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

by Dillon, Patrick

  Hogarth’s prints, Henry Fielding’s tract and Isaac Maddox’s sermon had all been timed to follow the start of the 1751 parliamentary session on 17 January. Other attacks followed. On 12 March the reformer Corbyn Morris published a detailed study of the London death rate. It focused on the enormous deficit between births and deaths in London – the city’s population only remained stable because of the immigrants flooding in from outside. He blamed the deficit in particular on ‘the enormous use of spirituous liquors.’20* The birth rate had been dropping (according to the Bills of Mortality) since the early 1720s – just when the authorities had taken notice of gin. Since then, ‘as [gin] consumption hath been constantly increasing … the amount of the births hath likewise been continually diminishing.’ As for the death rate, ‘inquire from the several hospitals in this city,’ Corbyn Morris suggested, ‘whether any increase of patients, and of what sort, are daily brought under their care? They will all declare, increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from the effects of spirituous liquors.’

  Meanwhile, another reformer, Josiah Tucker of Bristol, set about linking gin-drinking to the decline of the economy. Josiah Tucker had been sent Thomas Wilson’s memo of his conversation with Henry Fielding, and his argument followed the line Wilson had taken fifteen years before in Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation. His results were even more startling. Every year, Josiah Tucker concluded after pages of calculations, Madam Geneva cost the economy three million, nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand, six hundred and nineteen pounds, and eleven pence halfpenny.21 (The people of Bristol didn’t thank him for this insight. In April that year, as the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded, they ‘patrolled the streets with several effigies, one of which was … designed for the Rev Mr Tucker, rector of St Stephen, who had wrote … a pamphlet on the pernicious use of spirituous liquors.’ The effigies were later ‘committed to the flames with all the marks of detestation and contempt.’22)

  It all added up to a powerful attack on Madam Geneva. The tracts of 1751 brought a new kind of professionalism to the reform camp. As Josiah Tucker put it, they went beyond ‘pathetical description of the miseries and destructive consequences occasioned by spirituous liquors.’ The leading magistrate in Westminster had blamed Madam Geneva for the crime wave. A detailed analysis of the death rate had pinned London’s mortality on her. When trade was subjected to careful scrutiny, it appeared that gin was crippling the economy as well. And up in his pulpit, the Bishop of Worcester had described in graphic detail the damage gin-drinking was doing to the nation’s moral balance sheet.

  Once again, Madam Geneva was the talk of the town. ‘The fatal and destructive effects of the excessive use of spirituous liquors, especially Gin,’ noted a letter in the London Magazine, ‘[are] at present a general subject of conversation.’23 Henry Fielding’s Inquiry attracted widespread publicity, with long extracts published in the Gentleman’s Magazine and London Magazine. The Monthly Review thought that if Fielding had ‘been heretofore admired for his wit and humour, he now merits equal applause as a good magistrate, a useful and active member and a true friend to his country.’ Newspapers headlined the more shocking statistics. Since 1725, 84,000 children had died as result of gin-drinking. Spirit revenues in the 1740s had been more than £100,000 a year higher than in the previous decade. By now they were said to be running – licences, low wines and all – at £676,125 a year. ‘According to a list delivered in of private gin-shops,’ gasped the Whitehall Evening Post, ‘on the best calculation, they amount to upwards of 17,000 in the Bills of Mortality.’24 The temperature was starting to rise. ‘O my unhappy country!’ wailed a ‘Gentleman in the Country’. ‘What ruin must come upon thee if thou dost not quickly wake from the luxurious dream of pleasure, which locks up thy sense … Who, without grief, can behold England … laid waste by gin, and hastening fast to desolation and ruin?’25 Read’s Weekly Journal drafted the first public health warning:

  LABEL FOR A GIN BOTTLE

  When famed Pandora to the clouds withdrew,

  From her dire box, unnumbered evils flew.

