Between 1700 and 1760, London was involved in a passionate but staggeringly destructive love affair with gin, popularly known as "the mother's ruin." The city was positively drowning in the stuff.
By 1730, an estimated 7,000 gin shops (and probably many more if one was somehow able to count the untold illegal drinking dens) were catering to the trade, with some 10 million gallons of the spirit distilled each year. Historical accounts of violence, widespread addiction, and social devastation call to mind the early 80s crack epidemic that hit the US with ferocity.
For many working-class Londoners, gin became more than a drink. It sated desperate hunger pangs, offered relief from the perpetual cold, and was a blessed escape from the brutal drudgery of life in the slums and workhouses. It was a cheap buzz that could be had for pennies on any decrepit street corner stand or in the bowels of some stinking cellar—and it quickly wrecked havoc on inner city London.
Thomas Fielding, a social historian of the time, wrote about the ravages of the trade on what he termed the "inferior people" in his 1751 political pamphlet Enquiry into the causes of the late increase of Robbers:
"A new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up among us, and which if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here intend is … by this poison called Gin … the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this Metropolis."
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