The 18th century remains one of the most famed and spoken about era’s for Gin. It was one of its most transformative too. This period, famously known as the ‘Gin Craze’, is a pivotal chapter in the evolution of our beloved spirit.
Not only did it go from relative obscurity into the epicentre of an epidemic, but it also forever etched itself on the public’s imagination. And into museums too via Hogarth’s Gin Lane!
In many ways, it the craze wasn’t really about gin though.
In fact, it was in spite of it’s flavour that it still happened. Set against the backdrop of 18th century London, the Gin Craze was a socio-economic phenomenon that gripped the city for nearly 30 years. This is retrospectively accepted as lasting from 1721 to 1751.
How did the Gin Craze play out?
The origins lay in a combination of economic, social, and political factors.
The British government, seeking to boost grain prices, encouraged domestic distillation. Moreover, they also imposed heavy taxes on imported spirits giving the inexpensive, homegrown spirits a significant advantage.
It worked but the move inadvertently led to gin’s proliferation amongst the poorer classes, who found it a cheap and temporarily comforting escape from the hardships of daily life.
A series of legislative measures, known as the Gin Acts, were then introduced in an attempt to curb gin consumption and regulate both its production and sale. They were met with varying degrees of hostility and success…
Here are some of the key ones, which help pain the picture of the era.
The 1st – Gin Act of 1729.
This was the first significant attempt to control what was becoming a craze. The Act imposed a tax of 5 shillings per gallon on spirits and required sellers to take out a license costing £50. The intended effect was to price out small gin-sellers and decrease gin consumption among the poor.
However, the actual outcome was a failure as gin sales did not decrease significantly and the law was widely ignored.
Through the combination of historic records and expert insight, it is estimated that the number of gin shops in London exceeded 7000 by 1730. By 1733, the average person was said to be drinking over a litre of gin per week. In the heart of the action, in the City of London going East towards Whitechapel, one in three public houses either produced or sold gin.
The third – Gin Act of 1736
Seven years into the Gin Craze, a different approach came next. Recognising the failure of both the 1729 and 1733 Acts, the government passed more stringent measures in 1736, raising the tax on gin to an exorbitant 20 shillings per gallon and the annual retail license to £100. The aim was to price gin out of the reach of the masses.
The actual effect, however, was a surge in illicit gin production and even rioting. Like the previous Act of 1733, this new legislation relied heavily on professional informers. Because of this, the law was nearly impossible to enforce and led to a huge rise in corruption and public disorder.
Worse still, with respectable distillers now priced out, the sale of gin merely went underground and the bootlegged spirits significantly diminished in quality.
The sixth – Gin Act of 1743
This Act reduced the tax on gin in an attempt to undermine the black market. The highest proportion of this were gin shops (makeshift meeting places and street hawkers) in the poverty stricken alleys of East London.
While it aimed to restore law and order and provide some revenue to the government, it had the little effect of the consumption (indeed there are records that suggest it peaked in 1743), as gin became more affordable.
The eighth – Gin Act of 1751
This proved to be the most effective of all the Gin Acts. Instead of focusing solely on punitive taxes, the Act placed controls on distillers and retailers, limiting gin sales to larger retailers and prohibiting distillers from selling to unlicensed businesses. It also lowered the cost of a license.
The intended effect was to cut off the supply of spirit to small, often illegal sellers who compounded the gin further and often to deadly effect, thus reducing widespread gin consumption. By most accounts, it matched the intended effect more closely than previous Acts, although hailing it a success is a little generous…
Consumption levels remained high for a few years after the act, but the tide of public opinion was changing dramatically in the face of a potential famine (a series of poor grain harvests naturally drove up raw spirit prices and sharpened outcries against using grain for distillation).
With the scarcity of food, combined with the growing public sentiment against excessive gin drinking after years of debauchery, death and destruction, the Gin Craze was more or less over by 1757.
Why has the era endured in such infamy?
The story of the Gin Craze was not really about gin. It’s a story about the profound influence of economic, social and legislative forces on public behaviour. Gin was at the epicentre of it all, a chief protagonist – but the reason the era lives on with such infamy is because it speaks to a much bigger power struggle. The rich vs the poor.
It was also the source of the one of the most successful ever pieces of illustrative social commentary, the 1750 ‘Gin Lane’ engraving by William Hogarth.
Gin Lane depicted the societal decay brought on by excessive gin consumption. Its chilling imagery of a gin-crazed mother, obliviously dropping her baby (there’s another on a pike in the background) remains an indelible symbol of the era’s rampant gin addiction.
Its potent socio-political commentary was influential at the time and has served as a visual indictment of the social impact of substance misuse for generations that have followed.
What many don’t fully appreciate is that it was a commissioned engraving by breweries, and a diptych that ran in print alongside “Beer Street”. Beer Street depicted a prosperous and happy society, where people consumed beer, a beverage seen as healthy and nourishing, in contrast to the destructive effects of gin portrayed in Gin Lane.
And within that single piece you can see the full story – the propaganda machines swaying public influence, the horrific conditions, the will of the people, the addiction and the legislative forces at play.
It’s all there and it’s what makes the era an endless source of fascination.
Mythic stories
Another reason the gin craze era continues to captivate people is due to the enduring stories. Some are horrific like the case of Judith Darfour, a mother who killed her baby to sell its clothes. Some are funny to think of today- there were mock funeral processions for gin as a spirit for example. None more grandiose in it’s sheer cheek than that of Captain Dudley Bradstreet.
