1984 Victory Gin

[Dave Monroe]

>From Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A
Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants,
trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon, 1992), Ch.
5, "The Industrial Revolution, Beer, and Liquor," pp.
147-66 ...

   "At the start of the eighteenth century beer was
still the foremost beverage of the English people. 
Toward the middle of the century consumption of
liquor, now called 'gin,' suddenly soared.... With a 
population of roughly 6 million, that meant
approximately eight liters of gin per capita....
   "In the second half of the eighteenth century, gin
consumption dropped to a more normal level.  In this
sense the so-called gin epidemic was a historical
episode.  But for that very reason it offered clear
indications of the interconnection between the
Industrial Revolution and the need for a cheap and
powerful intoxicant.
   "Gin struck the typically beer-drinking English
populace like a thunderbolt.  Its social
destructiveness was comparable to the effect whiskey
later had upon the North American Indian cultures.... 
Drinking and intoxication totally lost their
characteristic role of establishing social bonds or
connections.  Alcoholic inebriation gave way to
alcoholic stupor....
   "The gin epidemic has rightly been called a 'social
catstrophe of enormous proportions' (Monckton).  Yet
the drunkenness of the masses at this time merely
reflected another social catastrophe.  What was
euphemistically termed 'rural exodus,' the 'flight
from the countryside,' and in reality meant the
expulsion of whole villages from their indigenous soil
through the so-called enclosures (another euphemism
for expropriation by large landowners) formed the
background, or rather the breeding ground, for the 
gin epidemic....
   "Gin held out the promise to working-class people
to help them forget their unbearable situation at
least momentarily.  It provided alcoholic
stupefaction, not social intoxication.  So began
solitary drinking, a form of drinking limited to
industrialized Europe and America.  In every other 
age and civilization drinking had been collective.
   "Liquor has never lost the stigma of having been
involved with this first brutal phase of the
Industrial Revolution.  It would henceforth be 
considered the vicious form of alcohol.  Beer in
contrast was the benign alcoholic beverage ....  It
was viewed--as in the engravings of Hogarth--as 
a guarantee of happiness, contentment, health.  The
world of beer was all right; with liquor it came apart
at the seams." (pp. 153-9)

And from Lisa Picard, Dr. Johnson's London:
Coffee-House and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste
and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and
Female Education (New York: St. Martin's, 2001), Ch.
14, "Amusements," pp. 123-32 ...

   "Drinking gin reached the scale of a mania.  It had
begun quite innocently.  The Dutch made a good warming
spirit to keep out the cold damp air.  Adding juniper
berries increased its medicinal effect and improved
the taste.  Visiting French soldiers took a liking to
it, and called it eau de genievre, juniper water.  The
next wave of soldiery was English.  They couldn't get
their tongues around genievre, so it became geneva,
which rapidly became gin.  Samuel Johnson defined it
as 'the spirit drawn by distillation from
juniper-berries,' but for once he was wrong.  They
were 
only used to flavour the spirit, which was made by
distilling grain.  By 1751 gin was being flavoured
with anything handy, such as turpentine.
   "At first, gin was thought by the nobility and the
gentry to be a good thing, since it provided na outlet
for surplus grain and kept the price up.  But it
gradually deteriorated in quality and increased in
quantity ....  Parliament became a little worried ....
 Parliament tried to get the genie back into the
bottle, by various licensing laws, but the only means
of enforcing them was by paid informers, who were so
unpopular they risked being torn from limb to limb....
   "By 1730 the poor drank 6,658,788 gallons of
'official' gin, let alone what they bought from
wheelbarrows.... the Gin Act passed [in 1736] was a 
dead letter.... [and here Picard cites at length Henry
Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of Late Increase of
Robbery (1751)]....
   "By now it was everywhere,  It was made and
sold--illegally--in prisons and workhouses and
hospitals....  Over 9,000 children died of gin, in
1751.  The rich even began to worry about the knock-on
effect on themselves....
   "In February 1751, Hogarth published his twin
prints, Gin Lane and Beer Street.  Beer, 'a common
necessity which Briton deem to be part of their
birth-right' [Joseph Massie, Calculation of the
Present Taxes, 2nd ed., London, 1761], was shown as a
good thing, on which a man could contribute a fair
day's work to the community.  But gin was
different....
   "Another Gin Act became law in 1751.  The sale of
gin was limited to substantial householders.  No more
wheelbarrow sales....
   "Before leaving it, here are some synonyms for gin:
cock-my-cap, kill-grief, comfort, poverty,
meat-and-drink, washing, lodging, bingo (also used to
mean brandy), diddle, heart's-ease, a kick in the
guts, tape, white wool and strip-me-naked.  If you had
been 
hicksius-doxious (drunk) you might feel womblety cropt
(hungover) the day after...." (pp. 123-5)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59732&sort=date

But to quote an early 70s Playboy ad, "Rum and
tonic--don't knock it 'til you try it."  With lime ...

--- The Great Quail <quail at libyrinth.com> wrote:
> Jbor writes,
> 
> > There is a strong sense in the novel that Victory
> > gin is used by the regime as a drug to deaden the
> > spirits of minor Party bureaucrats like Winston.
> 
> I agree. In fact, you can buy Victory Gin at the
> Ministry cafeteria, and it seems to be the one
> commodity the state is never without. Even though it
> helps Winston deaden the pain, alcohol is still a
> depressant. It's just another method of control for
> Party bureaucrats.

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