London's Gin Craze

In the first half of the 1700s, Britain was overwhelmed by gin. But it might not have been as fun as it sounds. Today, we're hearing about what the so-called gin-craze was, the impact that it had on regular people, and the government's attempts to control it. Kate is joined by Professor Judith Hawley from Royal Holloway for this episode. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheets in your ear holes, but now also available on YouTube, if you wanted to go and give us a subscribing over there as well. But as we are here, I should warn you before we go any further together. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults about adulty things and an adulty way of covering random subjects you should be an adult to. Do you feel safer? I feel safer. Right, let's crack on.

• 1:03Kate Lister?

  Well, team, we have crash landed here in St Giles, London, in the middle of the 18th century. And to be honest, I don't think we should stick around. It's absolute carnage. There are people fighting, there are people throwing up, there's a woman dropping her baby. I'm telling you, everybody is off their nut and their drink of choice seems to be gin. I mean, well, I guess that explains it. People are selling their belongings, their family belongings. Hell, people are selling their family members. They'll do anything to get money for more gin. Right, I've seen enough, let's get out of here.

• 1:58Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In the first half of the 1700s, Britain was awash with gin. Sounds like fun, right? Well, no, it wasn't. It wasn't naughty betwixter. It wasn't fun at all. For one thing, 18th century gin was, well, how would we describe it? Chewy, I think is a good word, certainly not something refined that you would have with tonic and a wedge of lime. And the people who drank it were just wronguns. Or at least, that's how the story goes, right? We've heard the horror stories, but just how true is that? To find out more, I am joined by Judith Hawley, Professor of 17th and 18th Century Literature

• 2:39Kate Lister?

  and Culture at Royal Holloway, and she is going to put us right on the subject. Cheers, let's do this.

• 2:52Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Judith Hawley. How are you doing?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  I'm doing very well. It's not yet gin o'clock, but I'm feeling fine.

• 3:05Kate Lister?

  You are a professor of 17th and 18th century literature and culture at Royal Holloway, with a particular interest in gin. Is that a professional interest, a personal interest?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yes, very professional. Everything I drink is tax deductible.

• 3:22Kate Lister?

  That is a genius strategy.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Isn't it, though?

• 3:25Kate Lister?

  We are here to talk about the so-called gin craze in the 18th century. And if anyone wants to know what we're talking about, get on your phones right now and Google Hogarth's Gin Lane, because that seems a very good place to start. Could you please tell us about this very famous print and what you see when you look at it?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Well, I have it here. Here's one I prepared earlier. So what we have in this image, which is readily searchable online, reproduced in lots and lots of places, because it is so iconic, it's a brilliant image, but it is a companion piece to Beer Street. This pair of images seem to be selling in 1751, is that if you drink beer, you'll be fat and happy and prosperous, which is, frankly, who wouldn't want to be fat and happy and prosperous? Everything goes well in Beer Street. The only buildings that are falling down are the pawnbrokers and the distillers, whereas the opposite is true in Gin Lane. The pawnbroker, the distillers and the funeral home are the only businesses that are prospering.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And at the centre of the image, the thing that attracts most commentators' attention is this haggard, seemingly an elderly woman, whose legs are covered in sores, her clothes are torn, and to use a technical term, her tits are hanging out.

• 4:46Kate Lister?

  We've all been there.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  We've all been there. She's also dropping her baby. Now, the baby is quite a well-fed infant, looks quite healthy, is less than two years old, but it's falling out of her hands and it's falling down into a stairwell that looks like the mouth of hell. In this sort of gaping mouth hole, there's, above it is a tankard marked Gin Royal and it's, you know, insignes and objects hanging outside shops were very common in an age where most poor people couldn't read. But above this entrance to the gin shop is the phrase, dead drunk for tuppence, straw for nothing. So the story that I've read over and over again in popular books on gin and in numerous

• 5:32Speaker 01

  websites, is that gin was called Mother's Ruin.

• 5:36Kate Lister?

