That ‘Not to be corrupted is the Shame.’ …
See, all our Nobles begging to be Slaves!
See, all our Fools aspiring to be Knaves!
The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore.29
John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, the satire which broke all records at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728, would liken Robert Walpole, the manipulative Prime Minister, to a common gang leader.
In the panicky 1720s, the streets seemed to be infested with footpads, the ministries with thieves. Your lifetime’s savings could disappear overnight; your walk home could end in robbery and murder. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, a publishing sensation on its appearance in 1722, exactly caught the mood of the moment with its tale of a random life driven through highs and lows by every whim of fortune. Panic was in the air. The same year brought a Jacobite scare with the revelation of a plot led by Bishop Atterbury. And with panic came panic reactions. The Atterbury plot was followed by the suspension of habeas corpus, troops in Hyde Park and fines for Catholics. 1722 saw prosecutions by the Societies for Reformation of Manners peak at over 7,000. The Workhouse Test Acts allowed parishes to refuse poor relief if the poor wouldn’t work. The Black Act of 1723 came up with yet more hanging offences to send petty criminals on the grim journey to Tyburn.
Madam Geneva was caught up in the flood. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that in this wave of recrimination and soul-searching reformers of all stamps should round on her. After all, she had had her own way in the slums for thirty years. She was bound to attract attention sooner or later.
For Christians, Josiah Woodward had sounded the key note back in 1711 in his Dissuasive from the Sin of Drunkenness. ‘When the dog turns to his vomit,’ he sorrowed, ‘or the swine wallows in the mire, they do but act according to their nature. But for the noble creature, man, that is made after the image of God … for this wise and noble creature to part with his reason, his conscience, his Heaven, his God, for a little drink more than he needs … is a most desperate pitch of sin and folly.’ For reformers of the ‘country’ school, the Golden, Age wasn’t just a time before speculation and corruption, it was a time before gin. In the good old days, ‘the labourer perform[ed] an honest day’s work for his wages, and his wife and children would be fed at home with wholesome meat and drink; the butcher, the baker, and the brewer would take his money instead of the distiller, his family would be decently cloathed, his landlord have his rent duly paid; the man would enjoy his health, his strength and his senses, his wife a good husband, himself a plentiful issue, with strong and healthful children; and his prince reap the fruits of their labours, in the increase of his subjects, as well as the riches of his people.’30
And when they did, at last, focus their sights on gin, reformers found plenty to worry about. It wasn’t just vice and immorality; Madam Geneva was ruining the economy. One reform publication, The Occasional Monitor, would complain of tradesmen ‘not daring to employ dram-drinkers, because they have not half the strength and capacity they ought to have to do their business; besides the many fatal instances we meet with of day-labourers falling off houses, and other the like accidents thro’ drunkenness.’ Drinkers lost their strength. They shirked hard work. And for early eighteenth-century economists, that wasn’t just their funeral; it spelled ruin for everyone. Conventional economic wisdom said that the more a nation produced, the more it could sell. Economic activity depended on supply, not demand. ‘The trade of this or any other country,’ as the London Magazine would later explain, ‘depends chiefly upon the number of natural born subjects employed in producing, manufacturing, conveying, or transporting any commodity.’31 So every active working man had a value to the nation (Braddon, a solicitor to the wine Excise board, reckoned a poor child at £15 a year).32 But if the working man was slumped in the doorway of a dram-shop, the whole system went wrong. Reformers produced streams of complaints about the idleness of the labouring classes. ‘If a person can get sufficient in four days, to support himself for seven days,’ one commentator sighed, ‘he will keep holiday the other three, that is he will live in riot and debauchery.’33 ‘Labour,’ Bishop Sherlock proclaimed, ‘is the business and employment of the poor: it is the work which God has given him to do.’34 Unfortunately, in St Giles-in-the-Fields, God came a poor third after Madam Geneva and Saint Monday.
