Geneva in London
By Sarah Stodola
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Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason
By Jessica Warner
Four Walls Eight WindowsThe first thing one must do upon reading Jessica Warner’s Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason is to reconcile the vast amount of gin consumption among 18th century lower-class Londoners with the present-day notion that England is a culture drowning in lager. However, Warner’s in depth knowledge of the many “gin acts” and their accompanying rebellions and riots leaves little doubt that it was gin and not beer that caused all the trouble several centuries ago, and that for nearly a hundred years, gin threatened to squeeze beer and other spirits out of the market altogether.
Not that the decline of beer sales was the foremost concern of lawmakers and enforcers. In a display of typical English classism, London’s elite eventually sought to curtail gin consumption only because they perceived that it threatened their source of cheap labor – cheap wages were a crucial ingredient in keeping them rich and the working class poor, and if the working class poor were busy being drunk on gin they weren’t working hard and earning those cheap wages. Less practically, lower-class drunkenness also offended the upper classes’ sense of good taste. For their part, London’s poor felt as though they were entitled to drink as much gin as they pleased, so colorless were most other parts of their lives. They therefore steadfastly refused to give it up, regardless of what lawmakers tried to impose upon them.
Warner begins her account with a bit of a gimmick: a cast of characters. Indeed, the book is framed as if it were an 18th century play – a ploy that was likely meant to bring the reader into the time and essence of the story it tells, but which in actuality serves mostly to make one feel as though she were reading an issue of McSweeney’s. This stands in startling contrast to the text, which reads in a straightforward and mostly earnest manner – certainly very readable, but a bit confusing nonetheless. Why use the theatrical language in fruity chapter titles if the tone is not to be carried out in the prose?
The book, then, is divided into three “acts,” and it is in the first of these that we learn how gin came to be the drink of choice among London’s working classes. (It should be said that although Warner touches on gin consumption in other parts of England, where the “craze” took hold as well, the bulk of her attention is rightly given to London, where the phenomenon really flourished.) This became possible only when grain prices decreased significantly due to surpluses, and the landowners who farmed grain thus sought new markets for their harvests. This motivated distillers, who added flavors and other modifications in order to make their gin more drinkable. As imports began to be taxed more heavily, England’s masses acquired their taste for domestic gin, or geneva, as it was originally called.
What makes such anecdotes interesting is the way in which they offer a slice of what life was like in 18th century London. The book’s strength is that it uses one small series of events to give readers a wider glimpse into the inner workings of a time and place that can otherwise be difficult to imagine. Warner impressively unearths, for example, several stories of specific nights and specific people, and she describes how gin affected specific areas of London. The only drawback to these stories is Warner’s occasional tendency to change directions, or even make two contradictory points, sometimes in the course of a single paragraph. She opens one paragraph, for example, by stating that “[t]he need for anonymity, in turn, effectively barred informers from all towns except London.” She then spends the majority of the paragraph recounting cases of informers in other English cities. This doesn’t take too much away from her engaging prose, but it does throw the reader off several times over the course of the book.
The final chapter of Craze, though, is an unqualified joy. In it, Warner muses on the implications of the 18th century gin craze on today’s culture -- although she seems to stick to current American culture, even though the obvious comparison would be between 18th century and contemporary England, with its own version of archaic drinking laws. Today's equivalent of polite society has taken up arms against any number of mind-altering substances in an attempt to keep the lower classes in their place. It is Warner’s belief that more often than not the criticisms are unfounded, having more to do with who takes the drug and what class of society they fall into. One can’t help but wish that Warner had spent more time on comparisons between 21st and 18th cultures and less time on the intricacies of laws that have been dead for hundreds of years. It’s one thing to know that there was a law concerning gin, and quite another thing to know exactly how that law came to pass in Parliament, after all. Unless you are a lawyer (and even then), such things are most often better left merely summarized. Making the 18th century relevant to contemporary life, on the other hand, is endlessly fascinating.
Warner states on page four that the central theme of the book is “why people worry at some times and not at others.” This seems to sell the book short, as the “central theme” could be more aptly described by saying that things never change; that the upper classes will always look out for themselves at the expense of the lower classes, that people will always drink to escape boredom and pain, and that profit will always be a chief motivation for lawmakers. It is in today’s America as it was in 18th century England. In the case of Craze, it is through the eyes of geneva that we are able to see as much.
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Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted here.
© 2005 Me Three