  I've heard that.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  In the 18th century. And that this figure here, Madame Geneva, symbolises the evils of gin. And that there were various gin shops, there's one often cited in Southwark, which had that phrase written above it.

• 5:52Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  A lot of that is just not true.

• 5:56Kate Lister?

  Not true at all.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Not true at all. One thing that interests me is that it's a canny twist on the truth. There are little details there.

• 6:04Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  And the way in which the details have been exaggerated and extrapolated, tell us something, both about the big debate about gin in the 18th century, and about how we view alcohol, scandal, women, intoxication now. So it's a classic story. There's a beginning, middle and end. It is commonly repeated on the internet and in many, many of the popular books, that there was a thing called the gin craze, that started in the 1690s, when William III, who was a Protestant king, who came to us from the Low Countries, from the Netherlands, brought gin with him. And then a craze erupted of gin drinking that spread especially through London and

• 6:48Speaker 01

  in a few other urban centres, but primarily London. And that people were lying dead drunk in the streets, women were living scandalous lives, there was a crime wave. And all this went on roughly between 1720, but then in 1751, William Hogarth, the great satirist, moralist and fantastic artist, teamed together with his friend, the novelist and magistrate, Henry Fielding. And they, with a few other reformers, churchmen, parliamentarians, mounted a campaign which brought about the end of gin and the gin craze in 1751, with the Eighth of Eight Acts about affecting gin production and consumption.

• 7:30Kate Lister?

  And it's got a nice little bit of slight xenophobia, a bit of misogyny thrown in there as well, then it's all fixed by some nice men that came along.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  The nasty foreigners coming over here and intoxicating our women were eventually quashed by not only the forces of law and order, but this great artist, William Hogarth.

• 7:48Kate Lister?

  Hurrah, we're all fixed, done and justed.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  People stopped drinking gin.

• 7:51Kate Lister?

  Brilliant.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  So where do we begin with unpicking this? One thing is that distilled spirits flavoured with juniper had been drunk in Britain from about the 16th century. And there's a wonderful new book by the people who are behind Sip Smith, one of the great new gin brands, Anastasia Miller and Jared Brown. And they trace the fact that women in particular were distilling spirits, because distilling spirits was a household task, like brewing beer and distilling spirits is something that women often did. Beer was a staple of everybody's diet. I mean, it's thought to be as good as food. You know, it's related to bread, it's made from grain, it's healthy, better than the water.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Kids drank beer for breakfast, why not? But they also made spirits as cordials, as medicines. But then a taste for spirit drinking spread through the court. And Miller and Brown suggest that the wife of James the First and Sixth, so the person who succeeded Elizabeth the First, that Anne of Denmark brought this taste for having little spirits. As social drinking is something pleasurable and not just as medicine.

• 9:04Kate Lister?

  Have we been sort of swigging spirits before that? Like whisky, I would have thought would be quite old.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Whisky is also developing in Scotland, but there's also, it's very hard to identify, to separate gin specifically from all the other spirits, because they're often referred to as brandy. Now, I think of brandy as being French and quite refined and expensive, and quite different from whisky, which is Irish or Scotch, and gin, which is Dutch stroke English. But brandy is a corruption of a Dutch term, meaning burnt wine. So it means wine that's been heated up and distilled. Distillation is basically heating an alcoholic ferment. And then it, in a still, it condensation settles and you get this spiritless liquid.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  So brandy is a general name for burnt wines. So we had been drinking spirits, but not many people, and it was expensive, associated with the court. I think it is the case, and the Sip Smith authors, brilliant in many ways, underestimate the extent to which there was something new happening when William of Orange came to the throne with Mary in 1689. So he is bringing a new taste for strong spirits, to be drunk socially and not just as a medicinal thing or a little tiny cordial. In Germany, they were drinking spirits as just a medicinal thing, a shot in the morning to get workers going.

• 10:39Kate Lister?

  Howls bells.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would go to a stand, like a coffee stand, you know, we often pick up our little cups of coffee on the way to the...

