The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth-century Gin Craze Book

In the England of Sir Robert Walpole, addiction to gin (particularly by women) caused as much concern in the national psyche as crack cocaine does today. Patrick Dillon's The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva is not the first account of this epidemic, nor does it, as the dust-jacket promises, take the story fully through to the Victorian era when the problem loomed large once more. But the book is a racy account of gin in Hogarth's London, where farmers, distillers, politicians, magistrates, backstreet spirit-sellers, magistrates and evangelicals battled over the production of the cheap spirit. Dillon argues that gin held up a mirror to Hanoverian London--a city of rapid growth, fluid fortunes and helpless squalor. Gin became blamed for social tensions the causes of which lay elsewhere, and as a result moral panic and heavy-handed policing of the problem just drove the trade off the high street and into the homes and backyards of the metropolis, where women and children fell victim to its crude charms. Dillon is quite good on the economics of gin production and consumption, and has dug out some interesting detail from the courts. But his style is too clichéd and colloquial to put him in the Dava Sobel league, and he lacks subtlety as a social historian--one can only wonder how the late great Roy Porter or Robert Darnton might have told this tale. --Miles TaylorRead More