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The Slow but Sure Poyson: The Representation of Gin and Its Drinkers,
17361751
Jonathan White
The Journal of British Studies / Volume 42 / Issue 01 / January 2003, pp 35 - 64
DOI: 10.1086/342685, Published online: 21 December 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100007139

How to cite this article:
Jonathan White (2003). The Slow but Sure Poyson: The Representation of Gin and Its Drinkers, 17361751. The Journal of
British Studies, 42, pp 35-64 doi:10.1086/342685
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The Slow but Sure Poyson: The

Representation of Gin and Its Drinkers,
17361751
Jonathan White

It can often seem that William Hogarths famous Gin Lane (1751)
says all that would ever need to be said about the gin craze of the
early eighteenth century. The engraving has come to be virtually identified with its subject, revealing and circumscribing possible histories
within its familiar lines. Yet, Gin Lane appeared at a determinate moment, chronologically marking the end of the gin craze and the culmination of one phase in the history of proletarian drinking. During this phase,
as I will argue, there were significant changes in both the social conditions and relations that shaped laboring-class drinking and the ideas
through which the propertied classes attempted to understand and control
it. That this has not been argued before suggests how many historians
have approached this phenomenon as a distinct social problem with fairly
simple, basic features.
For Dorothy George, for example, gin drunkenness was the sort of
social evil by which a civilization could be judged. She viewed the regulation of working-class drunkenness in 1751 as testament to the improving spirit of the eighteenth-century elites.1 Much the same perspective
pervades Lee Davisons recent contribution, which focuses on the legislation against the gin trade as a case study to examine the relative power
of the social groups influencing the state. Davison attempts to determine
why certain acts against the spirits trade failed and others succeeded. In
the end, he concludes, the trade was regulated because of the extent of
social disorder in 1751. The moral panic about lower-class manners perJonathan White is the Past and Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London. The author wishes to thank the following people who have read earlier
drafts and versions of this article: Maxine Berg, Margot Finn, Colin Jones, Karen OBrien,
Kate Retford, and the two readers at the Journal of British Studies.
1 M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1966), pp. 4244.
Journal of British Studies 42 (January 2003): 3564
2003 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2003/4201-0002$10.00

35

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suaded the propertied classes that the needs of the social fabric should
override the states interest in preserving a trade that generated enormous
revenue.2
In addition to this state-centered work, excellent empirical research
has exposed some of the myths about the gin craze. George Rude effectively debunked the notion that the Mother Gin riots of 1736 were
the actions of Londons drink-fueled dregs. Rude restored agency and
determinacy to these rioters by illuminating the interweaving of the activities of Jacobite agitators, the nervous reactions of an insecure government, and the flaring up of a long-running industrial dispute.3 Peter
Clarks work remains the only attempt to illuminate the social and economic realities of the gin trade and their connection to the debates over
laboring-class gin drinking. Clark gives some sense of the scale of gin
production and consumption in the early eighteenth century, suggesting
that the fears of contemporary reformers were deeply exaggerated.4
Moreover, Jessica Warner has argued that we can see important parallels
between the stereotypes deployed in the gin debates and the contemporary representation of drug addicts, in particular of heroin-addicted mothers in New York City.5
I want to emphasize two features of this historiography. First, most
historians approaching this subject have relied on a basic stock of seemingly constant images and themes. Second, historians have not analyzed
the gin trade as a part of the whole history of eighteenth-century social,
economic, and intellectual change. This article has a threefold aim. It
argues that systematic attention to ideas reveals significant changes in
the representation of gin and its drinkers in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Second, it insists that these changes are only comprehensible,
and their historical significance apparent, when dissolved back into the
changing totality of social forces and relations, of which they form the
intellectual expression. Finally, it suggests that it is only through such
2 Lee Davison, Experiments in the Social Regulation of Industry: Gin Legislation,
17291751, in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic
Problems in England, 16891750, ed. L. Davison, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn, and R. B.
Shoemaker (Stroud, 1992), pp. 2549.
3 George Rude
, Mother Gin and the London Riots of 1736, Guildhall Miscellany
1, no. 10 (1959): 5362.
4
Peter Clark, The Mother Gin Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 38 (1988): 6388.
5
Jessica Warner, The Naturalization of Beer and Gin in Early Modern England,
Contemporary Drug Problems (1997): 373402, and In Another City, in Another Time:
Rhetoric and the Creation of a Drug Scare in Eighteenth-Century London, Contemporary Drug Problems 21 (1994): 485511. My thanks go to John Chartres for directing
my attention to these two articles.

SLOW BUT SURE POYSON

37

an approach that the particular and enduring importance of the gin craze,
and the ideas to which it gave rise, can really emerge.
During the early eighteenth century, the particular balance between
the emerging forces of capitalist development and the residual forms of
precapitalist societies meant that the gin debates were shaped by a profound anxiety about many of the manifestations of commercial development. Laboring-class gin drinking was discussed in terms of a complex
set of concepts, betraying unease with the size of the urban proletariat,
the nature of London society, and the spread of luxury. By midcentury,
capitalist accumulation and networks of commercial exchange had developed to the point where the phenomenon of laboring-class drunkenness
became ideologically detached from the sense of societal sickness, becoming reconfigured instead as a determinate and delimited social problem: a specific issue that required reform. This transformation makes
sense within a society increasingly based on relations of commercial exchange, generated by the seemingly creative and progressive force of
desires. The gin debates saw both the formation of a set of concepts
for demarcating and stigmatizing drink in general and the elaboration of
concepts of addiction that expressed the particular plight of the most
abject proletarians in London society: working-class women. The concept of addiction, I suggest, developed as a partial expression of the increasing alienation within urban society, shaping urban drink culture particularly among working-class women.6
The article is based on the debates over two major pieces of legislation, those of 1736 and 1751, both of which attempted, with varying
degrees of success, to regulate the spirits trade.7 In considering each moment, I focus on a few pamphlets, prints, and poems, closely examining
their ideas in relation to the balance of political, social, and economic
forces. Throughout the article, I make use of the terms progressive
and conservative as analytical categories arising from the objective
forces driving social developments at any one moment. Yet they are also
empirical categories derived from the subjective perceptions of historical
actorstheir own apprehensions, however partial and incomplete, of
their position in relation to the deepest contemporary tendencies.
6
I am using alienation here in the rigorously Marxist sense of the estrangement
of humans from their productive activity, and thus the conditions for objectifying themselves as humans, by the mediating institutions of capitalism: wage labor, private property, and the division of labor. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
(1844), in his Early Writings (London, 1981), pp. 279401. See also Istvan Meszaros,
Marxs Theory of Alienation (London, 1972), pp. 12389.
7
The acts were 9 George II c. 23 and 24 George II c. 40.

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* * *
The history of the spirits trade forms an integral part of the development of the early eighteenth-century mercantilist state. The period 1700
36 saw the continued expansion of British overseas trade, which consolidated the power of the mercantile and financial classes. Ideologically,
these sections of propertied society were progressive insofar as they identified the wealth and refinement of the nation with the development of
foreign trade, the export of domestic manufactures, and the growing sophistication of the instruments of financial transactions. Sir Robert Walpoles state existed, in part at least, to enable the untroubled conduct of
a commercial society so conceptualized. Yet the capacity of these classes
and their advocates to identify the deepest tendencies driving economic
and social change was limited when it came to domestic commerce. Only
a few commercial writers could view the proliferating domestic trade of
the period, feeding the tastes and increasing the wealth of the middling
classes, with unambiguous approbation. Exotic cotton clothing, toys, tea,
sugar, and, most pertinent to this essay, foreign spirits began to enter
the nation in ever greater quantities, nourishing the branches of domestic
commerce as they did so. The spirits trade was a startling example of
this process.
Originally forged out of middling families tastes for sweetened
French and Dutch brandies, the growing market for spirits was soon supplied by a domestic industry peddling brandies, rum, and gin, the latter
distilled from farmers surplus grain. By the 1720s, the distillers had
become a powerful economic interest that embraced West India merchants, farmers, and the large numbers of petty tradesmen and merchants
who retailed spirits across the nation. More important, the state, politically eager to lighten the taxes on the landed classes, saw the spirits
trade as easy money. By 1730, one-quarter of all government taxation
came from the drinks trade, mostly in excises.8 But many commercial
writers could not be reconciled to spirits consumption, even after the
development of domestic production, because of its diffusion into the
British laboring classes. By the middle of the 1720s, a taste for spirits
had developed among sections of Londons laboring classes.
London possessed a large and growing proletariat, swelled by constant migration from the citys hinterlands. As well as being prone to
8 John Chartres, English Spirits: Ersatz Good or New Taste, New Good? (paper
presented to The Sweet Poison: Alcohol in European History conference, University of
Warwick, March 2000); Clark, Mother Gin, pp. 6570; Davison, Gin Legislation,
pp. 2526; Louis Cullen, The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Regime: Regional Specialisation in the Charente (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 118.