In 1738, Dudley Bradstreet rented a house in London’s Blue Anchor Alley and put up a cat sign with a hidden lead pipe under its paw. He spread the word that gin would be sold from the cat in the alley.
After stocking up on gin from a distillery in Holborn and barricading himself inside, he would awaiting a customer’s call of “puss” and reply with “mew” before customers would slide coins into a slot in the cat’s mouth, and in exchange, Bradstreet would pour gin down the pipe, which would flow out from under the cat’s paw.
Though the authorities couldn’t stop him, increased competition eventually made him relocate. “Puss and Mew houses” as they became known, have since become the stuff of legend – pre-dating the speakeasy era by centuries. They are the 1700’s version of a manually operated vending machine if you will. And illegal ones at that!
In 1755, Bradstreet detailed his inventive way to bypass the Gin Act in his book, ‘The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Captain Dudley Bradstreet’ but despite common beliefs, Bradstreet isn’t responsible to the term ‘old tom gin’. More on that in our article HERE.
Gin gained it’s unfortunate moniker, Mother’s Ruin
Slappy Bonita and Madame Geneva might be mostly forgotten, but it is in this era that the enduring term mother’s ruin was also coined. Take your pick as to why it was coined, or what the primary intent was… There’s the actual destitution of mothers and a life that sent many into prostitution and child neglect. There’s the decimated birth rates, skyrocketing infant mortality rates or more politically inspired – the term wrought fear into the gentry of the era due to the taboos it broke at the time…
On that note, it’s worth stating that Gin joints allowed women to drink alongside men; a first for many. It’s also worth noting that the terms efficacy to add shame and fear into the act of drinking gin was in part due to this patriarchal outcry around female empowerment (all be it to make the terrible decision to drink gut rot gin). It’s also because it implied something – the breaking of the bond between mother and child – that was held so sacrosanct by the powerful clergy.
Real concern, propaganda, politically charged or other, Mother’s Ruin has followed gin for hundreds of years since. It is another direct consequence of the indelible mark the gin craze era had on the spirit.
What was 17th Century gin like?
It was literally deadly.
Most of the gin being “produced” would have been compounded raw spirit with cheap essences and oils. There were not 7000 gleaming copper stills dotted around london. The gin was mostly not redistilled ever, and when compounded – rarely with quality ingredients.
Even when redistilled, it would have resembled ancestral mezcal production (pots and pans, saucers for cooling) done in domestic setting rather than something more complex.
Less like craft, more like crack
It’s more accurate to think of 1700’s Gin production in much of the same way as the journey of cocaine being stepped on. It goes from 100% pure, to lethal batch being laced in the corner of a crack house.
We can tell this from the chain of sales that were the focus of most of the Gin Acts. Distillers made raw spirit and sold that spirit onto shops, compounders, taverns and more. There were many respectable distillers doing this, legally and adhering to the constraints of the gin acts. (Indeed, many sold whisky, brandy and more to the army, navy and other institutions).
The issues are easy to spot however. There were those who just didn’t buy from a respectable source and made their own raw spirit themselves (badly, methanol included). Alternatively, they bought some, but would then stretch it and sell it on, masking what they had done by adapting it with whatever would increase the perceived potency.
This process would repeat itself and so on, until the eventual drinker.
Some of the ways they would go about “stepping on it” explain why there was such issues – cutting with water being a first. Fresh water in East London (pre-effective sewage systems) is an image and a smell no-one can fully comprehend. It must have mostly been foul. Masking a gin that was subsequently less alcoholic would then involve botanicals like pepper, or ginger to add a kick. Unfortunately, it might also involve turpentine…
Quality over quantity? Or neither – just mass amounts of awful gin.
Then it was the quantity of it. It doesn’t take much repetitive drinking in today’s era to ravage a body. But combine this with living conditions, general frailty through malnutrition and a multitude of health issues – it’s easy to see how drinking up to half a pint of day of bad gin was deadly.
This was neatly summed up by the slogan above the gin shop depicted in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. It says ‘drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing’. It is a clear reference to what happened on an alarming scale given gin was drunk in quarts (quarter pints), and a quart would only set you back by one penny. Meanwhile, the clean straw is a reference to how you could pass out for free on their hay bales.
Post Gin Craze – a path to respectability emerges
Despite the negative associations with the era, there are many iconic Gin dynasties that began then. Names, we all like to think were at the respectable, licence paying end of this chain when they began we should add..
Booth’s Gin were operational by 1740 (they had added distilling to their already established brewing and wine interests with their iconic distillery in Clerkenwell). Meanwhile, the Finsbury Distillery was founded in 1740 by Joseph Bishop in London.
By the late 1750s, gin had lost most of its infamous reputation. Not only had the better producers emerged from the rubble of decades of debauched reputations, the spirit was poised for a new generation of entrepreneurs and gentry with the intent to transform it respected spirit we enjoy today.
In the 1760’s both Greenall’s Gin and Gordon’s begin their legacies, along with the Blackfriars Distillery (Plymouth Gin) by 1793. It wasn’t just gin though, there were over 40 distilleries registered in London alone by the end of the century.
With the advance of new technology and a new era emerging, the story of Gin starts a new chapter in the 1800’s.
In wrapping up this article on the Gin Craze, it’s worth reflecting on the transformation of gin from a source of social decay to a respected spirit.
The era, spanning from the early to mid-18th century, was marked by rampant consumption and stories so shocking that they have reverberated through time.
This chapter in gin’s history is a fascinating case study in how economic, social, and legislative forces shape public behaviour and perception, turning a once notorious drink into a celebrated classic.
