London: The Biography полностью

Yet if the seventeenth century might rival any of its predecessors for the amount of alcohol flowing through the veins of London, it was overshadowed by the eighteenth century when drinking reached massive, even crisis, proportions. This was the period when Samuel Johnson, that great London luminary, declared that “a man is never happy in the present unless he is drunk.” A vast number of his fellow-citizens seemed to agree.

There was a fashion for “brown ale,” a sweet beer, but a further duty upon malt made it important for breweries to introduce more hops into their drink. This became “bitter beer”-“so bitter that I could not drink it,” according to Casanova-which, when mixed with regular ale, became known as “half and half.” In the same period “pale ale” was produced, and became so popular that pale ale houses were established in the city. In the early 1720s a mellow beer, brewed for four or five months, was introduced; the “labouring people, porters etc found its utility” for drinking at breakfast or at dinner, and thus it became known as “porter.” It was a beer brewed only in the city, and led directly to that class of beers known as “stout”: brown stout, double stouts, Irish, entire, or heavy wet, or London particular.

It was particular to London, also, that alehouses were directly connected with commerce. For many trades the only employment agency was a specific public house or “house of call.” Bakers and tailors, plumbers and bookbinders, congregated in one place where masters arrived “to enquire when they want hands.” The landlord himself was often of the same trade, giving credit to those out of employ, chiefly in the medium of drink. The tradesmen paid their employees at pay tables in the same public houses, with obvious and predictable results, compounded by the fact that money was not exchanged until the hours of midnight and one on a Sunday morning.

There were other working practices which demanded the consumption of liquor. “Entry money” for a new apprentice or journeyman was spent in the alehouse, and various fines for late or incomplete work were also paid in the same manner. According to one great historian, M. Dorothy George in London Life in the Eighteenth Century, “the consumption of strong drink was connected with every phase of life from apprenticeship”; we may also infer that the spirit of trade, so central to the life of London, thereby remained bright and fiery. Drink and fire go together, and distillers were accused of negligence whereby their stills “gave rise to frequent and terrible fires.”