Eighteenth century London was home to the gin craze, a chapter in English history that marked the unprecedented mass consumption of this newly developed spirit. This paper traces the development of this complex urban phenomenon and examines how Parliamentarians came to attribute many of the social ills of the day, including criminal activity, to gin drinking. It is seen that the passage of the Gin Acts were counterproductive and in themselves a source of crime. It is explored how, through these Acts, Parliament sought to exert control over the drinking habits of the masses and by extension, over the general behavior the wider public. In a similar vein, legislators used the regulation of gin consumption as a means to uphold a patriarchal social order by seeking to delineate acceptable sexuality, morality and motherhood and by limiting the economic opportunities accessible to London women. Negative female imagery is explored as a source of inspiration and tool of reformers who sought to restrict gin and female gin consumption in particular.

THE GIN CRAZE: KEY FACTS
Prior to the eighteenth century, alcohol consumption in England was for the most part restricted to ale, beer and wine.¹ The period referred to as the gin craze marked a significant departure from these drinking habits: between 1720 and 1751, the per capita consumption of cheap distilled spirits almost tripled.² Significantly, the gin craze was an urban phenomenon mainly confined to the working class poor of the capital. As such, London is the focus of this examination.³

In response to the gin craze, Parliament passed a total of eight Gin Acts between 1729 and 1751. The aims of these Acts changed over this period. Generally, however, the Gin Acts sought to reduce gin consumption and to tax the spirit in order to levy funds for war efforts. The Acts were passed to levy licensing fees, provide rewards for informers of petty hawkers, protect informers from attack, empower private individuals to arrest gin-sellers, and regulate the issuance of licenses.⁴ Some Gin Acts were passed to respond to unanticipated problems (such as attacks on informers in 1738) and previous failed policies (such as the licensing scheme and fees). For the purpose of brevity, these Acts are referred to as they pertain to the issues in analysis.

It must be noted that throughout the period of the gin craze, the Whigs remained firmly in power. Their position on gin was divided: some Whigs were prepared to tolerate it but others, such as Sir Joseph Jekyll, wanted to prohibit the drink outright.⁵ Reformers, as referred to below, refer to the latter group.

MAIN CAUSES OF THE GIN CRAZE

A. Urbanization
The problems brought about by the increasing urbanization of London created conditions that allowed the gin craze to flourish. Gin sellers thrived in the sprawling suburbs of London because the local authorities were either too weak, corrupt or simply overwhelmed by the number of problems to deal with to adequately respond to the increased consumption. This situation was exacerbated by the absence of magistrates willing or qualified to police these neighborhoods.⁶ Consequently, thousands of women and men were able to sell gin openly and without a license.

B. Economic and political factors
There were also underlying economic and political circumstances that favored the expansion of gin distilling and consumption. The rise of distilling and gin in England can be traced to William III. After he declared war on France at the end of the seventeenth century, trade between the two nations was restricted. This restriction included France’s lucrative brandy exports and, as a result, this gap in the market opened the door for the English distilling industry to flourish. An Act was passed in 1690 to encourage the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn.⁷ There also appears to have been a deliberate policy to guide British tastes towards spirits: in addition to the heavy duties imposed on French wines and brandy, duties on strong beer were doubled in 1690.⁸

The gin craze was fueled by the ease of manufacture of gin by small distillers: during the early years of the eighteenth century and gin production in England, there was absolutely no control over the production or consumption of gin.⁹ A new Act passed in 1713 helped entrench the distilling industry by affirming that, “[a]ny person may distil brandy or spirits from British malt and such […] persons shall not be prosecuted for so doing.”¹⁰

These changes coincided with a period of good grain harvests, when landowners who dominated both houses of Parliament were happy to encourage a new market for corn at a time when beer production was falling.⁸ Since domestic distillers provided a potentially inexhaustible market for surplus grain, policies were passed that reflected the alliance between distillers and landowners.¹¹ The good years for farmers represented equally good years for the urban population. The average income was much higher in London than elsewhere in England¹² and the increased spending power of this city’s working poor meant that they had discretionary income with which to indulge in gin.¹³

Last, the economic considerations of Parliament also account for the gin craze. Funds needed to be raised to fight costly wars, and from 1720 to 1750 gin became a powerful source of revenue.¹⁴ Gin was an ideal substance to tax because it had become the beverage of choice of the poor, a group that had little voice to oppose such taxation.