• 10:47Kate Lister?

  And they'd be knocking them back, just, wow.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  A strong spirits pick you up.

• 10:53Kate Lister?

  Seen it in Russia, that you can still do it there occasionally.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Having a little glass of Jouboné on the way to work. It picks you up. And when, you know, this is pre-caffeine days, so you've got to have something.

• 11:04Kate Lister?

  I suppose it would do something, wouldn't it?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  One thing that William and Mary did, and then successive monarchs, when we had the Georges, you know, we moved to the Hanoverian regime, is they encouraged the production of spirits.

• 11:18Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  They actually encouraged it as government policy.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  For several reasons. One is they did want to reduce people's drinking of French imports, like either brandy or French wines.

• 11:33Kate Lister?

  See, that sounds like us, doesn't it?

• 11:36Kate Lister?

  These damned foreigners again.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It's a solution to one problem. You know, there's foreign stuff flooding the market. We're at war with France. We're always at war with France. So let's hit them where it hurts in the in the economy. So you you try to reduce people's dependence on on French drinks. You encourage home distilling, patriotic, and that also suits the landowners. Because they are producing too much barley. It's part of crop rotation.

• 12:04Kate Lister?

  Ah, I see.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Barley's not a great grain for making bread, so it's not a staple food for the nation. So why not use that surplus barley to do some home distilling?

• 12:23Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Judith after this short break.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Hi there. I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with three hundred handmaidens in tow.

• 13:09Kate Lister?

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 13:39Kate Lister?

  Gin is reasonably easy to make. I'm going to caveat that with please don't try and make it yourself, you mad people. Just buy it from shops and sensible distillers. But it's very easy to make. It's not like rum that has to be distilled for this long or that long, or whisky that needs to be treated.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the reasons why it's so popular now is that whisky makers can make gin in seventy four hours.

• 14:02Kate Lister?

  It's very quick to make.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  So you you have a first distillation. So there's several stages of the process. You distill something. And at first it is being distilled from beer or from wine, or you make a mash of of sort of malted barley or other grains. And you distill that into a thing called low wine, which is very strong, neat spirit that's that's odorless. And you can just drink that as, and that's what, you know, a kind of vodka. And then you can do a second process, either rectifying it, re-distilling it with the botanicals, or compounding it, which is just banging in your botanicals, like making a very alcoholic tea.

• 14:41Kate Lister?

  And you can put juniper in it, and that's what it's most famous for. But technically, technically, you can put anything in gin.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  You can. So there are all sorts of flavoured spirits, like Alcopops, you know, these buzz balls that people are drinking now.

• 14:55Kate Lister?

  Like you see, you see that loads of those in the supermarket, don't you? Like Clementine Gin and Caramel Gin and all these other. And and it's just like, it's it's a sort of a distilled neutral spirit with this stuff added in, and it can be called a gin.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  So in order to count as gin, it has to have juniper in it.

• 15:11Kate Lister?

  It has to have juniper.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Has to have juniper in it. But there are lots of things that were lumped together as spirituals, liquids, or they had funny names, or it would be juniper. But then lots of other things too. And some of them sound really quite nice. Some of them less so.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  You know, if if juniper was expensive, and juniper grows everywhere in Europe, it grows in Britain, it grows all over the place. But each different juniper variety is slightly, I'm sort of getting led down a kind of a junipery path. But if you are just a compounder or a rectifier, so you're doing that second order process. And you won't remember the worshipful company of distillers who had the monopoly at first of producing that that raw spirit. You could put in a little bit of turpentine or sulphuric acid or pepper to give it that little sharp kick.

• 15:59Kate Lister?

