Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The REAL Bridgerton: Georgian Drugs & Alcohol

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

The third season of Bridgerton is out and we are back in sexy scandalous Georgian society. But while we watch, we're taking a step back to ask: how real is Bridgerton?On our third episode in our REAL Bridgerton mini-series, we're looking at the the booze and drugs that took 18th and early 19th century Britain by storm.Why was opium taken for health purposes? How did gin get the nickname "mother's ruin"? And what does it feel like to take snuff?Joining Kate today are Maddy Pelling, co-host of our sister podcast After Dark and author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain; Marina Capaldi from Summerhall Distillery, and Robert Good from Segar & Snuff Parlour.Also, if you'd like to find out more about this incredible period, you can watch Kate present a two-part documentary - Georgian Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll: Unbuttoning Bridgerton - over on History Hit. Simply click here for a free 14 day trial and watch now.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. Additional production was provided by Annie Woodman. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Dearest gentle listener, today I have something very special for you. You may have heard that London's fashionable set have returned for the new series of Bridgeton. You've seen their love stories, watched their decadent parties, and you've met the Royals and High Society darlings. But today we're stripping back all the tellers. televised glamour and finding out about the real Bridgeton.

Sex, drugs and celebrities in 18th century Britain. From the real-life dating taboos in the Georgian period... It's this thing that if you had one dance with a man at a ball, that's fine. Two dancers signalled you were getting close. Three dancers, you may as well be married because everyone was going to be like, whoa. To partying and letting loose. These glitzy sort of or neat, gas-lip. drinking venues that sprang up in cities around the country

where you don't sit down with your pals and have a drink. You're standing at the bar and you're having shots of gin. The It Girls and Boys of the Time. So Lord Byron is basically a rock star of his day. And of course, it wouldn't be Bridgeton without all the steamy sex. There starts to be the production of animal gut condoms. They were reusable, not forever, but certainly for multiple times. I'll also be uncovering this titillating time period over on the history hit website too for a two-part documentary series.

You'll see me taking off those gorgeous Bridgeton rose-tinted glasses and exploring the gritty underbelly of sex, drugs and rock and roll in Georgian Britain. Click the link in the description to sign up for a 14-day free trial. Won't cost you a penny. Bridgeton is one of the most popular historical series of all time. But how accurate is it? Wet shirts and Empire Waste dresses at the ready, this season is about to begin. This is the Real Bridgeton, Episode 3, Georgian Drugs and Alcohol. P.S., we're covering adult themes in this episode, so if you're not old enough to watch Bridgeton, fair-dos, you're probably not old enough to be listening to this.

And trust me, the real Georgians were much filthier than anything you see on TV. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Excuse me while I just tighten up this corset and powder my face. It's what I do every time I sit down to watch an episode of Bridgeton. I mean, I'm all for an immersive experience. No, no, that's true. I'm watching it in a wansy.

But to celebrate the release of the third season, here on betwixt, we wanted to remove the rose-tinted Bridgeton glasses and find out all about the real Georgian Britain the series is set in. In the first episode of this mini-series, we explored sexuality in the 18th and 19th centuries, everything from STIs to pig-gut condoms, to the roaring porn trade and flagellation brothels. In our second, we delved into the fabulous world of Georgian celebrities and royalty, from one of the filthiest men to ever put pen to paper, Lord Byron, to the fantastic Queen Charlotte and the raucous moats out.

Having covered Georgian sex and rock and roll, well, of a sort, it only feels right that we should now turn our attention to drugs and booze. We'll be finding out more about the casual usage of opium in the 18th century, how the Georgian gin craze took a tragic turn, and why snuff was all the rage. And as you will hear, I decided to get really method for this episode. Don't worry, not with the medicinal opium. They actually wouldn't let us have that.

But with the snuff. And I'm telling you right now that that stuff went out of fashion for a reason, folks. It was vile. Vile. I can still feel it's stinging the back of my throat right now. Bridgeton doesn't feature the characters microdosing on opium, but in fact, many Georgians were taking it

to deal with anything from insomnia to, well, a common cold. Like, everybody was off their heads. It was even prescribed for babies later on in the 19th century. Historian Maddie Pelling is the host of our sister podcast After Dark and she is here to tell me how opium was introduced into Georgian High Society. So opium comes from poppies and it's been, really the history of opium is the history of medicine from the ancient world.

It's always been used for its effects as a sedative, as a painkiller, as a euphoria. You know, it can make people kind of go out of themselves and have this huge rush of pleasure. Interestingly, so it's used by the ancient Egyptians, by the Romans, by the Greeks. In ancient Arab cultures, it was actually used as an animal. aesthetic, which I think is fascinating. And of course, there is a very fine line between an effective dose that you're going to enjoy and a lethal one. So there's something there about the levels of consciousness, about life and death that become culturally very interesting in 18th century Britain. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's an opiate, isn't it? So it's further down

the line from opium, we developed heroin and we all saw how well that went. But that's what opium is, basically, isn't it? Yeah. And in the late 18th into the 19th centres, you start to get Lordnum, which is... What's Lordham? What's Lawton? So it's basically opium, ground into a powder and added to alcohol, which, you know, interesting combination. And that, you know, that appeared in everyday homes, certainly by the Victorian period. You know, you see it. You can buy it over the counter. It's in baby cough syrup in the 19th century. It is Mrs. Beaton, calls it a crucial ingredient to have in your household.

It's part of your housekeeping regimen. They really were. And, you know, by that period by the 19th century, you're getting people taking sort of micro doses of it to get through their day. So people working in factories, people who are suffering from all kinds of medical problems. You know, as to say, it was taken to cure everything from insomnia to a cold to melancholia to nervous conditions. There's one MP in the Victorian period who actually takes morphine, which is slightly different from Lordham. But, you know, it's an opiate as well where he actually carries in his pocket a syringe and he shoots up in Parliament when he gets bored of the other speakers.

So, you know, this is a substance that has. had infiltrated all areas of British life from politics right down to people working on the factory floor, people living on the street. It's everywhere. And people are walking around really is functioning addicts. This is an addictive substance and something that people relied on increasingly from sort of the, certainly the 1790s onwards. I want to get into what kind of society, why people were taking this, but can I ask you first of all, where was it coming from? Where was it open? because I know you can grow poppies in Britain. I've never tried to cultivate them to make heroin,

but I don't think that you can. So where is this coming from? Well, we'll see how the history career goes. You know, we might all need to turn to that in the future. Go full breaking bad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, watch this space. No, no, no, no. Don't do it, kids.

Okay, so opium has always been traded globally, but in the 18th century, Britain, by the final decades, has sort of got a dominance over this trade. So the opium that Britain was trading in was grown in India and it was sold not to Brits to begin with, but in China. So the reason for this is that Britain throughout the 18th century had a huge interest in Chinese luxuries. So we're talking about things like porcelain, silk and of course the big one,

tea. That's where our obsession, our national obsession with tea drinking comes from. And the way that the Brits were paying for these luxuries in China was initially in gold and silver. and pretty soon they realized that opium was a valuable commodity that they could trade there. The Chinese used it in medicine. They used it sort of in the elite echelons of their society. And so it became a usable currency there.

So the East India Company, who's Britain's, I suppose, the muscle of the British Empire really, it had its own private army, it had strong. holes all over the world and one of those strong holes was in Bengal and India and it was there that they developed a way of growing poppies very cheaply because it wasn't a cheap commodity up until this point and they start to grow it cheaply and in huge quantities and with a view to selling it to China and what happens is that they flood the market in China and it becomes cheaper the price goes down this causes huge problems in China in terms of addiction. Suddenly ordinary people in China can afford to buy opium,

and of course that comes with all kinds of social problems then, people becoming addicted to it, organized crime, that kind of thing. And along with that, we start to see an influx like never before of opium into Britain. It had been available in Britain throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1701, for example, there's a best-selling book, would you believe, that is written by a doctor and it's dedicated to the king, no less, that talks about the medical benefits of opium. So this wasn't a new substance necessarily,

but it absolutely comes in these huge waves into Britain. Through, you know, sailors bringing it back, merchants bringing it back to Britain. And it's sort of tied to the history of empire, but it starts to become a really central thing, a cultural idea and a literal substance in British culture from the sort of the mid to late 18th century onwards. They mustn't have known what was going to hit them.

I mean, that's, I'm trying to think of what you would have used for a painkiller before opium. I mean, you've got alcohol, you can get somebody pissed. Well, you think about, you know, a lot of medical treatments in the early modern period are made at home and they're often made by women as well as professional medical people. thinking about, you know, I've spent a lot of time in the archives looking at people's sort of medicine books. So notebooks kept by women who would grow things in their garden and they would make, you know, there's a famous recipe book that exists from Jane Austen's family at the beginning of the 19th century that's got recipes in there for things to cure a cold, to make ink, importantly for Jane Austen, you know, and that people were really creating substances in their own home all the time.

And so opium comes into that and it's something that people use to self-medic. educate, there's, it's legal, there's no real regulation on it. And, you know, soon Brits are consuming like 10 to 20 tons of this stuff per year. This is a huge market. Yeah, it's a huge market in a really short amount of time. And I think it, as I say, it sort of infiltrates every area of society. People who are interested in the arts are using it, people in politics are using it, people in the military are using it. It's absolutely everyone. It's sort of hard to fathom now.

When we think about the past, we don't necessarily think that everyone is walking around pretty high, but actually, you know, that was the reality for a huge amount of the population. I suppose when you think about medical treatment, it was improving, but it was very limited, and certainly pain relief was incredibly limited beyond getting pissed and maybe willow bark to make aspirin or something like that.

But if you think about how many medical conditions people deal with just on a daily basis that if you don't have treatment for it is going to cause a lot of pain. And the only thing you've got that can really do it is opium. No wonder it was so popular. So it arrives in, it gets really big by the 18th century. Everyone seems to be at it. Was there any stigma around it?

Was there any sense of like, oh, you're off your tits again? So there's an interesting sort of cultural shift that happens in the romantic era. So from the sort of 1790s into the earliest decades of the 19th century. I think of the romantic poets as being off their face on opium quite a lot. Absolutely, yeah. So this, and I have to caveat this by saying that this coincides with an increased interest in chemistry. So people are experimenting with different substances, different chemicals, and also electricity. I'm thinking, you know, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, there's an interest in different states of consciousness and even the line between life and death

itself. So there's a great experiment that I've just been reading about as part of another project where in 1804 there's a man who's hanged for the murderer of his wife and child and he's taken away to the anatomist lab as so many murderers were in that period. And instead of being cut up by medical students, he's electrocuted. And his body actually supposedly, according to these reports in the newspapers afterwards, sits up and one of his eyes opens. And so, you know, you can just imagine. being in that space. And supposedly the man carrying out the experiment goes home and dies of a heart attack the next day. Well, that would freak you out, that would, wouldn't it?

But then I think the moral of the story is don't be electrocuting dead bodies that you've recently collected off the gallows. That's just... Exactly. You'd never get the ethical clearance for that today, Maddie, ever. No, you wouldn't. Although, you know, arguably it did move science on considerably. But ethical questions aside, I'm really showing a dark side of myself today, aren't it?

Ethical questions aside, you know, you? You know, there's, yes, there's this huge interest in levels of consciousness. And the romantics in particular are very interest in this. And the ways that opium specifically might open up their mind, allow them to access a sort of higher creative plane. And we see this in works by poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats. Later on, all kinds of literary figures. Charles Dickens takes Lordnum, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bramwell Bronte,

famously Elizabeth Siddell, the pre-Raphaelite artist, who's married to the very dodgy Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But one of the most famous figures that consumes opium in order to access this high plane of creativity is Thomas de Quincy. And he is the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater. And this is a text. It's an incredible book and people should absolutely go and read it for all kinds of reasons. It's fascinating. is a sort of autobiographical account in, you know, big question mark over the level of autobiography there, but it's an account of his addiction.

And De Quincey is sort of self-destructive outsider, and this, he really gives birth to the idea of the addict as a sort of fashionable peripheral figure, someone who's a bit emo, who's, you know, languishing on a couch maybe. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, he's sort of the original rock star. and in Confessions of an opium eater, he really describes the effect that this drug can have. And of course, it gives you psychedelic dreams. It gives you almost a sort of waking visionary state often. And actually, I have some of his words here that he uses to describe the first time that he takes opium. And he says, heavens, what a revulsion. What an upheaving from its lowest depths of the inner spirit.

What an apocalypse of the world within me. It's pretty powerful stuff. Wow. So you've got people like De Quincey who are kind of, he calls it an opium eater. I don't know if the word addict was around at the time, but certainly the figure of somebody who's an opium eater kind of maps onto that. But if you weren't a romantic poet and they were quite rich, apart from Keats, who wasn't all that rich, but they were kind of, they were quite a wealthy bunch. But if you were just a regular person, because opium permeated every level of society, where would you go to buy them? it? Was it just available in the shops? Were opium dens a thing? Or is that just in strange reimagininges of the Victorian period? So opium dens do come a little bit later. They are more

of a 19th century phenomenon. And they are very much born out of this global trade. So opium dens are often associated and whether this is partly a sort of racialized cultural portrayal that happens in the 19th century or, you know, that I'm sure there's a slight disparity in terms of that and the reality, but they're often associated with Chinese immigrants coming into Britain. And also, a lot of their customers are people who've spent time out in the empire who've encountered opium through their work. I'm thinking about sailors, in particular, people working on ships that are transporting opium or where they stop in various ports along the way, opium is available to them. And it's a real, again,

It's a sort of cultural shift. So we have at the beginning of the 19th century these glamorous rock star romantics taking these drugs to access heaven, to access art, to think about the moment of creation and the sort of spark of inspiration. But into the Victorian era, opium's become a little bit grungier. It's got a bad reputation now. And people have seen the significant effects that it can have on people. And so opium dens are filled with, you know, some of the most vulnerable in society. These are people who are truly addicted and they are in Victorian literature and art associated with underworlds of all kinds

and criminality essentially. So we see opium going from being this elevated substance, this thing to be experimented with, to be dabbled in, to be written about, that it goes hand in hand with artistic creation. And then we see it

something that is condemned, that is dark, that is problematic, and that comes with legal challenges to it and attempts to criminalise it, and at least to control it in some way. But as I say, opium dems are, they are later, and the 18th century, you know, I think in the 18th century,

the fact that this substance is not criminalised is because it's tied so heavily to empire, and it's such a foundation of British wealth, British trade. that there's really no inclination, despite the obvious effects of it to, in any way, control it. So if we're thinking about something like Bridgeton, now obviously there aren't any characters in it who are openly taking opium,

but it was an interesting question of, like, would it have been accessible at that kind of level of society? There was Benedict Bridgeton, wasn't it, who's quite an artie type. Would he have been somebody that you might have, expected to have been, you know, dabbling at the old opium? I would totally picture Benedict Bridgeton doing that. You know, we see him in the series interacting with this sort of artistic community.

He's part of the group who hangs around the Royal Academy. He is, you know, we see him in various states of undress, unlike other characters who, you know, we often see in Bridgeton in states of undress, but he's always made less formal. he's always shown in some mode of sort of creation, creativity, he's painting, he's drinking. And actually, it's interesting in terms of Benedict's character because I think we see a lot of focus on consumption and creativity going hand in hand.

He's often, I think, from memory, he's kind of berated by his siblings and his friends were drinking and getting into these quite sort of bacchanalian celebrations with different people. And I think in reality, if we were to think about that time period and a figure like Benedict Bridgeton, I think he absolutely would be using substances like that. And it's interesting, more generally in Bridgeting,

because I think it is a show that focuses so much on consumption in terms of the clothing, in terms of the sort of the confectionery and the alcohol, the food, the interiors, everything's about this kind of visual and material sensory delight. You know, even sex is used in the show as part of that sort of sensory experience. And it's kind of fascinating then that that opium is missing from that, because I think that would have been a reasonably everyday part of that experience for people like that. But it wasn't just opium the Georgians were taking. Oh no. Gin had become very

accessible and affordable in the regency period, and it was incredibly popular. After the break, I'm going to be finding out more about the 18th century gin crowsy. and how the spirit got his infamous nickname of Mother's Ruin. So we've heard our opium was being consumed in the Georgian period, but what about alcohol? It seems the Georgians were pretty alcohol obsessed. Beer, brandy, port, claret and gin were all available to, well, anyone who could afford it. But there was a lot of judgment attached to your tipple of choice. Some drinks like beer and port were seen as much more acceptable.

William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, from 1783 to 1801. would apparently drink a bottle of port before giving a speech to the House of Commons. Holy shit. But other drinks had a less than fancy reputation, especially gin. I spoke with expert Marina Capaldi from the Summerhall Distillery about gin in the 18th century. Gin arrived in the late 1600s with William of Orange because it was originally a drink from the Netherlands. It was Geneva and Geneva was brought over and it was Angliannambia. the term Yenever became Geneva and shortened to gin. Right. So that's how we ended up with gin. And Yaneva meaning

Jinniper, it was literally why gin is made with a lot of Jinnapur. So when it arrived here, William Vorenge dropped the taxes on the production of gin to facilitate, let's say, commerce with his own country. So Jinn was very affordable and also it was in a way safer than water in big cities like London or you know, because when the waters were full of disease back, then it was better for the people to drink something that looked like water, which was not water actually. So yeah, it was not safer than water clearly because as you said, the gin craze started, it was about 50 years between 1700 to 1750 where gin that was produced was very bad quality gin. There was a lot of adulterated

alcohol. So that means we had high levels of methanol and acetone in the spirit. People were drinking that and they were turning blind and turning blue and they were dying. So that was the issue with the gin craze back in those years. So gin took very bad names. You might have heard of the blue death because it was turning people. I haven't heard of blue death. Death in a glass as well, I think it's quite a good one. But the most popular nickname of Jin back then was the mother's ruin.

I have heard of that. Why was it called mother's ruin? Because it was literally destroying families and mothers. So the fertility rates plummeted and there was a lot of mothers abandoning their children because they were literally drinking all the time day and night. A stigma attached itself to those who drank this drink. And the difference between those who drank beer versus those who stuck to the harder stuff was immortalised by the artist William Hogarth. Hogarth, who was born in 1697, was best known for his social commentary,

which he would demonstrate through his paintings and engravings. He issued two separate prints in 1751 called Gin Lane and Beer Street, which depicted the evils of the consumption of gin in comparison to the spectacular health benefits of drinking beer. Today we may call gin mothers ruin with a wink and a nudge, but in Georgian Britain, this was no joke. This stuff was lethal. So, yeah, it was called mothers' ruin because it caused a lot of troubles for the families.

mothers were abandoning their children, but also the fertility rate plummeted. There was a lot of miscarriages as well due to the poor quality of the alcohol that was consumed. Yeah, so all these nicknames, it really highlights what these 50 years were for the people back then. 50 years. Lots of crimes. It really murders and robberies. People were hooked on gin like you would see today. People hooked on very highly addictive drugs.

It was really. affecting their brains in a way with all the chemicals that were present in the spirits that was adulterated, of course. And it was flavoured with all random sort of random things. If you were lucky, it would be flavoured with spices, nice spices. But if you're not so lucky, it would be down to burnt feces of urine. So it was really not yet a fancy drink. And it was consumed neat back then. So tonic didn't exist yet. Tonic arrived a century later when the Brits were in India and they had to prevent malaria. So for all these years, gin was consumed on its own as you would drink whiskey or any neat spirit. So we've got a mass outbreak of basically alcoholism. People cannot get enough of this

stuff. It's cheaply produced. It's mass produced. It does the job very effectively. So I was thinking about this last night, I'm trying to wonder why were people so drunk? Why were they drinking so much this stuff? And then we were wandering around Edinburgh and it was very cold. And then suddenly it started to make a bit more sense. Just to warm up, like, and the sort of like the poverty levels that we're talking about here in the industrialised towns

as they're springing up. Absolutely. So I think, I'm not too sure if Edinburgh was as affected as cities like London or Glasgow, of course. And gin was very much consumed in England, although there's been gin consumed here in Scotland as well. But it was really, when you think of the gin craze,

it's very much the big English cities, like Birmingham, London, Newcastle. So in the main British cities like Birmingham, London, etc., there was high levels of poverty, of course, people living in squalid conditions. Edinburgh was nicknamed for so many years, all drakey because it was really stank and so bad that you could smell the city from miles away.

It started changing in the late 1700s, early 1800s, when they opened up the new town, all the Princes Street side and George Street, etc. but the medieval city of Edinburgh was absolutely horrible for so many centuries. But not just Edinburgh, of course, many cities in Europe and in England during all these. Yeah, exactly. So when you were poor, you didn't have a lot of options. There was a lot of alcohol that was imported from France or from the Netherlands,

like brandy or wine and such things. But the taxes were so high on these products because William of Orange, he had a bone to chew with the French because of previous wars, when he arrived here. So the taxes were too high for poor people to afford what they used to be drinking, wine and brandy, etc. And when he dropped the taxes on gin, all of a sudden it became an alcohol.

It was very affordable for everybody, literally, but mostly the poor people. So it was decadence because it was just society. It was rolling down. People were drinking, they were losing their jobs, they were not making money. Yeah, so it is definitely linked to poverty and increasing the poverty in the cities as well.

Something had to be done really to protect the people at some point. So there's this product that has arrived and it's cheap, it's affordable, mass produced. It might have urine in it, it might have acid in it, you might be blind. How much of this stuff were they consuming? Did they have little 25-milled pub measures that everyone was sticking to? No. I'm afraid the measures and all the licensing about how much you could consume did not exist. back in the days. So it was free-pouring, you could call it in a way, and because it was consumed neat, and it looked like water, like literally gin looked exactly like water, and they were

consuming this as if they were drinking water to stay hydrated. So the percentage of alcohol in the drink back then was never the same. They didn't really have a way to measure how strong the alcohol that they were drinking. It was probably not as strong or stronger, actually, I'm not too sure, but it was to kept hydrated, to keep hydrated throughout the day. So they were consuming this all day long and all night long. So back in the days, people were basically drunk all the time. They must have been, right? I've read lots of records people buying jars of gin.

Like you'd go and you would buy a jar, and then that would keep you warm in the evening, and that's what you'd be nursing all night. They doesn't say how big a jar is. No. That's not standard measure. There's a small jar, a big jar is like, yeah, absolutely. The thing is like for many, many years before that,

people were consuming alcohol before water, again, because water was unsafe. But it was what they called small wine or small beer. It was really low percentage beer, low percentage wine, which would keep them hydrated throughout the day without technically not making them too drunk. Again, I don't know. We were not there to see. I would be hammered. I probably have got used to it.

I think then your body builds some sort of a... Yeah, tolerance, I would say. And that was for every generation, again, children as much as if you read books like that take place in the 1500s, 1600s, they do have an ale for breakfast with a bit of bread or... So, yeah, they were drinking alcohol all the time. Breakfast beer. Highest... Yeah, exactly. I'd much rather have a croissant and a coffee today.

But yeah, back in the days, it was high-class breakfast, definitely. He's a breakfast gin. This culture of drinking from morning to night created dependencies and addiction that tore through families. Maddie tells us more about the tragic repercussions of gin dependency, particularly for women. So gin is of course, it's addictive and it caused all kinds of social problems. And as you say, it becomes associated with social problems in a way that opium isn't necessarily. You know, opium has this association with the romantics and with sort of artistry. And gin really quickly becomes associated with the lower classes and with the sort of ills in society.

So, you know, it drives people to death as prison. People who end up on the gallows or in court at least are, you know, they represent themselves and their lives in terms of gin addiction. Often gin is blamed for causing people to end up in these situations. It's associated with madness. Think about, you know, some of the most famous asylums in the 18th century places like Bedlam. You know, it was full of people who had struggled with. gin addiction. We get people dying from it, of course. And also it's associated with mental illness, not only in terms of madness, but in terms of suicide as well. You know, so it really has

this stigma attached to it. One of the most sort of moving things I always find when I think about gin, I mean, you know, we all know the famous Hogarth image of Gin Lane with the mother dropping her baby. And I was working recently on some, some records from the Foundling Hospital, which for anyone who doesn't know, it's still in existence in London as a museum now, but in the 18th century it was set up as a charity to help mothers who, for whatever reason, could

not look after their children. But in order to get your child into the hospital and to secure them a place, you, the mother would have to come up. First of all, there was a sort of lottery where there was different coloured balls you'd pulled from a bag to see whether you'd get seen that day. So lots women, you know, are in the most

dire situations trying to find a better life. for their children and they would have to come back each day and try and get the right coloured ball and once you did that you would have to go in front of a panel of all men of course who would humiliate you and ask you questions and one of the questions that they would ask would be about gin drinking were you a consumer of gin and if you were you weren't really considered to be worthy of the help that they were offering and you and your child might be turned away and it's just it's unfathomable today but yeah

it's really incredible and you know just in terms of the founding hospital and you know gin in that case sits alongside so many other reasons why these women are often turned away and not helped and looking at these records I think I was looking at one woman whose child was taken in and in the same summer that she got her child accepted something like I think it was in space of two months 70 cases were turned away and I really could not work out why she was different from the women who were turned away, you know, and it's a lot of the time, I think, it was about presenting yourself in a certain way, and if you were drunk, if you were suffering visibly the effects of alcoholism, that would be a huge, you know.

Absolutely brutal, isn't it? It's no wonder that opium proved to be so popular then, if they were already kind of primed on this gin. Yeah, and the fact that, you know, opium was available over the counter, certainly, you know, you could buy it from the chemist going into the 19th century. It was considered a legitimate form of medication, of self-medication, in a way that gin wasn't necessarily, and whether that's something to do with the way that people would measure their doses, you know, that this idea that you're only taking a little bit of opium or a little bit of morphine,

a little bit of laudanum, maybe with your tea, it can still be consumed within the home in part of these sort of polite rituals of so-called respectability, whereas gin is consumed in different environments, often in quite raucous environments, either on the street or in public houses. And so for women in particular, I suppose, it becomes associated with a sort of a lower class and a sort of lack of respectability, so-called respectability anyway. The government had to step in and try and control gin consumption, which was proving to be a huge health and social problem. In 1729, 1736 and 1743, Parliament passed laws to try and control the gin trade.

These acts introduced taxes for distillers and those who sold gin had to purchase an annual licence. Here's Marina. In 1751, the Gin Act was passed. And the Gin Act put an end to the production of adulterated alcohol. Not overnight, of course. it took a bit of time for the police to enforce that. But it basically said that you had to produce at least 1,800 litres a day of the spirit to legally be a distillery and legally trade your spirit.

If anything under, you were illegal and we would have to shut you down. That's what happened. And gradually, of course, all the illegal gens disappeared. And Britain was left with about 20 browns of gin. about 300 years. So the big names that we still know, Gordons or beef heaters, and that last, they had the monopoly on the production of gin until 2008 when the law changed again for the benefit of small producers like us. And as we know, alcohol was not the only bite of Georgian Britain, far from it.

When they weren't drinking or micro-dosing smack, they could also be found snorting something that they could stuff up their noses too. Originally from the Americas, Snuff became extremely popular in 18th century Europe and was seen as something of a status symbol, taken only by the most elite in society. And because I want the history we talk about on the show to be authentic, I decided that I should investigate this further, all in the name of historical research. Here's me talking to Robert Good to find out more about how Snuff swept the nation. I'm here to talk to you about Snuff, which I don't know. I don't know. not anything about it at all. It's a ground tobacco, is that right?

It's a ground tobacco. Okay. The first snuff was found on some sunken Spanish ships. They found barrels of this, yeah, powdered tobacco. And someone worked out, but it was obviously meant to be taken up the nose. So we now, some of the most popular snuffs around are referred to as SP types. The SP basically stands for Spanish. Right. purely because obviously the tobacco didn't come from Spain because they'd absolutely grow tobacco in Spain. Spanish ships it mostly came from Africa and parts of South and Central America. Wow and it was so popular all over Europe wasn't it but

it was a big craze for it in England. What was the appeal for it? Well snuff was around before people were smoking cigarettes. That's true. And even when cigarettes first came you didn't buy a pack of cigarettes, you had to get tobacco and make your own, or have them made for you or whatever. So Snuff was the first introduction to most people to tobacco. Was it quite genteel, or was everyone else it? Well, there were different traditions. So obviously, yes, it was sort of used in the aristocracy and in the art world and the theatre world and whatever. But also quite working class.

That's particularly noted in Scotland. Very great difference between the tradition on the eastern side of Scotland, which was more genteel from the western side, which tends to be, you know, the weather is very different. I live there for a few years. So very windy, actually quite difficult to really try and smoke if you're outside. Actually sometimes quite difficult to walk yet alone there. So sort of taking snuff up the nose was actually quite an easy way of doing it.

That makes sense. All right, so talk me through this then. So if you want to take snuff and I've seen people like they're doing something with their hands, and then they kind of like... Well, there are two basic ways. Okay. So you take your tin of snuff. Okay.

There it is. There we are. This particular one had some, mainly because it's actually quite good for the sinuses, most likely a little less of the tobacco effect. Okay. Still very much is a ground of tobacco. So the, you know, the simplest tradition is you take a little pinch. Yep.

And... All right. I'm got... The other thing that people sometimes do, and you say about holding, this part of your hand, that bit. Between your first finger is called your snuff box.

So you can put your little bit of snuff on there. Yep. And again, I've put far too much there. Wow. Okay, right. In for a penny, infrapan, Robert. I think I've got to try this. This is for history.

Okay, right. So I've got my snuff. Yes. Is that Tim. much? I should be enough for both. Most sides, slightly more than you need, but it doesn't matter. I'm going to. Okay, there we go. There you go. That's smooth. That is like, that, it's like Vic's vaporub's gone up my nose. I'm going to do the other one so I'm matching. That is really minty. Yeah, well, obviously the main ingredient is tobacco, but it's, it's, it has a, it has a

I say this has some mentholing molecules in it. That, I wasn't expecting that. That is seriously minty, eucalyptusy, fresh, and I do feel a little bit giddy. Hopefully you just feel a bit jolly. Yeah, I feel clear-headed and ready to go. Thank you so much, Robert. This has been an absolute treat. Thank you to Robert, and thank you to all the guests who featured on this third episode

in a real Bridgeton special mini-series. We have got an upcoming reaction episode to Seasoning, 3 of Bridgeton with the one and only Catherine Curzon, where we will be doing a deep dive into how accurate the new episodes really are. And if you would like to see more of Maddie's work, please check out her podcast After Dark, which she hosts with Anthony Delaney, where they explore myths, misdeeds and the paranormal through a historical lens. She's also got a book out, writing on the wall, graffiti rebellion and the making of 18th century Britain. I'll also be uncovering this titillating time period over on the history hit website too for a two-peratured, for a two

part documentary series. You'll see me taking off those gorgeous Bridgeton rose-tinted glasses and exploring the gritty underbelly of sex, drugs and rock and roll in Georgian Britain. Click the link in the description to sign up for a 14-day free trial. Won't cost you a penny. And as always, if you want us to explore a subject or if you'd just been at the gin and you fancied saying hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. Additional production was provided by Annie Woodman. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contained music from Epidemic Sound.