GIN, SOCIAL UPHEAVAL & CRIME IN LONDON
When gin appeared on the streets of London, it was a new drug for which there were no rules and rituals governing its use, as there were with ale or wine, and thereby acting to limit its more harmful effects. For example, there are reports of early gin drinkers indulging in gin in the same volume as they would have ale.¹² Widespread drinking to intoxication by both genders came to be seen as a threat to public order and social stability, though today the disastrous effects of gin consumption are believed largely exaggerated.¹⁵ For example, during the gin craze, the per capita consumption of beer remained relatively constant¹² and consequently, alcohol-induced problems cannot be solely attributable to gin. Nevertheless, gin consumption was gradually linked with the increased commission of crime.

Crime or the fear of crime was a factor in the passage of the Gin Acts. Incidents of assaults, murders, and self-induced harm in gin-shops were regularly reported in London journals.¹⁶ Reformers turned to such accounts and concluded that gin made people violent.¹⁷ The fact that violence occurs most often when people happen to meet and gin-shops were frequent meeting places for the poor of eighteenth century London,¹⁷ was a detail omitted in such conclusions. Gin nonetheless came to be associated with a wide variety of crimes, as the following verse from The London Evening-Post, March 1751, illustrates:

This wicked gin, of all Defence bereft,
And guilty found of Whoredom, Murder, Theft,
Of rank Sedition, Treason, Blasphemy,
Should suffer Death, the Judges all agree¹⁸

Adding to the fears of crime was the return of soldiers and sailors to the populace of London. During years of war, it had been difficult for Whig reformers to suggest that the Crown place restrictions on an industry that provided much needed revenue. October 1748, however, marked the end of the War of Austrian Succession and between 1749 and 1750, 79,000 soldiers and sailors returned into the civilian population. The return of these men was a cause for alarm with respect to the crimes unemployed veterans could foreseeably commit in the streets of England.¹⁸ Since gin was believed to be a leading cause of crime, restricting the availability of it was considered sound policy to address this fear.

GIN ACT, 1751
To pass the 1751 Gin Act, reformers exploited the public’s fear of crime. They offered a simple formula with an equally simple solution: gin, they said, led to crime; take away the first and away goes the second.¹⁹ The Act had the effect of raising excises on British spirits by more than fifty percent, banning sales of gin in prisons and other lockups and barring distillers and street hawkers from retailing gin.¹⁹ By 1751, the gin craze had effectively ended but, as seen below, this event had little to do with the legislation or, for that matter, the end of crime.

GIN ACTS AS CAUSES OF CRIME
There are striking examples of the counterproductive nature of the increased state involvement in social ordering and regulation that was sought through the Gin Acts. The 1736 Gin Act, for instance, required an exorbitantly expensive £50 license for retailing gin and through such a steep requirement, Parliamentarians sought to effectively outlaw the sale of gin. This Gin Act provoked immense backlash against the government and in the years following this Act, London was rocked by a series of popular protests that posed a much more immediate threat to public order than gin ever had. There was widespread opposition from the trade and from the London public. Rioting, an explosion at Westminster Hall, and threats to the life of Joseph Jekyll (the chief initiator of the Act) ensued.²⁰ Moreover, sales of gin, after a momentary slump, actually increased after the 1736 Act in part because selling and drinking gin constituted a form of political protest against a highly unpopular government.²¹

The rewards to informers offered under the Gin Acts of 1736 and 1737 were also a catalyst for crime. In the year following these acts, hardly a day passed in which an informer was not attacked on the streets of London, sometimes by mobs of a hundred people or more.²²

GIN & POVERTY
An examination of the Gin Acts and crime would be incomplete without reference to poverty and the role poverty played in exacerbating the problems that arose in London related to gin consumption. Most people who drank gin were among the city’s working class poor. Since the poor were small, malnourished, and lived in an unsanitary environment, they were ill equipped to metabolize the large quantities of alcohol gin delivered.²³ Gin provided refuge and comfort from the harsh realities of daily London life.²⁴ Gin helped relieve the pains of adaptation to unfamiliar and increasingly industrialized work routines and to unhealthy living conditions in a city that had few recreational outlets beyond the gin-shop.²⁵ Evidently, the infrastructure of the day was inadequate to meet the complex challenges posed by a modern city life characterized by an increasingly heterogeneous population²⁶ and the dislocation of the industrial revolution served to heighten the social and medical problems of excessive gin-drinking.