  To give it a zing. Imagine turpentine would do that. It's quick to make. It's easy to make. We can make it ourselves right here in Blighty. We don't need to rely on those on those French and their and their fabulous spirits and liquors. Judith, this all sounds fabulous. How do we go from this to topless women hurling their babies down stairwells?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are several steps. So at first it's it's presented to the English as patriotic and also as health giving. It's really, it cures gout, dropsy, loose teeth, whatever. So encourage people to buy it. It becomes cheap to produce. And the government's encouraging it, first because it's affecting the French trade, but also because as we're at war with France the whole time, they start taxing it. So they're getting revenue from it. So it's not in the government's interest to ban gin. Because as with tobacco and arguments about legalising soft drugs. So first of all, it's wonderful. It's good for the health. So, oh, my God, it's it's great. It's it's really cheap.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And then you start to think, oh, my God, there's a crisis. We've got to stop this.

• 17:05Kate Lister?

  Everyone's drinking too much. We want you to drink it, but not not like that.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Not like that. So one of the things that that happens in in the seventeen twenties is that London is becoming an imperial city. It's the biggest city in Europe, and it's a huge magnet for young people. So you get unattached men and women coming to London, trying to make a living. And one way for women to make a living was to sell gin on the streets. So a kind of eighteenth century Deliveroo. You could order up, you know, your tot of gin. Your caution is often sold in quarter pint bottles, a caution of gin, and they'd have a basket.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  But you wouldn't necessarily, but you wouldn't necessarily sort of, I think the impression is given that you'd sit there and you'd glug down the whole caution. Often it's like that that German example I mentioned, that you might pop into a gin shop. Gin was sold in all sorts of different places. They're not all low dives like the one Hogarth depicts. But you might pop in and just have a stand at the bar, have your tot and go away, or meet people. It might well then end up into a kind of serious addiction or, you know, really problematic drinking. But a lot of it is just just drinking.

• 18:15Kate Lister?

  Did they take to drinking in the way that perhaps Hogarth depicts or some of the moralists seem to be concerned about? Was there something that could be termed a gin craze? Or was that exaggerated?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Both are true. There was something called a gin craze, and it was exaggerated. And it was exaggerated partly because I think, to be a bit Marxist about it, it's a it's a kind of social control of the of the pleasures of the poor.

• 18:38Kate Lister?

  That's interesting. Why'd you say that?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  The fear is that the poor were aping the manners of their betters. They're going for luxuries. And one of the the effects of intoxication, as we probably all know, is that you think you're capable of anything, you're as good as anyone. So some of the complaints about poor people drunk on gin is that they start demanding things.

• 19:00Kate Lister?

  They don't, do they?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Wanting power. Yes. And they might well end up wanting better pay.

• 19:08Kate Lister?

  They're getting rowdy.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  They're getting rowdy. They're getting above themselves. They are also, it's argued, less productive. So it's not just women. I I think in some ways fetal alcohol syndrome is a real thing, but is also used as a way of preventing women from drinking. If you're French and pregnant, they say just a little glass, it won't be, it'll be fine. If you're American and pregnant, no, no, you must not drink. And if you're English and and pregnant, don't tell me about it, but you know, you'd probably be all right. So the effects on the unborn child were exaggerated, but there are some well attested cases of of women doing horrible things with their babies.

• 19:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, dear.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  One of the most famous ones, which is usually linked in people's minds with the bad mother in the Hogarth print, is the case of Judith Dufour.

• 19:55Kate Lister?

  What happened to her?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  So there's a well attested case in which a woman called Judith Dufour was working in a manufacturing shop with her friend Sukie. And they're drinking tots of gin throughout the day. And their boss tolerated it because it, you know, you go out, it's like having a fag break or something. You'd have a gin break and you come back in, you feel a bit a bit pecked up and so, but you have to get the level right. You don't want to be too intoxicated. And Judith and Sukie had too much and they wanted more.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  And Judith had a child in a kind of children's home. She couldn't, she was a single mother, couldn't afford to look after this child. So this child was cared for by the parish. And Sukie put it into Judith's head to go and pick up her child from the parish to take it out for a walk, knowing that the child would be dressed in new clothes to be taken out by its parent. And they took the child out for a walk and supposedly they strangled it and left it in a ditch and sold the clothes and bought gin with the proceeds.