  No less a curse this vehicle contains: –

  Fire to the mind and poison to the veins.26

  Meanwhile, the reformer’s central strategy of linking gin to the crime wave was paying off. ‘There is not only no safety living in this town,’ Bishop Benson of Gloucester wrote in a letter, ‘but scarcely in the country now, robbery and murder are grown so frequent. Our people are now become what they never before were, cruel and inhuman. Those accursed spirituous liquors which, to the shame of our government, are so easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk, have changed the very nature of our people; and they will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race of people themselves.’27

  Parliament had assembled on 17 January. Opening the session, the King’s Speech deplored the ‘outrages and violences, which are inconsistent with all good government, and endanger the lives and properties of my subjects.’ Crime was firmly on the agenda. And gin had been tagged by reformers high on the list of its causes. There would be no compromise this time; they wanted Madam Geneva dead and buried. ‘As to gin-drinking,’ insisted a letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘the whole distillery should be suppressed: making gin a penny a pint dearer is doing nothing … It would be better for this kingdom if no sort of spirits was ever hereafter to be tasted in it.’28

  No one expected a turbulent session in Parliament. There was no war on. The opposition seemed moribund. Carteret was gone and Walpole’s protégé, Henry Pelham, had a firm grip on power. Once he was done with crime, George II seemed barely able to keep his eyes open in his opening address. ‘I have nothing further to recommend to you in particular,’ he yawned. ‘Let me exhort you, in general, to make the best use of the present state of tranquillity, for improving the trade and commerce of my Kingdom.’

  Maybe it was the ‘state of tranquillity’ that gave the Parliament of 1751 its opportunity. It was thirteen years, after all, since Parliament had been free from the burdens of war or its aftermath. Before that, Robert Walpole had controlled its business, and Robert Walpole was, by his own admission, ‘no reformer’. 1751 was the first year in decades when Parliament had had a clear run at domestic issues. It was the first time in years that entrenched divisions of party had largely dissolved. And the crime wave was the subject on everyone’s lips. Henry Fielding had reckoned the whole aim of his Inquiry had been ‘to rouse the civil power from its present lethargic state.’ This was its opportunity.

  There was little sign of lethargy. Instead, Parliament tore into domestic issues at a frenetic pace. It was in the early 1750s that the old Julian calendar was finally scrapped and Britain entered the same time-zone as the rest of Europe. Lord Chancellor Hardwicke moved to outlaw the abuses of back-street weddings at the Fleet. Henry Pelham introduced – although he later withdrew – a measure to increase the rights of Jews. The British Museum was established. There was a flood of proposals to mend and improve roads. And on 1 February 1751, just as Gin Lane went on sale at Hogarth’s house in Leicester Fields, a parliamentary committee was appointed ‘to revise and consider the laws in being, which relate to felonies, and other offences against the peace.’

  The committee broke new ground. To start with, its membership was interesting. The committee included not only the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, and most of the other leading parliamentary heavyweights, but also Henry Fielding’s old school-friends George Lyttelton and William Pitt. James Oglethorpe was back in London and soon joined the meetings. Charles Gray, a Tory and the son of a glazier, was also an amateur archaeologist and a founding trustee of the British Museum. William Hay, the disabled MP for Seaford, had been campaigning on poor relief and disability for fifteen years.

  Then there was the way the committee set about its business. Crime in the past had been dealt with ad hoc, but the new committee, which would meet for the next three years, would take a holistic approach, examining everything
from legal aid to cleaning up trials, from the handling of stolen goods to protecting magistrates from malicious prosecution. It came up with ideas about improving the watch, and alternatives to the bloody parade of Tyburn. Later reformers would sometimes claim the 1751 committee as the moment when Parliament started to take reform seriously. It wasn’t quite that. Most of its proposals got bogged down; only a few reached the statute book. A good number of its ideas belonged as much to the ‘repressive’ past as to any socially enlightened future. But it did create a background hum of social issues in Parliament. The spotlight was now firmly on crime. It was only a matter of time before MPs turned their attention to gin.