In the aftermath of the South Sea Crash, everything became clear to reformers. Sir John Gonson had found his scapegoat. Gin suddenly crystallised as the root cause of all London’s woes. For the poor, it was the start of the slippery slope. In brandy-shops, warned one magistrate, servants and apprentices ‘learn gaming; lose their money; then rob and pilfer from their masters and parents to recruit; and by quick progressions, at last come to the gallows.’35 When they attacked gin, reformers wanted to halt not just the chemistry of the still, but the stockmarket’s alchemy which transformed poor into rich, the masquerade that turned your serving maid into a sexual equal, a whole town which could magic highwaymen into heroes, country girls into preening sluts. But when it came to the poor, gin was the key. In an age whose nerve-ends always jangled at the threat of disrespect, Madam Geneva was the siren voice leading the poor away from their duty. She was, as the Middlesex magistrates put it, ‘the principal cause … of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people, as well as of the felonies & other disorders committed in & about this town.’36
Even after thirty years, Madam Geneva still had the reek of the alchemist’s laboratory about her. A dangerous magic had been unleashed; something unholy and unnatural was at large in the slums. Madam Geneva was the unacceptable face of the Age of Risk. She had corrupted London, and reformers wanted her out of town.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MAGISTRATES
The Middlesex magistrates may have identified Madam Geneva as the villain and handed out wanted posters. They may have warned that ‘in some of the larger parishes’ – they meant St Giles – ‘every seventh house at least sells one sort or other of these liquors.’1 There still remained the question of how to deal with it all. Distilling was a privileged industry, after all. Madam Geneva had friends in high places and a string of Acts to protect her.
There were plenty of Londoners, if it came to that, who weren’t sure the magistrates were the right men to cope with Madam Geneva in the first place.
Magistrates didn’t just sit in judgement. They were there to investigate crimes as well, to take evidence and call witnesses. Their business didn’t even end with crime. It extended from street repairs to the price of bread, from neighbour disputes to blasphemy. It was the magistrate who would chastise a shopkeeper for blocking a street, the magistrate who would direct a raid on a brothel – quite often in person. Magistrates were police chiefs, local council, social services and highways agency all rolled into one. If some new vice reared its head on the streets, it was the job of magistrates to alert the higher authorities by ‘presenting’ it at Quarter Sessions. If the King issued a proclamation against gambling-houses or brothels, it was the magistrate who found himself interviewing drunken young rakes at three in the morning.
To make the life of magistrates even harder, there was a constant risk of being sued for mistakes, and the bureaucracy was nightmarish. London was divided into separate jurisdictions. The City of London took care of its own affairs; the Lord Mayor and Aldermen formed its ‘Commission of Peace’. Across the river, Southwark counted as the City ward of Bridge Without, but the rest of south London fell under the jurisdiction of Surrey. The eastern suburbs were run by the justices of Tower Hamlets. Everything to the west and north fell into Middlesex. The City of Westminster, meanwhile – an island within Middlesex – had its own Commission of Peace, and was usually taken as a kind of junior partner to Middlesex. Most magistrates ended up sitting on two or three different Commissions of Peace just to make sense of it all.
They had no training. Nobody paid them a stipend. Magistrates were supposed to
be independent gentlemen, endowed with private means that lifted them beyond corruption or partiality. The trouble was that few gentlemen in London wanted the job. John Evelyn was approached to join the Surrey Commission back in 1666, but refused because of ‘the perpetual trouble thereof in these numerous parishes.’2 There was an income threshold of £300 – to keep out undesirables – but in 1732 that would have to be cut back to £100. Anyone with an income of £300 could find better things to do in London than sit up till all hours being abused by drunken streetwalkers.
The result was that the London Commissions of Peace were taken up not only by altruistic gentry, but by men who saw yet another chance to make money out of the city’s teeming streets. When the writer Henry Fielding took his place as Westminster’s senior magistrate in 1749, he complained that ‘a predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one thousand pounds a year in his office.’3 A thousand pounds a year put the canny magistrate in the bracket of the most successful doctors and top businessmen. There were plenty of ways for a ‘trading justice’ to wring money out of the bench. The trick with whores was simple. ‘The plan used to be to issue warrants,’ as a House of Commons committee was told, ‘and take up all the poor devils in the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 2/4, which the magistrate had; and taking up a hundred girls, that would make, at 2/4, £11.13.4.’4 In January 1726, Westminster JPs had to put out a warrant against their own clerk, Simon Parry, ‘for extorting money from victuallers & pretending to renew their licences.’5
So it was a disparate group of zealots and cynics, trading justices and reformers, hard-working public servants and bumbling amateurs that took the burden of controlling all the crime and chaos of Middlesex in the 1720s. It wasn’t surprising that their pronouncements should be greeted with a certain amount of scepticism. Nor was it surprising that within the Commission of Peace, Sir John Gonson and some like-minded zealots should decide to form themselves into a tightly knit cabal. A couple of years later, after a campaign against gambling, the Westminster Order Book would record the magistrates who ‘entered into a society to suppress gaming houses in … Westminster & … Middlesex in the year 1723 … who call themselves a convention.’6 Sir John Gonson headed that list of twenty-six names. It was the same group that decided to put Madam Geneva on the rack.
