Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (39 page)

Signs of change were noted approvingly. The tireless chronicler who wandered round London on a June weekend in 1752 noticed ‘careful old mothers of families, whose pangs and infirmities prevent their taking natural rest, lying in bed, considering how their circumstances are, and what method is best to take for the future … Wives and servant-girls … who live in courts and alleys, where one cock supplies the whole neighbourhood with water, taking the advantage before other people are up, to fill their tubs and pans, with a sufficiency to serve them the ensuing seven days … Poor people that lodge in low-rented houses, going to
each other, and after paying their awkward compliments, borrowing saucepans and stewpans, for the dressing peas, beans, bacon and mackerel for dinner.’ One of Walpole’s agents told him, in 1736, that ‘most of the common people of what rank or denomination soever … are linked together in clubs for the mutual subsistence and support of one another.’
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Though ‘the rabble, or those who compose the mob,’ were ‘still very insolent and abusive’, thought
A Brief Description of London
in 1776, they were ‘much mended in this respect within the last fifty years.’
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Its author even credited them with ‘good nature and humour.’ Baretti, writing in August 1760, found that ‘in the space of ten years, I have observed that the English populace have considerably mended their manners [in their attitude to strangers] and am persuaded that in about twenty years more they will become quite as civil … as the French and Italians.’
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There were sticks as well as carrots to the change in London manners. Most important was the economy. Living standards had been high all through the decades of good harvests and cheap food – all through the gin-drinking years. By the mid-century that boom had come to an end. Real wages had climbed all through the 1740s, but they went into steep decline when food prices rose and the population began growing. The peak probably came sometime around 1743, the year the Gin Craze reached its zenith. During the 1750s, the real wages of London bricklayers, to take one example, fell by almost ten per cent, and there were worse times ahead. One modern index of real wages has spending power in 1760 slumping back past the level of the early 1720s – the years when the Gin Craze, and the panic about gin, both took off in earnest.
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For decades it had been a standard lament about the poor that they would work only until they had enough to live; then they would head off to the dram-shop. If life was getting dearer all through the 1750s, it was hardly surprising
that they would abandon Saint Monday and seek thriftier gods to worship.

It wasn’t just a large sector of the population who were yearning for security and stability. London was changing as well. The city where Madam Geneva had made her home sixty years before had been a chaotic place, the battleground of entrepreneurs and con-men, pick-pockets and whores (or so, at least, it chose to represent itself). By the middle of the century, that image was changing. When Canaletto arrived in 1746, he and his imitators painted London as a city of politeness and civility rather than squalor and danger; Londoners suddenly seemed to look about themselves with new eyes. Public-spirited types were shocked to notice that ‘a city famous for its wealth, commerce, and plenty, and for every other kind of civility and politeness,’ should have streets ‘which abound with such heaps of filth, as a savage would look on with amazement.’
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Back in the 1720s they either hadn’t noticed the filth, or hadn’t known what to do about it. Now they took action. It started with street lighting. A Lighting Act was passed for the City of London in 1736. Spitalfields followed suit two years later, Shoreditch in 1749. Foreign visitors would be amazed by London’s brilliance. ‘In Oxford Street alone,’ Archenholz would exclaim, ‘there are more lights than in all Paris.’
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Lighting wasn’t the only improvement. The Fleet River, symbol of a sordid past, would be covered over in 1747. The Thames was bridged at Westminster, embanked above London Bridge. Public building projects transformed the centre of town. Parliament Street, a new ceremonial approach from St James’s to the Palace of Westminster, was begun in 1738. William Kent’s new Treasury had been completed in 1736; his Horse Guards would follow in 1753.

By the 1750s tracts were appearing thick and fast to condemn the city’s defects – from open cellars and projecting steps to broken pavements and dilapidated houses – and to suggest improvements.
‘A greater degree of true public spirit,’ wrote the MP Charles Gray, one of the members of the 1751 parliamentary committee on crime, ‘seems to be very happily rising among us, and more attention to be paid than formerly to matters upon which the real welfare of the nation depends.’
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There was a growing belief that things could be improved. Corbyn Morris’s
Observations
on London mortality ended with ‘proposals for a better regulation of the police
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of this metropolis.’ His models were the aqueducts and viaducts of ancient Rome. Rome’s monuments, he pointed out, were ‘all built at the public expense for public convenience.’ A generation before, no one had believed either in public expense or public convenience. But a generation before, change itself had been regarded with suspicion. Change belonged to the gamblers, to the speculators and social climbers, to Madam Geneva. Reformers didn’t look forwards; they looked back – back to an old England of social certainties and unchanging order. By the 1750s, that attitude was wearing thin. ‘To rail at the times at large,’ wrote the reformer John Brown in 1757, ‘can serve no good purpose. There never was an age or nation that had not virtues and vices peculiar to itself: And in some respects, perhaps, there is no time nor country delivered down to us in [hi]story, in which a wise man would so much wish to have lived, as in our own.’
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No wise reformer of the 1720s would have chosen to live in his own vicious age; he would have chosen Vergil’s Rome, or the reign of Alfred. But some had started looking for ways to improve the present, rather than dreaming about the past. They had begun to embrace change. They had invented progress.

