THE GIN CRAZE

Gin -- or Madam Geneva, as it was then known -- became all the rage among
the poor of early-18th-century London. At one point there were no fewer
than 7,044 licensed retailers in a city of 600,000 people, plus thousands
more street vendors peddling a spirit far rougher than today's gin. The
guardians of the public weal were soon alarmed.

Drunken men were not fit for work or for war. Drunken women neglected their
children.

The poor in general were getting out of hand.

Listing the dastardly effects of gin on "the poorer Sort of People," Sir
John Gonson, chairman of the Westminster bench of justices, wrote in 1728,
"In hot Tempers, it lets loose the Tongue to all the Indecencies and
Rudeness of the most provoking Language, as well as the most hellish Oaths
and Curses, and is frequently followed by Quarrels and Fightings, and
sometimes has been the Cause of Murder." Well, clearly not that much has
changed.

Still, many of England's powerful seemed unworried.

The landed gentry, for instance, made a tidy profit out of selling surplus
grain to distillers. The government, run from 1721 to 1742 by the bloated
and amoral figure of Sir Robert Walpole, was happy to collect excise taxes
and license fees associated with gin, above all when this provided funds to
keep George II happy. And the London Company of Distillers boasted more
than a few friends in the House of Commons ready to defend its interests in
exchange for bribes.

With the lines drawn, then, a protracted battle followed as Parliament
adopted a flurry of largely ineffective laws -- no fewer than eight in 22
years -- designed either to suppress gin consumption or to extract as much
money as possible from it. Led by the magistrate Thomas De Veil, the
reformers were naturally the most zealous, bolstering their campaign for
prohibition with sorry tales of abandoned children, whoring mothers and
irresponsible fathers.

The government, on the other hand, liked the tax revenue from gin sales but
was wary of stirring up the poor.

By coincidence, this stormy period of English history has now been
revisited in two new books: "Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of
Reason," by Jessica Warner, a professor of history at the University of
Toronto, and "Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva," by Patrick
Dillon, an English writer and architect.

Both books cover much the same ground, with Dillon perhaps the livelier
writer (Dillon recognizes Warner's previous articles on the gin craze in
his acknowledgments). Both books also compare the fight against Madam
Geneva with Prohibition and the more recent war against crack cocaine and
other drugs.

Past and present meet in the specificity of urban culture.

Certainly 1720's London was as lively as 1980's New York. With its
population swollen by immigrants from the countryside, its economy booming,
its politics alive with warring between Whigs and Tories, London was a city
open to novelty. "A city of transformations was a city of insecurities,"
Dillon writes, "and insecurity was reason enough for any Londoner to turn
to a new drug." A pricey gin had arrived from the Netherlands in the late
17th century, but once an affordable local version was available in the
early 1720's, laced with fruity additives to disguise its fiery taste, the
gin craze began.

Both authors have scoured newspapers, court documents and parliamentary
speeches to capture the mood of the times.

Many of the poor, used to drinking pints of beer, were evidently ill
prepared for the new hooch, which not infrequently killed them. Quoting one
contemporary record, Warner reports that "a laborer by the name of George
Wade went to a public house in Westminster, 'drank a Pint of Gin off at a
Draught, and expired in a few Minutes.' " Then there were those widely
reported cases, duly confirmed by physicians, where drunkards spontaneously
caught fire (although their beds or chairs were mysteriously undamaged).

The warnings were not heeded.

Gin was everywhere on sale. "Gin sellers also did well at public hangings,"
Warner notes, adding, ominously, "Sometimes even the hangmen were drunk."
Women, too, were caught up by the craze, both as vendors and consumers.

Hogarth's 1751 engraving "Gin Lane" shows what could happen next. "Madam
Geneva's blouse hangs open," Dillon observes. "Sometimes she has to take to
the streets to pay for her habit; her legs are covered with the sores of
syphilis." This was the sort of image propagated by reformers, but gin
remained an appealing escape from grim lives for many poor Londoners.

Predictably, the trouble began when the government decided to clamp down,
motivated initially more by money than by morality.

The first two legislative moves failed badly, but the Gin Act of 1736 gave
reformers all they wanted: it raised taxes and license fees and rewarded
informers who squealed on illegal vendors.

Naturally, informers were not popular.

Many were severely beaten and some were killed by mobs. The laws also fed
popular resentment against the authorities. "When gin was banned," Dillon
writes, "subversion almost became too easy. To cock a snook at the ruling
classes in winter 1736, all you had to do was buy a dram."

Soon the cumulative effect of attacks on informers and riots had undermined
the 1736 act. A new act in 1743 eased prohibition by reducing licensing
fees for publicans, raising excise taxes for gin and banning informers.

But the battle was not over. After a peace treaty in Europe in 1748, the
return of some 80,000 newly unemployed soldiers and sailors set off fear of
a crime wave and a fresh law-and-order panic, prompting the toughest
anti-gin legislation to date in 1751. But it was no longer necessary.

Consumption was now falling and when harvests failed in 1757, the
government, fearing food riots, banned grain sales to distillers. The gin
craze was over, at least for the 18th century.

When gin returned to fashion some 80 years later, temperance societies were
quick to resume their campaigning. Once again, though, the real problem was
not what people drank, but who did the drinking.

In the quiet comfort of London clubs, gin could be tippled with impunity.

But when the poor drank it to excess, they were viewed as a threat to society.

Charles Dickens saw through this hypocrisy. "Gin drinking is a great vice
in England," he wrote in the early 1830's, when he was still a journalist,
"but wretchedness and dirt are greater."

For much the same reason, the futile battle against gin consumption
anticipated the ineffectiveness of Prohibition in the United States in the
1920's. "Alcohol was the conservatives' scapegoat," Dillon writes. "Just as
gin had in the 1720's, it became a focus for all the evils of the age.
Drink threatened America's security and damaged its economy." And, he
reminds us, "Even so, Prohibition never stopped people drinking."

Warner comes even closer to endorsing Dickens. Recalling the failure of
many antidrug campaigns since the 1970's, she argues that we are "too
easily seduced by the notion that the complex problems that come with
complex places boil down to a simple and single source, be it gin, heroin
or crack cocaine." England's 18th-century reformers got it all wrong. "It
was not gin that made people poor," she writes. "It was poverty that made
them drink."

Alan Riding is the European cultural correspondent of The Times, based in Paris.