SLOW BUT SURE POYSON

39

the endemic diseases of the city, these young people, the majority of
them women, brought with them cultural norms and expectations that,
when fused with the conditions of urban wage labor, appeared unruly
and threatening to their employers. Changing property and sex relations
in the countryside may have driven these men and women into urban
wage labor, but they did not erase this culture. Practices of gifting, extravagant social expenditure, and leisure-oriented work patterns would
perpetuate, in slowly changing forms, throughout the gradual transition
from the peasant-based society in which they had originally been forged.
Drink had always played an important part in this culture.9 Since the
metropolitan beer trade was tightly regulated and highly taxed, a market
existed for cheap inebriating drink, which the expanding spirits industry
gladly provided. Production and retailing of gin expanded into the eastern
and southern suburbs of the city, where Londons manufacturers and servants were concentrated. Gin shops proliferated in these parishes, where,
it was noted, the wives of artisans and female servants could resort during
the day without the disapprobation they would attract in the alehouses.10
To these workers, binge drinking fulfilled the expectations of a culture
that maintained strong residual ties to norms of social expenditure. To
their employers and to the state, ever more estranged from such norms,
laboring-class drinking appeared to be yet another instance of their inveterate idleness. More worryingly, it also appeared to be another example
of fashionable luxury diffusing through the social order.
The propertied classes could generally agree on the need to reform
the manners of the poor. Only a few of the most progressive of commercial writers considered plebeian desires as anything more than unruly
appetites detracting from labor effort. Daniel Defoe was unusual in arguing that domestic commerce, fed by laboring-class consumption, was
economically and socially useful. But even he could see it as little more
9
For the clearest and most sophisticated statement of this thesis, see Hans Medick,
Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism, in Culture, Ideology and Politics:
Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (London,
1982), pp. 10712, and The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structure and Function of the Household during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism, Social History 3 (1976): 291315. See also Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged:
Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), pp. 741, 11983;
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 259403; Keith Thomas,
Work and Leisure in Preindustrial Society, Past and Present, no. 29 (1964): 5062;
Douglas Reid, The Decline of Saint Monday, 17661876, Past and Present, no. 71
(1976): 76101. For an intriguing recent study of middling mens changing consumer
practices, see Margot Finn, Mens Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution, Social History 25 (2000): 13355.
10 Clark, Mother Gin, pp. 6473, and The English Alehouse: A Social History,
12001830 (Harlow, 1983), pp. 184242.

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than a happy Mandevillian paradox, an example of irrational private habits and desires functioned for the public good.11 The agents of the state
and the overseas merchants could both see an interest in a large, healthy,
and sober population from which the fiscal-military state could draw its
manpower. In addition, an unnerved Whig government was happy to see
some regulation that would marry its fiscal interests with its interest in
preserving a social order that seemed extremely fragile when placed
against the ever-present Jacobite threat. Consequently, there was broad
support for some measure to restrain laboring-class gin drinking.12
By 1729, the problem was sufficiently serious to arouse the concern
of Londons two benches of justices and certain sections of the metropolitan middling sorts. In 1729, an act was passed to place a duty of 5s. a
gallon on all spirits, demand a 20 license for retailing spirits, and issue
10 fines for hawking gin in the streets. This was the culmination of a
campaign by the Middlesex bench, the Royal College of Physicians, and
the Middlesex grand jurymen. Scrupulously avoiding any tax on distilling, this act testified to the lobbying power of the Distillers Company
and the growing importance of the drinks trade to land and government
revenue alike. Widespread evasion of the law led to its repeal in 1733,
and gin production steadily continued to rise. In 1736, a new and more
impressive coalition of reformers began to campaign against the gin
trade. It was again centered on crucial Middlesex justices like Nathaniel
Blackerby and Thomas Lane and the Westminster justice Sir John Gonson, whose Charges to the Grand Jury of 1728 had formed an important
part of the campaign for the earlier act.13 This time, petitions came from
sections of the urban middling people: presentments against the growth
of the gin trade included ones from the grand juries of Middlesex and
Tower Hamlets. Vital additional activism and lobbying power came in
the form of the moral reformers of the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge (SPCK) and Georgia Colony. These ecumenical organizations brought together those of progressive and conservative tendencies
alike, connecting the urban magistracy with the campaign for the reformation of manners and the House of Commons.14
11
For more detailed discussion of Defoes views of laboring-class consumption, see
Jonathan White, Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2001), pp. 4448.
12 Davison, Gin Legislation, pp. 2835;
13 Ibid., pp. 2829; Clark, Mother Gin, pp. 7376. See also The Charge of Sir
John Gonson, Knt. to the Grand Jury of the City and Liberty Westminster etc . . . At the
General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, 24 April, Westminster Hall 1728 (London, 1728).
14 Activism in the SPCK also united the reforming M.P. James Oglethorpe; the bishop
of London, Edmund Gibson; the scientist and philanthropist Stephen Hales; Thomas Wilsonthe son of the bishop of Sodor and Manand, crucially, the Master of the Rolls
Joseph Jekyll, who was a friend of William Hay and whose backing would prove vital

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41

In 1735, the grand jury of the City of London presented to complain of the late surprising Increase of Gin Shops and other Retailers of
Distilled Spirituous Liquors. Drawing on the petition of the College of
Physicians from 1725, they outlined the effects of gin on the bodies of
the inferior sort. To this practice, they claimed, is chiefly owing that
our lower Kind of People are enfeebled and disabled, having neither the
Will nor Power to Labor for an honest Livelihood. Similarly, the grand
jury of the County of Middlesex reported that because gin was sold so
cheaply, the meaner, though useful Part of the Nation, as Day-Laborers,
Men and Women Servants and Common Soldiers, nay even Children are
enticed and seduced to taste, like and approve of these liquors,
whereby they are intoxicated and get Drunk and are frequently seen
in our Streets in such a Condition abhorrent to reasonable creatures.
Like the countys grand jurymen, they emphasized that many are
thereby rendered useless to themselves as well as the Community. 15
Gin, it was argued, excited the poor to social disorder, made them incapable of labor, and eventually ended their lives prematurely. With pressure
growing among the London justices, and with the sponsorship of the
moral reformers, a bill was introduced into Parliament, under the guidance of Joseph Jekyll. The bill proposed placing domestic gin under the
jurisdiction of the Excise and charging high fees for the issuing of licenses to sell spirits.16
But this bill also ranged important social forces against reform. The
states interest in revenue led it to hedge its advocacy of Jekylls bill,
seeking to protect the distillers from direct taxation and concentrating
instead on licensing retailers and placing excises on possession.17 Even
this was insufficient to appease farmers who considered that a vital outlet
for their grain was being threatened. And the likely effects of the proposed bill on those tradesmen who retailed spirits meant that broad
swathes of the metropolitan middling sorts were driven into another coalition with the landed classes and their parliamentary representatives.
in passing not only this bill but the playhouse bill in 1737. Jekyll, like Hay, was a Whig
lawyer and a loyalist to Walpole but not a courtier. See Dictionary of National Biography
(DNB), 1st ed., s.v. Joseph Jekyll. The role of the SPCK is best explored in Clark,
Mother Gin, pp. 7376.
15
See A Presentment of the Grand Jury of the City of London, A Presentment of the
Grand Jury for the County of Middlesex and A Report Made to the Justices of the Peace
for the County of Middlesex, both appendices in Isaac Maddox, The Expediency of Preventive Wisdom. A Sermon Preachd before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, the Aldermen and Governors of the Several Hospitals of the City of London (London, 1751),
pp. 2428. See also The Charge of J. . . . P. . . . To the Grand Jury of Middlesex, On
Saturday May 22nd. 1736 (London, 1738).
16 Davison, Gin Legislation, pp. 3335.
17 Ibid., pp. 3334.

