Gin Craze

8 Key excerpts on "Gin Craze"

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  eBook - ePub

  Regulating Alcohol around the World

  Policy Cocktails

  • Tiffany Bergin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These concerns can be shaped by changes in drinking patterns, as well as by cultural attitudes—such as, in this case, attitudes about women’s societal roles—and by political and economic factors. Such concerns can, in turn, be mobilized by reformers to instigate policy change. The Gin Craze is also important because it offers an example of the ways in which historical experiences—or the collective memories and understandings of such experiences—can influence later alcohol policymaking. Perhaps in part because of Hogarth’s memorable works, this historical phenomenon has had a lasting effect on British culture and attitudes to alcohol. Indeed, even a 2010 article published in The Telegraph about the contemporary problem of binge drinking referenced “Hogarth’s Gin Lane” (Humphrys, 2010). As the British Museum’s official description of Hogarth’s print explains: “The horrors of Gin Lane provided imagery for propaganda against alcohol for another hundred years.” The fact that the Gin Craze is still referenced in contemporary debates illustrates the potency of history—or, at least, society’s collective interpretation of such history. Beyond the Gin Craze In addition to the Gin Craze, other historical phenomena have also cast long shadows over British alcohol policymaking. For example, the British temperance movement that gained prominence in the nineteenth century “had a decisive impact on the way alcohol is viewed in Britain,” as it cast alcohol’s negative impacts as important social and political issues (Yeomans, 2009, p. 3.1). Similarly, in the US the Prohibition Era of the early twentieth century has left a lasting legacy. Even today Prohibition’s perceived failures are often cited in debates about restricting alcohol’s availability, as seen in relation to the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s policy of prohibiting alcohol at the Pine Ridge Reservation, discussed in Chapter 1

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  Mayhem

  Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748-53

  • Nicholas Rogers(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Tackling the Gin Craze 157 the prohibition of gin in prisons and workhouses. At least in controlled en-vironments the law had a measure of success. Otherwise it was more of the same. Certainly the hopes of moral reformers that gin could be regulated out of the reach of the poor remained unrealized. The gin epidemic was ultimately contained by changes in consumer taste, not by regulation. Poorer harvests and higher prices gradually weaned workers away from gin, the consumption of which fell precipitously after the harvest failures of 1756–57. Cheaper beer, and especially porter, stepped in to take its place. Yet the fact that the gin crisis was resolved by economics rather than social regulation underscored the huge difficulties of policing consumer tastes that did not jibe with the official national project. Parliamentarians recognized this problem very clearly in the debates of 1743, which were well reported in the press. The problem was also recognized by Henry Fielding in his role as a journalist and Bow Street magistrate. In the Covent Garden Journal, Fielding expatiated on what he saw as the rise of the mob to the status of a ‘‘Fourth Estate.’’ One of the hallmarks of this disturbing phenomenon, disturbing, that is, to Fielding, was the ability of the populace to control the execution of the laws. The glaring example Fielding cited was the Gin Acts, which, unlike the protests against turnpikes, were resisted not so much by force as by evasion, obstruction, and by the intimidation of informers on whom the legal process depended. Ω∏ How Fielding confronted the Gin Craze and the social problems of the postwar era is the subject of my next chapter. Suffice to say that the gin era raised important issues of governance, with respect both to healthy, productive populations and to policing. These two themes, so clearly articulated by Mad-dox and Fielding in the early 1750s, distinguished the debate on gin in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession.

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  Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety

  • SEAN HIER(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In both cases, claims making was enhanced by newspaper coverage portraying and indicting the behaviour for those otherwise unaware of it. Public opinion was constructed by enraged sectors of the middle class but popular feeling was indifferent or tacitly tolerant. The media did not lead the campaign but reflected the views of moralistic campaigners with wider agendas. Claims makers offered statistical calculations of the damage wreaked by alcohol as well as emotive denigration of drinkers, including vivid, visual images of public disorder and social disintegration.

  Measures adopted extended the powers of state officials to immediately apprehend offenders. In the Gin Craze the use of paid informers, designed to exert control, instead provoked minor disturbances and occasional riots. Action against binge drinkers – such as on-the-spot fines or alcohol-free zones – seem ineffective compared with enforcing existing legal powers. In both cases the power of the state could be increased in principle, but proved difficult to realize in practice.

  Differences

  The political contexts differed, especially government priorities. During the Gin Craze Britain was, paradoxically, a stable country with fragile institutions: ‘even the slightest threat to the status quo was a source of enormous alarm to the nation’s governing class’ (Warner 2002 : 7). ‘New’ Labour aimed to create a new moral order, based on rights and responsibilities, with great hostility towards those threatening it. The issues varied by geography and generation. The gin problem was confined to London but binge drinking is a problem in all towns and city centres. Gin drinking was an issue between classes; binge drinking is an issue between generations. The gin issue provoked an objection to a specific type of alcoholic drink rather than to drunkenness. Binge drinking provoked a critique of excessive drinking, whatever the type of drink involved.

