In the mid-18th century, London was struck by a strange epidemic of drunkenness. The streets of the overcrowded capital were in the grip of a moral crisis compounded by an unprecedented economic downturn. The culprit: a flood of cheap alcohol, creating an outbreak of drunkenness that upended the entire city. This is a story of fast technological change, greed and poverty.

The origins of a bizarre epidemic

It all began with the Glorious Revolution. Despite the great name, is was neither glorious nor much of a revolution.

After years f mistrust, English nobles ousted their Catholic king, James II of England, and replaced him with William III of Orange, Prince of the Dutch Republic. That’s right, they hated the guy so much they literally invited another nation’s boss to kick him out. William of Orange didn’t speak a word of English, but he was Protestant and shared a common enemy with the English crown: France. That was plenty enough for the nobles.

The Anglo-Dutch alliance rapidly imposed a blockade on France, causin the price of wines and spirits to explode. In 1689, to make up for the unpopular shortfall, William abolished the state monopoly on spirits which until then had been unaffordable and scarce, allowing England to embark on large-scale commercial production of spirits.

Encouraged by William III, England quickly adopted gin, a typically Dutch spirit spiced with age-old juniper berries.

At War With French Wines

The other reason why William III promoted gin production was to please the wealth landowners who put him on the throne in the first place.

After all, it was their money that funded his coronation. And as the cost of grain fell, they were in a bind. Years of good harvests had created a glut, leading to a sharp drop in prices. While workers and brewers rejoiced, landowners angrily sought other solutions. Gin came to the rescue, increasing demand for cereals and making up for the shortfall.

London Flooded by Gin

The abundance of alcohol in the capital was, in many ways, unprecedented. Never before in the history of alcohol had there been such a sudden and rapid shift from light beers to blindingly strong spirits.

In retrospect, these drinks can hardly be described as gin. The equipment was rudimentary, the quantity of alcohol uncontrolled and the taste often awful. Gin was served anywhere, in any weather and at any temperature.

By 1730, London had over 7,000 gin pits. In some neighborhoods, there was one booth for every 15 households. Annual consumption rose from 527,000 gallons in 1684 to almost 3,601,000 gallons in 1735. In the 1730s, gin was sold under ominous signs, including this now iconic line:

Accustomed to gulping down several light ales at a time, some revellers downed huge pints of gin and died on the spot, as if struck by divine wrath. Within a few years, the streets of London were filled with delirious, drunken crowds, their clothes reduced to rags and their bodies famished. The doctors at St. George’s Hospital did the math. Between 1734 and 1749, admissions to the hospital rose from 12,710 a year to 38,147 « for the melancholy consequences of gin ingestion ».

The crisis quickly triggered a knee-jerk reaction from the conservative merchant class. The authorities looked with horror at the gentil state, the lower classes of society who seemed to be drinking themselves to death. For the gin craze did not come alone. Crime also increased significantly during the same period. The emerging satirical press eagerly printed stories of real and invented drunken accidents, to the horror and fascination of their readers. The drink itself was a shock to the London elite, who fiercely resisted the invasion of an alien drink, much as they had done with hopped beer from the Netherlands a century before. Real Englishmen drank ale!

1720-1730: A population in Distress

Gin fever was probably just the tip of the iceberg. London was in the midst of a demographic boom. The population rose from 500,000 to 750,000 between 1700 and 1750, before reaching the million mark in 1800. By this time, the city had absorbed more than 40 towns along the Thames and united the two cities of London and Westminster.

The Scots, Irish and Welsh flocked to the city, driven by their collective impoverishment and the promise of employment in the large new warehouses beginning to dot the outskirts of London. There was a lot to do, and a lot of people to do it. Half the city had burned down in 1666, and parts of London were being rebuilt as the city continued to expand.

To make matters worse, the city was also plagued by religious fervor. London was politically divided between Jacobins and anti-Catholics. Lynchings of foreigners, particularly Scots, were not uncommon. Londoners dislike the poor and foreigners.