• 20:58Kate Lister?

  I think that's not good, is it?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  That's really not good.

• 21:01Kate Lister?

  That's really not good.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  That's really, really not good. And there are other cases, this is supposedly one of a woman who's hired as a nurse or nanny and got so drunk that she put what she thought was a log on the fire, but it wasn't.

• 21:15Kate Lister?

  All right, the state might, you can't be chucking babies on the fire. Like there's, the state might have to intervene.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:22Kate Lister?

  Or is it the case, like, these stories were sort of leapt upon and gin was made the culprit, which is sort of an interesting thing. Anyway, like, would it have happened if there was no gin, if there was just beer, if there was just alcohol, but gin gets the blame for these cases?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  That's a good point. I think one of the things that might be different is that women did drink beer and they did drink spirits in the past. And there's an interesting book published by Eliza Hayward, who was a writer of all sorts of writing in the 18th century, and she writes a book helping women off their addictions to alcohol. And this is addressed to upper class women as well as the poor. But it's likely to be the case that women drank more in public than they had done before. And that for a while at least, gin was readily available. There were the street sellers, it was served in various kind of establishments like ale houses, coffee houses, you could buy gin in coffee houses,

• 22:19Speaker 01

  in dedicated hot water shops, with hot waters, fire water, and that they could, they could drink there in mixed company and they're drinking more of it throughout the day.

• 22:29Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That is a possibility, that they were more drunk than they were. I mean, beer consumption went down slightly, but not very much. So people were drinking spirits in addition to beer.

• 22:40Kate Lister?

  And that's not a good idea, is it? I mean, really?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  There is also an 18th century drink, the dogs knows, which is a beer with the gin poured into it.

• 22:48Kate Lister?

  Sometimes I look back at history, and it's not just the 18th and 17th century, although it seems to be particularly rife there, but like, like well into the 20th century and even now. And I just think, how drunk was everybody? Like, like, just when you read through some of the, the alcohol consumptions, like George the Fourth, I mean, his daily alcohol intake is on record somewhere. And it's like bottles of brandy for breakfast. And, and you see like these people going to work and just having gin, just as, as a little pick me up. Like, how drunk was everybody?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things is, we can't really tell how strong this 18th century gin was. There wasn't really a very good way of, of telling. And that two-stage process of gin making, you start with a very strong spirit and it is watered down, it has to be watered down, but it might be watered down further by the people hawking it to make more money out of it. So they might not have been drinking anything that was super strong. We just, we just don't know.

• 23:44Kate Lister?

  They probably still had a buzz on though, didn't they?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  It must have had a buzz on it. But, and also they would drink it. So it comes as this flavoured, deliciously flavoured liquid, and then you might pour some hot water into it.

• 23:55Kate Lister?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So that dilutes it further. So it's like kind of hot lemon sip.

• 24:02Kate Lister?

  There's a Victorian recipe, I think, I remember it was called a quick sip or a, oh no, a piss quick, that's what it was called. And it was hot water and it had brandy in it and lemon and some spices. And it was recommending that you drink that in the morning.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:15Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Mixed drinks were really, really popular. This is an era of punch. This is pre-cocktail, official coining of cocktails. But lots of people drank all sorts of mixed drinks, including punch with spices, lemon, hot water, all those things that you were mentioning.

• 24:42Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Judith after this short break.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 25:58Kate Lister?

  And when you're thinking about Hogarth, it's really interesting that like his, his counterpoint to this awful hellhole of Gin Lane that he's created is not like an abstinence based programme. It's not fresh water and exercise, it's beer. It's like, don't drink that, drink this instead. Why did he think beer was, was the antidote to gin? Because if you look at Beer Street, it's all sunshine and everybody's having a fabulous time.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Everybody's having a fabulous time. But one of the things that Hogarth is very good at is that he's very, he's readable. You can take all the elements apart. And sometimes there is this text. And one of the things you can read is that the, the posture of the drunk woman in the centre of the, the picture, she's leaning like this, she's got one hand in a snuff, she's taking snuff, that's where she's dropped the baby. That's the same posture of a fat man who's, I think he's a butcher, who's got his arm around a young woman. So you're, you're moving from, here's this drink-addled, addicted woman to, here's a creepy bloke, you know, fondling a maiden.