  The deleterious effects of excessive alcoholic consumption were stressed for both gin and binge drinking, but with different emphases. Gin harmed the health of the nation and future generations. Binge drinkers damaged their own health. Claims makers about gin were moral, and especially Christian, reformers but for binge drinking more prominent critics were law-enforcement agencies supported by anti-alcohol groups. Claims about gin were largely uncontested because brewers and distillers were politically disorganized. By the time of binge drinking the trade is highly organized, public-relations conscious and allegedly very influential on government policy. Measures adopted differed because the absence of a police force stymied attempts to suppress the gin trade, whereas the police have been crucial to the definition of binge drinking. Government acted reluctantly over gin but it has been the prime mover on binge drinking.

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  Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830

  • Helen Berry, Jeremy Gregory(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Spirits in the North-East? Gin and Other Vices in the Long Eighteenth Century*

  * Some of the material of this chapter was the result of ESRC Project Grant R000222612, and this support is acknowledged with pleasure, as is the contribution of Dr Christine Garwood, Research Fellow on that project, who contributed so much on London archives.

  J. A. CHARTRES

  The 'Reign of Queen Gin' between the mid-1720s and the late 1740s is a familiar symbol of excess consumption. Hogarth's Gin Lane (1742) gave its social costs iconic form, and framed perceptions for the majority of subsequent historians and others looking at the period. Home-produced spirits, above all gin, have thus been set into a fundamentally metropolitan frame of reference, and seen as affecting the lowest orders of society. Excess consumption of spirits was seen by both contemporaries and subsequent observers as a drug of despair, affecting those without ambitions or hope, and was a gendered vice, displaying particularly damaging effects upon women, and by transference, their children.1 For the second quarter of the century, public anxiety over this vice was sharpened by apparently clear evidence of wild excesses, although policy makers and medical authorities retained concern for much longer.

  1 M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1925), pp. 41-55; G. Rudé '"Mother Gin" and the London Riots of 1736', Guildhall Miscellany, I (1959), 53-62, reprinted in idem,

  Paris and London in the 18th Century: Studies in Popular Protest

  (London 1970), pp. 201-21; John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: a Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (London, 1999), pp. 162-5; Jessica Warner, 'In Another City, in Another Time: Rhetoric and the Creation of a Drug Scare in Eighteenth-Century London', Contemporary Drug Problems (1994), 485-511; and Lee Davison, 'Experiments in the Social Regulation of Industry: Gin Legislation, 1729-1751', in Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750

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  Moral Panics in the Contemporary World

  • Julian Petley, Chas Critcher, Jason Hughes, Amanda Rohloff(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Moral panic and moral regulation theories encourage concentration on differing means, anxiety and discourse, through which to explain the emergence of social problems. Which is more suited to studying the ‘drink problem’?

  Moral panics and social anxiety are clearly relevant to the subject area of drinking. Indeed, these heuristic devices have been employed numerous times since Joseph Gusfield (1962) highlighted the causal importance of status anxiety within the emerging middle class in producing the American temperance movement. More recently, Peter Borsay’s (2007) discussion of the Georgian ‘gin panics’ cited contextual factors, such as rapid urbanization, increasing working-class affluence and concerns about the breakdown of the family, as factors instrumental in producing the social unease which came to be directed at the consumption of spirituous liquor.1 Gin was a relatively new substance, having been introduced to Britain from the Netherlands after the Glorious Revolution, and historians generally accept that its consumption was on the rise in London during the first half of the eighteenth century (Nicholls 2009). But, according to Borsay, it was ‘the capacity to yoke the rise in gin drinking to the wider concerns of society that transformed a potential social problem into a full blown “moral panic”’ (2007) – a panic which saw William Hogarth famously depict the criminal and immoral depravities of ‘Gin Lane’. Nicholls describes how it is common to see the Licensing Act 1751, which raised the licence fee for gin-sellers and restricted the type of premises which could hold a licence, as making the gin trade respectable and thus ending the gin panics (Nicholls 2009: 46–8).2 The ‘gin panics’ thus seem to lend themselves readily to explanation through moral panic theory: social changes created anxiety which became focused on a new substance and a new social group (emerging urban working class); Hogarth and others ‘manned the barricades’ before legal changes restored some sense of equilibrium.

