Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
49
Addictive Architecture: The
Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces
and Women’s Desire
Julia Skelly
Abstract. This article critically examines the Crystal Palace, which was
originally built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition in London, and public
drinking spaces such as gin palaces from the perspective of visual culture
studies informed by feminist theory. Many nineteenth-century commentators concerned with alcohol consumption argued that the Crystal Palace
would function as an alternative to the public house for working-class
people. However, some Victorians believed that the Crystal Palace was
an example of “addictive architecture” just like any public drinking space,
because the structure seemed to encourage people to seek immediate gratification through consumption. Both the Crystal Palace and gin palaces are
considered here in light of anxieties about desire in general and women’s
desire in particular. Graphic representations of both architectural sites
are discussed in order to support the argument that women were often
perceived as powerful, even dangerous consumers, whether of alcohol or
material culture. It is proposed that not only did women’s desire for alcohol (among other things) motivate them to enter ostensibly “masculine”
spaces, but also that this desire, which sometimes evolved into addiction,
was a powerful motivator for women’s mobility through the streets and
architectural spaces of nineteenth-century London.
Various architectural sites in Victorian London became the loci of anxieties
about desire in general and women’s desire in particular. This essay will focus
on two of these sites: first, the Crystal Palace (Figure 1), which was designed
by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65) for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and second,
the gin palace, a public drinking space that was often criticized for seducing
drinkers with its ornate decoration and shop-style windows, although reports
of these aesthetic accoutrements were often greatly exaggerated (Figure 2).
According to Mark Girouard, the term “gin palace” began to be used around
1834 to describe “gin shops in the new flamboyant style.” 1 The gin palace was
usually characterized as having gas lighting, large plate glass windows, counters, and decorative elements incorporating iron and wood.2 However, both
writers and artists continued to use terms including “gin shops” and “dram
shops” to describe public drinking spaces that had all or some of these features. For instance, a wood-engraving published in a temperance tract entitled
Julia Skelly is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University in Montreal.
SHAD (2011): 49-65
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
Figure 1. Phillip Brannan, The Crystal Palace – View of the South Side near the
Princes Gate, 1851. Colour lithograph
Source. Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reproduced
with permission.
Figure 2: C. Gregory, A Sunday Afternoon in a Gin Palace, from the Graphic,
February 8, 1879
Source. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans. Reproduced with permission.
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
51
The Witch of Endor and the Dram Shop represents the exterior of a dram
shop with large windows and ornament on the façade. The author of the tract,
probably published in the 1830s, remarks: “If you observe the dram-shops,
you will see…[that] attention [has been paid] to the point of concealment.
In the first place, the inner doors are provided with a spring, so as to shut
again as soon as the customers are entered. In the second place, the windows
are constructed as to render it impossible for passengers without to observe
what is doing within.”3 Critics of gin palaces and other public drinking spaces
perceived the dazzling new aesthetics of glass, lighting and iron as threatening because it was widely believed that the façades would lure working-class
people, especially women, into their depths. As I will show, graphic satire
representing the interiors of public drinking spaces played on these fears, and
added fuel to the flame by portraying a mostly female clientele, thus perpetuating anxieties about women’s gin consumption that had been circulating
since at least the early eighteenth century.4
Although the Crystal Palace has garnered much critical attention in many
disciplines, the structure, which was initially built in Hyde Park in 1851 and
was subsequently rebuilt at Sydenham Hill in 1854 (labelled the “new Crystal Palace” by many commentators), has rarely been discussed in the context
of alcohol consumption.5 Peter Gurney’s work is an exception. In an essay
concerning the Crystal Palace and consumer culture, Gurney observes that
“people went to the Crystal Palace on the spree, deliberately to overindulge
their usually constrained appetites, especially the desire for alcohol. [George]
Gissing… emphasized this particular motivation, understandable given his
personal history. And there is no doubt that a good deal of drinking did indeed
take place at Sydenham, especially on bank holidays.”6 My essay builds on
Gurney’s discussion by showing the extent to which the Palace was discussed
in relation to concerns about drunkenness in nineteenth-century London, and
I examine an illustration from Punch in order to show that women were sometimes perceived as powerful, and therefore dangerous, consumers within the
walls of the Crystal Palace.
