The old spirit of oblivion

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Gin has given us our most unforgettable image of 18th century London. Hogarth's Gin Lane is a snapshot of a society falling apart. A drunk woman lets her child tumble to its death, a workman pawns his tools to buy gin, a suicide hangs from the rafters, a nursemaid silences an infant with gin. The very buildings are collapsing.

But as Jessica Warner shows in e, by 1751, the "craze" for gin and the moral panic that accompanied it were almost over.

Gin had become the rage in London, and to a lesser extent in Britain as a whole, in the 1720s. Only then had distillers learnt to produce a concoction (out of often rotten grain) that was reasonably pleasing to the palate.

They masked its taste not just with juniper berries, as is now the case, but also aniseed, sugar, cherries, elderberries and various other fruits. The English version, never as good as the Dutch original, became known as "geneva" - "gin" for short. Consumption soared.

The nation's rulers were disturbed, like Lord Lonsdale, to see, even in the West End, "Wretches stretched upon the Pavement, insensible and motionless".

Yet some thought that even this was a sign of commercial affluence, more and more people having money to spend on pleasurable superfluities.

This was, as Warner puts it, "a culture that was increasingly inclined to see man as a consuming animal". Pragmatists such as Sir Robert Walpole thought of gin above all as a source of tax. By the 1740s, excises on distilled spirits made up a tenth of all public revenue. Gin helped to fund the nation's wars.

Much of Warner's book, in fact, concerns not the actual consumption of gin, but the long national debate about whether it was such a bad thing. Was it, as many believed, destroying the "prolific Capacities" of the labouring classes and "enfeebling Posterity"?

Certainly newspapers were running sensational stories of the dire effects of gin. Campaigners seized on a Southwark publican's advertisement and made it infamous.

Drunk for one pence.
Dead Drunk for twopence.
Clean straw for nothing.

It was duly reproduced in Gin Lane.

London was a city of thousands of gin hawkers and gin shops, "the Nurseries of all manner of Vice and Wickedness", Henry Fielding said. A movement to clamp down on these, organised by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, soon had powerful allies, including the Queen.

Warner documents the bills suppressing small-scale gin vendors, and the system of informers that enforcement of the new laws required. The laws were almost entirely ignored.

There were frequent riots (there is one in the background of Hogarth's print), usually sparked by the activities of the informers, who were themselves often punished by the mob.

Warner has actually done time among court records and sessions papers, turning up strange, violent anecdotes of the influence of gin which are the best parts of her book.

She has scanned the London newspapers for telling, shocking news items. We see a culture drunk on stories of what this drink could do - well-attested tales like those of Grace Pett, of Ipswich, who, according to a paper by a Fellow of the Royal Society, spontaneously combusted after bingeing on gin to celebrate her daughter's return from Gibraltar.

It was supposed that women were especially likely to succumb. Invariably in contemporary satire, the spirit is personified as "Mother Gin" - solicitous to nurse her charge into oblivion.

In a finger-wagging final chapter, Warner likens the casuistry of moral reformers in the 18th century to antidrugs propagandists of the US Republican Party in the late 20th century. It would have been better to see what the story of gin tells us about the 18th century.

Hogarth's Gin Lane is paired with a print actually celebrating alcoholic consumption, Beer Street. Here all is prosperity and plenty, sleek fat citizens downing a patriotic brew.

Here were two new extremes: a prosperous commercial nation at ease with its democratic pleasures - or a hellish city of frenzied self-destruction and entropy.

Many a Georgian Londoner felt he lived in both places.

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