GIN

From English historian, architect, and novelist Dillon, an admirable history of the London gin craze that tainted everyone involved.

When William of Orange took the throne from James Stuart in the Glorious Revolution, things French and Catholic got their walking papers—among them brandy—and things Dutch were welcomed—among them gin. That clear, juniper-scented distillate took London by storm. Already pummeled by its political transformation, London was also “neurotic and violent,” racked by great population growth, high and wild with gambling, stock-jobbing, debt-running, gangs, and prostitution. Gin was fuel to all these woes, but, to Dillon’s way of thinking, it also served to put a balm on all the uncertainty and risk of the times: it made life more palatable for those in a state of struggle even as it lined the pockets of land owners and the distillers. And it came, too, to line the pockets of corrupt excisemen, informers, and—for Madam Geneva had friends in high places—politicians themselves once the gin acts were instituted in a doomed and eerily familiar effort to exert control. Dillon ably brings into the picture what the writers of the times had to offer, from Smollet to Defoe to Fielding; the role of class distinction in gin’s rise and fall; the effects of the middle class and materialism on the drink; and the part Mother Nature played via harvest failures. He lauds the pragmatism of repealing the gin acts and draws the obvious parallels between those acts and our own war on drugs, which by the 1980s “was no longer about the social causes of drug abuse, nor about the safety of users. It was about enforcement.”

Every duck associated with the gin craze—lord, merchant, magistrate, family-values careerist, commoner, reformer, sot—is crisply lined up and then bowled over for the benefit of the self-righteousness, self-service, and self-destruction.