THERE are few places in London where so great a variety of...
THERE are few places in London where so great a variety of characters may be seen popping in and out in a short space of time, as at the bars of our modern gin-palaces. Even respectable men who meet each other by chance, after a long absence, must drop in at the nearest tavern, although they have scarcely a minute to spare, to drink a glass together at the bar, and enquire about old friends. Married women, we are sorry to say, many of them the wives of clever mechanics, also congregate when they ought to be providing the dinner for their families. Such things are thought but little of among those who are far from being numbered with the lowest orders of society. Then there are young itinerant vendors of almost every imaginable thing - these are, also, constant members of the bar, confining themselves generally to pennyworths of gin. The coster-mongers, who come wheeling and shouting from opposite directions, with their barrows, if they chance to meet near the door of a tavern must, after a little gossip, go in and have their “drain.” Added to these, there are the poor, the old, and the miserable, who look and feel “half-dead,” as they themselves express it, unless they are “lighted up” every two or three hours with a glass of spirits. Many of these have become so habituated to drink that they care but little for food, and very rarely partake of a substantial meal; a pennyworth of boiled shell-fish, such as whilks or mussels, an oyster or two, or a trotter, or sometimes a fried fish - all of which are borne into into these places by hawkers every hour of the day - maybe taken as fair samples of the food consumed by these regular drinkers.
Nor is it at the front of the gaudily fitted-up bars alone where such quantities of spirits are consumed. Women and children even are coming in with bottles; some of the latter so little, that, like the one which our artist has so truthfully sketched, they are scarcely able to reach up and place the bottle upon the zinc-covered bar. If the weather is cold they are generally sent out in their mothers’ shawls and bonnets, the one trailing upon the ground, and the other completely burying their little dirty faces. Even these young miserable creatures are fond of drink, and may sometimes be seen slily drawing the cork outside the door, and lifting the poisonous potion to their white withered lips. They have already found that gin numbs and destroys for a time the gnawing pangs of hunger, and they can drink the fiery mixture in its raw state.
-Illustrated London News, May 6, 1848