This unprecedented demographic boom altered the social dynamics of the metropolis. Within a generation, London was faced with a massive influx of poor, unskilled young workers. Few made it to the top, most living a life of perpetual toil for pennies on the dollar. The economist Adam Smith noted that carpenters had only eight healthy years in which to ply their trade, even in their best years if they could afford a newspaper.

Many of them sought to earn their living in one of the hundreds of large workshops that foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution. Far from home, these sons and daughters of peasants no longer enjoyed the social support and constraints of village life. No parish charity, no mother-in-law to stop you drinking. The number of dwellings did not keep pace with the number of workers. Ten people slept in one room. Again, it’s an unsanitary room. Hygiene was deplorable. Infant mortality rates reached staggering heights. In the 1730s, 75% of baptized children did not reach the age of five.

1730-1740: When Gin Hit the Fan

In total, no less than eight Gin laws were passed by parliament to end the crisis. Parliament struggled to strike a balance between the interests of public order and its need for political support. Landowners and distillers welcomed the new windfall. London’s workshop owners and merchants, on the other hand, were not. All the gin laws seemed to add fuel to the fire, without tackling the underlying problem: the appalling living conditions of the working class.

The Gin Act of 1729, the first of eight, restricted the sale of gin to merchants with a legal license, in return for a hefty fee. This measure only served to bury the problem out of the public eye. Business simply went underground. Unfortunately, 1729 brought a cereal surplus, prompting even more distillers to flood London’s streets with cheap alcohol. The price of gin was already lower than that of beer.

The crisis hit working-class families like a plague, and women were particularly hard hit. The sudden availability of gin outside traditional pubs gave women access to alcohol for the first time. These women, like men, worked long hours in unsafe workshops. Like many men, they found solace in the easy intoxication of cheap alcohol. But at what price? Some of these drinks were poison. Mothers abandoned their children to pay for their next round, others turned to prostitution, and many succumbed to alcohol and slumbered in dark alleys, never to get up again.

The case of Judith the Killer illustrates the excesses of the time. Judith Dufour worked as a silk spinner in the Bethnal Green parish workshop in London. She was the mother of a five-year-old girl, Mary. One day, Judith took her daughter on an outing, and the workshop supplied Mary with skirts for the occasion. In the evening, Judith came home without the child and was drunk.

Back at the workshop, she continued to spin while drinking and told a colleague that she had left the child in the field. In the days that follow, the child is found strangled, tied to a tree and stripped naked. It then transpired that Judith had killed her daughter to trade her skirts for a few glasses of gin. The story horrified public opinion and spurred the adoption of a new law. From this story sprang the sinister legend of Madame Juniper, the new witch of the Georgian era who debased souls with her malevolent gin. Now, the excesses of gin had taken on a feminine twist.

These stories, spread and exaggerated by a brand-new satirical press, particularly alarmed the authorities (newspapers were still a relatively new phenomenon: the first newspaper appeared in 1702). Gin was thought to weaken men and make women immoral. In polite society, men feared that gin would compromise the virtues of their wives. While the poor often drank on an equal footing, the elite were totally reticent. In 1737, newspapers such as the Grub Street Journal proposed nothing less than to ban women from drinking.

In 1736, a second Act required the purchase of a £50 license for the right to sell alcohol, a law that did nothing to alter the flourishing illegal trade but greatly intensified public discontent. In 1739, a fourth law offered shrewd rewards to anyone who turned in an unlicensed gin seller. These legal bribes led to endless cycles of retaliation, and widespread suspicion added to the daily violence.

Violence reached its peak during the popular uprisings of 1743. Angry crowds chanted « No king, no gin ». The king, George II, was visiting cousins in Germany when the law was passed. The message was clear: the king wasn’t welcome at home if he didn’t bring home the gin.

1751: Beer Strikes Back

In 1751, Parliament drafted an eighth act to defeat Madame Juniper. This last act aimed to eradicate the epidemic with firmness and pragmatism. Henceforth, distillers were no longer allowed to sell directly to the customer, but only through an authorized retailer. This is how the law that put an end to Madame Gin’s excesses was described at the time:

However, historians doubt that this measure was genuinely decisive. After all, prices had already been raised several times, and this was not the first time such draconian restrictions had been added. If gin consumption fell rapidly in 1751, this was partly due to developments in London.

