Tea and gin are still with us, but one eighteenth-century drink has utterly disappeared. Saloop was a hot, sweet beverage made from a decoction of sassafras wood, milk and sugar, and sold for three halfpence a bowl; the name is supposed to have been derived from the slopping sound of those drinking it in the street. Coffee and tea were expensive, so stalls selling saloop were found in the poorer areas of London. In summer saloop was sold from an open table on wheels; in winter from a kind of tent made from a screen and an old umbrella. It was considered to be the best possible cure for a hangover, and Charles Lamb recalled the artisan and the chimney-sweep mingling with “the rake” at dawn around the saloopian stalls; “being penniless,” the young sweeps “will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steams, to gratify one sense if possible.” The spectacle prompted Lamb to reflection upon a city where “extremes meet.”
In the same period as Lamb wrote his reflections, designed for the London Magazine, the young Charles Dickens entered a public house in Parliament Street and ordered “your very best-the VERY best-ale.” It was called the Genuine Stunning and the twelve-year-old boy said, “Just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.” The spectacle of children drinking in the streets and alehouses was familiar, if not common, in the early years of the nineteenth century. “The girls, I am told,” wrote Henry Mayhew as late as the 1850s, “are generally fonder of gin than the boys.” They took it “to keep the cold out.”
Verlaine (1873) considered Londoners to be “noisy as ducks, eternally drunk,” while Dostoevsky (1862) noted that “everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.” A German journalist, Max Schlesinger (1853), saw the inhabitants of a public house “standing, staggering, crouching, or lying down, groaning, and cursing, drink and forget.” An observer closer to home, Charles Booth, noticed that drinking among women in the 1890s had materially increased. “One drunken woman in a street will set all the women in it drinking,” he quotes one male inhabitant of the East End as saying. Nearly all women “get drunk of Monday. They say “we have our fling; we like to have a little fuddle on Monday.’” All classes of London women seem to have been drinking, largely because it was no longer considered wrong for a female to enter a public house for a “nip.” In the evening, children of the poorer classes were sent around to the local public house to have a jug filled with ale; as Booth reported, “it was constant come and go, one moment to go in and get the jug filled, and out again the next; none of the children waited to talk or play with one another, but at once hurried home.”
Gentlemen drank as deeply and freely as the poor. Thackeray noted those “who glory in drinking bouts” with “bottle-noses” and “pimpled faces.” “I was so cut last night” is one of the phrases he recalled.
In each year of the nineteenth century, approximately 25,000 people were arrested for drunkenness in the streets. Yet the conditions of life often drove poorer Londoners into their condition. One of them, a collector of “pure” (dog excrement) told Mayhew that he had often been drunk “for three months together”-he had “bent his head down to his cup to drink, being utterly incapable of raising it to his lips.”
So even though the gin fever had subsided, and its shops closed down, its spirit-we might say-was continued in the “gin palaces” of the nineteenth century. These large establishments, clad in shining plate-glass windows with stucco rosettes and gilt cornices, were resplendent with advertisements lit by gas-lamps announcing “the only real brandy in London” or “the famous cordial, medicated gin, which is so strongly recommended by the faculty.” The fine lettering reveals the attractions of “The Out and Out!,” “The No Mistake,” “The Good for Mixing” and “The real Knock-me-down.” Yet the exterior brightness was generally deceptive; the scene within these “palaces” was a dismal one, almost reminiscent of the old gin-shops. There was characteristically a long bar of mahogany, behind which were casks painted green and gold, with the customers standing-or sitting on old barrels-along a narrow and dirty area beside it. It might be noted here, too, that social observers believed drink to be “at the root of all the poverty and distress with which they came into contact.” Again the emphasis is upon the unhappy conditions of the city itself, literally driving men and women to drink with its relentless speed, urgency and oppression. Of the skeletons investigated in St. Bride’s Lower Churchyard, “just under 10 per cent had at least one fracture.” It is also revealed, in the fascinating London Bodies compiled by Alex Werner, that “almost half of these were rib fractures, commonly caused by stumbling or brawling.”
In the same period the breweries had become one of the wonders of London, one of the sights to which foreign visitors were directed. By the 1830s there were twelve principal brewers, producing, according to Charles Knight’s London, “two barrels, or 76 gallons, of beer per annum for every inhabitant of the metropolis-man, woman and child.” Who would not want to observe all this industry and enterprise? One German visitor was impressed by the “vast establishment” of Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street, with its buildings “higher than a church” and its horses “the giants of their breed.” In similar fashion, in the summer of 1827, a German prince “turned my ‘cab’ to Barclay’s brewery, in Park Street, Southwark, which the vastness of its dimensions renders almost romantic.” He observed that steam engines drove the machinery which manufactured from twelve to fifteen thousand barrels a day; ninety-nine of the larger barrels, each one “as high as a house,” are kept in “gigantic sheds”; 150 horses “like elephants” transport the beer. His awareness of the size and immensity of London are here reflected in its capacity for beer and, in a final parallel, he notes that from the roof of the brewery “you have a very fine panoramic view of London.”
That emblematic significance was recognised by painters as well as visitors, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was established what London art historians have termed “the brewery genre.” Ten years after the prince’s visit, for example, Barclay’s brewery was painted by an anonymous hand; the entrance is depicted, together with the thriving life of London all around it. To the right is the great brewhouse, with a suspension bridge connecting to the other side of the street. In the foreground a butcher’s boy, in the blue apron typical of his trade, stands with another customer beside a baked-potato van; barrels of beer on sleds are being drawn by horses into the yard, passing a dray which is just leaving. In the street, to the right, a hansom cab is bringing in more visitors. It is a picture of appetite, with the meat carried on the shoulders of the butcher’s boy as an apt token of the London diet, as well as of immense energy and industry.
But there are other ways of conveying the immensity of the city’s drinking. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré visited the same premises for their London: a Pilgrimage-“the town of Malt and Hops” as Jerrold called it in 1871-in order to see the brewing of the beer named Entire which assuaged “Thirsty London.” Jerrold noted that against the great towers and barrels the working men “look like flies,” and indeed in Doré’s engravings these dark anonymous shapes tend to their beer-mashing and beer-making duties like votaries; all is in shadow and chiaroscuro, with fitful gleams illuminating the activities of these small figures in vast enclosed spaces. Here again the life of the city is like that within some great decaying prison, with the metal pipes and cylinders as its bars and gates. Jerrold, like the German visitor before him, looked over London “with St. Paul’s dominating the view from the north,” and apostrophises beer as the city’s sacred drink. “We are,” he remarked, “upon classic ground.”