The trouble was the magistrates didn’t have the powers they needed to deal with her. They had pointed the finger. They had complained that ‘brandy shops are … the cause of more mischief & inconveniences to this town, than all other publick houses joined together.’7 But when they set to work, it turned out there was almost nothing they could do to run Madam Geneva out of town.
She was protected by law. When the Middlesex magistrates met to consider Sir John’s report on 13 October 1721, they resolved ‘to suppress all houses, shops and other places where these sorts of liquors are retailed without licence.’8 But most gin-sellers didn’t need a licence anyway. Under the Act of 1701, distillers and chandlers’ shops were exempt. Even if the magistrates found an unlicensed dram-shop and tried to shut it down, they ended up gagging on red tape. ‘The certificate of conviction,’ they complained to the Lord Chancellor, ‘amounts to above threescore sheets of paper writ copywise, and the expense attending them, which no person or parish is obliged to disburse, in effect renders this method impractical & encourages the offenders to continue selling liquors without licences.’9 With the very first action of their campaign, the magistrates had run up against a brick wall.
The licensing exemption was bad enough, but there was more than that to make a reformer’s blood boil. Sir John Gonson soon spotted another legal loophole. Troops in the early eighteenth century were billeted on public houses. It was one of the constant laments of alehouse-keepers and victuallers; the billet filled their houses with unruly soldiers, and always ended up costing them money. But the Mutiny Act – which was passed each year to regulate such matters – exempted distillers’ shops and chandlers from having to house soldiers. It was based on the Licensing Act. So drink-sellers had only to buy a still and they could laugh at the billeting officer who turned up with six hulking soldiers in search of a home.
The law was actively encouraging the spread of back-room stills. ‘[Brandy-shops] distil small quantities only,’ complained a letter which the magistrates fired off to the Secretary at War the day they approved Sir John’s report, ‘& yet insist they are thereby distillers within this exception, and as such to be exempted from quartering soldiers & taking licences, the two greatest inconveniences which attend those who keep any kind of publick house.’10 To make matters worse, the powerful malt distillers were throwing their weight behind gin-shops. ‘Almost all that sell brandy or Geneva shelter themselves from quartering of soldiers,’ the letter went on, ‘& on all occasion threaten the Justice & Constables with actions, if they quarter upon them, wherein they [claim] to be supported by those … distillers, of whom they buy the waters they sell.’ Threatened with legal action, constables backed down.
And for the moment, that was where the magistrates had to back down as well. There was nothing else they could do but write angry letters. All the 1721 campaign achieved was to highlight the charmed circle in which Madam Geneva lived. No action could be taken against her until the law was changed. The campaign of the zealots was over almost before it had begun.
