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Updated: August 24, 2024
Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of gilded door-posts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there.
The great business places dwindled down into commonplace shops and dwellings, which decreased and became more stunted, even as the folk who filled them did, until he was deep in the evil places of the eastern end. It was a land of huge, dark houses and of garish gin-shops, a land, too, where life moves irregularly and where adventures are to be gained as the Admiral was to learn to his cost.
Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour.
Such amusements were interspersed with cock-fighting, prize fights, and boxing matches between women. The same brutality characterised the crimes of the period. Violent riots, aggravated by the plunder of gin-shops, attended the preaching of the Methodists, the Gin Act, and even the employment by Garrick of a few French dancers at Drury Lane Theatre.
Then the men began to shoot "craps" for a readjustment of the spoils, with the result that Red Phil, as his henchmen called him, was the smiling possessor of most of the money, without the erstwhile necessity of "holding out." Then the gangsters scattered to the nearby gin-shops to while away the time before darkness should call for their evil activities.
Did grandpapa kill many watchmen when he was a young man, and frequent thieves' gin-shops, cock-fights, and the ring, before you married him? Did he use to talk the extraordinary slang and jargon which is printed in this book? He is very much changed. He seems a gentlemanly old boy enough now."
So secret were the orders kept that they did not know the nature of the business on which they were going until they boarded the tier of colliers at the New Quay, and other gangs the ships in the Catwater and the Pool, and the gin-shops. A great number of prime seamen were taken out and sent on board the Admiral's ship.
The whole old system of saloons, gin-shops, and the like, with their allurements to the drinking of adulterated alcohol, had been swept away, and in its place the government had given to a corporation the privilege of selling pure liquors in a restricted number of decent shops, under carefully devised limitations.
Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there.
In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence. Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and sloth of the priesthood.
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