The campaign against gin presented a simple solution to the problem of poverty: gin by itself was responsible for the poor health and poor behavior of its users.²⁷ People were poor and destitute because they drank gin and not the other way around. The link between gin and poverty is of particular relevance as one considers the impact of the gin craze and its accompanying legislative measures on the predominantly poor women of London.

WOMEN & GIN
Reformers sought to problematize the behavior of women who had taken to gin drinking as a way to push forward an agenda that upheld a status quo in which women had a given role and place: a role that included chastity and subordination, and a place that was in the home and not gin-shops. In the process of the regulation of gin possibilities opened for the indirect regulation of other behaviors that linked drug use with moral choice. In the case of the gin craze, these behaviors center on women with respect to sexuality, gender role, motherhood, and economic activity. Upholding the patriarchal order accounts for, in part, the disproportionate conviction of women under the Gin Acts and why the Gin Acts operated to restrict women’s access to gin. Moreover, the emphasis placed in the popular press on the evils of female gin consumption provided added momentum for reformers.

A. Gender and sexuality
The connection between women’s use of gin and crime was of particular concern for reformers. During the gin craze years, women were participating in an activity that had previously been restricted to men in ales houses; women could now drink side by side with men in gin-shops of London.²⁸ This was a cause for alarm among reformers because it symbolized a transformation in the station and gender role of women.

Drinking women alarmed reformers because they believed that, “drunkenness desires lust” and that women who drank were promiscuous.²⁹ Consequently, reformers considered gin-drinking women responsible for the spread of the sexual health scourge of the eighteenth century: syphilis.³⁰ Evidently, this belief was inconsistent in its exclusive application to the effects of alcohol on women and did not address male responsibility in the spread of venereal disease. Women were singled out for responsibility and this contributed to the vilification of female gin drinkers and women generally, an issue examined below. The association between alcohol and sexuality also led to assumptions that drinking wives could be adulterous wives. Drinking wives could be disorderly and challenge their husbands’ authority (and by extension, the authority of the state) and thereby the natural order of things in a patriarchal society.³¹

Along with promiscuous and adulterous behavior, gin became associated with prostitution, an issue that ranked high on the agenda of moral reformers. The association between gin and prostitution came about because gin-shops were public places that brought prostitute and customer together. It is important to note however that gin-shops were simply places where ordinary people gathered in a city where there were few other social spaces. As such, gin-shops were perhaps unfairly associated with prostitution in the sense that prostitution occurs where people happen to frequently gather. The tarnished reputation of gin shops in the eyes of reformers prompted legislation that aimed to shut down gin-shops, target petty hawkers, and disproportionately convict women.³²

B. Women and children
Reformers were especially critical of women whose drinking endangered the health or welfare of infants or small children. These women included pregnant women, nursing women and women who looked after their own or other people’s children.³³ The cause of infant welfare was adopted by reformers not out of concern for the welfare of mothers or the infants themselves, but because reformers believed that the survival of the nation was jeopardized by the behavior of gin-consuming women. They believed gin to have the potential to reduce both the number and fitness of the next generation of soldiers, sailors and laborers.³⁴

In the 1740s, newspaper headlined shocking statistics, such as attributing the death of 84,000 children as a result of gin drinking since 1725.³⁵ While the effects of gin on the fetus and breast fed children were not benign, as medical evidence from that period and today demonstrate, the overwhelming cause of child mortality was not gin but rather infectious diseases resulting from severe overcrowding, the lack of sanitation, polluted water supplies and inadequate nutrition.³⁶ It was hence inaccurate to attribute infant death and the stagnant population growth on the gin drinking habits of poor women. Whatever the actual harms of gin drinking, the lives and health of women adversely affected were not a priority with reformers.

