Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. By Jessica Warner. Profile Books, London. www.profilebooks.co.uk, 267 pp., £15. ISBN: 1 86197 676 4.

Readers of an international journal may not be aware of the epidemic of excessive gin drinking that inflicted London in the eighteenth century.

The usurping of the British throne by a Dutch prince in 1688 brought gin in its wake. Taxes on the concoction of grain spirits and juniper oil, though minimal, provided useful revenues to support the new government's wars against France. Unhappily, the low cost resulted in an explosion of gin drinking among the poorer citizens of what was then the most populous city in Europe.

Across the four decades from 1700, consumption rose 7-fold. Gin was widely sold in streets, houses, shops and prisons. An advertisement, now notorious, boasted ‘Drunk for one pence. Dead Drunk for two pence. Clean straw for nothing.’ The results were disastrous, with neglect of duties, fights, crime and health damage. Burials exceeded births. Women were frequently affected, living in a gap between the puritanism of the previous century and the temperance impetus of the next.

The British Parliament was forced to institute no fewer that eight Gin Acts, which progressively raised taxes and limited places of sale. The final Act of 1751 greatly encouraged a pre-existing minor fall of consumption, and ended the so-called gin craze.

The author's account derives from a wide-ranging study of the basic historical sources. She is careful to explain that poverty, malnutrition, harsh work, overcrowding and inadequate sanitation were major, though generally unaknowledged, contributors to morbidity and mortality. As with other periods, alcohol was subject to exaggerated reports of its dangers, including ‘Gout, Stones and Rheumatism, raging Fevers, Pleurisies, Small Pox, or Measles’ and ‘Polypuses in the Heart’. The text draws analogies with the US over myths concerning cocaine and cannabis.

It would have been helpful for the book to have included data from the London Bills of Mortality to establish precisely the link between high gin intake and deaths. More importantly, the author attributes the steep fall of consumption after the last Gin Act to a spontaneous decline, and refrains from giving credit to the crucial benefits of restrictive legislation.

The text avowedly aims to show that the responses of the reforming elite arose basically from a desire to suppress the disordered conduct that endangered its status. The volume delivers repeated censures of alleged social control in terms which are quaintly archaic for the present century. The potential reader should not allow Foucaultian moralizing to prevent enjoyment of an instructive text that is enriched by lively anecdotes.

Spencer Madden





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