• 27:06Kate Lister?

  So much better.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Though, first, he's, he's not saying that beer is totally virtuous.

• 27:12Kate Lister?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  But it's better. It's better for the economy. It's more patriotic. He's got a couple of very famous anti-French, this one called the Gates of Calais, he favours beef eating, you know, roast beef is, is patriotic, rather than those nasty French foods that come with sauces. So you can't tell what's, what's in them. He also makes fun of people drinking punch and wine.

• 27:34Kate Lister?

  Ah, so he's got form then.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  For him, it's intoxication and it's intoxication of the poor. Because at the same time as he's doing this, he's, he's, he did a cartoon series, Industry and Idleness, saying, this is what happens with a good apprentice who does what he's supposed to. And this is what happens with the poor one. And this is how he gets led into failure.

• 27:54Kate Lister?

  Always the poor that they focus on, isn't it? It's never the rich aristocrats who are drinking the stuff that people are concerned about. And that's the, that's the same right up to the present day. It's the working classes that get the focus.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Who makes the law?

• 28:07Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yes. Who is it? The, the Green MP recently caused havoc by suggesting that maybe, maybe MPs shouldn't be smashed when they're voting on certain policies. Maybe you shouldn't be drinking while at work.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the, in the highly subsidised bars.

• 28:22Kate Lister?

  Yes. But don't question them. Let's focus on the poor people doing it. I'm interested as well, what you're saying about like, that one of the issues that arises that gin becomes not gentrified, the opposite of gentrified. It goes from being something that the rich people have to being something that the poor people are doing. And it's interesting whenever that process happens, because it does have the effect of it devalues it. The example I'm thinking of in my head is, is Burberry, remember the Burberry prince?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:49Kate Lister?

  That was like, it was so exclusive and elite. And then suddenly it was being replicated everywhere in the working class. You could buy it on Leeds Market, it was no big deal. And that's sort of what gin is doing here, is now it's becoming something poor people do.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  It's going down market, yeah. There are probably two types of gin. So there is the stuff that's being distilled by the, the big business distillers with training, with good equipment, with, with money. And then this cheap and nasty stuff that might be adulterated with, you know, turpentine and sulfuric acid.

• 29:21Kate Lister?

  Is it true then that Hogarth managed to put an end to the gin craze and it all stopped and it was all fine? Was there a campaign to stop people drinking it?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  There was a campaign to stop people drinking it. But my line now is that I'm now much more sceptical about the stories of, of the gin craze than I was. Hogarth was definitely involved in the campaign. So there are eight acts of parliament that tackled gin, either distillation, or rectifying, or retail, or consumption. And they, they tried over the years, really ineffective. Because the government really, until the 18th century, hadn't even attempted to do proper social control.

• 30:00Kate Lister?

  Just a free for all.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no sort of social welfare. So, so government legislation wasn't used to intervening in social matters in this way at all. So it starts in the 1720s, but there's a big act in 1736, which really cracks down on gin drinking. There's a huge public backlash. People come out onto the streets and even shout things like, no gin, no king, no gin, no king. They think that taxing them in this way breaks their liberties. The British prided themselves for some reason on, on their liberties in the 18th century. The 1736 Act was a big failure. It slightly affected gin sales, but it was so unpopular it couldn't be enforced. And the various other attempts, but there's a concerted