Not everybody in London was sorry about that. For many, Sir John Gonson and his ‘convention’ sounded too much like the Societies for Reformation of Manners. The zealots’ ‘busy care and officious instruction’ were criticised in the London Journal. ‘Every man must carry his own conscience,’ the paper warned. ‘Neither has the magistrate a right to direct the private behaviour of men; nor has the magistrate, or any body else, any manner of power to model people’s speculations, any more than their dreams.’11
Others had already complained about the way reformers of Sir John’s stamp picked on the poor. After all, it wasn’t only the poor who drank and gambled. ‘Your annual lists of criminals appear,’ had been Defoe’s early riposte to the Societies for Reformation of Manners. ‘But no Sir Harry or Sir Charles is here.’12 A Poor Man’s Plea in 1703 had been that ‘We don’t find the rich drunkard carried before my Lord Mayor, nor a swearing, lewd merchant punished.’13
In any case, not everyone in London joined the backlash when the South Sea Mountain erupted; a good number set off for the alehouse instead. Porter, a draught rival to bottled imports, was invented in Shoreditch in autumn 1722. Much stronger than ordinary beer, it sold for 3d a ‘pot’, or quart. The same year saw growth in spirits production hit a new peak. While the ink was drying on Sir John Gonson’s report, output of raw spirits was going up by twenty per cent a year. More than three and a quarter million gallons of spirits were distilled in England in 1723, four-fifths of them in London. And those were just raw spirits – turning them into gin increased the volume by a third. Not all of London’s spirits were being compounded into gin, of course, nor drunk in London. But for that matter, official figures didn’t pick up what the distillers managed to hide from Excise men, and left out imports from Holland. It all meant that by 1723 each man, woman, child, market-woman and magistrate in London was getting through something like a pint of gin a week.
All that was bad enough for reformers. Worse was to come. In 1723, the Grand Jury of Middlesex furiously proscribed a poem by the little-known doctor and writer, Bernard Mandeville. The poem, The Fable of the Bees, had first been published back in 1714 but had attracted little notice, possibly because no one could see what Mandeville (Man-Devil, he was soon being dubbed) was getting at. Reissued in 1723 with copious explanatory notes, it caused a storm. The book was sub-titled Public Vices and Private Benefits, and Mandeville’s subversive notion was that national prosperity might come not from frugal living and hard work, but from the very vices, fashions and luxuries that reformers abhorred. Whores made work for seamstresses (and doctors). The consumer society had found its first apologist. When it came to gin, the
‘large catalogue of solid blessings that accrue from … [this] evil’ included ‘the rents that are received, the ground that is tilled, the tools that are made, the cattle that are employed, and, above all, the multitude of poor that are maintained, by the variety of labour, required in husbandry, in malting, in carriage, and distillation.’14 It was bad enough that Madam Geneva should be tolerated in London at all. Now she was being held up as a pillar of the economy.
Maybe that was what stung Sir John and his convention of magistrates back into action, or maybe they were inspired by a 1724 sermon against strong-water shops by Dr Chandler, Bishop of Litchfield (the occasion had been the annual address preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners). Either way, when Westminster Quarter Sessions met in February 1725, the magistrates returned to the attack. They started by ordering their constables out onto the streets to make a tally of shops which sold gin.15 But this time Sir John Gonson and his colleagues knew what they were after. To clamp down on unlicensed gin-shops wasn’t enough. This time they wanted a change in the law.
Before the Westminster report could be written, the magistrates’ campaign widened to the whole of Middlesex. ‘The cry of [this] wickedness,’ proclaimed Sir Daniel Dolins, Chair of Middlesex Quarter Sessions, in October 1725, ‘I mean excessive drinking gin, and other pernicious spirits; is become so great, so loud, so importunate; and the growing mischiefs from it so many, so great, so destructive to the lives, families, trades and business of such multitudes, especially of the lower, poorer sort of people; that I can no longer doubt, but it must soon reach the ears of our legislators in parliament assembled; and there meet with … effectual redress.’16
The survey of gin-shops was also widened to cover the whole district. Constables tramped up and down the alleys of Middlesex, noting down names, asking questions. Some of the constables scribbled their notes on rough scraps of paper (‘a list of the Chandler shops that sell drams in Suffolk Street Ward by John Cameron Constable’). Others embellished their returns with pompous flourishes (‘Civitas et Libertas Westm. in Com Middx. The Returns of Rich Dew Constable of Exchange Ward in the Parish of St Martins in the Fields in the Liberty & County aforesaid, of all those that sells Geneva’). There were scatter-brained officers who scrawled down a rough list of householders, and more meticulous types who added trades, addresses and shop signs. The constables struggled with foreign names. They were jeered at when they went into brandy-shops. The pompous Richard Dew left Church Lane laughing up their sleeves the day he was taken in by ‘Will Wildgoose, victualler.’17
Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze Page 6
