PROJECT

IN
ENGLISH

The 18th-century craze for gin

Inspiring oddities from mass public

nudity to a mechanical gin-selling cat,
the craze for gin swept across London
and much of England during the first
half of the 18th century. Writing
for History Extra, Mark Forsyth,
author of A Short History of
Drunkenness, explores the history
behind this alcoholic spirit…

Gin causes women to spontaneously

combust. Or, at least, that was the
theory. There are two documented

cases of British ladies downing gin

and going up in smoke, and a few
more of European women doing the
same with brandy. The matter was
taken seriously enough to be
discussed by the Royal Society in
1745.
We don’t take stories of spontaneous
human combustion that seriously any
more (for reasons I’ll get back to), but
for a historian, the stories are
fascinating because they’re part of the
great Gin Panic. This was the
moralising and serious counterpart to
the great Gin Craze that swept
London and much of England in the
first half of the 18th century and
produced (aside from the ignited
ladies) mass public nudity, burning
babies, and a mechanical gin-selling
cat.
Alcoholic spirits were a pretty new
commodity in 18th-century society,
though they had actually been around
for a long time. They started as a
chemical curiosity in about the 10th
century AD. They were being drunk
by the very, very rich for pleasure by
about 1500, as shown when James IV
of Scotland bought several barrels of
whisky. But even a hundred years
later, in 1600, there was only one
recorded bar in England that sold
spirits to the curious (just outside
London, towards Barking).

Then in about 1700, spirits hit. The

reasons are complicated and involve

taxation of grain and the relations

with the Dutch, but the important
thing is that gin suddenly became
widely available to Londoners, which
was a good thing for the gin-sellers as
Londoners needed a drink. The turn
of the 18th century was a great period
of urbanisation, when the poor of
England flocked to London in search
of streets paved with gold and
Bubbles from South Sea [the South
Sea Bubble was a speculation boom in
the early 1710s], only to find that the
streets were paved with mud and
there was no work to be had.
London’s population was around
600,000. There were only two other
towns in England with populations of
20,000. London was the first grand,
anonymous city. There were none of
the social constraints of a village
where everybody knew everybody’s
business. And there were none of the
financial safeguards either, with a

parish that would support its native

poor, or the family and friends who
might have looked after you at home.
Instead, there was gin.