Nineteenth-century critics of both the Crystal Palace and the gin palace
were ultimately concerned with the possibility that desire could mutate into
addiction; that is, that the desire “to fill” – with things or with alcohol – would
subsume people in a constantly self-perpetuating cycle of repetition and elusive pleasure. In the first section of this essay I demonstrate how the Crystal
Palace at Sydenham came to be pivotal to debates about Sabbatarianism and
drunkenness. In subsequent sections I discuss three moral narratives that accrued to both the Crystal Palace and the gin palace. First, concerns about
desire, whether for alcohol or other commodities; second, the presence of
women in public, actively looking, desiring, and consuming; and third, concerns about the use of glass and other aesthetic strategies to seduce and dazzle
the spectator/drinker. I attempt to shed new light on both the Crystal Palace
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
and gin palaces by examining each structure from a perspective influenced by
feminist theory, and I propose that it is illuminating to consider these architectural structures against each other in order to develop further insight into
Victorian anxieties about women’s desire, pleasure and consumption.
In Space, Time, and Perversion (1995), Elizabeth Grosz remarks that a feminist theorist “might take many different approaches in exploring the theme of
women and architecture.”7 Jane Rendell has argued in a discussion regarding
Regency architecture that “Consumption, by virtue of the fact that it is neither
production nor reproduction, runs against the grain of the separate spheres
ideology, and so [certain] spaces were represented as sites where social codes
were transgressed.”8 The separate spheres ideology posited public spaces as
masculine and private domestic spaces as feminine.9 In the latter half of this
essay I examine nineteenth-century representations, both visual and textual,
of women’s consumption at the Crystal Palace and in public drinking spaces
as part of a feminist project concerned with how women’s desire, consumption and addictions were perceived and pathologized during the Victorian period in Britain.10 I propose, ultimately, that not only did women’s desire for
alcohol (among other things) motivate them to enter ostensibly ‘masculine’
spaces, but also that this desire, which sometimes evolved into addiction, was
a powerful motivator for women’s mobility through the streets and architectural spaces of nineteenth-century London.11
The New Crystal Palace, Sabbatarianism and Sobriety
Following the Great Exhibition in 1851, many people, including Paxton himself, proposed that the Crystal Palace be rebuilt at another site.12 Those who
did not want the Palace to be reconstructed focused on the original promise
by the Great Exhibition’s organizers that the Palace would be a temporary,
ephemeral structure. One author reminded his readers that the Palace had been
made out of glass in part because it could “be put together and taken down
with much less labour, and much less time, than an ordinary building.”13 Most
of the commentators who supported the reconstruction emphasized the building’s potential to draw people away from public drinking spaces, especially on
Sundays (see Figure 2). Charles Vaughan, for instance, wrote that “the question really lies not between the Crystal Palace and the Church, but between
the Crystal Palace and the street or the gin-shop.”14 He was responding to the
Sabbatarian argument that, like the pub, the Crystal Palace should be closed
on Sundays, preserving the Sabbath for rest and religious worship.15 Similarly,
pamphleteer John Rose Butlin stated that “The churches are unvisited, while
those who should be worshiping God give themselves up to every kind of vice
and folly,” and, like Vaughan, he suggested that the Crystal Palace be rebuilt
at Sydenham and allowed to be open on Sundays so that working-class people
had a place to go other than the public house or gin palace.16
Equally, two anonymous authors, who identified themselves as the ghosts
of Calvin and Luther, alluding to major figures of the Reformation, supported
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
53
the opening of the Crystal Palace on Sundays, because they also believed
that it would increase sobriety among working-class people.17 Their pamphlet
suggests that they regarded the Sabbatarian argument as an excessively fanatical approach to Protestant values. “Practically,” the authors write, “the
clergy argue the question as if it were the Palace against the Church. But it is
not so. In Principle it is just this: shall it be the Gin Palace or the Crystal Palace – drunkenness or temperance?”18 This was certainly a question that was
repeatedly asked in the nineteenth century, but there are others that are even
more illuminating for my purposes here. Such as: what did the Crystal Palace
and the gin palace have in common according to nineteenth-century critics?
How was women’s presence in these spaces perceived? And in what ways did
the two sites – as ideas, as spaces, and as visual and material culture – offer
potential for women to experience desire for not only alcohol, but also mobility, vision and pleasure?
The Desire to Fill
Although many Victorians believed that the Crystal Palace, if rebuilt at
Sydenham, would serve as an alternative to the gin palace, there were those
who had suggested during the Great Exhibition that the Palace itself was a
space that encouraged consumption and immediate gratification not unlike
spaces constructed specifically for the purposes of drinking. In Stone the First
at the Great Glass House (1851), the anonymous author employs the spatial
act of “filling” as a metaphor for the intoxicating effect that the Crystal Palace
supposedly had on its visitors. The Palace is “filled, first with odds and ends
from all corners of the earth, and next with starers.”19 The author suggests that
while the building is filled with “starers,” the starers are subsequently filled,
in a superficial way, by the “odds and ends,” a phrase that effectively empties
the objects exhibited in the Crystal Palace of their cultural and artistic capital.
