Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  In the end there were only two real beneficiaries of the Gin Act. One was Thomas Wilson. The ambitious young cleric had met Sir Joseph Jekyll through the reform campaign, and it was Jekyll, in the end, who got him the job he wanted. In May 1737, Wilson heard ‘that Dr Watson of St Stephen’s Walbrook was very ill.’ He ‘ventured to ask the Master of the Rolls to beg that living of my Lord Chancellor for me;’50 Jekyll agreed. The only problem was that Dr Watson took a whole six months to die. On 13 September, ‘a message from town that Dr Watson was supposed to be dead carried me in some hurry to London,’ Wilson reported; but he added crossly: ‘found that he had been very ill, but not dead.’ Thomas Wilson spent most of the time camped out in the Master of the Rolls’ apartments. Dr Watson didn’t finally expire until the last day of November. Then Wilson ‘waited upon the Master of the Rolls who sent immediately to the Lord Chancellor, which gave me good hopes I shall succeed.’ It was almost the last entry in his diary. In spring 1738, as worried magistrates struggled to cope with the consequences of the Gin Act, he was installed in the lucrative living of St Stephen’s.

  The only other winner was Madam Geneva herself. She never did leave London during prohibition. There were plenty of places for her to hide – in back-alleys and poor men’s rooms, in tumbledown workshops and attics, in the hubbub of markets, or four flights up a Rag Fair tenement. She must have regarded the antics of MPs and magistrates with a faint amusement as they totted up the gin-sellers they had sent to Bridewell. She knew the only statistic which really mattered …

  In the seven years the Gin Act was in force, spirit production rose by more than a third.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WOMEN

  There is only one picture of Madam Geneva.

  She is disguised as one of her devotees, sitting on some broken steps somewhere in St Giles’s. Around her is the chaos and despair of all slums everywhere: tumbledown buildings and pawnbrokers’ shops, crowds on the streets, beggars in the gutter. But Madam Geneva is too drunk to notice any of it. She is in a world of her own. Her fingers fumble for some snuff. She’s even forgotten about the child on her lap. It takes a moment to realise what’s going on: the child is falling off the steps onto the paving below. Not even maternal instinct has survived the ravages of gin.

  Nor has shame. Madam Geneva’s blouse hangs open. Sometimes she has to take to the streets to pay for her habit; her legs are covered with the sores of syphilis. She might have been a beauty once, but now her hair is filthy and dishevelled, her lips slack, her cheeks sunken. No one could gaze on that goggling, unfocused face with any feeling of tenderness.

  There are other people on the steps as well, although the woman is too drunk to take any notice of them. Just behind her right shoulder a carpenter is pawning the tools of his trade to buy gin. Below her, a ballad-seller has passed out. There are men in the background, too, but when Hogarth drew Gin Lane, in 1751, he was in no doubt who had to be its centrepiece. It had to be Madam Geneva herself. It had to be a woman.

  Or what had once been a woman. What William Hogarth drew was the perversion of woman, the symbol of everything a woman ought not to be. She was the degeneration of mother into child-killer, beauty into something filthy, wife into shameless whore. A contemporary gloss on the print minced no words. ‘If a woman accustoms herself to dram-drinking,’ it warned, ‘she … becomes the most miserable as well as the most contemptible creature on earth.’ Looks went first but honour followed. ‘For so sure as she habituates herself to drinking, so sure it is she will never be satisfied without it, whatever means she uses to procure a supply … thro’ mere necessity [she] becomes a street-walker, and at last an abandon’d prostitute.’ As for her children, it was they who paid the heaviest price of all. ‘So indulgent are these tender mothers,’ the writer went on, ‘that to stop their little gaping mouths, they will pour down a spoonful of their own delightful cordial. What numbers of little creatures, who, had they grown up to maturity, might have proved useful members of society, are lost, murder’d, I may truly say, by these inhuman wretches, their mothers!’1

  Hogarth didn’t draw just any woman; he drew Judith Defour. The woman on the steps in Gin Lane wasn’t a figure of pity but one to inspire fear and loathing. She wasn’t only destroying herself, she was spreading her foul disease among London’s men. She was turning the world’s greatest city into an object of disgust. She was robbing the nation of the workers who ought one day to enrich it, the soldiers and sailors who should protect its shores.

