Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (38 page)

THE MIDDLE CLASSES

B
y the middle of the eighteenth century, spirits weren’t the only kind of transformation on offer in London. Those who wanted it could try out a drug far more potent even than gin.

It all started in May 1738, just after the acquittal of Roger Allen, the Thrift Street rioter. On Wednesday 24 May, a young cleric was attending a religious meeting in Aldersgate Street. Listening to Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, at ‘about a quarter before nine’ in the evening, he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed.’ That was all there was to it; in his diary he sounded a bit disappointed there were no angels or trumpets. But 24 May 1738 was the transfiguring day of John Wesley’s life.

Everyone had to hear the good news. In London that autumn Wesley threw himself into his new ministry. He preached in prisons and workhouses. He rode the cart to Tyburn with the condemned. Even that wasn’t enough. On 2 April 1739 ‘at four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking … to about three thousand people.’
Wesley’s fellow ‘enthusiast’, George Whitefield, followed his lead the same month. On 29 April Whitefield preached to 20,000 (by his own estimate) on Kennington Common. Thousands more flocked to hear Wesley at Blackheath and Kennington. On 6 May, at one of Whitefield’s meetings, ‘some supposed there were above 30 or 40,000 people, and near fourscore coaches … and there was … an awful silence among them.’

The evangelists didn’t silence their congregations with dry commentaries on church matters. Theirs was faith distilled into its purest spirit, a heady draught which intoxicated the crowds. Garrick said he would give £1,000 to be able to utter ‘Oh!’ like Mr Wesley. Of William Romaine, another charismatic who began his ministry in 1738, it was said that visitors came to London ‘to see Garrick act and Romaine preach.’
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And the message was as intoxicating as the delivery. Religion was a transfiguring experience. There was more to it than dutiful church attendance. It could alter your whole life.

The establishment hated it, of course. Transformations were exactly what they wanted to avoid. ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth,’ the Duchess of Buckingham exclaimed. ‘This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’
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The establishment was missing the point. Methodism and Madam Geneva may have seemed equally addictive, equally intoxicating, and equally dangerous in their effect on the people (‘Piety as well as gin helps to fill up their leisure moments,’ was one dismissive verdict).
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But religious zealots had one big advantage over gin-drinkers. They may have been insufferable, but they didn’t dodge work, abandon their families or pass out on the pavement. In turning from bottle to Bible, people were taking a step towards responsibility. For some, at least – the thousands who craned on
tiptoe and shushed their neighbours to hear John Wesley preach – conspicuous consumption, drink, gambling and whores were out. A more sober future beckoned.

Religion was only part of it. Sometime in the 1740s, the middle classes came out of their shell. They had always existed, of course, although no one knew quite what to call the third of Londoners who earned something between £50 and £400 a year. There had always been attorneys and wealthy shopkeepers, curates and apothecaries. But the eighteenth-century town opened up a whole range of new opportunities for them. It offered new ways to use what wealth and leisure time they had, new ways to express themselves. By 1750, Londoners could find better places to spend their money than the dram-shop or gambling-table. ‘Every clerk, apprentice, and … waiter,’ Smollett exaggerated, ‘maintains a gelding by himself, or in partnership.’
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They could spend money on their homes. ‘What is an article of necessity in England,’ Grosley noticed on his visit, ‘is mere extravagance in France. The houses in London are all wainscotted with deal; the stairs and the floors are composed of the same materials.’
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An English commentator reckoned that ‘peasants and mechanics … freeholders, tradesmen and manufacturers in middling life, wholesale dealers, [and] merchants … have better conveniences in their houses and … more in quantity of clean, neat furniture, and a greater variety [of] carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc., (things hardly known abroad among persons of such rank) than are to be found in any country of Europe.’
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The middling tradesman saving up for new carpets and curtains was not going to spend his time crashed out at the local dram-shop. From his comfortably furnished home, perhaps in one of the new terraces springing up all over London, he set out to explore a more orderly way of life. One writer in 1752 took the measure of London
on a hot June Sunday. He noticed the gin-drinkers, of course, but other Londoners now caught his eye as well. He saw ‘citizens who have pieces of gardens in the adjacent villages, walking to them with their wives and children, in order to drink tea … after which they load themselves with … roots, salads and other vegetables to bring home to supper.’ Old women fed the ducks in St James’s Park; children thronged the railings in the middle of London Bridge. In the summer sunshine, anyone with a flat roof, ‘especially such as have prospects of the river Thames,’ could be seen ‘taking the advantage of the fineness of the weather, and drinking tea, beer, punch, and smoking tobacco there, till the dusk of the evening.’ On Westminster Bridge he saw ‘hundreds of people, mostly women and children, walking backward and forward … looking at the boats going up and down the river; and sitting on the resting benches to pick up new acquaintance.’
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Indoors, the middle classes hurried to dinner parties, boring each other with ‘a great deal of insignificant discourse among people who are strangers to each other, and have met casually at some friend’s house to dinner, about the fineness or dullness of the weather, beauty of their children, goodness of their husbands, and badness of their several trades and callings.’

