There are some singular vignettes of drunkenness in the city-Oliver Goldsmith putting on his wig back to front to amuse friends in his Temple Lodgings, Charles Lamb staggering home beside the New River where he had once bathed as a schoolboy, Joe Grimaldi being carried home every night on the back of the landlord of the Marquis of Cornwallis. There were, however, less happy episodes. The Restoration dramatist Nathaniel Lee drank himself into Bedlam where he declared: “They said I was mad: and I said they were mad: damn them, they outvoted me.” He was eventually released, but on the day of his death “he drank so hard, that he dropped down in the street, and was run over by a coach. His body was laid in a bulk at Trunkits, the perfumer’s at Temple Bar, till it was owned.” William Hickey, the early nineteenth-century memoirist, was found in a gutter along Parliament Street, “utterly incapable of giving any account of myself, or of even articulating … having no more recollection of a single circumstance that had occurred for the preceding twelve hours, than if I had been dead.” He awoke the following day “unable to move hand or foot, being most miserably bruised, cut and maimed in every part of my body.” Another London particular in the eighteenth century was Richard Porson, the first librarian of the London Institution, who was often seen in the morning staggering “from his old haunt, the Cider Cellars; in Maiden Lane.” The editor of Euripides, he was a renowned scholar who “could hiccup Greek like a Helot,” but preferred to boast that he could repeat from memory the whole of Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). “It was said of Porson,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “that he drank everything he could lay his hands upon, even to embrocation and spirits of wine intended for the lamp. Samuel Rogers described him returning to the dining room after the people had gone, and drinking all that was left in their glasses.” His usual and familiar exclamation, when surprised or perplexed, was “Whooe!” and, on the day of his death, he was heard quoting from the Greek Anthologia. A friend noticed that on this last occasion “he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English with painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally.” Revived by wine and jelly dissolved in brandy and water, he was taken to a tavern in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, but later died in the London Institution on the stroke of midnight.
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When the phrase “spirituous liquor” is applied to the city’s drinking habits, however, the spirit is generally that of gin. It was denounced by the magistrate Sir John Fielding as “this liquid fire by which men drink their hell beforehand.” The demon of London for half a century, it was held responsible for the deaths of many thousands of men, women and children. Whatever the truth of mortality rates, and they are open to question, there is no doubting the popularity of gin (concocted from grain, sloe or juniper). It has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 “gin-houses.” The slogan, copied by Hogarth for his portrayal of Gin Lane, ran “Drunk for 1d, dead drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing.” These “geneva shops” were located in cellars or in converted ground-floor workshops; they multiplied in poorer quarters, making the more familiar and traditional alehouses of the city seem respectable in contrast. Hogarth himself said of his portrait that “In gin lane every circumstance of its horrid effects are brought to view, in terorem, nothing but Poverty misery and ruin are to be seen Distress even to madnes and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.” In that famous study, an infant is seen falling to its certain death from the emaciated arms of its drunken mother; she is sitting upon wooden stairs, with ulcerated legs, her countenance expressive only of oblivion beyond despair. It may seem melodramatic, but it is a pictorial variant upon a salient truth. One Judith Defour took her two-year-old daughter from a workhouse, for example, and then strangled her in order to strip her of the new clothes with which she had been dressed. She sold the baby’s clothes and spent the money, 1s 4d, on gin.