  Madam Geneva, Mother Gin; from the moment she appeared on the streets, Londoners always recognised their new patron as a woman. A hundred years later she would be Mother’s Ruin. Her followers were women as well. They were the London Spy’s ‘tattered assembly of fat motherly flat-caps … with every one her nipperkin of warm ale and brandy.’ Another satirist gave them names: Dorothy Addle-Brains and Sarah Suckwell, Jenny Pisspot and Rebecca Rag-Manners.

  Beer was always a man’s drink. For a start, it needed John Bull’s stout frame to down a gallon of warm, sour liquid. But it was more than that. Beer was drunk in the alehouse, a male enclave whose windows were steamed up with the fug of male tradition. Women weren’t shut out, but when they crossed the threshold of an alehouse, they knew they were entering a man’s world. By contrast, gin was drunk in places where women went. ‘Almost at every herb-stall,’ wrote a 1751 commentator, ‘[women] will find a private room backwards, where they may take their glass in secret very comfortably.’2 It was sold on street corners, in the chandlers’ shops where women bought their everyday groceries. With the arrival of Madam Geneva, women suddenly had access to a drug which wasn’t loaded with male tradition, one which was easy for them to take, and which was available in the places they frequented.

  Besides, women didn’t just drink gin; they sold it as well. When the 1738 clamp-down on gin began, three-quarters of the gin-sellers hauled up before the magistrates’ special sessions were women. A hundred years earlier, the bawdy alewife had been a stock character of comedy – as she had been for centuries. But ale-selling in the early eighteenth century was being taken over by large brewers and well-established victuallers. Tied houses, owned by big brewers, were appearing. Women were being squeezed out. Instead, the old alewife had turned into the market-woman with a gin bottle hidden in her petticoats. For many poor women and widows, selling gin was the only way they could scrape a living off the London streets.

  And so, sipping gin in shops or dispensing it from barrows, women became the public face of the Gin Craze. When reformers had attacked drinking in the past, women had been victims. For Thomas Dekker, back in 1603, ale-drinkers left ‘their wives … starving at home and their ragged children begging abroad.’3 With the arrival of spirits all that changed. Women became villains instead. If more women than men were swept into Bridewell during the 1738 clamp-down, it wasn’t only because most gin-sellers were women, or that women were easier targets than men for the informers. For magistrates, the gin-swilling, gin-selling woman was far more of a threat than her male counterpart. It was frightening enough to watch poor men abandon their roles as labourers and soldiers. Even worse was the thought of what a drunken woman might do when Madam Geneva dissolved her shame and loosened her morals. Knocking back drams outside the pawnbroker’s shop, a woman discarded all the standards of behaviour which society had set out for her: her obedience, her humility, even her chastity.

  Her chastity most of all. Sex had always been top of the reformers’ agenda. ‘It has been a common thing,’ the Royal Proclamation lamented in 1738, ‘to see men and women lie under … bulks, even in the daytime, so drunk, as not to be capable of standing … Women have been seen exposing their sex in such a condition, that ’twas an offence to every modest eye.’ Every gin-shop, Thomas Secker added a few years later, ‘had a back shop or cellar, strewed every morning with fresh straw, where those that got drunk were thrown, men and women promiscuously together: here they might commit what wickedness they pleased.’ It was dr
unken women, of course, who cursed the town with the sexual health scourge of the early eighteenth century: syphilis. In the minds of reformers, sex, vice and retribution were inextricably linked.