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Middling tradesmen had plenty of reasons to feel that the state was in
the hands of a clique of financiers who profited from speculation, which
hurt traders credit, and higher taxation, which increasingly fell on their
commerce. For the landed interest, whose mostly Tory representatives
were excluded from political power, and whose social preeminence was
challenged regularly by Whig grandees and new wealth in the city, the
frustrations of middling tradesmen were a force to be harnessed. An essentially conservative interest could, at times, enter into coalition with the
classes representing some of the periods most progressive tendencies. In
social terms, this could be seen in the provincial gentrys collusion with
smugglers, blacks, or excise rioters. In the political sphere it produced
Lord Bolingbroke and William Pulteneys country opposition of the
1730s.18 Once it became clear that Walpoles government intended to
make spirits a milk cow for the state, the gin bill became socially divisive
and politically contentious.
A close examination of the pamphlet literature inspired by the bill
on both sides reveals a profound ideological crisis. Within these discourses on urban gin drinking, we can detect not only the proximate
political and social determination of the debates but a developing consciousness of the social processes of estrangement and alienation, projected into the sphere of bourgeois social thought. As well as wrestling
to shape the legislation around the gin trade, these commentators were
struggling to comprehend the place of commerce and the position of
laboring people in society. In doing so, they were also struggling to comprehend the relationships between private desires and public good and
between moral reform and economic utility. These more abstract concerns signified the ongoing development of intellectual estrangement, of
alienation at the level of thought, expressing on this plane the estrangement that lay at the heart of developing capitalist relations in English
society, particularly in London. Knowledge, like society, appeared increasingly fragmented, yet not to the extent that these realms could be
unproblematically separated out, experienced as distinct entities. The ex18
There is a substantial literature on these coalitions. See, e.g., Paul Langford, The
Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 17151785
(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 84165; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party,
17141760 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 53174. For conservative ideology in this period, see
Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of
Walpole (Oxford, 1968); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought in the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 423506.
For a highly illuminating study of the potential for coalitions around country ideas, see
John Brewer, English Radicalism in the Age of George III, in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 33342.

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43

perience of this ideological crisis was common across the range of social forces present in these debates and ramified the representation of
laboring-class agency as expressed in the form of gin drinking.
The first pamphlet that I will examine was written anonymously,
possibly by a churchman, definitely by someone sympathetic to the industrial and merchant interests. Accordingly, The Trial of the Spirits represents an attempt to argue for reform within the terms of contemporary
mercantilist discourse. The Strength and Riches of a National Community, the author argued, consist in the health and Numerousness of
its Laborers. If these be not preservd, he asked, where will you
find Soldiers? How will the culture of your lands, the useful manufactures and Merchandize of the Nation be carried on? 19 The gin trade
was not a species of luxury or a vicious industry, so much as a useless
nuisance. In a thoroughly Mandevillian passage, he maintained, I cannot but allow that Mankind in a trading nation especially, lives upon the
Vices and Extravagancies of one another. But there had to be limits
placed on those who produced the wealth of the nation: No body of
men ought to get estates at the expense of the Poor less because it was
wrong, than for the reason that that very Expense disables them from
being Serviceable to the Community. 20
The gin trade, as it conflicted with the military and economic capabilities of a trading nation, was considered useless and harmful. The
problem lay primarily with the drinks cheapness. For Gin is sold very
cheap, so that People may get muddled with it for three half pence and
for three pence made quite Drunk even to Madness, so that it comes
within the power of Common People to purchase the hopeful Reputation
of getting drunk at a very small Expense. 21 In describing how gin operated on its drinkers, this author used the most advanced contemporary
physiological and psychological arguments. In a manner reminiscent of
Bernard Mandevilles arguments about the problems of educating the
lower orders, this author argued that gin unleashed passions that reduced
the capacity to labor.22 People drunk on gin forgot to pay their debts,
leaving their families in want and poverty. They were inspired with a
false courage or Mock-Heroism, and, for as long as this lasted, His
majestys Peace must be broken and the neighborhood disturbed. When
19 The Trial of the Spirits; or, Some Considerations upon the Pernicious Consequences of the Gin Trade to Great Britain (London, 1736), p. 3.
20 The Trial, pp. 1429.
21 Ibid., p. 4.
22 For Mandevilles arguments on education, see Bernard Mandeville, An Essay on
Charity and Charity Schools (1723), in Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees, ed.
F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1988), 1:28590.

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the money ran out, these people were compelled to obtain more, regardless of the means: Hence follow desperate Attacks, Highway and street
Robberies, attended sometimes with the most Cruel and unheard of Murthers. For these people, the Fear of House of Correction, Imprisonment or the Gallows make little impression on them, if any at all. But,
as with Mandevilles arguments on education, it was not that there was
anything inherently bad about such self-delusion. It was rather that it
disabled people for useful labor. For, the Fury at length being over,
the hero subsides in proportion and sinks into a miserable invalid, his
whole Strength and Courage being entirely demolished. Conscious suddenly of the misfit between their aspirations and the realities of their
lives, he suggested, these drinkers sank into melancholy, initiating a train
of diseases that left the laboring man so stupid and enervated, that instead of being a useful member of the Community, he is actually become
a scandalous burthen to it. 23
It was a measure of the authors economic progressivism that he
extended his argument to address the potential utility of the appetites of
the poor. In an attempt to allay the fears of farmers and landlords, he
deployed medical theory and political arithmetic to demonstrate that gin
drinkers ate less bread, so that what farmers gained on one hand, they
lost on the other. Thus, the distillery was extremely hurtful to the landed
interest. 24 Adam Holden wrote a defense of the Trial, in which he
fleshed out the nature of laboring peoples consumption. Here we can
see how current ideas that stressed the laboring classes function as producers of the nations wealth placed severe limits on contemporaries
capacity to envisage them as consumers. They were, Holden claimed, a
different sort of people to those with property, and their utility had to
be assessed on this basis. Lay but the Temptation before these Sort of
People, he argued, and all the Laws in being or that can be made
consonant with the natural Right of the Subject can never prevent em
from being drunk. The task was, therefore, to raise the price of spirits
so that they would be forced to return to their natural taste of bread,
meat and beer and the consumption of these underdeveloped people
would become socially beneficial again.25 Like Mandeville, these authors
suggested that it was unwise to allow the appetites and wants of the
laboring classes to develop in the same way as had those of the propertied
elites. Paradoxically, it would best suit a prosperous commercial society
23

The Trial, pp. 47.

Ibid., pp. 913.
25 Adam Holden, A Vindication of a Pamphlet Lately Published, Entitled The Trial
of the Spirits (London, 1736), p. 9.
24

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45

if they remained in a state of semidevelopment, subservient to civilized

wage labor but confined to primitive appetites.
In arguing that the maintenance of wage labor was of primary importance, necessitating the control of workers patterns of consumption,
these writers recognized the growing relations of social alienation in London. They characterized the laboring classes desire for gin as a new
want, aroused by the capacity of the drink to fire the imaginations of its
consumers. In doing so, they made it no different in form and operation
to the range of wants that were deemed to be socially useful. But the
same utilitarian logic proscribed this modern form of consumption for
the poor. The unregulated expansion of the laboring populations desires
was seen as irreconcilable with the creation of wealth in a trading nation.
The laboring classes would not work unless they were compelled to.
To develop their tastes and expand their wants undermined the forces
compelling them to engage in demoralizing wage labor. Just as estrangement was recognized as it shaped social relations in the city, so it was
manifested in the logic of these authors arguments. In extending their
Mandevillian vision across all spheres of the social world, they bracketed
off questions of virtue as increasingly irrelevant for questions of policy.
Policy had to be guided by economic utility, without reference to the
virtue of traditional social relations. Estranged social relations increasingly infused both the form and content of these ideological positions.
We can see this process from the other side of the debate. The terms
that Thomas Wilson used to attack the spirits trade in his Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation seem to be absolutely different
from those of the Trial. Moreover, the two representations of gin and
its drinkers appear, at first, to be irreconcilable. Yet Wilsons analysis,
while highly conservative in orientation, also had to be intelligible to the
broad public it addressed if it were to be hegemonic. In addressing questions of economic policy, and the subjective effects of the drink on its
consumers, Wilson thus turned to progressive ideas and sciences. He was
compelled to endorse and reproduce the processes of alienation and fragmentation in social and intellectual life that he ostensibly deplored.
Wilsons pamphlet abounds with attacks on the processes of luxury
and decay rife within the social metabolism. For Wilson, the spirits industry represented an upstart Trade, introducd upon the Luxury and
Depravity of the Age. To defend the spirits trade was to defend a private interest against the public good, to endorse the spread of vice
throughout the social order. In the southeastern counties, for example,
the taste for gin had spread from farmers to their servants in husbandry,
who love to imitate their betters. But, most notoriously, it fueled the
turbulent social relations of the metropolis. Here, the taste for spirits