This is the beginning of the British Empire. Recent victories over Austria and France in Europe gave the middle class a sense of superiority, rewarded not with gin but with wine and good beer. Beer became much more affordable after Parliament reduced the excise tax on beer to counter the abuse of gin. As a result, beer regained popularity and consumption rose vigorously, while gin declined as rapidly as it rose.

It was also the beginning of coffee and tea. First introduced in Marseilles, France, coffee made its way into the royal courts before gaining favor with the nobility and, finally, the aristocracy. Around 1750, coffee and tea offered a substitute for beer as a beverage for the professions. Strong beer put people to sleep, while coffee woke them up. At the same time, the temperance movement emerged under the influence of the new Methodist movement. Sermons from the well-intentioned elite to the working classes attracted tens of thousands of listeners.

In conclusion: Did the gin apocalypse happen?

Ultimately, this gin apocalypse is a symptom of a society in transition, featuring armies of uprooted workers in an indifferent city. Cheap, often deadly and sometimes downright vile, spirits were the only remedy for a desperate existence for many, but certainly not for all.

If history has made this period a popular fever, it is largely due to the retrospective stigma it receives. Business and property circles cried scandal and indecency but were more concerned about the productivity of their workshops.

Nevertheless, this episode marks the transition from a feudal to a modern city, precisely at a time when England was moving from a local to a global power. A whole new liberal class of small merchants, thriving on the new wealth brought by the crown, were more than happy to celebrate their new-found prosperity by disdainfully rejecting gin. That’s why, for almost 200 years, gin suffered the stigma of indecency before being reborn during the American Prohibition.

The Gin Fever : Important Dates

• 1729 – 1st Gin Act: a tax of 5 shillings is imposed on the gallon of gin.

• 1733 – 2nd Gin Act: The distillation taxes were reduced, export subsidies were introduced, along with various minor restrictions on unlicensed gin sellers

• 1734 – « Judith the Killer » : This cruel example of infant cruelty linked to gin inflames the popular imagination and directly leads to the third reform of gin laws.

• 1736 – 3rd Gin Act: The law establishes a retail tax on gin and annual licenses for gin sellers. The law was widely disobeyed and subsequently repealed in 1743

• 1737: 4th Gin Act : Amendment to the law of the previous year, increasing rewards for informants.

• 1738: 5th Gin Act: This law almost entirely abolishes gin sales rights and makes any attack by informers a felony

• 1743: 6th Gin Act: Revises the informant policy and turns once again to the distillers, this time with significantly lower taxable charges. For the first time, distillers are prevented from selling directly to the public.

• 1747: 7e Act: Sees the introduction of a much higher excise tax. However, the Act allows distillers to sell directly to the public for a fee of 50 pounds

• 1751: 8e Act: Also known as the Tippling Act, the law once again raises the sales tax and restricts the liquor-selling permit to a handful of institutions. After the previous years’ anti-alcohol crusade, illegal distilleries collapse due to lack of demand

Sources

1. How a Gin Craze Nearly Destroyed 18th-Century London, 2017 Vice
2. History of Gin (1728 0 1794) London’s Gin Craze, Difford’s Guide
3. The Gin Craze, People or Policies? University of Victoria
4. What was the gin craze? 2021, History Hit
5. Drink, a cultural history of alcohol, Iain Gately
6. London, 1760-1815, Old Bailey
7. British Society in mid 18th century, Britannica
8. The delightfully dysfunctional Georgians, History Extra
9. King George II, Historic U.K. 
10. The Tippling Act and London’s 300 year love of gin, U.K. parliament
11. “Ladies Delight?”: Women in London’s 18th Century Gin Craze, Emily Anne Adams
12. Gin: The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva, Patrick Dillon

Pierre-Olivier Bussières is the Editor-in-Chief of Hoppy History and Uber Optimized. He is the Sales and Marketing Director at Uberflix Studio. He also writes about travel, geopolitics, and alcohol markets, and has published articles in The Diplomat, Reflets, The Main, Go Nomad, Global Risk Insights, and Diplomatie.

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