London: The Biography полностью

“A new kind of drunkenness,” Henry Fielding wrote in 1751, “unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us, and which if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here intend is … by this Poison called Gin … the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand People in this Metropolis.” There had been attempts to put a “stop” to this trade, most notably by the Gin Act of 1736 which was greeted only by “the execrations of the mob.” The Act was ridiculed and evaded, with gin being sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift, or King Theodore of Corsica. The gin-shops were still filled with men and women “and even sometimes of children” who drank so much that “they find it difficult to walk on going away.” The corn distillers of London claimed that they produced “upward of eleven twelfths of the whole distillery of England” and a contemporary, Lord Lansdowne, recognised in 1743 that “the excessive use of gin hath hitherto been pretty much confined to the Cities of London and Westminster.” It offered the comfort of forgetfulness to prisoners and vagrants; it provided oblivion to the poor of St. Giles, where one house in four was a gin-shop.

Distilling was highly profitable. The trade was “thrown open” and protected from excessive excise; so the great destroyer of the poor and disadvantaged was actually created by those who wished to make a quick and easy profit. Only belatedly did the authorities respond to crimes of violence against property, fuelled by the demand for gin, and to the number of “weak and sickly” children who were proving a burden upon the parish authorities. Some gin-shops were suppressed in 1751. This measure seemed to work. Improvements in the distilleries, closer inspection of gin-shops and increase in taxes eventually resulted in the observation of 1757 that “We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the street since the said qualifications.” The fever passed. The rage for gin subsided as quickly as it had arisen, leading to the surmise that it was some climacteric of the city’s history as if London itself had been seized by sudden frenzy and burning thirst.

Yet gin and ale were not considered to be the only addictive and dangerous liquids. There was also tea.

The grocer Daniel Rowlinson was the first man to sell a pound of tea, in the 1650s; fifty years later Congreve described the “auxiliaries to the tea-table” as “orange brandy, aniseed, cinnamon, citron, and Barbadoes water.” J. Ilive, author of A New and Compleat Survey of London in 1762, also blamed the “excessive drinking of Tea” for enervating “the Stomachs of the Populace, as to render them incapable of performing the offices of Digestion; whereby the Appetite is so much deprav’d.” A pamphleteer in 1758 declared tea-drinking to be “very hurtful to those who work hard and live low” and condemned it as “one of the worst of habits, rendering you lost to yourselves, and unfit for the comforts you were first designed for.” William Hazlitt was popularly supposed to have died in Frith Street, Soho, in 1830 from the excessive drinking of that plant infusion. The emphasis once again is on the tendency of Londoners-even imported citizens such as Hazlitt-to obsession and excess, so that an apparently harmless cordial can become dangerous. That is also why London tea gardens soon acquired a dubious reputation. Suburban retreats with agreeable names such as White Conduite House, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Cuper’s Gardens, Montpelier and Bagnigge Wells, devoted to the drinking of tea and other pleasant pastimes, became associated “with loose women and with boys whose morals are depraved, and their constitutions ruined” and were well known “for the encouragement of luxury, extravagance, idleness and other wicked illegal purposes.” It is as if the opportunity for pleasure, or leisure, in London was immediately transformed into excess, viciousness and immorality; the city can never be at peace.