Gin Lane
Feb 07
London
It is the first half of the 18th Century, the dawning Age of Reason.
The entire city, it seems, is in thrall to Mother Gin – often blind drunk. A nation that could, with hard work and good fortune, rule the world, is drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence. The straw is free (but your pockets will be emptied as you lie there).
Mother Gin is the true queen – the rich and powerful her courtiers; and pimps and panders; the poor are subject to her, sacrificing, wealth, health and happiness for temporary oblivion. None dare say her ‘Nay’.
None?
“The cry of wickedness, I mean excessive drinking gin, and other pernicious spirits ; is become so great, so loud, so importunate ; and the growing mischiefs from it so many, so great, so destructive to the lives, families, trades and business of such multitudes, especially of the lower, poorer sort of people ; that I can no longer doubt, but it must soon reach the ears of our legislators in Parliament assembled ; and there meet with … effectual redress.”
— Sir Daniel Dolins, Chair of Middlesex Quarter Sessions (1725)
A few. High-minded magistrates, their bailiffs, their tipstaffs, and private associations of concerned citizens (and killjoys) steadfastly trying to stem the flow of Gin – the Dutch curse – against the wishes of the gin-crazed mobile vulgus, or mob for short, and the interests of those Persons of Quality who own, shall we say, a huge supply of bathtubs.
Welcome, then, to:
The Society for Effectual Redress
Honorary President Sir Daniel Dolins, did he but know it.
The Society exists to provide for effectual redress in any field of endeavour in which the membership may care to take an interest, until the King and Parliament shall indeed undertake its effective enactment when, as loyal subjects, the Society shall, of course, stand aside.
It meets at divers times and locations, though principally at Kent’s Coffee House, at the sign of the Old Phoenix. Membership of the Society is drawn from all social ranks by sponsorship of three established (of one years’s standing) members. Attendance fee is one shilling. A guest may be introduced on the payment of the attendance fee by a Patron member.
Meanwhile the Society acts as an exchange for information and cases which members may care to take up or relate, as befits the moment. Between meetings Kent’s also acts as an informal rendezvous for members and others with an interest to advance, support to elicit, information to exchange, or effectual redress to seek.
Some Points of History
No Age can be taken out from the context which gave it birth; just so the Age of Enlightenment which some philosophers of history take to be a reaction to the extremes of the last age, culminating in the corruption of the Blood Royal, Regicide and rule of the sectaries and the phanatique cults.
The miracles of St Josephine split England’s true and justified faith from the corruption of Rome, culminating in the Age of Gloriana, Queen. But from the peak England fell far, to the nadir of the Civil War of the phanatiques and sectaries against the ‘corruption’ of the royal line. The later years of the war fell into stalemate and manoeuvres designed only to secure obscure points of advantage, leading to disease and starvation across a land paralysed by the indecision and lack of strategic thinking on both sides. The breaking of that stalemate (by the campaign known as the ‘Dutch War’, commemorating the brutal conduct of the “Deutcher” (German) mercenaries imported for the purpose) led to the ascendancy of the Phanatiques, the Protectorate, then the Regicide as a ‘cleansing of the land’.
It became apparent that the sects no longer had the inner fire that had once moved them. They had no more effective power in government than they had had to prosecute effective warfare. Eventually the mass of the people abandoned the sects’ rites, calling for a return of the GOD of their forbears and the leadership of the Royal Line.
Though hopes were that good and true advisors might moderate effects of the corrupted blood of that line, plague and fire, wars, rebellions and the lack of a true heir time after time, have proved otherwise. Until, that is, the arrival of our present king, George, by Grace of GOD etc, etc.
Some Social Notes
Religion
Religion is no longer the burning issue it once was. Only Anglicans are permitted in government or the universities, but dissenters are not noticeably oppressed, and though the Church of Rome still excites suspicion:
“It is to no purpose for you to aspire to the honour of martyrdom. Fire and faggot are quite out of fashion.”
Lord Chesterfield, to an English Jesuit
Women
Though the phanatique sects’ collapsed when they were shown to be fraudulent and quite unable to order the miracles that they claimed, some of their social reforms remained as they could not easily be undone. The equality of men and women under the eye of the Son, a practical necessity in the depopulated land of the Protectorate and into the Restoration, though unfashionable now, holds on, just. The Justices, appointed as pre-pubescent girls to be ‘innocent Justice’ after the phanatique courts’ death sentences on the whole previous judiciary, were still passing judgement within living memory. Their passing is mourned by some.
Magic
Come, come, Sir. This is the Age of Enlightenment. Primitive and ignorant folk-beliefs have no place in rational and philosophical society. And besides the mob would take unkindly to open displays of, ahem, practical philosophical knowledge of the underlying nature of Creation, fearing a return to the unconstrained and arbitrary rule of the the phanatiques’ miracles. Which of course were false anyway.
Philosophy
Would that be Natural Philosophy, in which case I would direct you to the Royal Society, or the more esoteric and advanced theoretical Philosophy that might be discussed, purely as an intellectual exercise I emphasise, at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge for Anglicans, or Edinburgh for Dissenters, or Paris and even Rome for Catholics? That which, merely because ‘advanced theoretical Philosophy’ is such a damnably long phrase requiring at least three dips of the pen, one might, as a convenient though inaccurate short hand, refer to as “magic”?
Such Philosophers do exist, but generally turn their attentions to the great Questions of the Nature of Existence because it is is dangerous to meddle in the affairs of mortals, for they are unsubtle and swift to anger. They can also get very insistent on the question of base metals and transformation into gold if there is so much as a bare crucible in sight (though a retort, piping, glassware et cetera will just be assumed to be a gin still, of course).
The Law
Executive summary: Don’t be caught. And if you are caught: Don’t be poor.