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spread like a disease. Is it not notorious, he demanded, that Luxury

and Extravagance were never at a greater height than at present, amongst
the laborious and even the meanest part of Mankind? This most valuable part of the nation was, consequently, intoxicated and enervated by
a fatal love of a slow but sure Poyson. 26
For Wilson, the gin shops that proliferated in Londons poorer parishes acted as conduits of this fatal luxury, wherein inversions of the
social order were daily staged. I am informed, Wilson claimed, in
one place not far from Smithfield . . . a Trader has a large empty room
backward, where as his wretched guests get intoxicated, they are laid
together in Heaps, promiscuously, Men, Women and Children, until they
recover their senses, whereupon they either proceed to drink on, or
having spent all the time they have, go out for find wherewithal to return
to the same dreadful pursuit. And, he continued, how they procure
more money for this Purpose, many of them, the Sessions-Paper too often
acquaints us. 27 For Wilson, it was the nature of the city, with its manifold temptations, playing on the same primitive tastes and simple natures
that the author of the Trial attempted to preserve, that created the disastrous taste for gin and the Deluge of Vice and Immorality that followed in its wake.28
But Wilsons conceptual armory of civic humanism and Protestant
reform, his lexicon of virtue and vice, was necessarily buttressed by a
recognition that the gin trade had an economic logic to it. More particularly, this economic logic was clear to the conservative landed classes
to whom he appealed. Consequently, while he argued that the taste for
gin was an instance of the general Depravity of the lower Class of
People, he also had to address the counterargument that the lower-class
taste for gin was increasing the wealth and power of the landed classes
and, therefore, of society.29 Like the author of the Trial, then, he had to
take on the Mandevillian argument that private vices led to public benefits and argue within its terms.
Reform was not simply a question of vice and immorality, Wilson
insisted, but one of utility for a trading nation. The Strength and Riches
of every Country, the Laborious Hands, were being frittered away
in the gin shops.30 Marshaling medical knowledge from the works of
George Cheyne and Stephen Hales, he urged that future generations were
26 Thomas Wilson, Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation (London,
1736), pp. ixx, 2, 7, 29.
27 Ibid., p. vi.
28 Ibid., p. 11.
29 Ibid., p. vi
30 Ibid., pp. ix, 8.

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47

being destroyed, physically, in the wombs of gin-drinking women. Thousands brought on various Diseases that carry them off, if not suddenly,
yet in the End, as certainly as if they had been stabbd through the heart.
Those children that survived would only drag on a miserable Life, a
burthen to themselves and a load to their Country. 31
The laboring people were not simply registered as burdensome
through their inability to labor. Like the author of the Trial, Wilson, to a
limited extent, saw laborers consumption as possessing economic value.
Again deploying the most advanced medical knowledge and making extensive use of political arithmetic, he argued that as the demand for
and Consumption of spirits increases . . . the Stomachs of more People
will be lost. London, then, was not simply a den of vice but, to some
extent, a source of useful appetites, the Great Stomach of the Nation.
If this appetite be vitiated and lost, even the most Distant Members
of the social body will find a Sensible Decay. 32
Finally, Wilson had to account for the laboring classes apparent
desire for something that was so patently bad for them and the nation.
If it was too much to expect for people of such limited capacities to
reform themselves for the nation, what made them want to drink this
deadly liquid? Again, turning to the work of the highly progressive Hales,
Wilson argued that gin operated in a peculiar manner on the human subject, perverting desires and diverting them from their proper outlets. Gin,
he claimed, generated delusory feelings of warmth and comfort through
the blood and the stomach. When it wore off, drinkers, craving more,
turned once more to the drink, without understanding that they were destroying their own capacity for true pleasure by eroding their capacity
for rational discrimination.33 As Hales argued, when a mans will and
affections are thus depraved . . . and he is delighted with this worst of
slavery, there are but little hopes of him. To save such a man, he
must be, as it were, forced into his Liberty and rescued, in some measure,
from his own inordinate Desires. 34
So, Wilsons pamphlet was an attempt to link gin drinking to the
range of examples that conservatives of the early eighteenth century saw
as instances of luxury destroying the virtue embedded within the social
order. Yet to make his argument compelling, Wilson had not only to
address the Mandevillian arguments of mercantilist advocates of the trade
but to convince the landed classes that the spirits trade was not, in fact,
31

Ibid., pp. 3839.

Ibid., pp. 1418.
33 Ibid., pp. 3952.
34 Stephen Hales, A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Gin, Brandy and Other
Distilled Spirituous Liquors, 5th ed. (London, 1754), pp. 1114.
32

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in their interests and that the gin drinker was useless, both as a laborer
and as a consumer. In doing so, Wilson recognized the need for and
increasing dominance of arguments with an economic logic. He allowed for the possibility that the laboring classes might possess some
useful desires in trading nations and that their desire for gin, if it were
to be differentiated from useful desires, needed to be explained with reference to concepts of rational intention. Such concepts implied that the
laboring classes might not in fact be primitive and inclined to vice and
depravity, that they might be endowed with the same capacities as the
propertied Englishman. A subjectively conservative tract contained
within it a recognition of the instability of conservative ideas, the necessity of some accommodation with the forces of economic and social development, and the complex position of desire in human subjectivity.
These paradoxes and reversals were reproduced in a different form
by those writers who sought to defend the gin trade. As the debates in
Parliament revealed to many members that the governments interest in
the reform of the gin trade might be more pecuniary than virtuous, Jekylls bill offered an opportunity for the opposition to mobilize its coalition of country Whigs and Tory gentry. Outside Parliament, the coalition
represented a growing alliance of the urban retailing and distilling interests with the farming interests and some West India merchants. Pamphleteers and prominent opposition politicians began to argue that the bill,
in its current form at least, was an attempt to destroy a useful trade and
a hypocritical attack on the drinking habits of the poor. The anonymous
author of a pamphlet opposing the act argued that while all could see
the need to regulate the spirits industry and to confine the drinking of
the poor, the very criteria that reformers usedthe effects on industriousness and on the wealth of the nationcould make a case for utility of
the drinks trade. Deploying the same progressive technologies of political
arithmetic so lovingly used by reformers, this author calculated that there
were near 100,000 families now in this kingdom, who owe the whole or
chief part of their support to the manufacture and sale of such liquors. It
made no practical sense, therefore, to destroy so valuable a trade. 35
More radically, the leading opposition representative of the country
Whigs, William Pulteney, argued a political case for the maintenance of
the trade. The poor might be guilty of immoderate drinking, he admitted, but the current bill was an infringement of natural justice. By this
35 Occasional Remarks upon the Act for Laying a Duty upon the Retailers of Spirituous Liquors etc . . . and for Licensing the Retailers Thereof (London, 1736), pp. 520;
A Proper Reply to a Scandalous Libel Entitled The Trial of the Spirits. In a Letter to
the Worshipful Author (London, 1736), pp. 69; Eboranos, A Collection of Political
Tracts (London, 1736), pp. 3538.

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49

act, he claimed, a poor journeyman or laborer shall not have a dram,

shall not have a glass of punch until he can spare to lay out 8 or 10s.
at a time, which I am sure Two Thirds of our People cannot well spare
to do, whereas a rich man could commit as many debauches as he
liked. 36 Yet, even Pulteney could not avoid the economic logic of national utility. In a pamphlet taking the form of a letter from an M.P. to
his Friend in the Country, Pulteney asked whether it was not the case
that a proper Degree of the consumption of rum, sugar and our own
spirits might be not only Right but beneficial to the nation? 37
Pulteneys position accorded the laboring people a political right
and economic license to drink gin, but it gave little idea of how one
might preserve regulation or address the patent fact that the poor could
be observed constantly drinking to excess. The same problem confronted
more conservative defenses of the gin trade. These country Tory writings,
like their country Whig counterparts, combined the economic logic of
utility with an assertion of political entitlement, which was hard to maintain without contemplating the wholly unpalatable conclusion that the
poor should be allowed to drink to excess without restraint. Bolingbroke
and the Tory writers made much of the governments hypocrisy in attacking the drunkenness of the poor. Ill warrant you it will be thought
a mighty crime for a laboring man to take a cheerful glass his own way,
exclaimed a Man of Kent in the daily papers, whereas of course,
it would be a harmless thing to be drunk on French Claret and spend
the rent of two or three acres of land for an evenings Diversions of your
Italian geldings. A paternalistic Parliament, as opposed to one driven
by lucre and private ambition, would allow people to have a reasonable
use of that commodity. 38
This was, of course, a position fraught with difficulty. The references
to the laboring people drinking constantly and excessively or even,
in a more positive light, in their own way reveal that these paternalists
and political advocates of the poor regarded them as irrational and underdeveloped consumers. Was it plausible to imagine them being reformed
simply by raising the price of spirits? How could such people be selfgoverning political subjects? How could a truly paternalistic farmer or
landlord endorse excessive drinking in the knowledge that he stood to
36

Gentlemans Magazine 6 (1736): 57678.

