Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

In 1738 in London, informers who exposed gin-sellers were frequently attacked by mobs of citizens. They were beaten up, burned in effigy and dunked in horse ponds and cesspools. At least one informer died of wounds after boiling water was poured down his throat, and another died after having “dirt crammed into her mouth.” Such was the rough music of the day in the streets of the largest city in Europe, during a period of class struggle punctuated by the many revisions to the Gin Act, which, as Jessica Warner tells us in Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (Four Walls Eight Windows), was a forerunner of more recent attempts to control the poor by outlawing their drugs. Gin was a cheap drink, and when it became available in eighteenth-century London, it became a recreation and a street-corner business for thousands of people in the lower classes. The big landowners in the rural areas, whose grain could not be sold outside the country, were pleased to find a new market for their product, and the reformers of morals were pleased to find a new cause with which to fill up the prisons with poor people. Warner, who describes herself as “not unlike a pirate’s parrot,” has written an entertaining and instructive account of the forces at work in a three-sided struggle between the people and their betters that history records as the Gin Riots. Samuel Johnson was a hack writer at the time; he counterfeited the gin debates in Parliament (Warner mistakenly identifies his writing as “transcription”) for the Gentleman’s Magazine (it was illegal to report such speeches directly: Johnson wrote from notes scribbled by agents on scraps of paper hidden in their pockets), with the result that for two centuries the world believed the parliamentarians of that day to be especially gifted in oratory. Here is what Johnson had the heartless Lord Hervey say about the evil effects of strong liquors: “They produce in almost every one a high Opinion of his own Merit . . . they blow the latent Sparks of Pride into Flame, and, therefore destroy all voluntary Submission, they put an End to Subordination, and raise every Man to an Equality with his Master, or his Governour. They repress all that Awe by which Men are restrained within the Limits of their proper Spheres.”