  Reformers’ fears were inspired by transformations: the servant metamorphosed into master, the poor man into gentleman. The idea that women might abandon their natural station was the most frightening of all. But suddenly women were reeling drunkenly out of chandlers’ shops, and selling drams on street corners. Frightened reformers could see women embracing all too many of the age’s changes. They turned up in Exchange Alley to speculate on the markets. Thirty-five of the eighty-eight investors in the South Sea Company’s second money subscription were women (speculation, after all, was one of the few ways women could make money; like gin, it was new; there were no traditional barriers to keep them out). When Hogarth drew his Lottery print in 1724, it was the figures of women who presided, and women – one dressed unnaturally in men’s clothing – who pulled the tickets from the wheels.

  It was all part of a pattern. Reformers were scared of the changes of the age, and the most frightening possibility of all was a change in women. They wasted no time in slamming shut the lid of Pandora’s box. Increasingly, women were to be confined to a smaller, safer world. As the eighteenth century progressed, fewer and fewer women went to work. And a vapourish, delicate creature was born, obsessed with her virtue, pious, unadventurous and chaste. Moll Flanders was consigned to the unruly past. The future belonged to Pamela.

  In all of their campaigns, it wasn’t only poor women that reformers were concerned about – the market-women and servants, or the bedraggled prostitute on the steps in St Giles’s. They were also worried about virtue closer to home.

  Daniel Defoe started it. ‘I was infinitely satisfied with my wife,’ wrote his Colonel Jack, ‘who was, indeed, the best-humoured woman in the world, and a most accomplished beautiful creature – indeed, perfectly well bred, and had not one ill quality about her.’4 That was until Colonel Jack’s wife fell ill. But the medicine she took, like most eighteenth-century medicines, contained spirits. Addiction to prescribed drugs had arrived. ‘During her illness and weakness,’ the Colonel went on, ‘her nurse pressed her, whenever she found herself faint … to take this cordial, and that dram, till it became necessary to keep her alive, and gradually increased to a habit, so that it was no longer her physic but her food … She came at last to a dreadful height, that … she would be drunk in her dressing-room before eleven o’clock in the morning … In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife, grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table, nay, in her own closet by herself, till she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue.’ Eighteen months later she was dead.

  If drinking among the poor was the main target of the Gin Panic, drinking among middle-class women came a close second. ‘Wherever the tea-kettle is, there must the dram-bottle be,’ warned the Tavern Scuffle in 1726. ‘One succeeds the other as naturally as the night does the day; when a woman once takes to drinking, I give her over for lost, she then neglects husband, children, family, and all for her darling liquor.’ Thomas Wilson would follow the same line in Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation. He turned to middle-class women in his second edition, not without qualms. ‘My mind is wounded but to think of imputing any share of this depravity to them,’ he fluttered. ‘The subject [is] too delicate to be insisted upon.’ Not that that stopped Thomas Wilson. ‘I must, however, just observe, that it is always attended with the most terrible consequences, to their posterity, as well as to themselves. That most excellent part of the human species, whose principal glory is their affection to their innocent infants, would do well to reflect upon the shockingness of a fault, which entails misery upon their harmless progeny as long as they live.’

  Thomas Wilson gave examples, and they weren’t poor women. One was ‘a lady of good fortune, whose family and husband a friend of mine intimately knows.’ She ‘began with Barbados waters.’* But when her husband locked the drinks cupboard, ‘she sunk into a taste for the lowest English spirits she could procure.’ This lady had only one child, ‘and [she] was determined, by a well-intended tenderness, to suckle this herself.’ The result was a warning to all mothers. ‘The poison it had sucked in before and after its birth, from its unhappy mother, was so prevalent, that all the art of physic, all the care of its nurse, could not recover the mischief, and clothe its little half-dried bones, with aught but a shrivelled sallow skin. It has now the look of an old withered baby, its skin loose and wrinkled … [It] lives, if we may say lives, by the help of art, a miserable memento of its mother’s unnatural habit.’ The mother, as Thomas Wilson sorrowfully told his readers, was now dying of consumption.