The anonymity of the town had been one of its dangers. Now it was being softened by clubs. ‘Bodies of men (known by the name of rural societies)’ were seen on that June Sunday, ‘straggling about the fields, cracking merry jokes, making ludicrous remarks on the places they go to, and settling where to dine, and what to spend at dinner.’ There were picnics on the river, ‘young people … taking spells of the oar to relieve each other, while they refresh themselves with the tongue, ham, bread, butter, wine and punch which they took on board.’ There was sport. The bloodthirsty spectacles of combat and animal-baiting at Clerkenwell were giving way to organised games. The ‘healthful and manly exercise of rowing on the river Thames’
was certainly a change from the brandy-shop. Saussure remarked, in 1728, that ‘the English are very fond of a game they call cricket.’ (‘For this purpose,’ he explained, ‘they go into a large open field, and knock a small ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe this game to you; it is too complicated … Sometimes one county plays against another county.’)
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By the mid-1730s cricket matches were being publicised and the press reported them enthusiastically. On 20 September 1736 the papers announced ‘on Kennington Common, the greatest match at cricket, that has been known for many years, between the gentlemen of Kent and those of Surrey.’ Surrey won by two wickets. Formal rules of cricket arrived in 1744. There were new rules for boxing as well; thuggery was being transformed into noble science. The champion of England, Jack Broughton, opened a boxing academy in the Haymarket in 1743, offering ‘muffles … that will effectively secure [participants] from the inconveniency of black eyes, broken jaws, and bloody noses.’

Suddenly, there was more for middle-class townsfolk to do in their leisure hours than strut along the Strand, aping the languid habits of their superiors. At work, meanwhile, even the hazards of business were starting to be tamed. A 1739 commentator remarked on the ‘box and tradesmen’s clubs which … meet at taverns, inns, coffee and alehouses … whereby … a good correspondence [is] cultivated, for the mutual improvement of their respective business.’
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Being middle class became something to be celebrated for its security, its freedom from ups and downs. ‘The calamities of life,’ Robinson Crusoe’s father advised him, ‘were always shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but … the middle station had the
fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes … The middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of virtues and all kinds of enjoyments … Peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune … Temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; [and] this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it.’
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In a life of temperance, moderation, quietness and health, there was no room for Madam Geneva.

The middle classes were starting to become conscious of their own virtues. There was a growing self-help literature to guide them through their new world. Their dinner parties might be planned from Hannah Glasse’s
Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy
, published in 1747, or
The Family Magazine, Containing Useful Directions in All the Branches of House-keeping and Cookery
, which appeared from 1741. They no longer had to keep referring to those above or below them to define who they were. A new kind of sentimental patriotism emerged around the middle of the century as well. Its appeal was no longer just to duty, but to something emotional, a sense of belonging. Britain was a club which anyone could join, and tub-thumping songs were composed to celebrate membership. Thomas Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’ would be written in 1740; ‘God Save the King’ would become a popular anthem at the time of the 1745 rebellion. In John Brown’s
Estimate of the Manners of the Times
, written in 1757, he would see Britain’s strength as based not only on ‘the national capacity’ and ‘the national spirit of defence’, but on ‘the national spirit of union.’

He saw other new developments as well. One was ‘the spirit of humanity.’ There was a new mood in the air. In February 1751, Hogarth’s
Four Stages of Cruelty
appeared alongside
Gin Lane
and
Beer Street
. Concern for the humane treatment of animals was already becoming more widespread. The Eton tradition of
‘hunting the ram’ (not just hunting it; clubbing it to death) was banned in 1747. Nor was it only animals that were being seen in a new sentimental light; attitudes to children were changing as well. Children’s books started to appear. John Newbury’s
Pretty Little Pocket Book
would be a runaway success in 1742, and many others would follow. Writers cast a sentimental eye on children. One, walking round London at dusk, noticed – as if they had never been there before – children sitting ‘in back-alleys and narrow passages, very busy at their several doors, shelling peas and beans for supper, and making boats, as they call them, with bean shells and deal matches.’
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Tom Jones’ landlady described a little girl nursing her mother: ‘Molly … is but thirteen years old, and yet, in my life, I never saw a better nurse … what is wonderful in a creature so young, she shows all the cheerfulness in the world to her mother; and yet I saw her – I saw the poor child … turn about, and privately wipe the tears from her eyes.’
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Sentiment had arrived. In literature, Swift and Pope had both died during the 1740s, and with them had passed away the harsh wit and vitriol of the Augustan coffee-house. Biting verse satire was replaced by sentimental prose. Middle-class readers of the 1740s sobbed for
Pamela
and wept buckets over
Clarissa
. Even sensible Sophia Western, in Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, couldn’t resist a good novel. ‘“There appears to me a great deal of human nature in it,”’ she protested when her aunt caught her reading
David Simple
, ‘“and in many parts, so much true tenderness and delicacy, that it hath cost me many a tear.” “Ay, and do you love to cry then?” says the aunt. “I love a tender sensation,” answered the niece, “and would pay the price of a tear for it any time.”’
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The world of Moll Flanders – the world of Jonathan Wild and the South Sea Bubble, Madam Geneva’s world – suddenly seemed very far away. The party, or nightmare, of the Age of Risk was coming to an end. If anyone still needed intoxication,
they were as likely to turn to John Wesley’s new religion as to fall into the arms of Madam Geneva. The Gin Craze had been born from an age of highs and lows, opportunities and risks. It reflected the euphoria of boom, the despair of bust. By the middle of the century, though, the middle classes were promoting new virtues of stability and responsibility.

It was only a matter of time before such habits, such fashions in behaviour, should spread further across society. Reformers soon spotted that the key to changing manners wasn’t dragging the cursing poor off to prison; it was persuading them to be more middle class. ‘Household economy,’ one complained, ‘has not the least appearance among these wretched people. Mutual affection and tenderness between husband and wife, the chief comfort and happiness of a family, is turned into brawls, strife, perpetual wranglings and everlasting jars. Parental love for their natural offspring is converted into a cruel neglect and careless disregard.’
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Good housekeeping, marriage and the family, love for children: these were all middle-class virtues, and that was where the future lay. The same writer thought that the poor were not so far gone in vice, ‘but that they may be reclaim’d … if the better sort of people … will but every man begin the work … The generality, the vulgar … will soon follow their example.’
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