Drinking with Dickens

George Cruikshank's illustration of a gin palace, for Hard Times (1854): © Alamy

By THEA LENARDUZZI

Drinking always tastes better if you can find some literary justification for it. Just think of the mass appeal of Burns Night. I spent much of last night at the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury sipping gin (much of it more or less neat) as part of a gin-tasting evening organized by the London Gin Club. That was in the basement, in Dickens’s kitchen. There was a “pop-up” gin bar upstairs in what is usually the café (pop-up, here, in its most proper sense, as it’s moved on after only one night). That’s diversification for you.

There’s a new exhibitions – “Dickens’s First Love” –  just down the hall, too, bringing together some of the writer’s earliest literary efforts, including love poems about Maria Beadnell  (a banker’s daughter whom the young journalist courted, ultimately without success, for three years), as well as comic verse written for her sister Anne. (The organizers’ hope that visitors will “pen their own love poems and try to better the great Victorian novelist” seems a touch ambitious, especially if there’s gin involved.)

Back in the kitchen, we tasted Old Tom –  a popular eighteen-century recipe, which was sweetened with sugar (or whatever else was to hand when the price of sugar soared)  – and London Dry, a much drier variant with no added sugars or botanicals, favoured since the mid-1900s. Both, we were told, are having something of a revival, though I’d never realized they were dead. (Olivia Williams gives a good account of all this in her book Gin, Glorious, Gin.)

There was gin blended with cardamom, another with coriander, and a few others too (the lack of greater detail is perhaps self-explanatory), all loosely pinned to the master’s own taste for the old comfort. Rare is the work by Dickens’s that doesn’t make some mention of drink: Mr Micawber’s lethal rum and brandy punch, for example, or Bob Cratchit’s more frugal “hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons”, which he turns up his cuffs – “as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby” – to serve.

Bob Cratchit was the kind of person whom Dickens would probably have encountered on his journey into the “narrow streets and dirty courts” of High Holborn, described so memorably in his article “Gin Shops”, published in the Evening Chronicle in 1835; the kind of man who, had his morals been less steady and his family life less wholesome, might have joined the fellows Dickens found there, “who came in ‘just to have a drain’” and “made themselves crying drunk”.

There was no such riotous behaviour last night, arms, legs and staves remaining easily defined and our coats untorn. When we left our faces were shining like Micawber’s – personal finances and some vague sense of propriety having prevented us from drinking ourselves into the oblivion Dickens had witnessed. Time for a hot chocolate, perhaps . . . ?