  The middle-class wife drinking at home had joined the gallery of reformers’ villains. In January 1737 the Grub Street Journal even suggested a ban on selling spirits to women.5 Later that year, the Universal Spectator ran an exposé of dram-drinking in women. ‘When I behold the woman … who still is the delight of my heart,’ wailed one wretched witness, ‘degraded into the most infamous habit of drinking; when I view those eyes that were wont to sparkle with inviting lustre, with awkward goggling betray an unmeaning look; when I see deadness in her features, folly in her behaviour, her tongue faltering, her breath tainted, her health impaired, my concern, like her debasement, is inexpressible.’6

  By 1751, when the Gin Panic next flared up, the stereotype of the middle-class female dram-drinker was everywhere. ‘The wives of genteel mechanicks,’ noted one author, describing a day in the life of London, ‘under pretence of going to prayers in their apartments, take a nap and a dram, after which they chew lemon peel to prevent being smelt.’7 ‘How does she behave in her family?’ asked another tract on these secret tipplers. ‘The poor children are kicked and tumbl’d about like so many footballs … She gets rid on them as soon as she can, by packing them away to school with a bit of bread and butter in their hands.’8

  In 1750 Eliza Haywood even produced A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking, adapted to all the different stations in life, from a Lady of Quality to a Common Servant. ‘The prodigious progress made by this vice of female drinking within these few years,’ she protested, ‘is so incontestibly notorious, that the propriety and usefulness of the treatise cannot be disputed.’ Eliza Haywood knew exactly whom she was trying to save. Her examples included ‘a young woman of quality … a gentleman’s daughter … a young gentlewoman of small fortune … daughter of a middling tradesman … the wife of a clergyman … the dreadful effects of this vice in a married Lady of Quality.’ For each, she provide advice and a terrible example. The gentleman’s daughter would be tyrannised by servants who discover her habit. The ‘married Lady of Quality’ (‘Lady Lucy’) ‘was the daughter of a very great man, and the sister of a greater, but her vices made her odious, and at the same time, ridiculous. She sought at last to take shelter in what had brought her misfortunes upon her; she drank to drive away thought; she did it effectually, she drank herself to death.’

  Eliza Haywood was more sensitive than most reformers. She worried about how to draw drinkers’ attention to her tract. It was easy enough with servants, harder with genteel boozers; still, ‘a method may be found of dropping it in a closet, or a toilet.’ She offered advice on how to kick the habit, which was more than the Societies for Reformation of Manners had ever done. Eliza Haywood ‘knew a gentleman that cured his sister by furnishing her with romances.’ For other ‘sipping misses’ she suggested ‘painting, japanning, colouring of prints, or whatever else will fix the attention, and take off that inclination for indolence which made way for the other vice.’

  With a role-model like Pamela and a life of japanning and colouring in prints, any sane woman would take to the bottle sooner or later. Middle-class women were on the way towards a vicious spiral. Debilitating role-models created debilitating habits. Laudanum, Mother’s Ruin and the teapot full of sherry
were only just around the corner.

  The woman drinker was a threat. She was a threat to society, to her family, and to herself. She was a threat to her husband and children. Fallen onto the streets and infected with syphilis, she was a threat to other women, for the whore infected the rakish husband, who carried the poison back to his family. The middle-class woman who drank endangered her own servants by encouraging them to take up the habit themselves. In turn, gossiping in the chandler’s shop, the servant ruined her mistress by spreading the secrets of the household around the neighbourhood. Reformers weren’t short of reasons to castigate Madam Geneva and the women who followed her. Religion, morality, patriotism and regard for society all recoiled in horror from that slack-lipped, goggling figure on the steps in St Giles’s.

  But as if that wasn’t enough, the doctors were ready to weigh in as well. It wasn’t just immoral for women to drink spirits. It was unhealthy and dangerous as well.

  The theory of humours still dominated medicine. It held that everything was made up of earth, water, fire and air, and had a corresponding mixture of qualities, dry or wet, hot or cold. And that explained human nature as well. People were choleric (hot and dry), sanguine (hot and moist), phlegmatic (moist and cold), or melancholic (cold and dry). Fevers and ailments were imbalances of the natural elements. They were cured by diet. And all foods, in detailed and complex ways, were combinations of qualities. Pepper was hot in the third degree and dry in the fourth. Fruit was cold, moist and bad for you.