Other reasons underpinning the concerns of the reformers for the fitness of the next generation were far less patriotic. Contemporary mercantilist theory favored an ever-growing population as a way to ensure that the supply of labour always exceeded demand and this was a way to ensure longer working hours from the poor and to keep wages low.³⁷ The loss of millions of pounds to the economy was attributed to a depressed population and gin-drinking women were among those responsible for crippling London’s economic growth.³⁵

C. Economic opportunity
The reformers’ aim was not only to control the sexuality of women, but also to maintain the status quo with respect to the economic opportunities open to women. The early eighteenth century was a period of enormous mobility in which thousands of young women descended on London every year in search of jobs and husbands. The reality they faced was bleak: the few jobs that were open to women tended to be poorly paid.³⁸ Gin selling, however, was one of the few occupations from which women were not effectively or explicitly excluded and the black market in gin came to be characterized by poor, single, destitute women who supplemented their meager incomes through the sale of this spirit.³⁹ Thus to criminalize the sale of gin by petty hawkers was to criminalize one of the few economic endeavors accessible to women at a time when this was one of the only ways women could raise their standard of living. Ironically, reformers failed to see that gin-selling actually provided women with an alternative to an evil they campaigned against: prostitution.

The Gin Acts of 1736 and 1737 authorized commissioners of excise to reward informers of petty hawkers who sold gin in the streets and alleys of London. As a result, thousands of Londoners, most of them women, were convicted of selling gin without a license.²² After the passing of these Acts, women were several times more likely than men to be charged, convicted and sent to prison once convicted.⁴⁰ Though women accounted for less than 20 percent of all known retailers in East London and the City of London, they accounted for nearly 70 percent of the individuals charged under the Gin Act 1736.⁴¹

Jessica Warner links the campaign against gin to a larger campaign to regulate the pre-industrial marketplace and drive from it occasional vendors, most of them women.⁴² It is difficult to estimate the impact these policies had on the long-term exclusion of women from economic ventures. What is known is that targeting women in this manner had an immediate impact on the welfare and potential for self-improvement of the poor women of eighteenth century London.

D. Women personifying the evils of gin
The year the most infamous of the Gin Acts was passed, marked the year witchcraft ceased to be a statutory offence in England.⁴³ The ideas associated with witches continued and superposed women through the personification of the evils of female gin-drinking in “Madam Geneva.” Madam Geneva was an unholy and unnatural creature that was described as “part whore and part witch.”⁴⁴ She is the central figure in William Hogarth’s 1751 satirical print “Gin Lane” (see image): a drunken woman sprawled on the steps in St Giles’s. She is too drunk with gin to notice the squalor around her or her child falling out of her arms. With her blouse hanging open and the sores of syphilis on her legs, the observer learns what she has had to do to pay for her gin habit, a habit that has aged and destroyed her.⁴⁵ Madam Geneva epitomizes all the evils of gin and its corruption of women. She is the image of failed motherhood and immorality. Hogarth choice of subject was not coincidence. He was a reformer and “Gin Lane” was his attack on the evils of the gin⁴⁶ and this piece highlights the negative female imagery of the gin craze. The highly published case of Judith Defour, that served as a rallying cry for the reformers, also contributed to the creation of this picture. Together, Hogarth’s work and the Defour murder helped make the case for the passing of the last Gin Act in 1751.

Defour was a single mother who was convicted for the murder of her young daughter, Mary. She strangled her daughter after stripping Mary of the new clothes given by a parish. Judith used the money from their sale to buy gin.⁴⁷ The Defour case highlighted the dangers of gin that echoed those of reformers: the failure of motherhood and the murder of children.

Female gin consumption was problematized and value-loaded as an act of moral significance. This is reflected in the response of magistrates and the disproportionate convictions of women. The perception of reformers and their attempt to regulate women is a complex interplay between the lives and economic realities of women, the influence of the press and the institution of government.

THE END OF THE GIN CRAZE
The mid-eighteenth century marked a time of disastrous harvests in England. As a result, the distillation of spirits from corn was significantly reduced. As the supply dropped, the price of gin soared accordingly.⁴⁸ The consumer power of the urban poor was by this time also in decline. By the time the final Gin Act was passed in 1751, average wages were depressed and the price of bread was high, thus leaving the working poor with little disposable income to spend on gin.⁴⁹ The excises on gin also account for the end of the craze: these had grown by more that 1,200 percent between 1700 and 1771.⁵⁰ Scholars have also argued that, like all crazes, the novelty of the substance had to wear off at some point.⁵¹ Gin was the drink of choice of a generation, similar to the choice of opium or ecstasy as a drug of choice of later generations.

