About book Gin: The Much Lamented Death Of Madam Geneva (2002)
This is an entertaining look at the gin craze of the 1800s, which remains the greatest drug epidemic to ever hit the British Isles.In 1723 each man, woman and child in London was getting through something like a pint of gin a week.It was just after the South Sea Bubble burst, an age of gambling, and what higher stakes were there than sinking your money into a whole load of cheap hooch in an establishment which provided its own straw for you to pass out on? Of course this led to a fair degree of chaos, with the great men of the capital looking around and seeing the poor people gin-sodden, neglecting their jobs and committing acts of violence. Swiftly campaign groups formed to stamp out this wanton drunkenness, and after a circuitous route through parliament the reformers did manage to ban the drink know as Madam Geneva.However in 1743 – at the height of prohibition – each man, woman and child in London was drinking two pints of the stuff a week.Eventually the ban was repealed and gin legalised again, although with greater regulation. But it was the emergence of the aspirational middle classes – creating a kind of proto-Victorian age with cricket matches, Wesleyan church meetings and tea parties to while away the time – which stopped the trend for being blotto at all hours on the streets. And it was many years later in the Victorian age itself – when London had mushroomed in size – before gin production reached anything near the levels they’d reached in Georgian times.And then, of course, London had itself a new gin epidemic.Dillon relates this tale with great vim and vigour, expertly conjuring the world of Defoe and Hogarth and bringing to life the exuberant squalor of the London streets.The epilogue shows how this tale was first echoed in America’s prohibition, and again with the hard drug policies introduced worldwide in the early 1970s. I don’t know what the answer is, but the 18th century gin craze proves that just banning something you don’t like is not necessarily the answer.
Not gonna lie, I got pretty well acquainted with Madam Geneva when I was in high school and stayed in touch with her all throughout college. Anywho, this is a very entertaining overview of the Gin Panic which swept England in ye olde 18th century and bore a slew of striking similarities to American Prohibition and our current (un-winnable) war on drugs. Maybe it's a European thing, or maybe I'm just seeing too much irony in it, but I got a kick out of how British authorities were all, "Gin and spirituous liquors are the greatest evil mankind has ever faced and result in nothing less then murder, lassitude, rape, necrophilia, profanity and more. Why oh why can't people just be happy with beer and wine?"
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