Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Drunk for a Penny

  Dead Drunk for twopence

  Clean Straw for Nothing.

  It is unlikely that such words were ever inscribed for a gin shop, and Hogarth himself could well have invented them, but nevertheless they have become proverbial.

  Gin Lane is unknown to the topographer and gazetteer but Hogarth has situated it in the parish of St Giles, notorious for its beggars, cripples, vagrants and the very poor. The site of the print is now at the northern end of Shaftesbury Avenue. A dazed and drunken woman sits upon some steps. It looks as if time has been suspended around her, except that an infant is falling from her useless arms onto the ground below. An emaciated ballad-singer lies dying on the steps immediately below her. Close by, a man and a dog quarrel over a filthy bone.

  But the woman is the centre of this part of the composition. She has the tokens of syphilis upon her legs. She is filthy, and her clothes are in tatters. She must have been on the streets of St Giles to pay for her addiction. A commentary on the print noticed that ‘if a woman accustoms herself to dram-drinking, she becomes the most miserable as well as the most contemptible creature on earth’. A recent case pointed the moral better than words. Judith Defour had taken her two-year-old child to a workhouse where it received better care and a set of new clothes. She returned to the workhouse a few days later and claimed the child; she then took the infant to a nearby field where she strangled it and dumped the body in a ditch before pawning the new clothes for a shilling which she then spent on gin. It was an extreme case, but not so extreme as to be implausible.

  Beside Kilman Distillery, on the right of Hogarth’s print, two young girls are quaffing the gin, while some beggars fight for a dram and a young mother is pouring the drink into her baby’s mouth. Signs of death are everywhere, with a suicide hanging in plain sight, a baby accidentally impaled upon a spit, a swinging coffin as a sign of an undertaker’s shop, and a makeshift funeral. The pawnbroker’s sign hangs like a cross over the street scene while in the distance is the steeple of St George’s Bloomsbury with a statue of George I on its pinnacle. He is the only king so to be honoured in London, but on this occasion he seems as cold and remote from his realm as the church itself. Hogarth’s print is composed of minute particulars which, taken together, make up one overwhelming statement. The two girls, for example, wear their parish insignia of ‘GS’ or St Giles. The churchwardens, the vestry and the overseers of the poor are exposed as incompetent or irresponsible.

  Hogarth’s print sold for a shilling, together with its companion piece, ‘Beer Street’, and although its cost would have been beyond the reach of the poor, it is reasonable to suppose that it found a place on the walls of the tavern or the alehouse where it might act as a satire or as a corrective. An advertisement in the London Evening Post remarked that ‘as the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the Author has publish’d them in the cheapest Manner possible’.

  The craze for gin began, approximately, in 1720 but it had been readily available since the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. William III brought the drink with him from the purlieux of Rotterdam, and soon enough the Dutch spirit had supplanted the taste for French brandies. Anything French was suspect. The soldiers of William’s army were encouraged to imbibe ‘Dutch courage’ before action. Two years after his successful invasion an Act was passed ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’. The farmers and distillers were further rewarded when the duty on their liquor fell from a shilling to a penny a gallon. London had always been a city of hard drinking but in the streets of the capital the current of gin grew stronger and faster. In times of want, and pain, and cold, many ran into it willingly. A nasty steam, or fog, arose from the vats of the distillers.

  The gin was sold in the shops of weavers, dyers, barbers, carpenters and shoemakers; the workhouses, prisons and madhouses were awash. There were degrees of nastiness and discomfort. Inns had lodging rooms for guests, while alehouses provided ‘houses of call’ for the various trades of the city; the brandy shops or dram shops were of the lowest grade, where cellars, back rooms and holes in the wall provided shelter for copious consumption. Gin was sold from wheelbarrows, from temporary stalls, from alleys, from back rooms and from cheap lodging houses. It was consumed greedily by beggars and vagrants, by the inmates of prisons or workhouses, by Londoners young and old. It was a particular favourite of women, who also used liberal quantities of the stuff to silence children and to ward off the privations of cold and hunger. It was a way of staving off the world.

  The consequences were dire. Children would congregate in a gin shop, and would drink until they could not move. Men and women died in the gutters after too much consumption. Some drinkers dropped dead on the spot. It was not at all unusual to see people staggering blindly at any time of night and day. Fights, and fires started out of neglect, were common. A foreign observer, César de Saussure, noted that ‘the taverns are almost always filled with men and women, and even sometimes children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away’. It kept the poor warm and dazed, at least for an hour or two.

  William Maitland, whose The History of London was published in the mid-eighteenth century, reckoned that 8,659 gin shops were operating in the city, with particular clusters around Southwark and Whitechapel. The sale of spirits had doubled in a decade, with 5.5 million gallons purchased in 1735. Women were not only customers but also vendors. It has been estimated that between one quarter and one third of unlicensed sellers of spirits were female. It was one London trade from which they were not excluded, and the influx of girls and young women into the capital provided a ready source for exploitation. In a pamphlet of 1736, ‘Distilled Spirituous Liquors: The Bane of the Nation’, it was recorded that the dram shops were filled with ‘servant maids and laboring men’s wives’, emphasizing the belief that gin was in some sense a female drink. It was known as ‘the ladies’ delight’, and the passage of the Gin Act in 1736 was said to have provoked ‘widows’ tears’ and ‘shreeks of desponding Matrons’.