  The immediate trigger for action, as usual, was a flood of petitions calling on Parliament to legislate. First to move was the City of London, nicely whipped up to a frenzy by Isaac Maddox’s sermon. Others soon followed. The petitions attacked Madam Geneva from the usual angles and in the usual language. The difference this time was the range of directions they came from. In the past it had been the magistrates of Middlesex and Westminster who applied themselves to the gin problem. Now parish vestries started to lobby on their own account. On 1 March St Martin-in-the-Fields sent their own lobby to Parliament, and St Anne’s Westminster followed a few days later. Within a week they were joined by seven others. The ‘Lord High Steward and other officials of the City of Westminster’ feared that gin-drinking, if not checked, ‘may prove the destruction of religion and civil society.’ Middlesex Quarter Sessions joined the chorus on 7 March.

  Petitions came from outside London as well. There was a growing feeling that the gin problem was spreading to the country. ‘The evil is increasing every day,’ Josiah Tucker of Bristol thought, ‘making its way from the Metropolis into the country towns, and even villages.’ (That nicely matched the reformer’s image of the big city’s corruption poisoning the nation.) In 1751, petitions to Parliament would arrive from Bristol – both its Lord Mayor and its ‘Society of Merchant Adventurers’ – and from ‘the Justices of the Peace, Clergy, Gentlemen, Merchants, Dealers, and Manufacturers, of the Town of Manchester.’ A petition from Norwich reported ‘a manifest change … amongst the … common people in their habitations, cloathing, and manner of living,’ and laid it all at the door of Madam Geneva. A final, late entrant in the line-up of petitions was that den of debauchery and drug abuse, Henley-upon-Thames.

  The buzz of voices calling for legislation was rising to a roar. At the bar of the House of Commons, a succession of experts testified to the trail of devastation Madam Geneva left behind her. Eminent doctors like Dawson, physician to St George’s Hospital, confirmed that between 1734 and 1749 hospital admissions had risen from 12,710 a year to 38,147. Asked to account for the change, Dr Dawson ‘answered, from the melancholy consequences of gin-drinking, principally.’ City of London officials testified that one house in fifteen in the City was a gin-shop. Saunders Welch, High Constable of Holborn, capped that with evidence that the 7,066 gin-shops in his division amounted to almost one house in five. In St Giles’s, things were even worse. ‘There were about 2,000 houses and 506 gin-shops, being above one house in four; besides about 82 two-penny houses of the greatest infamy, where gin was the principal liquor drank.’ Two bakers, John Wyburn and John Rogers, reported ‘that the consumption of bread amongst the poor was greatly diminished since the excessive drinking of gin … The poor laid out their earnings in gin, which ought to purchase them bread for themselves and families; and that, in many of the out-parts, the bakers were obliged to cut their loaves into halfpenny-worths, a practice unknown to the trade till gin was so universally drank by the poor.’

  In the hands of the newspapers, these statistics became even more terrifying. Daniel Carne, High Constable of Westminster, had testified that 2,200 of the 17,000 houses in Westminster sold gin. But someone was spinning the press again. The figure that took the headlines that week claimed a shocking 17,000 gin-shops in London. There was a good deal of exaggeration on all sides. The statistics which the City of London put before the House were swollen by the inclusion of ordinary alehouses. When the City constables returned records of unlicensed spirit-sellers, they could only come up with a total of 274 in the whole City.29 The figure was not widely publicised.

