Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason.

Brennan, Thomas

Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. By Jessica Warner (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. xviii plus 267 pp. $24.95).

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 in the hope of restricting consumption. They largely failed, and gin consumption continued to increase. The ubiquity of gin retailing proved to be beyond the limited capacities of public authority, so the government created incentives for the poor to inform against each other. Warner's analysis of the informers and their impact on London society is her most original contribution to the history of the gin craze. She has studied the court records for the informers and their tricks of the trade and is particularly interested in why they were ultimately unsuccessful. Operating in gangs and pooling their information, they apprehended and testified against thousands of retailers for a small reward. But informers needed justices of the peace and excise commissioners who were willing to convict the retailers and help protect the informers from an increasingly irate populace. Within a few years, in the face of hostile crowds and abuses by informers, most of the justices were no longer willing to enforce the law against retailers. Riots to rescue an apprehended seller or to attack an informer had become a frequent occurrence and began to rattle the elites. Warner celebrates this as a "rare and singular triumph for ordinary men and women ... in cowing both the men who judged them and the men who governed them." [162] She points also to the middle classes, serving as vestrymen and jurors, who progressively lost faith in the informers and the gin acts they were enforcing.

Social control had failed, yet in the following decades gin consumption began to diminish through a different set of circumstances. The government stopped picking on retailers but it raised the excise on gin, and incomes were generally falling. Warner also suggests that the earlier repression of retailers had turned the selling and drinking of gin into a "form of popular protest against a wildly unpopular government," which status it lost with the end of repression. [218] She offers little more explanation for the decline, except to note that it "followed the trajectory of other and more recent drug epidemics." [208] Gin was like modern drugs, she concludes, in symbolizing larger fights over the culture and social problems of the consumers. Both historians and policy makers must understand the culture if they wish to make sense of the consumption.

Thomas Brennan

United States Naval Academy