Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze by Patrick Dillon Page A

Settlement. It had set up Houses of Correction late in the sixteenth century, and workhouses more recently. In a way, those all tackled social issues. But the only social agenda for a 1720s Parliament was to maintain the status quo. There was no notion of progress, no idea that social change was desirable, or that it might be engineered by legislation. All parts of the constitution were supposed to operate in balance, like the organs of a healthy body. Change was a symptom of sickness. Then again, gin-drinking was a new problem, and Parliament wasn’t good at novelty. It didn’t have the statistical tools to get to grips with new problems, or social theories to cope with them. There was no Civil Service to go out and rustle up data. Vice was the church’s problem, not theirs; the poor should be dealt with by magistrates.
    There were practical difficulties as well. Parliamentary time was limited. There was a single session which ran, in 1729, from January to May. Parliament was dominated by parties, but parties were notinterested in social policy. Sir Robert Walpole, Parliament’s master, reckoned himself ‘no Saint, no Spartan, no reformer.’ If a ‘social’ initiative was brought in, it was usually introduced by a private member, and survived only if he was particularly energetic or influential. Without parties throwing their weight behind reform, it was hard ever to break through the logjam of different interest groups of which Parliament was made up. The result was that when Parliament did address ‘social’ matters, it did so piecemeal – a plethora of lighting acts, a separate private bill to repair every stretch of broken highway in the country. Like the little Dutch boy, Parliament stuck its finger into every leak that appeared; it didn’t think of rebuilding the dyke.
    As it happened, the session of 1729 almost managed to crack the mould. In 1729 the House of Commons was presented not only with Madam Geneva bound and gagged, but with a rare example of a social issue around which MPs could unite: prisons.
    Prisons, like everything else in London, were a business. In 1713 John Huggins bought the wardenship of the Fleet jail for £5,000. It was a lucrative asset. Prisoners could be blackmailed to improve their accommodation; concessions could be sold for food and drink. In 1728 Huggins sold the wardenship to his deputy, Thomas Bambridge. It didn’t take long for rumours about conditions in the Fleet to start leaking out. Sir William Rich, unable to pay for better conditions in the jail, was threatened with a poker, then shackled and thrown into a freezing hole above an open sewer. Robert Castell, scholarly author of The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated , was forced to sleep in a sponging-house where smallpox was rife, even though he begged the Warden for mercy. He died.
    In the ensuing outcry, a parliamentary Committee was appointed to investigate what was going on in the Fleet. The Committee laid before the House a catalogue of brutality, incompetence andcorruption. Huggins admitted ‘that so many prisoners had escaped, during the time he was warden, that it was impossible to enumerate them.’ 3 Healthy women had been forced into smallpox wards; casual cruelty was an everyday occurrence. When the Committee moved on to look at the Marshalsea and King’s Bench, they found the same thing. Investigating the overall management of London’s prisons, they uncovered a Byzantine web of lets and sub-lets, transfers of ownership and corrupt charities.
    During the session of 1729 some energetic MPs started to take an interest in reform. On 27 February the Prisons Committee had been painted at the Fleet by a rising young artist called William Hogarth. Hogarth’s sketch caught the moment when Bambridge was brought face to face with his accusers. Ranged around the table in front of him were William Pulteney, who would lead the Whig opposition to Walpole, and share power in the government that replaced him, Henry