And so it is…
Brennan, Thomas Edward.
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (review)
Journal of Social History – Volume 37, Number 3, Spring 2004, pp. 774-776George Mason University Press
Thomas Edward Brennan – Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (review) – Journal of Social History 37:3 Journal of Social History 37.3 (2004) 774-776 Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. By Jessica Warner (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. xviii plus 267 pp. $24.95). Although presented as a “Tragicomedy in three acts” and in a style that occasionally descends to an arch burlesque of the eighteenth-century works she often quotes from, Jessica Warner’s Craze is a serious scholarly study of the first and, arguably, most notorious drug scare in history. The rapid spread of gin consumption, from its mid-seventeenth century invention to the squalor depicted in the Hogarth engraving “Gin Lane” a hundred years later, continues to challenge the historian’s understanding of popular culture and the policy maker’s views on drug policies and social control. This expertly argued book has compelling insights to offer both fields. The gin craze itself, the consumption of which quadrupled in three…