  Several attempts were made to administer or temper the sale of gin, with diverse consequences. The Gin Act introduced a duty of 20 shillings per gallon on spirituous liquors, and retailers of gin were required to purchase an annual licence of £50. This simply served to encourage the illicit selling of spirits that now expanded out of all proportion. Gin was sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift or King Theodore of Corsica. Subtle means of distribution were invented. An enterprising trader in Blue Anchor Alley bought the sign of a cat with an open mouth; he nailed it by his window and then put a small lead pipe under one of its paws. The other end of the pipe held a funnel through which the gin could be poured. It was soon bruited ‘that gin would be sold by the cat at my window the next day’. He waited for his first customer, and soon enough he heard ‘a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me twopennyworth of gin”’. The coins were inserted into the mouth of the cat, and the tradesman poured the required amount into the funnel of the pipe. Crowds soon gathered to see ‘the enchanted cat’ and the liquor itself came to be known as ‘Puss’.

  The evidence of Westminster interference in the once flourishing gin trade provoked riots in the poorer parts of the city; the turmoil became so violent that it was deemed by some to be a danger to the state. Shoreditch and Spitalfields were practically under siege. Informers, those who swore to the justice that a certain establishment was selling gin unlawfully, were hounded and struck down by the mobs. Some of them were beaten to death, while others were ducked in the Thames, the ponds, or the common sewers. It was a form of street power. A woman in the Strand called out ‘Informers!’ whereupon ‘the Mob secur’d’ the man involved ‘and us’d him so ill that he is since dead of his Bruises’.

  The legislation of 1736 proved impossible to enforce. The Act
was modified in the light of public complaint and a new Act was drawn up seven years later; it was known as ‘the Tippling Act’, and in 1747 the gin distillers won back the right to sell their product retail. Spirit, raw or mixed with cordial, was once more the drink of choice. It was estimated that, in Holborn, one in five dwellings was used as a gin shop.

  The effects were predictable and familiar. In 1751 Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator, noted the fall in births as well as ‘the sickly state of such infants as are born’. He observed also that the hospitals were crowded with ‘increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from spirituous liquors’. The drink was also associated with sexual licence, and it was reported that ‘young creatures, girls of twelve and thirteen years of age, drink Geneva like fishes and make themselves unfit to live in sober families . . . there is no passing the streets for ’em, so shameless are they grown’. This was the immediate context for Hogarth’s print and Fielding’s pamphlet.

  Yet, in one of those ultimately unfathomable changes of taste, the craze for gin subsided. This had nothing to do with the attempt at prohibition, which had become a dead failure. Bad harvests rendered gin more expensive. The influence of Methodism was growing even among the urban poor. And, suddenly, there was the new fashion for tea.

  It is fitting that William Hogarth should have become the most celebrated observer of this London craze, as he was of other urban phenomena. This was the Hogarthian moment. He was a Londoner by birth, out of Smithfield, and an urban tradesman who started his career as a goldsmith’s engraver. His first paintings were of a scene from The Beggar’s Opera. He is as intrinsic to the eighteenth century as Samuel Johnson or Henry Fielding. He was a model and an inspiration for the new generation of novelists. ‘It would take the pencil of Hogarth’, Tobias Smollett wrote in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), ‘to express the astonishment and concern of Strap.’ Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733) wishes that ‘the ingenious Mr Hogarth would finish the portrait’. In The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Henry Fielding interrupts his narrative to exclaim, ‘O Hogarth! Had I thy pencil!’

  Hogarth touches upon so many and so various eighteenth-century concerns that he might be called the presiding deity of the period. He understood the randomness of life from the chance encounter to the unexpected event, from the fall of a building to the overturning of a coach; he also understood the extremes of living, rich beside poor, sick and dying beside the healthy, vice beside virtue. He loved the low life of the streets, and spent much of his life in celebrating it. Melodrama and spectacle, as common on the streets of the city as among the players of Bartholomew Fair, were some of the spirits of the age. ‘We will therefore compare subjects for painting’, Hogarth wrote, ‘with those of the stage.’

  He was also an astute man of business. He became the professional above all others. He advertised his prints in the newspapers and sold directly to purchasers without going through the medium of dealers or print-sellers; he hung a shop sign outside the door of his house. He also secured the passage of legislation, known as ‘Hogarth’s Act’, that managed to protect the copyright of engravers. Artists had always exploited the market, and manipulated their patrons, but perhaps in never so overtly a commercial fashion. Whether in his robust moralism, or in his evocation of urban fever, or in his financial acuteness, he caught the temper of the times.