  Orchestrating the parade of evidence to the House in the second week of March was a rising parliamentary star. Thomas Potter, second son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, would die young, never fulfilling his promise, but in 1751 he was ‘a handsome clever youth,’ closely linked with the Prince of Wales’s faction. Horace Walpole remarked that session that ‘the Prince has got some new and very able speakers, particularly a young Mr Potter … who promises very greatly; the world is already matching him against Mr Pitt.’ (Potter’s private life was less promising. Leading a rakish existence from his father’s apartments in Lambeth Palace, he had got a rector’s daughter, a Miss Manningham, into trouble, and been forced to marry her. ‘Oh, my dear Charles,’ he wrote to his friend, Charles Lyttelton, ‘I am no more what I was, no more the careless, the cheerful, the happy man thou knowest, but unhappy, miserable beyond remedy. In short I am – married, and married to a woman I despise and detest.’)30

  Thomas Potter was on the committee looking into crime, and he was close to the reformers. On 12 March, with the petitions flooding in, Corbyn Morris published his Observations on the London death rate and dedicated it to Potter. The day it came out, as Horace Walpole put it, ‘Potter produced several physicians and masters of workhouses to prove the fatal consequences of spirituous liquors, which laid waste the meaner parts of the town, and were now spreading into the country.’ As always, the reform campaign made no mistakes in its timing.

  But it was on the same day, 12 March, that the bandwagon for a hardline new Gin Act received its first check. The spanner would be thrown into the works by Henry Pelham, Prime Minister and brother of the Duke of Newcastle.

  It wasn’t for nothing that Henry Pelham was seen as Robert Walpole’s political heir. He was worried about his revenues. On 12 March he tried to have the physicians’ evidence ruled out of court. The reason, to Horace Walpole at least, was transparent. Pelham ‘believed no remedy could be found for the evil, and yet imposing new duties would greatly diminish the Revenue.’31 The government had only been cohabiting with Madam Geneva for eight years, but already they couldn’t imagine life without her.

  The reformers held a trump card. Back in 1743 there had been a war on. Ministers had been able to claim an urgent need for cash. In 1751, Isaac Maddox could ask what the country was coming to if it had to raise its revenue from vice ‘even in a time of public peace and tranquillity.’32 The zealots were in a better position to prise ministers’ hands off spirit revenues than at any time since 1738.

  The way to do it was through a massive increase in the ‘still-head’ duties paid by malt distillers. There would be no more messing around with compound distillers or Parliamentary Brandy. And the increase would be big enough to kill the trade outright. It would ‘fall short of the ends intended by it,’ in the view of one reformer, ‘unless the duty is so high as to prevent the common sale of this commodity.’33 And when Thomas Potter’s draft Bill was published, it showed every sign of living up to expectations. The extra two shillings a gallon which he proposed for the spirits duty would represent more than half the cost of spirits. Giving evidence in 1745, the spirit dealer Stephen South told a select committee that malt distillers sold their spirits at around 1/10 a gallon, or £23 a ton, and profits ran at £3–4 a ton. Thomas Potter’s new duty by itself would have come to more than £25 a ton. There would be no more getting drunk for a penny and dead drunk for tuppence.

  Henry Pelham ‘spoke greatly against it,’ Horace Walpole remembered. Pelham could see a black hole opening up in government finances. But all he managed to win was an adjournment. The bandwagon for a return to prohibition seemed unstoppable. Given time, Henry Pelham might put the case for keeping the pragmatic policy of 1743, but he didn’t have time. He
had only won himself seven days. The debate would resume on 28 March.

  But someone’s lucky star – either Henry Pelham’s or Madam Geneva’s – was shining on them. On 20 March, even as Henry Pelham was on his feet in the House of Commons, Frederick, Prince of Wales, slumped onto a sofa complaining of pain in his stomach. Doctors would later diagnose the bursting of an abscess caused when the Prince had been struck by a tennis ball some weeks earlier. By next morning the heir to the throne was dead. It would be a month of mourning and funeral arrangements before debate on the Gin Bill could be resumed.

  It wasn’t only the fear of lost revenues that worried men like Henry Pelham. The measures which Thomas Potter put forward on behalf of the reformers would have meant a return to prohibition, but there were plenty of politicians and commentators who could remember the lesson of 1736, even if Isaac Maddox and Henry Fielding had forgotten it.