Captain Thomas Coram had dreamed ever since 1722 of opening a hospital to care for London’s foundling children. Walking to and from the City at night had ‘afforded him frequent occasions of seeing young children exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead,
and sometimes dying.’
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Back in 1722, no one had listened. It wasn’t until 1741 that the Foundling Hospital finally opened its doors in Hatton Garden. It would be the high-profile charity success of the 1740s. It became fashionable to visit the hospital and give your name to a Foundling Hospital child. Handel conducted his first benefit concert in the unconsecrated chapel in May 1749. Many reformers would be involved with it (including many from the campaign against gin). Hogarth donated his own portrait of Coram at the opening of the chapel; Commons Speaker Arthur Onslow gave a prayer book. The chapel would be consecrated with an inaugural sermon by Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester. (Thomas Coram, sadly, would miss out on all this triumph. He fell out with the General Committee in 1742; his wife died; he ran into financial difficulties. He would be remembered at the end of his life sitting in the hospital arcade in a shabby red coat, handing out gingerbread to the children.)

The Foundling Hospital wasn’t just a new institution for London. It was a whole new way of looking at charity. Back in 1709, Atterbury had written that ‘the value of our gift depends not on the success of it.’
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Charity, in his view, was there to benefit giver as much as recipient (‘Our part is to chuse out the most deserving objects … and when that is done, all is done, that lies in our power: the rest must be left to Providence’). But the Foundling Hospital had a specific social purpose, and it would be judged by its results. To achieve them it would bring to the business of charity a new efficiency of organisation and fund-raising. Instead of railing against the institutions of the new age – marketing, subscription, the joint-stock company – it would use them to achieve its ends. There was no coincidence in that. Aristocratic support had been needed to get the project off the ground, but the huge majority of the hospital’s active supporters were untitled, and the biggest group were merchants. By the 1750s a new kind of
reformer was emerging. Jonas Hanway embodied the type. Tireless and professional, grounded in business, he brought to reform an unquenchable thirst for improvement, promoting church, trade and empire through projects from foundlings to fallen women, poor boys to sailors.
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The Foundling Hospital broke ground in another way. Its end was to help that very embodiment of the Age of Risk, the foundling. Foundlings had always been vilified. They overturned the traditional idea that you were defined by your birth and must bear the consequences of it. Without known parents, foundlings had no place in traditional society and were punished for it. They carried their mothers’ sin on their shoulders. Now reformers set out to help them. Many foundations followed the Foundling Hospital’s lead. The Lock Hospital for women with sexually transmitted diseases opened in 1746, and two smallpox hospitals in the same year. The Lying-in Hospital for Poor Married Women would open in Covent Garden in 1749, and Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for Unmarried Mothers in 1752. Many of them broke taboos, as the Foundling Hospital did. The Magdalen Hospital, opened in 1758, aimed to reclaim prostitutes. It wasn’t long since the fallen woman had been held up as the cause of the age’s vices, not as its victim.

Through such institutions, the risks of the age were being tamed. Its villains – whores, foundlings and bankrupts – started to attract society’s pity as well as its fear and loathing; they were offered help rather than curses. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. But a new mood emerged in the middle of the century, one which promoted stability above risk, public spirit over private gain. Out of doors, reformers worked busily to improve the city; indoors, families were discovering the docile pleasures of middle-class life. There were
no gin-drinkers in the paintings of Canaletto. The frenetic world which had created Madam Geneva was passing. ‘Were the same persons who made a full tour of England thirty years ago,’ the
Gentleman’s Magazine
wrote in 1754, ‘to make a fresh one now they would find themselves in a land of enchantment. England is no more like to what England was than it resembles Borneo or Madagascar.’
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The reactionaries of the Societies for Reformation of Manners had turned into the reformers of the 1750s, men like Jonas Hanway, busily sending poor boys off to a life at sea, or Henry Fielding’s half-brother John, blind magistrate of Bow Street, who campaigned tirelessly to improve London’s law and order. It was in the gin years that the nineteenth-century reform movement had its roots. Vigorous Christians started campaigns; writers and artists joined the chorus (in the 1750s it would be Hogarth and Henry Fielding; eighty years later, Dickens and Cruikshank); the end result was rational legislation which extinguished the problem and improved the lot of the poor.

Even at the time, the tight-knit reform lobby claimed the 1751 Gin Act as its own. In later years they would claim the whole victory over gin. For Dorothy George, writing in the liberal reform tradition in the 1930s, it was ‘a turning point in the social history of London.’
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Before the 1751 Act, vice and misery had roved unchecked among the poor; afterwards, an orderly succession of campaigns and reforms had steadily improved their lot. The 1751 Gin Act was the first step on a road which led onwards and upwards towards clean drinking-water, pensions and the Welfare State. (Liberal historians would routinely exaggerate the figures for early eighteenth-century spirits production, usually by adding the quantities of low wines produced to the spirits that were made from them.) For subsequent reformers, the battle against
gin seemed to provide a blueprint for how society could be improved.

It wasn’t quite like that at the time. Reformers in the mid-eighteenth century had wanted Madam Geneva dead, not tamed; they had done their best to drive her out of town. Henry Fielding could show benevolent compassion on every page of his novels (
Tom Jones
, after all, was
The History of … a Foundling
), but when it came to gin he was a zealot. Isaac Maddox could extend sympathy to foundlings but not to gin-drinkers. John Fielding could be pragmatic about most fallen women, but not about Madam Geneva.

There was something about her that still stuck in their throats. Back in 1743, all rational argument supported a policy of pragmatism and demonstrated that prohibition had failed, but for the bishops compromise was still too hard to swallow. The stench of the alchemist’s workshop still clung to Madam Geneva. Reformers couldn’t rid themselves of the idea that the distiller’s alembic performed an evil magic, that it was unnatural, an insult to God. Somewhere at the back of their minds they still saw witches burning at the stake.

So reformers were the first to cheer when, in 1757, the government suddenly did exactly what they had wanted all along. They banned all distilling from grain and malt. For the first time in seventy years, the fires went out on the London distilling industry. The magic potion stopped dripping from the still-heads.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN