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Updated: June 24, 2025
The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap Utopianism will grow dumb those phrases which offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and gaudy, standardized enjoyments phrases which assure us that when we have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
First, then, as to drunkenness, the great parent of British poverty and crime drunkenness, which is a greater tax upon us than the National Debt; let us see what share that has in the grievances of Birmingham. It appears that in 1850 there were, including hotels, taverns, gin-shops, and beer-shops, altogether 1293 establishments for the supply of intoxicating liquors.
Had it not been for the imputation on his beauty, Dorothea might perhaps have blazed out in open rebellion, or remained passive in silent sulks; but to hear her Jim, the flash man of a dozen gin-shops, the beloved of a score of rivals, called "ugly," was more than flesh and blood could endure. She turned fiercely on her auxiliary and gave battle at once.
We never pass one of those stifling rendezvous in the metropolis a cigar-shop, open till the latest hours without mentally classing it with the gin-shops, its only compeers!
And then we send him, at the public expense, from the Moscow to the Irkoutsk Government, in company with the most depraved of men. "But we do nothing to destroy the conditions in which people like these are produced; on the contrary, we support the establishments where they are formed. These establishments are well known: factories, mills, workshops, public-houses, gin-shops, brothels.
The scuffle became general, and terminates, in minor play-bill phraseology, with ‘arrival of the policemen, interior of the station-house, and impressive dénouement.’ In addition to the numerous groups who are idling about the gin-shops and squabbling in the centre of the road, every post in the open space has its occupant, who leans against it for hours, with listless perseverance.
But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops.
To this his Worship added the greater gratification of having given amusement to nine-tenths of the city costermongers, made idle seven-tenths of the working people, kept busy two thousand gin-shops, filled eleven hundred chop-houses, given hard work to five hundred policemen, who never like to be worked hard, and made lackeydom tumultuous.
Once the latter cried out as a man leapt for his life; Oliver laughed, and said, without turning his head, "You'll get used to it by and by." They went down Fourth Avenue and turned into the Bowery. Elevated trains pounded overhead, and a maze of gin-shops, dime-museums, cheap lodging-houses, and clothing-stores sped past them.
Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men, and now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms, in the light of the gin-shops.
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