A Letter from a Member of Parliament to His Friend in the Country Containing
his Reasons for Being Against the Late Act for Preventing the Retail of Spirituous Liquors
(London, 1736), pp. 1921.
38 A Collection of Letters Published in the Daily Papers Relating to the British Distillery (London, 1736), pp. 4, 12, 30, 78. See also Gentlemans Magazine (1736): 310
12.
37

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gain materially from the prosperity of the spirits trade? That contemporaries were conscious of these contradictions becomes even more clear with
reference to the satirical literature produced in these debates.
The gin act of 1736 produced a large number of prints and poems
by Grub Street hacks, who were overwhelmingly hostile to Walpoles
ministry. Prints and poems proliferated with satirical references and
comic inversions. Formally, the poems demonstrate the familiar burlesque, mock forms of Augustan satirical literature. Their content also
displays well-known images mocking the hypocrisy and venality of the
government. Yet, as with the best of such literature, the satire frequently
swings both ways, displaying the self-conscious recognition that positions based on virtue are impossible. The great ones might be vicious
and oppressive, but the nostalgic yearnings of the country are as hypocritical as the pious rhetoric of the government reformer. In this way,
gin became a metaphor for the sickness of a society caught in seemingly
irresolvable contradictions.
We can see this more clearly with reference to one of the most
accomplished of the satirical verses of 1736, An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of the Most Excellent, the Most Truly-Beloved and Universally Admired Lady, Madam Gineva.39 This mock elegy enacts a satire
that refers in part to a tradition of wine and ale poems. But while wine
was a burlesque drink that permitted inferiors to imagine themselves
kings, the qualities of gin and its socioeconomic status demanded a more
astringent and much darker satire. There is the familiar condemnation
of oppressive governors:
Howeer they gloss their late officious Zeal,
With feignd Pretence to serve the Common-Weal,
Envy we know, this harsh Restraint suggests.
(O why shoud Envy enter Noble Breasts?)
Jealous that beggars with the Rich shoud vie,
Dare to drink drams and like their Betters Die.
39
An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of the Most Excellent, the Most TrulyBeloved and Universally Admired Lady, Madam Gineva. Worthy to be Perused by All
Distillers, whether Simple or Compound (London, 1736). See also Mother Gin: A TragiComical Eclogue, Being a Paraphrastical Imitation of the Daphnis of Virgil (London,
1737); The Deposing and Death of Queen Gin, with the Ruin of Duke Rum, Marquee de
Nantz and the Lord Sugarcane etc . . . An Heroic-Comic-Tragical Farce (London, 1736).
This section owes much to Anne Janowitz, Gin in the Discourse of Libationary Poetics
(paper presented at the University of Warwick Luxury Projects Summer Assembly, 1997).
See also the following prints: The Funeral Procession of Madam Geneva, engraving (29
September 1736); The Lamentable Fall of Madam Geneva, engraving (29 September
1736); and To the Mortal Memory of Madam Geneva, Who Died Sept. 29, 1736, engraving
(29 September 1736), all in Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,
ed. F. G. Stephens and M. D. George (London, 1877), nos. 2277, 2278, and 2279.

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51

Yet if virtue and nobility are masks for oppression and exploitation, then
the nostalgic politics of the country are equally delusory. The poet continues in an equally bitter vein:
Must we then lose alas! however loth,
The blissful privilege of drunken Sloth?
Freedom and Property are then but Names?:
Thinjurious Parliament our Birth-Right claims.

And the satire extends into a mockery of the Golden Age of liberty,
where
Open drunkenness, devoid of Awe,
Reignd without check, establishd by the law . . .
Prompt we obeyd each dictate of the mind,
Light as Air and Common as the Wind,
now whore, now steal, Now lie, now Swear, Now Fight,
And bravely Vindicate each natural Right.40

Gin functions as the metaphor of universal corruption and vice,

throwing all certainties into drunken instability; this condition is followed, inevitably, by a period of intense melancholy. Yet in this poem,
gin also offers the only balm for the experience of such painful contradictions. Gin, the product of an exploitative and self-destructive society, is
its own medicine, obscuring the painful truth with its delusory comforts.
Gin is the solution to the problem of overpopulation for parishes anxious
to keep their rates low, for it kills children in the womb and makes men
impotent. And, perhaps the worst crime of the reformers, the poet
claimed, is to deprive the poor of their only solace:
Now greedy Great Ones, their inferiors Grind
And Vice monopolize of evry kind.
In costly Riot they may waste their Wealth.
The Poor must rest content with Temprate Health.

Can it be called an act of public good, he asks,

To take our Raiment from us, and our Food?
For food and Raiment, with lifes every sweet,
Comprizd of Gin, our summum bonum meet.41
40
41

Elegy.
Ibid.

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The image of gin as an anesthetic against poverty and exploitation

recurs throughout the satirical literature, where it features as their chief
pleasure, the cheap cordial for the Poors relief. 42 To remove this,
the satirists urged the ministry, was to inflame the fury of the dispossessed. To a ministry made nervous by rumors of Jacobite plots and by
riots across East London and the west of England, this was not to be
taken lightly.
These satires also highlighted a significant aspect of the culture
within which laboring-class Londoners drank gin. The political pamphleteers, whether advocating reform or not, all recognized that the laboring
classes drink culture was shaped by values and norms that these writers
did not themselves share. To the writers it appeared as excess or as the
simple habits of an uncivilized and unrefined people. The satirical productions were able, through their use of comic modes, to capture something of the carnivalesque sociability that informed laborers drink culture. They also captured the changing function of these values and
practices in the citys developing capitalist social relations. The carnivalesque imagery and comic inversions are deeply melancholic; they enact a dark and humorless laughter fueled by a commodity that made
substantial profits for the landed and trading classes. These hack writers
demonstrated a partial consciousness that the citys laboring people were
being destroyed and their culture travestied by the relations of wage labor. Laborers only outlet was to direct the residues of their autonomous
culture into the dubious compensations of a commodity that destroyed
their own health and increased others wealth. Just as the satirists exposed the alienation of virtue from social and intellectual life, so they
also partially revealed the estrangement of the urban laboring classes.
In the 1730s, the issue of laboring-class gin drinking, like that of
laboring-class consumption more generally, was bound up with the concerns animating debates about luxury and, more broadly, with the historical emergence of the economic as a separate sphere of knowledge
and social practice. How free should the passions be? While they created
amazing opulence, the commerce they inspired contradicted many traditional legitimations of the social order. What was the status of justice
and virtue, if these concepts could, in theory, be explained as effects of
desire-driven economic practice? Gin came to stand as a metaphor for
contradiction and paradox, as part of a more general crisis within early
capitalist ideology caused by the increasing obsolescence of ideologies
forged for an earlier stage of capitalist development. By the 1750s, as the
next section explores, this particular ideological crisis had been largely
42

Lamentable Fall.

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53

resolved. Capitalist ideology produced concepts that made the new conditions of the midcentury intelligible, supplanting the ideologies of the
early eighteenth century.
* * *
One way of tracing the shifting conditions and ideology of the 1730s
to the 1750s is to examine the fate of the gin act of 1736. The contradictory coalition of the conservative landed opposition and the urban trading
classes may have failed to prevent the act from passing, but it soon rendered it unenforceable. In the name of liberty, acts of civil disorder
against justices and excisemen were orchestrated by the London middling
sorts and legitimated by the parliamentary opposition. By 1740, the act
was totally dead. In 1743, it was repealed in favor of far more lenient
legislation.43 Politically, this can be seen as part of the demise of the
Walpolean objective of appeasing the landed classes at the expense of
trade, itself an expression of the increased social and political status of
the commercial middling sorts in the social and economic order. This
episode was also intimately bound up with the further commercialization
of the British economy and the increased accumulation of capital. In the
case of the gin trade, the spirits trade reached its eighteenth-century peak
in the late 1740s.44
By the 1750s, land had also expanded its commercial links. The
interdependence of land and commerce can be registered in the largescale redirection of grain into the lucrative export trade (which reached
its peak in the 1750s) and in the increasing immersion of farmers in the
world of credit and finance, tying them into expanding capital markets
in order to improve their land.45 Ideologically, this change was expressed
in the frequent observation that land was just another species of commerce, indistinguishable from any other branch of trade.46 If the landed
classes had now become a recognizable commercial interest, the traders
who fed domestic demand were also enjoying a higher social and cultural
status. Contemporary paeans to commerce as the strength of the na43
See Jessica Warner and Frank Ivis, Damn You, You Informing Bitch: Vox
Populi and the Unmaking of the Gin Act of 1736, Journal of Social History 33, no. 2
(1999): 299330. See also Rude, Mother Gin; Davison, Gin Legislation, pp. 36
41.
44 Chartres, English Spirits; Davison, Gin Legislation, pp. 4142.
45 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 17271783 (Oxford,
1989), pp. 16265; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven,
Conn., 1992), pp. 6371.
46 See Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which
Respectively Attend France and Great Britain with Regard to Trade (London, 1753),
p. 34; Malachy Postlethwayt, Britains Commercial Interest Explained and Improved, 2
vols. (London, 1757), 1:13, 367.

