Snitch on a Gin Seller, Collect £5: London’s War on Gin

Dark food history: Parliament built London’s gin trade on purpose, then spent twenty-two years legislating against it. In 1690 Parliament opened grain distilling to anyone, in an Act whose own title called it encouragement. A dark food history documentary on the London gin craze: the 1736 Act that priced gin out of existence, the informers paid to enforce it, the excise ledgers that showed it failing, and the 1743 debate in which the Lords heard the excise records instead of the physicians. CHAPTERS 0:00 A Quarter-Pint of Gin 1:39 The Law That Built the Gin Trade 4:17 A License Nobody Could Afford 8:13 Paid to Inform on Your Neighbors 11:10 What the Lords Refused to Hear 13:51 What Actually Ended It SOURCES An Act for the Encouraging of the Distilling of Brandy and Spirits from Corn, 2 Gul. & Mar. Sess. 2 c. 9 (1690), Statutes of the Realm, vol. 6 (Record Commission, 1819; reprinted Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963), pp. 236 and 238 Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large (Cambridge): 2 Geo. II c. 17 (1729), abstracted in vol. XVI, p. 27; 9 Geo. II c. 23 (1736), vol. XVII, pp. 22, 23 and 28; 11 Geo. II c. 26 (1738), vol. XVII, p. 201; 16 Geo. II c. 8 (1743), vol. XVIII, pp. 79–80 and 82–83; 24 Geo. II c. 40 (1751), vol. XX, pp. 236 and 239; 30 Geo. II c. 10 (1757), vol. XXII, p. 33; 33 Geo. II c. 9 (1760), vol. XXIII, p. 7 Journals of the House of Lords, vol. 26, p. 210 (February 21, 1742/3) and p. 219, the protest of February 25, 1742/3 Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation, 2nd ed. (London, 1736), p. 10 and appendix p. [xv], Wellcome Collection copy Proceedings of the Old Bailey, t17340227-32 (February 1734) and t17381011-16 (October 1738), oldbaileyonline.org M. Dorothy George, London Life in the XVIIIth Century (Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 32–37 Jessica Warner and others, “Can Legislation Prevent Debauchery? Mother Gin and Public Health in 18th-Century England,” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 3 (2001), pp. 375–384 Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1620–1759,” Agricultural History Review 16, no. 1 (1968), pp. 15–31 William Hogarth, Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751), Brooklyn Museum 22.1855 and 22.1867 BOOKS FROM THIS INVESTIGATION As a Bookshop.org affiliate, Untold Bites earns a commission on qualifying purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. Bookshop.org exists to support independent bookstores. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: https://bookshop.org/a/127745/9781107... M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century: https://bookshop.org/a/127745/9781025... GO DEEPER Richard Barnett, The Book of Gin: https://bookshop.org/a/127745/9780802... Lesley Jacobs Solmonson, Gin: A Global History: https://bookshop.org/a/127745/9781861... Every book behind every investigation: https://bookshop.org/shop/Untold-Bites IMAGE CREDITS Old Bailey in 1750, the Sessions House. Wellcome Collection, London, L0001329, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Bailey_in_1750._Sessions_House._Wellcome_L0001329.jpg. CC BY 4.0. Color graded, reframed and pillarboxed. R. Page after W. Hogarth and J. Thornhill, The House of Commons. Wellcome Collection, London, V0049272, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_House_of_Commons_in_Sir_Robert_Walpole's_administration._Wellcome_V0049272.jpg. CC BY 4.0. Color graded, reframed and pillarboxed. The two images above are licensed CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... The London Gazette, no. 7650, November 15–19, 1737, p. 1. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/d... Statutes of the Realm, vol. 6 (Record Commission, 1819; reprinted Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963), pp. 236 and 238, via Wikimedia Commons Yale Center for British Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Rijksmuseum MSK Gent Brooklyn Museum Bode-Museum, Berlin, photograph by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons Wellcome Collection Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division British Library University of Pennsylvania Libraries New York Public Library, University of California, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Chicago and Columbia University Libraries, via HathiTrust Subscribe to follow the investigation. Untold Bites uncovers the dark history of what people ate and drank, and who profited from it.