Punch by David Wondrich

with some of those “filths” and could turn from curious crowd to murderous mob at the drop of a handkerchief.
    They did not drink Punch. They drank gin, and far too much of it. As much as their putative betters deplored the gin habit, though, they weren’t all that much better when it came to resisting the power of aqua vitae. When, in the 1730s, Parliament began to consider various prohibition measures, there were always members who could be counted on to mount passionate arguments for the exemption of Punch and its component spirits (i.e., anything but gin) from the law. In 1737, when Parliament passed the infamous Gin Act, with no exceptions, one of the first acts of protest came from the Cherry Tree Tavern in Clerkenwell (by then, taverns had followed the coffeehouses’ lead in serving Punch), where “a Company of 100 Persons resolving to drink Punch . . . had a Bowl (or rather Trough) of that liquor . . . containing 80 Gallons, which was drunk out before the Company parted.” ab Reading through the Old Bailey’s records of the rapes, robberies, assaults and outright murders committed under the influence of Punch, one may conclude that at times the main difference between the filth-pelter and the peltee was the price of their tipple (those sword-carrying gentlemen, for example, had a distressing habit of getting quarrelsome over Punch and sticking each other, all too often fatally).
    Punch was not cheap. Once it became a status drink, the literate classes made it an object of connoisseurship, in particular the spirits that fueled it. By the late seventeenth century, the days of generic aqua vitae were over. Now drinkers had preferences. If it wasn’t arrack, imported at great expense from the East, ac it was French brandy, by now (at its best, anyway) an exceedingly well-distilled, barrel-mellowed commodity, or fragrant rum from the Caribbean. For a bowl of Punch made with one of these, one might expect to pay six or eight shillings a three-quart bowl. Eight shillings doesn’t sound like much, but in an age when, as a friend of Samuel Johnson observed to him, “thirty pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live [in London] and not be contemptible,” it amounted to half a week’s living wage—say, some two hundred dollars today. The lemons alone cost the equivalent of eight dollars each. Sure, you would split this bowl between three or four people, but it still required a rather hefty capital investment. By the 1730s, the gin-drinkers had learned to make Punch with it, which could be sold for a shilling—say, twenty-five dollars a bowl. Entirely more like it. With the creation of Gin Punch, this simple sailor’s expedient completed its conquest: all levels of English—or rather British, as it had to be called since the 1707 union of England and Scotland—society were more or less comfortable with the idea that spirits could be drunk recreationally.
    More or less. There would always be some who eyed Punch with suspicion. In 1727, Daniel Defoe could still sniff about “The Punch Drinkers of Quality (if any such there be).” But he was an old-timer, born just before the Restoration, and didn’t quite get what was going on. People of “Quality” most assuredly drank Punch; they just didn’t really respect it. Not even in the colonies: in 1739, Charles Francis wrote a friend in England from Jamaica that “The common Drink here is Madeira wine, or Rum Punch; the first, mixed with Water, is used by the better Sort; the latter, by Servants and the inferior kind of People.” Now, it’s safe to say that either he wasn’t being strictly truthful or his Jamaican acquaintances were on their best behavior while the man from the home office was sniffing around. Jamaica was as punchy as a place could be. But it’s true that even in its heyday, Punch could never quite rid itself of the whiff of the lower decks it carried with it. A gentleman or a lady could always drink French claret—even the