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rough, fiery spirit. Many of the distillers were themselves hopeless drunkards whose stills often exploded and sent fire racing through the old wooden quarters of the town. Official figures estimated that by 1725 every fifth house in the city was selling gin. This was probably an underestimate which did not take into account the huge number of street vendors and freelance grog merchants. ‘All chandlers, many tobacconists, and such who sell fruit or herbs in stalls and wheelbarrows sell geneva, and many inferior tradesmen begin now to keep it in their shops for their customers,’ declared an investigator’s report. It was impossible to go about your day without confronting the opportunity for cheap drink and constant imprecations to partake. By the 1730s over eighty trades including barbers, tailors, labourers, weavers, dyers and shoemakers were retailing the stuff. Many workers were encouraged by their employers to take their pay in gin, inevitably finding they had nothing to take home at the end of the week.
    The orgy of spirit drinking was a public disaster, greater – by several orders of magnitude – than the troubles visited on the late twentieth century by heroin, amphetamines or indeed all of the legal and illegal drugs combined. Cheap, ubiquitous, warm and numbing, it was especially ruinous for the poor. During the worst years of the epidemic three quarters of their children died before the age of five. Those who were consigned to the parish workhouse had even less chance. The mortality rate for children taken in under the age of twelve months was ninety-nine percent. The ravages were not restricted to a general depression of already marginal living standards. The drink inflamed terrible passions. In 1750 Judith Dufour strangled her two-year-old child to death and threw the body in a ditch so she could sell the clothes for gin. Although reforms in the middle of the century put an end to the worst excesses, the mortality bills still reflected an increased death rate from the long binge fifty years later. Many of the first convicts were raised in this debauched environment.
    In the 1840s Friedrich Engels dived into the underworld to describe the rookery of St Giles, an infamous den surrounded by the rich environs of Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square and the Strand. He found:
    a disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storeyed houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in [which] there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that here, people of the working class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’ stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’ quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools.
    Engels, as industrious and sympathetic an observer of the poor as his class enemy Mayhew, agreed with the magazine publisher that these crowded slums were as great a source of moral corruption as they were of diseases such as scrofula and typhus. He sermonised that there is a degree of misery, a proximity to sin which virtue is rarely able to withstand and which the young cannot resist. In such