should pick up his pen to address the troubles overwhelming London. His new tract, published in January 1751, was dedicated to the Lord Chancellor, and he called it
An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
. From his vantage-point in Bow Street, Henry Fielding knew more about crime than most of the armchair pamphleteers who pontificated about law and order that year. He looked at crime and he looked at the causes of crime. His tract ranged widely over the Poor Laws, pardons, executions and every aspect of the criminal justice system.