Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (review)

Although presented as a “Tragicomedy in three acts” and in a style that occasionally descends to an arch burlesque of the eighteenth-century works she often quotes from, Jessica Warner’s Craze is a serious scholarly study of the first and, arguably, most notorious drug scare in history. The rapid spread of gin consumption, from its mid-seventeenth century invention to the squalor depicted in the Hogarth engraving “Gin Lane” a hundred years later, continues to challenge the historian’s understanding of popular culture and the policy maker’s views on drug policies and social control. This expertly argued book has compelling insights to offer both fields.

The gin craze itself, the consumption of which quadrupled in three decades after 1700, remains rather a mystery, especially in light of recent tax increases that had raised its price. Warner cannot explain its sudden popularity beyond a vague improvement in taste and a regulatory regime that was initially favorable to turning the nation’s grain surplus into spirits. There are also intriguing hints in her observation that women played a prominent role in both retailing and drinking gin, and she points out that this was increasingly a consumer society that welcomed new commodities and tastes. Unfortunately, gin’s potency made it hard for a population accustomed to drinking large quantities of weak beer to integrate the new beverage into their consumption patterns. Yet Warner cannot shed much light on how and where people consumed gin. London was saturated by thousands of people selling gin from tiny shops and simple stalls or carts, which were able to evade licenses through most of the period and left little historical record. A healthy skepticism limits her use of elite descriptions of gin shops and their customers, though she has found fascinating material in the judicial records that might have repaid further study. Instead she uses elite sources, both written and engraved, to probe elite prejudices, as in her acerbic exegesis of stories about the spontaneous combustion of gin-soaked widows. In the end, the popular culture of gin consumption is not her principal target, beyond creating the conditions for a national debate. Rather she is interested in the elites’ response to gin, particularly in their efforts to regulate and repress consumption.

Throughout the decades of the gin craze, roughly the 1720s to the ‘50s, the elites were actually divided about the proper regulation of gin. With sales taxes on gin contributing ten percent of all government revenues, and distillation drawing off a glut of grain, there were powerful incentives for tolerating popular drinking. Warner skillfully dissects the political battles that gradually overwhelmed Robert Walpole’s reluctance to limit or regulate gin sales. His opponents were moral reformers motivated, Warner argues, by a combination of vestigial Puritanism and mercantilism, evident in the frequent recourse to a rhetoric of anticonsumerism and a “political arithmetic” that emphasized the abundance and cheapness of the labor force. Hence a prominent theme in the assault on gin was its harmful effects on young mothers and consequences for the population.

Warner has little sympathy for either side in this battle. The commercial and agrarian interests of the country colluded to make massive quantities of gin available at low prices. The government, preferring to shift the tax burden onto consumers than landowners, was reluctant to limit sales. The moral reformers she dismisses as “prigs” and “reactionaries” whose reforming instincts were not philanthropic but aimed merely to keep the poor in their place. Their abhorrence of gin was fundamentally abhorrence of popular culture and the poor. If their campaign to reduce consumption produced health benefits, which Warner does not dwell on, they were achieved at the cost of serious social harm. The government’s criminalization of the poorest gin sellers and encouragement of informers damaged the equilibrium of urban society and stirred up popular resentment.

The government passed a succession of gin acts through the thirties that aimed to license and limit retailers...