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tion pointedly included the domestic trade and even its laboring-class
markets. The War of the Austrian Succession had closed off many markets for British manufactures against the background of an all-too-evident resurgence in French commerce. As the French appeared to threaten
Britains position in both traditional textile markets and new luxury
trades, the war made it clear to many commercial writers just how important domestic markets had become.47
Thus, by the 1750s, the laboring classes consumer desires, their
appetites and wants, enjoyed a remarkably enhanced economic and social
position in capitalist ideology. Mercantile writers spoke of increasing the
consumption of British manufactures, developing the laboring classes
taste for clothing and manufactured domestic furnishings, and refining
their manners in the process. The most progressive writers of this period,
identifying commerce as the motor of economic, social, and moral improvement, aimed to expand the reach of these improving forces across
the nation and across the world, including even the laboring poor in their
vision of universal progress.48
These writers drew, to some extent, on what they saw around them.
Sections of the urban laboring classes appeared to conform to bourgeois
notions of industrious labor, thrifty accumulation, and judicious, respectable consumption. In London, for example, workers began to take fewer
holidays and gradually detach themselves from customary work patterns.
Significant sections were also consuming commodities associated with
middling-sort ideas of respectable and decent consumption. Tea and its
accoutrements, a higher standard of interior furnishing and decoration,
and fashionable cotton clothing were regular features of urban laboringclass life.49 Yet there were definite limits to this accommodation. The
power of laboring people as consumers was materially limited by their
position within capitalist production. The imperatives of poverty and labor limited the assimilation of middling-sort ideals. Consequently, laboring people remained residually tied to the customary norms that
47
Langford, Polite and Commercial People, pp. 61121, 16574; Colley, Britons,
pp. 85100.
48
This argument is developed in detail in White, Luxury and Labour, pp. 146
57.
49
Hans Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England, 17501830 (Oxford, 2000),
pp. 11833; John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England (London,
1986), pp. 13053, 25560; Carole Shammas, The Domestic Environment in Early
Modern England and America, Journal of Social History 14, no. 1 (1980): 324, and
Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 15501800, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1991), pp. 177
205; Beverly Lemire, Fashions Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 16601800 (Oxford, 1991), and Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing
Trade before the Factory (Basingstoke, 1997).

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55

shaped urban community relations and to petty credit networks that

played a vital role in keeping poor families afloat.50
This conjunction highlighted a contradiction in progressive expectations for the poor. The laboring classes were distinguished by the same
feature that progressive thinkers used to include them in the vision of
commercial progress: their property in and exchange of labor. This enabled progressive writers to see the laboring classes as assimilable to
respectable society, making them rational agents engaged in refining
commerce to secure their wants. Writers described labor as the poor
mans commodity or a commodity like any other. 51 Yet the societal
need for labor over and above the less urgent and more contingent need
for laboring-class consumption made it impossible to reconcile working
people with universal improvement. More conservative writers recognized this, claiming that laborers were constitutionally incapable of sustained rational conduct and too inured to misery to possess any potential
for development. Instead, conservative commentators appealed to the
need to restrain plebeian consumption, appealing to strategies aimed at
maintaining structures of mystification and immiseration. One key for
such conservative critics, anxious to point out the moral and economic
deficiencies of the poor, was workers consumption of gin.52
Following the failure of the 1736 act and under the shelter of lenient
legislation in 1743 and 1747, the spirits industry had become a truly
national phenomenon. Its market stretched across the nations alehouses
and retailing outlets, and a significant part of this market lay among the
urban laboring classes. Provincial towns throughout England complained
of the gin drinking among their local labor forces. Still the largest single
50 For the conditions of London workers, see L. D. Schwartz, The Standard of Living in the Long Run: London, 17001860, Economic History Review, 2d ser., 38, no.
1 (1985): 2441; John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry
(London, 1981), pp. 5074. For the customary determination of plebeian consumption,
see Beverly Lemire, Peddling Fashion: Salesmen, Pawnbrokers, Taylors, Thieves and
Second-Hand Clothes in England, c. 17001800, Textile History 22, no. 1 (1991): 67
82, and Petty Pawns and Informal Lending: Gender, Households and Small-Scale Credit
in English Communities, in From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism: Essays in
Business and Industrial History in Honour of Peter Mathias, ed. Kristine Bruland and
Patrick OBrien (Oxford, 1998), pp. 11238; John Styles, Custom or Consumption?
Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (paper presented at the Luxury Project
Conference, Luxury and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century Europe, University of
Warwick, July 1998). My thanks to Beverly Lemire and John Styles for allowing me to
cite these papers.
51 See, e.g., Reflections on Various Subjects Relating to Arts and Commerce (London,
1752), pp. 5364; Josiah Tucker, The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes (unpublished manuscript, 1755), pp. 8182; White, Luxury and Labour, pp. 13267.
52 See, e.g., John Clayton, Friendly Advice to the Poor (Manchester, 1755); White,
Luxury and Labour, pp. 132233.

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market, and the most visible, remained London. As laborers ties to customary culture were progressively weakened, gin, which had become a
part of proletarian life in the context of customary norms of consumption
and social expenditure, probably functioned strongly as compensation
and comfort. Working women, in particular, might enjoy drinking in the
gin shops as part of their newfound wage-earning power and relative
consumer freedom. Yet, they might just as easily buy it to drink at home
as a cheap cordial for domestication, underemployment, desertion, poverty, sickness, or any of the symptoms of the womens fragile position
in urban economy and social order.53
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, as thousands of soldiers and
sailors were released from military service into London society, brought
these longer-term developments sharply into view. As underemployment
reached crisis proportions, crimes against property became a fixation for
a ruling class that perceived itself to be under threat from a turbulent
and ungovernable people. In this context, another assault on the gin trade,
seen as profiting from this disorder, became inevitable. This time, the
social forces arrayed in favor of reform were stronger, and those against
it were substantially weakened. Although the spirits trade had grown, its
relative importance to the national economy, given the profits to be made
from grain exporting, was less. It was also less important to a state shifting its fiscal attention to genuine mass commodities like tea. Given these
conditions, the heavily capitalized and established end of the trade was
probably ready to contemplate reform of the lesser manufacturers and
retailers in order to preserve its market position and save the industry
from total destruction.54
In 1751, a group of reforming M.P.s, with the backing of prominent
churchmen and public luminaries, began to agitate for and formulate a
53 For the extent of the trade in the 1750s, see Davison, Gin Legislation, pp. 41
42; Chartres, English Spirits; Clark, Mother Gin, p. 68. For womens access to gin
shops, see Clark, Mother Gin, pp. 7071; Warner and Ivis, Damn You, p. 307.
On the fragility of working womens lives in London, see Peter Earle, The Female
Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries, Economic History Review 42 (1989): 33852; L. D. Schwartz, London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 17001850 (Cambridge,
1992), pp. 1821, 4349.
54 On the crisis of order in the wake of 1748, see Nicholas Rogers, Confronting the
Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 17491753, in Davison et
al. eds., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, pp. 7798; Richard Connors, Pelham, Parliament
and Public Policy: 17461754 (D.Phil thesis, Cambridge University, 1993), pp. 187
217. For the changing position of the spirits trade within the economy and within the
states fiscal regime, see Langford, Polite and Commercial People, pp. 14849, 16465;
Patrick K. OBrien, The Political Economy of British Taxation, 16601815, Economic
History Review, 2d ser., 41, no. 1 (1988): 2332.