• 30:44Speaker 01

  attempt from about 1749. And one of the factors is that we had just ended another of our wars with France, and there were lots of soldiers returning to Britain in, in 1748. Battle hardened, unemployed, rowdy.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And causing problems. And this is then assimilated to gin. So Hogarth, Henry Fielding, and a whole bunch of distillers who are trying to protect their own interests, members of parliament who have got some stake in it, and some high-ranking Church of England clergymen, especially some bishops, start publishing letters, pamphlets, making sermons. Henry Fielding wrote an inquiry into the current increase in the present state of robbery, or something like that. One of the chapters about gin, but there are lots of other chapters. So there's this concerted campaign to control gin. They do bring in some controls which separate distillation and retail, and basically mean that you can't

• 31:44Speaker 01

  just sell gin on the streets anymore. You can't have an old lady with a basket and gin hidden in her apron. It has to be sold by a sort of respectable person. And that means a middle-class male publican.

• 31:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, look at that. So that's, it's taking away what sounds like quite a woman, a woman-heavy workforce there, if we were the ones selling it on the streets.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Kate Lister?

  Swine.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  But one last thing about the gin lane, if I may. So that phrase on the, above the cellar says, drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, straw for nothing. And then that is repeated as being, you know, a set of things that is on gin houses. Well, actually, the phrase drunk for a penny was used in the House of Lords in one of the speeches against gin, just drunk for a penny. And then you get this kind of inflation. Then there's a pamphlet says drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence. And then Hogarth adds the free straw. So you can see how he's, he's layering it on. It's not, it's not a documentary piece of

• 32:50Speaker 01

  work. It is, it's polemical, it's propaganda. So he adds the third term, and then that becomes the phrase that gets repeated.

• 32:59Kate Lister?

  See, nobody was actually advertising a gin house with those slogans.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  No, but it is possibly the case that poor people living in unheated houses would happily go to a place which had a fire, company, maybe some straw to bed down on. But that phrase is a selling point for gin.

• 33:19Kate Lister?

  Tell me about Mother's Ruin then.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Similarly, this phrase, Mother's Ruin, gets inserted into the discourse. And I've tracked it on websites. People will quote a possibly testified source saying that there was a figure called Madame Geneva or Mother Gin, and that women were particularly thought to be susceptible to addiction to gin. And you can actually see them kind of almost like opening up the quotation and shoving in Mother's Ruin. Mother's Ruin did not appear in the original quotation. And I've done a really extensive search on databases of 18th century literature. You do not find the phrase, Mother's Ruin.

• 33:59Kate Lister?

  In the 18th century?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  In the 18th century is a term for gin.

• 34:02Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay. When's the earliest that you've dated this to?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  1905.

• 34:06Kate Lister?

  That's a lot later than I thought that that would be.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  And it's also used humorously and affectionately by the kind of bright young thing saying, oh, shall we have a glass of Mother's Ruin? Oh, how lovely. Yes, I'll drink it. It's an utterly different meaning, isn't it?

• 34:26Kate Lister?

  That's a completely different meaning.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Ladies Delight is one of, I mean, dozens and dozens of humorous names, sometimes brand names, but also names which were invented to try to get around the tax on gin. So if you call it by a different name, it's not gin. No, no, no, no, no. It's the cockle's pleasure, or it's brown dog, or it's yellow tom, or whatever. So it's not gin, you can't tax it. Ladies Delight is one of many names used there.

• 34:54Kate Lister?

  It seems that we do get in periodic fits about certain types of alcohol from time to time. We still do it. Like, I remember when I was a teenager and was worried about Alcopops. And now we're worried about what are they called, buzz balls or buzz bombs or something, or spice or something. Do you think that was what we're seeing here? Because it's, you're quite, I mean, you pointed out earlier, like, we never drank gin again. Well, obvi, like, yeah, so obviously, they didn't stop people drinking gin, did they?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  No, gin consumption went down slightly after 1751, but it had been on the wane from about 1745, partly because it's coming out of fashion, but it also depends a lot on how much available income people have. People were too poor to buy gin for a bit. And so it went down a bit. And then distillation altogether was prevented by the government for a few years because of poor grain harvests.