  But the utility of social anxiety as an explanatory concept is not universal. In his study of the Black Act 1723, E. P. Thompson criticized the idea that this repressive law, which condemned many people to death for relatively minor criminal offences, could be explained simply by the wave of public concern unleashed by social unrest. A widespread perception of crisis may have led to a consensus that something needed to be done, but ‘If we agree that “something” needed to be done this does not entail the conclusion that anything

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  Drink and British Politics Since 1830

  A Study in Policy Making

  • J. Greenaway(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 The Drink Problem in Early Victorian Britain, 1830–70 Governments had been concerned about the dangers of intoxicants as far back as Tudor times. The link to public disorder or crime was the main issue. Hence, the very first reference in England to liquor licens- ing came in a statute of 1494 that dealt with the problem of ‘vagabonds’ and gave the justices of the peace power to ‘reject and put away common ale selling’ where they deemed necessary. 1 From time to time, moralists also waxed lyrical about the effects of overindulgence among the masses. This was especially marked in the celebrated ‘gin mania’ in London in the eighteenth century, so vividly satirised and illustrated by Hogarth. However, there had been no systematic policy or attitude towards alcohol or its abuse. Indeed, the gin problem had been the unintended result of the landed interest in Parliament desiring to dispose of a glut of corn and to raise money for a war with France. 2 By the early nineteenth century, however, the issue of the excess con- sumption of alcohol began to be defined as a social problem, one of intemperance or excessive drinking. Several factors explain this shift. In the first place, changes in agrarian practices at the time of the industrial revolution, by facilitating the production of alcohol, made ‘new and potentially disruptive patterns of alcohol consumption feasible’. 3 Secondly, the processes of indus- trialisation and urbanisation actually encouraged excessive drinking. Intemperance was frequently the response to a truly wretched and debilitating environment by men and women who were enjoying a fluctuating, but on occasions high, cash income. The popular adage that drink was the quickest and easiest way out of the slums of Manchester was borne out by Engel’s lurid account of the resort of the working class to alcohol. 4 In the early part of the nineteenth cen- tury the public house, for all its deficiencies, was often the one oasis of 7

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  Drugs, Alcohol and Addiction in the Long Nineteenth Century

  Volume I

  • Daniel Malleck(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  But the tension between Carnival and Lent was a tension between common and divine activity, and although viewed with some concern, it was not something against which authorities normally sought to impose heavy restrictions. The Hogarth drawings, on the other hand, represent the concerns about types of drinking and the excesses of spirits over beer. The community where gin prevailed was degraded and destitute, with only the pawn shop benefitting because people would sell their goods to buy gin. The community where beer prevailed was healthy and orderly; only the pawn shop was destitute. 1 The resulting laws to suppress the gin trade targeted one product, not all forms of consumption. 2 Such regulations themselves demonstrate how profound were the changes in the nineteenth century, because in order to curtail the gin trade the government instituted controls including taxes and licensing, rather than imposing prohibitions and laws condemning individual consumption. More complex than these secular impressions were the debates among religious leaders. Especially, Puritan ministers railed against public drunkenness, linking it to more substantial problems of individual excess and social deterioration. 3 Such proclamations are often seen as the roots of the idea that addiction to drink was a social problem requiring more sophisticated social intervention. One classic work on addiction is by Harry Levine, and set the origins of the medical interpretation of addiction in the writings of Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush. Levine argued that Rush’s An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (reprinted in this collection) was the pivotal document that started the process of medicalizing drunkenness, providing a language upon which subsequent reformers based their concerns

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  Ethics in the Alcohol Industry

  • S. Robinson, A. Kenyon(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Thefts and social unrest at the time, however, had many other causes. Families were starving – due, in part, to poor har- vests of barley, which drove up food prices for essential foodstuffs such as bread. Therefore, desperate people stole to make ends meet (Malcolmson 1981). Indeed, following the ‘gin epidemic’, crime rates increased. Despite these arguments, and concern for the decreasing price of gin, the government felt responsible and intervened with the Tipping Act of 1751. The Tipping Act prohibited distillers selling gin to the consumer at retail prices, as it encouraged ‘drunkenness’. Two things came out of the gin epidemic. First, there was an increased national awareness that 16 Ethics in the Alcohol Industry intoxication, with its rippling effects through the social and economic environment, is a political problem. Second, alcohol was confirmed as an addictive substance, the consumption of which had to be controlled. The Beer Act 1830 and the growth of the Temperance Movement Moving to the beginning of the nineteenth century, which still had a ‘gin haze’, drinking was still considered to be both the scourge of the working classes and a social problem. When there were problems, especially with the ‘masses’, the educated and the activists often protested or demanded that Parliament add to existing laws, bring in new legislation and encour- age the police force to use their powers to halt or change the problematic behaviour. London’s police force was privately owned, paid for with tax- payers’ money, but not the national police force known today. Political leaders and commentators at the time stated that the poor were drink- ing excessively, which, by definition, created an ugly social problem. The ‘Drink Question’ was discussed by activists and policy-makers, such as Samuel Pope, who wished to bring about prohibition. Government fig- ures such as Lord Stanley, Lord Salisbury and Lord Chancellor Goulburn offered a more liberal view.

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