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57

bill to reform the spirits trade, this time focusing attention on the distillers. The bill met with little opposition either in Parliament or in the wider
public debate and passed fairly quietly into law. An examination of the
reform interest and its ideological production shows that the gin debates
embodied and expressed the conditions and ideological changes sketched
out above, replicating developments in social relations and social thought
central to this phase of capitalist development. But it also demonstrates
why the gin debates were so important and what was particular about
the ideas and concepts they expressed.
The reform writers of 1751 were notable in combining their advocacy of philanthropic reform as part of a holistic vision of national improvement that sought to develop national commerce, prosperity, and
refinement. Hogarth, Isaac Maddox, the Bishop of Worcester, and Josiah
Tucker were all proponents of the British Fisheries scheme. Tucker, who
was living in Bristol, was on close terms with Robert Nugent, M.P. for
Bristol and among the bills backers. Both were strong advocates for the
Bristol merchant community. Hogarth, Maddox, and Tucker were all also
closely involved with charitable activities both in London and in the
wider nation. Hogarth was active in the Foundling Hospital, Maddox was
a prime mover behind the Worcester Infirmary and was also active with
the London Hospitals, and Tucker was a keen promoter of the Bristol
infirmary. For these people, commerce and moral activism went hand in
hand.55
The writer who least fits this profile was Henry Fielding, a justice on
the Middlesex bench. Fieldings wide-ranging Enquiry into the Causes of
the Late Increase of Robberies appealed for a reform of the spirits trade.
The tract demonstrates how far conservatism had developed from the
early eighteenth century. Fielding drew on the language of luxury in his
diagnosis of the causes of social disorder. However, he used the idea of
luxury in a manner far more reminiscent of Mandeville than of the civic
humanist or Protestant reform traditions used by early eighteenth-century
conservatives. Luxury and social disorder, he claimed, were an inevitable
price of commercial development, costs that had to be assessed against
the utility of wealth creation and dealt with pragmatically. Gin, about
which he said relatively little, was a prime example. Fielding closely
followed the substance of Wilsons pamphlet, claiming that gin was a
55
For Hogarths advocacy of the British Fisheries, and his charitable commitments,
see Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London, 1997), p. 499. For Maddox
and Tuckers activities, see DNB, 1st ed., s.vv. Isaac Maddox, Josiah Tucker. For
Tuckers connections with Robert Nugent, and on the British Fisheries project more
broadly, see Connors, Pelham, Parliament and Public Policy, pp. 27880.

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species of luxury that dispersed its canker into the bowels of the nation.
Yet its disutility lay, not in its status as a luxury but, rather, in its status
as a luxury of the vulgar. It removed fear and shame, which were
socially useful in securing labor. It also killed the useful laborers who
created wealth and the soldiers and sailors who defended the nation and
supported its trade. Such, he claimed, were arguments enough for reforming the trade. Fielding might lament the passing of ancient forms
of government and ancient deference, but he legislated as a modern pragmatist, deferring to the nations economic interest.56
By contrast, Maddox embraced commerce and moral reform as improving forces. Maddox, a self-made man and the son of an artisan, published his pamphlet urging reform of the spirits trade shortly after Fieldings intervention. He too emphasized the disastrous effect on the labor
force, reiterating the familiar arguments about fear, shame, and idleness.
But he supplemented this with an entirely new stress on the commerce
and consumption of the laboring classes. How many consumers of the
general product of the Nation are annually killed, he demanded, and
how many Commodities and how many Utensils does this pernicious
Gin supplant or supply the place of? Maddox was clear that the nation
stood to lose a valuable market for home manufactures if it allowed the
spirits trade to live.57
This emphasis on the commercial exchanges of the laborer, this extension of civil society to embrace the laboring people, inevitably enhanced the social and economic importance of their domestic and familial
lives. Reformulating laborers as property owners in labor, exchanging
their commodity in pursuit of their desires, meant that capitalist ideology
had to address these lives in a way that would accord to them forms of
affect and modes of rational conduct previously confined to property
owners. The domestic and familial lives of the poor now came under
the public scrutiny of the propertied, just as they became configured as
56 Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers etc.,
With Some Proposals for Remedying This Growing Evil (London, 1751), in An Enquiry
into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings: The Wesleyan
Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988), pp. 78
84, 8788.
57 Isaac Maddox, The Expediency of Preventive Wisdom, a Sermon Preached before
the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, the Aldermen and the Governors of the Severall
Hospitals of the City of London, at St Bridgets Church on Easter Monday (London,
1751), pp. iv, viviii. See also Josiah Tucker, An Impartial Inquiry into the Benefits and
Damages Arising to the Nation from the Present Very Great Use of Low-Priced Spirituous
Liquors (London, 1751), pp. 815, app.; A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to
His Friend in the Town, London Magazine (1751), pp. 12526; Serious Thoughts in
Regard to the Publick Disorders (London, 1750), pp. 3840.

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private lives. And gin was now seen in the new contexts of its effects
on the private home and on the subjectivity of private individuals.58
Maddox provides an example of the turn to the domestic sphere.
He bade his readers: Look in on the dwelling of a regular industrious
workman of the like Occupation of the slaves of gin. One could see
immediately, he claimed, that many trades have been employed to provide clothes and furnish a homely but decent and cleanly habitation for
himself, his wife and healthy Children. By contrast, the noisome
abode of the Gin-drinkers, if they have any settled abode at all, shall be
void of every thing decent or even necessary. 59 The domestic sphere
here was a site whose condition and worth could be assessed through
its material condition, by the commodities that mediated its relations to
the civil society of commercial exchanges within which laboring people
could now be incorporated. Gin disrupted the ideal of a regular and respectable domestic oeconomy within private families.
The concept of oeconomy, as I have argued elsewhere, became of
central importance in the new ideology of consumption. Oeconomy was
constituted by the ordered management of the family household by the
mother, while her husband labored for wages. She was to govern this
realm. In order to maintain regular order, however, the wage-earning man
must temper his leisure hours, providing rational oversight of her conduct. Good oeconomy, many argued, consisted of disposing of resources
rationally and fostering the habits of respectable, decent consumption
that would refine manners and develop the capacity for familial affect.
Thus, commerce and sentimental refinement were seen as mutually reinforcing, in line with contemporary moral philosophy.60
A pamphlet written to accompany Hogarths pair of engravings of
the same year, Beer Street and Gin Lane, gives a sense of this oeconomy
and the disruptive role of gin. The anonymous author of the Dissertation
upon Mr. Hogarths Six Prints (Gin Lane and Beer Street, plus the Four
Stages of Cruelty) supplemented Hogarths images by conducting his
readers on an imaginary tour through the world hidden by the crumbling
walls of Gin Lane. Household Oeconomy, so requisite in a poor mans
family, has not the least Appearance among these wretched people, the
author lamented. Cast your Eyes around the room and take notice of
its furniture, he urged, What can you see that is not offensive, or
58
For the ways in which social reformers focused on the public condition of the
private familial lives of the laboring classes at this time, see White, Luxury and
Labour, pp. 20133.
59
Maddox, Expediency, pp. ixx.
60
White, Luxury and Labour, pp. 15277.

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carries not the marks of misery and wretchedness. It will be much,

he claimed, if there is any thing worth Two-pence in the whole apartment, either in cloths, Linen or Woolen. 61 Everything the family owned
had gone, been sold or pawned, to secure more gin.
Familial affect was also perverted by the gin-drinking woman.
While her husband neglected his paternal duties, drinking with his workmates, the wife and mother lapsed into irrational and false desires, manifesting an affect that could only result in the destruction of her family.
Modesty is entirely laid aside by gin-addicted women. The true pleasures of domestic decency and respectability are replaced by the Enjoyment of their delightful companion, the gin bottle. Mothers addled by
alcohol would allow their children to crawl around half naked tho in
the coldest weather . . . half starved for want of nourishment, yet consider themselves loving parents by feeding them a spoonful of their own
delightful cordial to stop their little gaping mouths. O monstrous
Depravity of Human nature!, exclaimed the author, how capable of
noblest excellencies . . . and yet how coverd with Disgrace and sunk
in Corruption. 62 This emphasis on distorted affect and irrational behavior was crucial. It signaled the emergence of a key concept that expressed
the forms of spirits drinking and explained to polite society how poor
people could so desperately want something so dangerous to themselves
and so inimical to society. It indicated the development of a concept of
alcoholic addiction, of a species of desire that was not real desire.
Writers of the 1750s emphasized, with almost mantra-like frequency, the effects of gin on the rational component of human subjectivity, often drawing on the works of men like Hales. Tucker claimed that
gin induced a peculiar form of intoxication, a kind of instantaneous
drunkenness where a man hath no time to recollect or think whether he
hath had enough or no. His reason, Tucker claimed, is gone before
he is aware. The author of the Dissertation argued that, though endowed with reason, the gin-drinking man quickly became a slave to
his appetites and follows each dictate of his senses, how wild and extravagant soever they be. Troubled constantly with Anxieties, his money
was quickly spent and his life destitute of every rational pleasure.
Rationality was seen as essential to any authentic experience of pleasure,
61 A Dissertation on Mr. Hogarths Six Prints, Lately Publishd viz. Gin Lane, Beer
Street, and the Four Stages of Cruelty (London, 1751), pp. 17, 26. See also Maddox,
Expediency, pp. ixx; Eliza Haywood, A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking,
Adapted to All the Different Stations of Life: From a Lady of Quality to a Common
Servant (London, 1750), pp. 125, 3535; Petition of the Mayor, Citizens, Sherriff and
Commonalty of the City and County of Norwich in Common Council Assembled, Journals of the House of Commons 26 (1751): 88.
62 Dissertation, pp. 1516, 27.