The belief in the potentially intoxicating or narcotic effect that art and commodities, among other things, had on people was part of a Victorian mistrust
of anything that threatened to alter an individual’s perception of reality.20 Desire, imagination, intoxication, and other routes to pleasure, both physical and
mental, were regarded as destabilizing forces, in part because they allowed a
person to escape their everyday lives. Thus the desire to fill with art, novels,
alcohol, or drugs was viewed by many as threatening to the equilibrium of
British society. As the editors of Victorian Prism (2007) observe:
Like the commodities it enshrined, the Exhibition stimulated both persistent attempts to attain the gratification of capturing it and the awareness that its value
would always remain elusive. It was both monumental and essentially transient,
colossal and evanescent. Like the plate glass that covered its surface, the Crystal
Palace could appear the architectural symbol of either the liberal utopia of “transparent” social relations founded upon free trade, or modernity’s false promise
of such transparency (since the building reflected light and thus “closed itself to
outside scrutiny”).21
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According to this reading of the structure, any gratification enjoyed at the
Crystal Palace was, like the pleasure offered by alcohol, ultimately elusive
and transient, and this was certainly how many nineteenth-century commentators perceived the Palace and its contents.
Many critics of the Crystal Palace were concerned about people’s desire “to
fill,” a phrase that I am using to describe people’s desire to consume (anything)
with the specific intention of having a mind-altering experience. The author
of Stone the First at the Great Glass House, for example, was suspicious of
any “filling” that might lead to a distorted sense of reality, and by extension,
responsibility, and perhaps also respectability, particularly for working-class
people who raised the greatest amount of alarm for Sabbatarian commentators.22 The text reveals a discursive thread between perceptions of the Crystal
Palace and the gin palace that positioned them both as spaces that provided
transient, and ultimately unfulfilling, satisfaction for the individuals who entered them. The implicit message in this pamphlet is that the people who fill
the Crystal Palace will leave with altered perceptions. The same argument, of
course, could be made for any public drinking space. The author asserts: “I
am no enemy of Caesar, but I am to the false palaces that he would raise; to
the delusions into which he would feed the multitude; to the stones which he
would give the hungry children instead of bread; to the glass sausages with
which he would cram them.”23 The author is suggesting that the objects found
in the Crystal Palace were no more than “glass sausages” that look like they
will satiate, but which leave the hungry person hungrier than ever.
In “Smoking, Addiction, and the Making of Time” (2002), Helen Keane
observes that addiction is the potentially endless repetition of pleasure, highlighting the “addictiveness of desire itself.”24 Anxieties about desire led concerned parties in the nineteenth century to argue that anything pleasurable
could be addictive, and therefore dangerous. As Butlin remarked in 1853,
“The poor are addicted to sensual gratifications, but scarcely more so than
many above them who feel no great relish for mental enjoyments.”25 If we
extend the author’s argument in Stone the First at the Great Glass House,
it would not be outrageous to conclude that he perceived the Crystal Palace
as addictive architecture or as an addictive space because of the promise of
pleasure it offered, and the false gratification it provided. According to literary
historian Isobel Armstrong, glass was fundamental to the addictiveness of the
Crystal Palace. Within the glass walls, “things take on a strange status, they
become anomalies. And with this, the meanings of need and luxury (there is
no gap between need and desire) begin to lose the power of opposition as what
these categories mean is thrown into question.”26 When there is no longer a
gap between need and desire, the experience of consumption has, I would
argue, evolved into addiction.
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
55
Gin Shops and Gin Palaces
Like the Crystal Palace, public drinking spaces were perceived in the nineteenth century as sites of potential addiction that seduced the spectator/drinker
through aesthetic strategies such as the use of glass and decorative elements.
