MADAM WHO RULED THE ROOST

The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The 18th-Century Gin Craze by
Patrick Dillon
Review 354pp £16.99 (£14.99)
Reviewed by Frank Kermode

To establish a personal connection with the 18th-century gin trade, you
have only to look at the label of your own supply: Beefeater, Booth,
Gordon, Tanqueray. All descend from the first companies of distillers who,
having grown very rich on gin, understandably and on the whole successfully
resisted attempts to limit its consumption.

Distilling had its origin in alchemy. Eventually it was discovered that you
could add flavours to the raw spirit and make it drinkable. Its early use
was primarily medicinal, but from about the time of the Restoration one
drank it for fun, if that is the word. The English had acquired a Dutch
king who encouraged the recreational use of gin as distilled, from 1572 on,
by his compatriot Bols. Compounding the spirit with, say, juniper berries
(or aniseed, though that later became very un-English) provided a beverage
desirable in itself and also an economic benefit, since it was distilled
from the produce of native agriculture rather than from the grape. Later
the government enthusiastically supported English farmers by banning the
import of brandy, but smuggling made it available to those who could afford
it - which was one reason gin was the drink of the poor and brandy that of
the rich.

Patrick Dillon has researched the history of the 18th-century gin craze in
admirable detail. His material is serious history but his manner is rather
slangy, and his tedious insistence on personifying gin as Madam Geneva is
enough to drive one to drink. At the height of the craze London, in any
case not a salubrious city, was full of back-street dram shops and pedlars
selling pennyworths. Illicit stills competed with the big distillers - in
1726 there were 1,500 stills in London and 6,287 places where gin was sold,
much of it adulterated with turpentine, alum and sulphuric acid. You could
even leave out the juniper juice, because among the desperate (congregated
mostly in Holborn and St Giles), raw hooch was perfectly acceptable, though
many died of it. It was the opium of the people before opium itself took on
that role in the next century. It was forced on babies. Women took to it,
and drunken women were thought especially disgusting. Workmen sold the
tools of their trade for gin. Crime and suicide rates increased, and the
birthrate fell.

In the end the government, though anxious about the effect on the tax
receipts, had to do something about "the infection of gin drinking". It
required premises to be licensed, and taxed the retailers (but not the big
distillers) ferociously. Large fines disappeared into the pockets of
magistrates. Bodies such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge employed large numbers of informers, who by 1725 had achieved
about 9,000 prosecutions. The populace deplored their trade and beat them
up as and when they could, but the racket continued, run by bosses who sat
safely back and took their cut.

In the end, the opposition succeeded in persuading a reluctant government
to ban the sale of gin altogether, and seven years of prohibition followed.
They were marked by riots, some fomented by Jacobite dissidents, and by the
growth of organised crime and bootlegging. Consumption of gin rose by a
third during those seven years. Before it ended, prohibition had become an
acute political issue. And when gin became legal again, it was at last made
expensive by heavy taxes on the primary distillers.
This was not the only reason why the gin craze came to an end and the
liquor moved up the social scale. It occurred to some advanced thinkers
that the repressive energies of the government and the law were being
wrongly applied. "If we would really prevent such intolerable disorders,"
argued the London Evening Post, "we should, like skilful physicians, remove
the cause of them and not vainly fight against the effects": that is, be
tough not only on drinking but on the causes of drinking, mainly the
poverty and misery of the slums.

After 1751 the craze began to die away, partly because of a succession of
failed harvests when no grain could be spared for distilling, partly as a
result of the evangelical efforts of Wesley and others, and partly because
of a novel idea that a more humane attitude to the poor would pay off. Gin
didn't disappear alto gether; witness the vast Victorian gin palaces, still
open in the years before the second world war. But it was no longer a
craze, an epidemic of addiction. Moreover London had become less of a
squalid dust-heap and more of a proud capital - less ostentatiously a scene
of crime and misery.

Dillon does not ignore historical comparisons, and adds an epilogue about
the Prohibition era in America, which affords interesting if inexact
parallels to the 18th-century phenomenon. He ends with some sage remarks
about drugs in our own time, when once again the chief instruments of
control are entirely repressive. But his main interest is that
extraordinary period he describes as having a culture of risk.

The word "risk" seems to have come into English about the time of the
Restoration (if Shakespeare had known it, he would very likely have used it
in The Merchant Of Venice). Its introduction coincided with a craze for
speculation, as in the South Sea Bubble, and with addictive gambling in
newly founded clubs like White's and Brook's. Dillon associates these risk
crazes with the gin craze, and we need no Hogarth to tell us that when you
entered a dram shop, or bought gin at a street stall or from a woman who
furtively produced drams from under her skirts, you were taking a risk -
though whether all these risks were interrelated, as Dillon suggests, may
be disputed.

One thing he is clear about: from the top down - that is, from Prime
Minister Walpole down to the excise men and the magistrates - this was a
culture of corruption. A huge public problem became the occasion for
political manoeuvring. And the law was ruthless, filling the prisons and
the Bridewell, imposing ruinous fines and allowing its agents to take the
profits. It is an odd thought, but on the whole we nowadays do seem to
manage such matters a little, if not much, better