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61

and the loss of this managerial reason resulted in a form of nonpleasure.

This was even more visible in women, whose rational capacity was supposedly more slender. Once habituated to spirits, the author of the Dissertation argued, a woman will never be satisfied without it, whatever
means she uses to procure a supply. A woman addicted to gin would
do anything that will fetch a penny, so that she might have what
she so continually longs for. 63
The concepts of addiction, insanity, and false desires abound in
these writings. They are also forcefully expressed in Hogarths two engravings.64 Beer Street represents a scene of controlled and enlightened
enjoyment, of pleasure agreeably harnessed to commercial development,
affectionately parodied in its comic representation of fat proletarians and
artisans. There are more particular indications as well: the central group
drink English ale during a period of rest from work outside a prosperous
alehouse. The labor they have interrupted is itself the consequence of
the propertied elites legitimate pursuit of politeness and fashionable opulence, while the copy of the kings speech encouraging the promotion
of commerce and reform in his kingdom being read by the Billingsgate
fish sellers conveys that the nations governors share the common interest
in prosperity.
In Gin Lane, by contrast, desire has run insane, having become a
form of ersatz pleasure. The economy of Gin Lane, located in the impoverished parish of St. Giles, is dark and predatory, peopled by those who
profit from the destruction of degeraded laborers: pawnbrokers, distillers,
and undertakers. The parishs material condition echoes the physical and
mental destruction of the gin-sodden laboring people whose insane compulsion drives them to pawn their household goods and work tools to
secure their fatal drink. The central embodiment of this false affect is
the mother, her disease-wracked body telling of her prostitution, a hollow
and deathly smile smeared across her face, allowing her child to fall from
her arms while she pinches a little more snuff. She is the embodiment of
the transient pleasures of drunkenness triumphing over the capacity for
rational pleasure.
This vision of the objective effects of gin, seen from the outside,
was given an equally disturbing subjective form in a poem of the same
year entitled Strip Me Naked, or Royal Gin Forever. This poem contains
63 Tucker, Impartial Inquiry, pp. 2122; Dissertation, pp. 4, 15, 1112. See also,
Maddox, Expediency, pp. xixii; Haywood, A Present, pp. 57.
64 On Gin Lane and Beer Street, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. 3, Art and Politics, 17501764 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), pp. 1721; Mark Hallett, The Spectacle
of Difference Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (London, 1999), pp. 2046; Uglow,
Hogarth, pp. 498501; Medick, Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism.

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echoes of the mock-elegies and odes of the 1730s, but the form is completely different. Instead, familiar images are regrouped around new
ones, structured by a first-person narrative that functions almost as a
novel in identifying the reader, however reprovingly, with the heroine.
It takes the form of a series of utterances that come in rushes, replicating
in their effect the drunkenness they describe.
I MUST, I will have gin!that skillet take,
Pawn it.No more Ill roast, or boil or bake.
This juice immortal will each want supply;
Starve on, ye brats! so I but bung my eye.
Starve? No! This gin evn mothers milk excels,
Paints the pale cheeks and hungers darts repels.
The skillets pawned already? Take this cap;
Round my bare head Ill yon brown paper wrap.
Ha! half my petticoat was torn away
By dogs (I fancy) as I maudlin lay.
How the wind whistles through each broken pane!
Through the wide-yawning roof how pours the rain!
My bedsteads cracked; the table goes hip-hop
But see! the gin! Come, come thou cordial drop!
Thou sovereign balsam to my longing heart!
Thou husband, children, all, We must not part!
Drinks
Delicious! O! Down the red lane it goes;
Now Im a queen and trample all my woes.
Inspired by gin Im ready for the road,
Could shoot my man, or fire the Kings abode.
Ha! my brains cracked.The room turns round and round;
down drop the platters, pans: Im on the ground.
My tattered gown slips from me.what care I?
I was born naked and Ill naked die.65

This poem describes from the inside the world that Hogarth grimly
satirizes from the outside, combining all the elements from other writings: the decay of the domestic economy, the mothers dependence on
the pawnbroker, the false hope and fake affect provided by the drink,
the illusory power threatening all forms of order, and the dark hints of
rape emerging from the loss of care and true self-regard. More than anything, perhaps, it conveys the desperate need that characterizes addicts.
In aestheticizing its subject, the poem generates, possibly counter to the
authors intention, a more sympathetic response, muddying the causal
65

Gentlemans Magazine 21 (1751), p. 134.

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chain that is supposed to ensure the womans culpability. This points to

the enduring importance of the gin debates.
* * *
The concept of addiction emerged at midcentury, fulfilling a specific
need in British capitalist society. Writers who positively identified themselves with commercial accumulation as a universally improving force
and who wished to extend its benefits across humanity, had to explain
why so many laboring people in cities preferred the dubious pleasures
of compulsive drinking to those of thrifty accumulation and judicious
expenditure. In formulating their concept of addiction, they drew on ideas
and potentials that had been forged in the very different debates of the
1730s, reshaping them to the needs of a society ideally considered to
rest on the commerce of private families rationally managing their desires
in pursuit of true pleasure. Within this context, gins ability to destroy
reason was in turn seen to destroy the capacity for authentic pleasure,
substituting an ersatz pleasure built on compulsive consumption. This
addiction made laboring people unfit for rational production and consumption, as well as condemning them to misery. The writers of the
midcentury drew on a range of competing notions derived from the earlier period of ideological crisis. Progressive natural-scientific explanations of intoxication and political writers analyses of the operation of
society were combined with the moral vocabulary of conservatives and
the critical rhetorics of satirists. But whereas, in their early eighteenthcentury context, these ideas had formed part of the last phase of a struggle for hegemony by distinct ideological forces, related to the struggle
to expand or delimit commercial development, by the 1750s the objective
had changed. The task for the midcentury bourgeois reformer was less
to comprehend the contradictions of an entire society than to interpret
the actions of a specific and delimited social class.
Addiction, in the 1750s, functioned as a highly ideological and
unself-conscious explanation of a particular social classs failure to progress. But the concept contained elements produced in the more crisisridden and self-conscious atmosphere of the 1730s. Perhaps most important among these elements was the satirical literatures subversive emphasis on universal corruption and the impossibility of virtue or affect
in urban society. At midcentury, the concept of addiction transformed a
set of ideas that had previously functioned to describe the sickness of a
whole society. These evils were rendered now as private and local, employed to describe the malaise of a specific social group and the effects
of drunkenness on the private individual. This could then be vectored
onto laboring-class families now firmly situated within the commercial

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society in order to explain their failure to fulfill their potential. The loss
of the social self-consciousness that had characterized the satirical literature, produced in a period of intense ideological crisis and rapid social
change, was replaced by a clearer attention to the particular plight of
laboring people in capitalist society. However, within this altered social
context, blame was now firmly placed on working people themselves.
Yet, as Strip Me Naked shows, the rhetorics of estrangement and
alienation, when combined with the midcenturys clearer focus on the
particularity of proletarian experience, endowed the idea of addiction
with potential for more critical and socially explosive usages. Later social
movements mobilized the social phenomena of addiction and alcoholism
as symptoms of a fundamental malaise in the political order rather than
as the causes of moral and economic failure. For addiction expressed
some of the content, some of the consequences, of the alienation characteristic of urban capitalist society. Addiction thus formed part of the
broader process of human estrangement that subsumed eighteenth-century social relations. The history of the gin trade and of the gin craze
not only reflected the history of capitalist development in the eighteenth
century, it eventually was to furnish modern political movements with
a crucial conceptual tool in their critique of the existing social order.