Richard Barnett - The Dedalus Book of Gin

The defining image of the gin craze: William Hogarths Gin Lane, 1751.

William Hogarths Beer Street, 1751. The companion piece to Gin Lane, less well-known but just as loaded with moral meaning.

To Matthew Barnett

Londons Victorian gin palaces: gaily lit and full of bustling conviviality, but also the setting for violence, obscenity and despair. Scene in a London Gin Palace, The Working Mans Friend, and Family Instructor, vol 1 no 4, 25 Oct 1851, p 56.

For friendship, guidance, expertise, and material which I would otherwise have missed, my heartfelt thanks to Elma Brenner, Rosalind Draper, Geoffrey Elborn, Caroline Essex (especially), David Allan Feller, Alex Hammond, Patricia Hammond, Anne Hardy, Phoebe Harkins, Theresia Hofer, Tom Gillmor, Mike Jay, Allison Ksiazkiewicz, Eric Lane, Marie Lane, Ross MacFarlane, Bill MacLehose, Joanne McKerchar, Anna Morgan, Michael Neve, Mark Pilkington, Kelley Swain, Thea Vidnes, Hannah Westland, Caitlin Wylie, and the staff of the Bishopsgate Library, the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Wellcome Library. Thanks also to my colleagues and students on the 2011 Pembroke / Kings International Programme, Cambridge, for creating a thoroughly congenial atmosphere in which to finish the first draft.

I am indebted to several writers who have mapped aspects of this territory in their work: Phil Baker, Jared Brown, Peter Clark, Geraldine Coates, Patrick Dillon, Lowell Edmunds, Iain Gateley, Ted Haigh, Brian Harrison, Mack P. Holt, Anistatia Miller, and Jessica Warner. It goes without saying that my errors are not their fault.

The photograph of Jared Brown and the Sipsmiths Gin still appears by kind permission of Sipsmith Independent Spirits, and is copyright Sipsmith Independent Spirits.

The extract from Casino Royale by Ian Fleming is reproduced with the permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, London, www. ianfleming.com, and is copyright Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1953.

The extracts from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Copyright George Orwell, 1949) are reproduced by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

The images on pages 125, 154, 206, 231 and 249 have been reproduced courtesy of Diageo plc, owners of the GORDONS and TANQUERAY brands.

Juniper sacred herb, medicine, and one of the two crucial ingredients in gin. Juniperus communis, from Franz Eugen Khler, Khlers Medizinal-Pflanzen, 3 vols, Berlin, 1897.

On the morning of Wednesday 23rd February 1732 a prisoner was brought up from the dank, cramped cells of Newgate Prison into the open-fronted courthouse of Londons Old Bailey. Robert Atkinson a leather-worker from the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields was on trial for his life, and he knew that, if found guilty, he would be hanged before the crowd at Tyburn. Atkinson stood accused, in the eighteenth centurys vivid, precise legal language, of murdering his mother:

by throwing her down a pair of Stairs, upon a Pavement of Tiles below, and by which fall her Skull was broke, and she receivd one mortal Bruise, of which she instantly dyd, the 15th of this Instant February.

The case against Atkinson seems, at first glance, to have been unanswerable. He lived with his mother, Ann, and her maidservant, Mary, in rooms above his shop. Mary testified that on the night of the crime, she had gone to bed just after midnight, but her mistress had stayed up to let her son in when he returned. Woken in the small hours by Atkinson battering on the front door, she heard him bellow Damn ye, ye old bitch, do ye think Ill be lockd up in my own House? Ann let him in, entreating him to go quietly to bed, but he had other things on his mind. He burst into Marys room:

I was very much frighted, for he was stark naked without his Shirt. Sir, says I, you had much better go to Bed: No, says he, I will have a Buss first. He came to my Bed-side, and as he did not offer any Rudeness, I sufferd him to kiss me once or twice, in hopes that he would then go away. But instead of that, he got upon the Bed (outside the Bed-Clothes) and lay upon me very hard, and endeavourd to put his Hands into the Bed, but with much difficulty I kept them out.

At this moment his mother entered the room, catching her son on the cusp of a bodice-ripping violation: You Dog, said she, what business have you upon the Maids Bed? Atkinson turned on her, and she tried to slip past him into a cupboard, but he seized her and threw her out of the room. Mary did not see the rest of the incident: she heard a great Scuffle, and a Struggling in the Passage at the Stairs Head as if he was running after her, and she was endeavouring to get away from him. In the next moment Ann tumbled down the stairs with such violence as if Part of the House had falln with her. After this she made no sound, not even a groan.

How could Atkinson possibly justify his actions? A coroners inquest had indicted him for murder, and he did not dispute that his mother had died after a brutal quarrel. Indeed, in the heat of the moment he appeared to have admitted his guilt. Seeing his mother lying at the foot of the stairs, he cried out Damn the old Bitch, I have murderd her, and I shall hang for it. Atkinsons defence hinged upon intoxication, and no ordinary intoxication the vicious, malevolent haze induced by gin. Cross-examining Mary, he forced her to admit that her mistress was a regular and heavy drinker, who had rounded off her last evening on earth with half a Pint of Gin and Bitter (I think they call it). Mary fought back I know she would drink a great deal; but she was so much used to it, that it would hardly disorder her but she acknowledged that Ann was almost dead drunk by the time he had returned. And Atkinson himself had spent the night in a circuit of local taverns and gin-shops, enjoying a binge which had, he admitted, inflamed his great Passion.

Gin, it seems, enabled Atkinson to get away with murder. The jury found him not guilty, concluding that his mothers death was not even manslaughter but a mere accident, and he left the dock a free man. And this episode of gin-fuelled violence was far from unique. Leaf through the Newgate Calendar, the Ordinary of Newgates Accounts or the Proceedings of the Old Bailey for any year in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and you will find dozens of similar examples. To many of Atkinsons contemporaries, these cases proved that English law and society were dissolving in a flood of cheap gin. This episode the gin craze has had a profound effect on our historical perceptions of gin, but it also captures a truth central to the story of this book. Gin is not (like absinthe) the drink of velvet-trousered aesthetes, nor is it (like port) the toast of respectable merchants and scholars, nor (like ale) the refreshment of peasants in the meadows of Merry England. It is urban, and it possesses or has been said to possess all the vices and virtues of urban life.