• 35:50Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  But then it came back on again. And well through the rest of the 18th century, gin consumption was, it's just become one of the drinks, but no one panicked about it anymore. It's like, it's not that people stopped drinking gin, but people stopped panicking about gin.

• 36:09Kate Lister?

  It's funny how certain drinks become gendered. There's nothing in it at all, really, that would, that would say a man has to drink this, or a woman has to drink this. But gin has got that reputation as being a woman's drink, that you remember your mum or your auntie drinking a gin and tonic, and it's Mother's Ruin. And like, has it always been like that, gin?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I think that's more of a late 20th, early 21st century association.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  You know, my grandmother was, my grandmother was quite a drinker. She had lots of medicinal drinks. She had a medicinal stout in the afternoon.

• 36:48Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And then a medicinal sherry.

• 36:51Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Water on a tray. And she might go to the, to the pub and have a port and lemon.

• 36:56Kate Lister?

  A port and lemon? I haven't heard about that in a long time.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  No, I've never, I've never tried it. It doesn't, doesn't appeal. Sort of double headache and sugar rush, really, no. I think that gin association, I think, comes from a kind of gin and tonic drinking, which is very much a 20th century thing. And it was not first drunk in India in 1825 by British soldiers. No.

• 37:18Kate Lister?

  I've heard that one.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  That's also, sorry, not true. The, I mean, AI is just going to make this worse because it scrapes up stuff from the internet and it doesn't go back and check the sources. I'm sorry, but we are doomed.

• 37:29Kate Lister?

  We are, I'm afraid.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  But I think one of the interesting things about Mother's Ruin now is that it's a selling point.

• 37:36Kate Lister?

  Yes, it is. It's got that very, like, super nostalgia, like historic ring to it. Like, like, it's got that kind of link to our history, the same way that, you know, tequila's like the bad boy of drinking. Mother's Ruin gives it that sort of, that vintage feel, doesn't it?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Vintage and also subversive.

• 37:54Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  So that you're doing something a bit naughty by having a gin and tonic. Really?

• 37:58Kate Lister?

  Yeah. And it's, it's making a comeback, gin. I mean, for about 10, 10, 15 years or so, gin's been fighting its way back to being quite a sophisticated spirit.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  It's also close to the Alcopops too, because you mentioned the flavour drinks. And so people drank flavoured gins in the 18th century. But then the London Dry Gin became the standard gin drink. It really became standardized. Production methods changed, the recipe became pretty much fixed. And that was in the kind of probably 1830s or so, there's new stills make better, cleaner spirit. But so London Dry Gin and tonic became the drink. And then you've got the cocktails as well, which are, you know, got different cultural associations. But I think now sometimes it's marketed as women, as oh, go on, be naughty.

• 38:44Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, Judith, do you like gin? And how is your favourite way to drink gin if you do?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I do like gin. I tend to drink it as a, as a pick-me-up. So pre-dinner, I know some people drink gin in big copper glasses throughout the evening. And I prefer to drink it either at home in a really nicely made gin with a lot of lime in it, or if you can go to one of the good gin bars in London, and they'll do the correct serve with the slices of this, that and the other. It's also great if you go to the theatre. I am middle class, so I go to the theatre a lot. And in the interval, when you've had an hour and a half of a difficult play, sitting in the warm dark and you're feeling a little bit sleepy, that's the other perfect time to drink a gin and tonic.

• 39:28Kate Lister?

  That sounds amazing. Judith, you have been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I did a programme on the gin craze on In Our Time 10 years ago. And I've, I've rethought some of what I said then. You can find me there. I don't have my own website, but I will be on the Royal Holloway University of London website. And you can find my email address there. I'm always happy to talk about gin. And I'm writing a book about gin at the moment, wouldn't you know?

• 39:58Kate Lister?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much. You have been a treat.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Kate. It's lovely to talk to you and your excellent listeners.

• 40:07Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Judith for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And do go over to YouTube and give us a subscribing. It's not that I want to have more than Dan Snow. It's just, I really want to have more than Dan Snow. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov. And produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again at Betwixt Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.