  15

  The pack of cards

  William Pitt would be conceived and fashioned in war; from the beginning he had despised Robert Walpole’s policy of peace at any price. He had taken on Walpole and won. Now his time had almost come, when he would be saluted as the war master of the age, the ‘great commoner’ who had become a great warrior. Eight years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, negotiated by Britain, France and the other combatants of the War of the Austrian Succession, his first intimations of blood came in the distant colonies across the ocean. It took once again the form of Anglo-French enmity. The policy of France in North America, as far as the English were concerned, was one of expansion and aggression; it was believed that they aimed for ‘universal commerce’. They had settled on the St Lawrence to the north, and on the Mississippi to the south, and were thus in a position to control with a line of forts all the territory west of the New England colonies. If the British were confined to that narrow strip along the Atlantic shore, they would have no part in the burgeoning and profitable fur trade. It did not help that the French were in alliance with the confederation of Native Indians known as the ‘Six Nations’. In April 1754, a French force from Canada occupied the fort that would one day be the site of Pittsburgh. Offensive expeditions were in turn sent out by the British, but with very little effect. The battlegrounds were not yet important.

  America was still a far-off land of which the British knew very little. Snippets of news from ‘the colonies’ appeared in the public prints, under the headings of ‘American Affairs’ or ‘British Plantations’, but there was no genuine bond of sentiment or sympathy between the two communities. America was considered to be a nation of farmers, in a wilderness dotted with small farms and villages. That was far from the case – Harvard and Yale had already been established, Harvard more than a century before. The merchants of England of course also knew better; they traded in fish and lumber products, as well as the great wheat and grain crops that were already pouring out of the ‘bread colonies’. And then there was the tobacco of Virginia and Maryland. In the end these commodities would be the root and cause of war.

  The relations between France and England, exacerbated by the tensions in America, were becoming more ominous closer to home. In March 1756, an invasion scare prompted the administration to send for Hanoverian mercenaries to defend the shores. The use of German troops was unparalleled and raised a tempest against the presence of Hanoverians and Hessians. Their strength, however, was never tested; it may be that the French never intended to invade but were making a feint in advance of more serious hostilities. Sure enough, on 18 May, a general war was declared which can be seen as the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession. War was the familiar bed-fellow of politics and trade.

  All the old alliances were give a new twist, however, when England and Prussia were joined against Austria and the Bourbon powers of France and Spain. The struggle had many names, according to the theatres of battle: in North America it was known as ‘the French and Indian War’, in India ‘the Third Carnatic War’. On the European mainland it was called ‘the Pomeranian War’ or ‘the Third Silesian War’. In England it eventually came to be known, more directly, as ‘the Seven Years War’. It probably did not occur to any of the participants that the conflict would last so long.

  Even before war was declared it was ascertained that a French fleet was being prepared at Toulon for action in the Mediterranean. The French had for a long time threatened Minorca, the island having come under British control in 1708, and so a defence force of ten ships was dispatched from Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Byng. The battle was confused and uncertain, compounded by Byng’s caution and the poor condition of his ships. When it was believed that the English could do no more, Byng sailed back to Gibraltar without assisting the British garrison on Minorca itself. The garrison surrendered in June, just a month after the general war had been declared. It was not a happy beginning.

  The Admiralty was eager to shift the blame to an expendable officer, and Admiral Byng was court-martialled before being shot on the deck of HMS Monarch; Voltaire had said of the incident that ‘it is a good idea to kill an admiral from time to time, simply to encourage the others’. But the sacrificial killing of Byng did not appease the English public who considered their nation to be the acknowledged ruler of the high seas. There was a rise in public suspicion and anger with which Newcastle, still the first minister, was singularly unable to deal. Byng may have been burned in effigy by irate crowds, but the images of others were also held up in derision. A ballad of the day declared ‘to
the block with Newcastle and the yardarm with Byng’. In the autumn of the year the duke of Newcastle resigned. All eyes were now upon William Pitt who, much to the king’s annoyance and even disgust, seemed likely to be the new leader of the administration. It had been Pitt, after all, who scorned the Hanoverian loyalties of the king. But Pitt was certain of himself. He informed the duke of Devonshire that ‘I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.’ In the conventional histories of the period one figure exits stage left while another makes a grand entrance. But it was never as simple as that.

  All the cards were to be reshuffled. The players crowded around the table and met in corners. The remarks in the political correspondence of the period set the scene.

  There are so many wheels within wheels that no eye can see . . . the patriot of Monday is the courtier of Tuesday, and the courtier of Wednesday is the patriot of Thursday . . . if he is a good boy in the meantime . . . the opposition, like schoolboys, don’t know how to settle to their books again after the holidays . . . more than one has thrown away a very good game . . . Pitt has lent his paws to draw the chestnuts out of the fire . . . you know here is no such thing as first minister in England, and therefore you should not seem to be so . . . he treated it as words and mere amusement . . . patriots we have none, all is election jobbery.