LEGACY OF THE GIN CRAZE
The gin craze is a complex and multidimensional story. It is a story of industrialization and urbanization, wealth and want, gender roles, and the criminalization of certain activities. The problems reformers sought to curb with gin in eighteenth century helped shape the responses adopted by later government to phenomena of perceived widespread substance use. The ideas stemming from the gin craze also served to fuel later movements to promote complete abstinence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁶ To this end, the gin craze initiated a pattern of problematizing and criminalizing behavior associated with substance use and provides insight into contemporary drug wars. The gin craze of eighteenth century London also demonstrates that the fear associated with the use of a substance is often disproportionate to the actual harm and serves to obfuscate underlying social and economic inequities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burnett, John. Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain. (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Dillon, Patrick. Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva. (Boston: Justin, Charles and Co., 2004).

Martin, A. Lynn. Alcohol, Sex and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Warner, Jessica. Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. (Toronto: Random House 2002).

Warner, Jessica et al. “On the Vanguard of the First Drug Scare: Newspapers and Gin in London, 1736-1751.” Journalism History. December 1, 2001. Vol. 27. Issue 4.

Watney, John. Mother’s Ruin: A History of Gin. (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1976).

Notes:

1. A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, New York: Palgrave, 2001 at 2. [↩]
2. Jessica Warner et al., On the Vanguard of the First Drug Scare: Newspapers and Gin in London, 1736-1751, Journalism History, December 1, 2001, Vol. 27, Issue 4 at 1. [↩]
3. John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain, New York: Routledge, 1999 at 162. [↩]
4. Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason, Toronto: Random House 2002, at 221-223. [↩]
5. Ibid., at 7. [↩]
6. Ibid., at 44-45. [↩]
7. Patrick Dillon, Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, Boston: Justin, Charles and Co., 2004 at 8-9. [↩]
8. Burnett, supra note 3 at 161. [↩] [↩]
9. John Watney, Mother’s Ruin: A History of Gin, London: Peter Owen Limited, 1976 at 18. [↩]
10. Dillon, supra note 7 at 15. [↩]
11. Warner, supra note 4 at 30. [↩]
12. Warner, supra note 2 at 1. [↩] [↩] [↩]
13. Burnett, supra note 3 at 163. [↩]
14. Warner, supra note 4 at 59. [↩]
15. Burnett, supra note 3 at 162. [↩]
16. Warner, supra note 4 at 202-203. [↩]
17. Ibid., at 59. [↩] [↩]
18. Ibid., at 193. [↩] [↩]
19. Ibid., at 224. [↩] [↩]
20. Burnett, supra note 3 at 164. [↩]
21. Warner, supra note 4 at 218. [↩]
22. Ibid., at 222. [↩] [↩]
23. Ibid., at 16. [↩]
24. Martin, supra note 1 at 3. [↩]
25. Burnett, supra note 3 at 166. [↩]
26. Martin, supra note 1 at 8. [↩] [↩]
27. Warner, supra note 4 at 212. [↩]
28. Ibid., at 63. [↩]
29. Martin, supra note 1 at 1. [↩]
30. Dillon, supra note 7 at 210. [↩]
31. Martin, supra note 1 at 11. [↩]
32. Warner, supra note 4 at 57. [↩]
33. Ibid., at 69. [↩]
34. Ibid., at 70. [↩]
35. Dillon, supra note 7 at 249. [↩] [↩]
36. Burnett, supra note 3 at 164-165. [↩]
37. Warner, supra note 4 at 70. [↩]
38. Warner, supra note 4 at 66. [↩]
39. Ibid., at 50-51. [↩]
40. Ibid., at 51. [↩]
41. Ibid., at 54. [↩]
42. Ibid., at 53. [↩]
43. Ibid., at 81. [↩]
44. Dillon, supra note 7 at 4. [↩]
45. Ibid., at 207-208. [↩]
46. Ibid., at 247. [↩]
47. Ibid., at 98. [↩]
48. Watney, supra note 9 at 44. [↩]
49. Warner, supra note 4 at 208. [↩]
50. Ibid., at 87. [↩]
51. Ibid., at 208. [↩]

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