Charles Dickens published an article entitled “Gin Shops” in 1836 that underscores the optical seductions associated with new forms of public drinking
spaces:
Six or eight years ago the epidemic began to display itself among the linendrapers and haberdashers. The primary symptoms were an inordinate love of
plate-glass, and a passion for gas-lights and gilding. The disease gradually progressed, and at last attained a fearful height. Quiet dusty old shops in different
parts of town were pulled down; spacious premises with stuccoed front and gold
letters were erected instead; floors were covered with Turkey carpets; roofs supported by massive pillars; doors knocked into windows, a dozen squares of glass
into one.27
The epidemic that Dickens satirically refers to here is the desire for, and creation of, highly decorative drinking spaces. He identifies another “symptom”
as “a strong desire to stick the royal arms over the shop door, and a great rage
for mahogany, varnish, and expensive floor cloth,” and refers to “stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and illuminated clocks at the corner
of every street.”28 Although he called his article “Gin Shops,” the aesthetic
features that Dickens mentions – glass, gas-lighting, gilding, gold, mahogany
– were among the features associated with the structure that came to be known
as a gin palace. Dickens’s emphasis on the use of glass as a key element in
this type of structure denotes a parallel between the architectural designs of
gin palaces and the Crystal Palace, which was famously made of cast-iron and
over a million feet of glass.
It would be helpful here to further clarify the histories of public drinking
spaces that were linked with gin during the Victorian period. Regarding gin
shops in eighteenth-century London, Jessica Warner has remarked that little
is known about this type of space: “Hidden from view and known only to local customers, these shops have all but vanished from the historical record.”29
This kind of addictive space – that is, a space where addictions were believed
to be initiated and exacerbated – received negative press in the eighteenth
century, just as gin palaces did in the nineteenth. Henry Fielding, for instance,
wrote that “Gin shops are undoubtedly the Nurseries of all manner of Vice and
Wickedness.”30
According to Peter Clark, the “great age” of gin palaces arrived in the 1830s
and 1840s when “their proprietors and builders scaled increasingly extravagant heights of architectural bravura,” but that even before 1830 gin-drinkers
were flocking to the “handsome [gin] shops” on Holborn Hill.31 Thomas L.
Reed attributes the increase in attention to the aesthetic seductiveness of ginselling spaces to competition with alehouses that accelerated around the time
of the Beerhouses Act of 1830.32 Girouard, however, is adamant that the or-
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nate decoration and other aesthetic elements associated with gin palaces were
introduced prior to the 1830 Act.33 He argues that, due to the seductiveness of
public drinking spaces that sold gin, the British government introduced the
Beerhouses Act in order to increase consumption of beer. As he observes, “All
duty on beer was abolished and beer licences were taken out of the control
of the licensing justices and made available to any householder who paid a
two guinea fee. Within a year 31,000 new beer licences were issued and the
total number of licensed houses in England and Wales increased from around
50,000 to 80,000 as a result.”34 This increase in the number of beerhouses
inevitably led the owners of gin shops, and later gin palaces, to employ even
more elaborate aesthetic strategies in order to compete with the beerhouses.
The Rev. Henry Worsley, writing in 1849, appears to substantiate Girouard’s claim when he observes that the British Parliament wanted to position beer as the national beverage of Britain as opposed to gin, which was a
foreign product. The result was that “A competition was immediately opened
between the beer-shops and the public houses; and the proprietors of the latter, since their custom was very much diminished by the new additions to the
trade, were obliged to have recourse to fresh expedients, and endeavored to
fascinate the eyes of passengers by outward decorations, and the glittering display of their spirit-houses: in fine, converted the old taverns into the modern
gin-palace.”35 Like Dickens, Worsley’s emphasis on the seductive optics of
the “modern gin palace” reveals an anxiety about the assumed impact of these
new opulent aesthetics, namely that more people would enter these spaces and
consume more alcohol.
If we accept as fact Dickens’s statement that the decoration associated with
gin palaces began to appear “six to eight years” before 1836 – that is, the late
1820s – we can conclude that Girouard is correct when he argues that the new
style associated with gin palaces did not come into existence after the Beerhouses Act of 1830, but was already being used in the 1820s. As noted earlier,
Girouard suggests that the term “gin palace” was coined around 1834.36 As
Dickens’s 1836 article shows, however, nineteenth-century writers were still
using the term “gin shop” to describe buildings with the seductive aesthetics
increasingly associated with buildings I have been calling “gin palaces” in
this essay.37
Dr. Kate Mitchell, a Lecturer on Physiology and Health at the Crystal Palace, was, like so many of her contemporaries, attentive to the aesthetics of
public drinking spaces. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century she remarked: “The public-houses must be rivaled in brilliancy, decorative work,
and general attractiveness.” Mitchell proposed that coffee-taverns be altered
aesthetically in order to seduce drinkers away from public houses, but she
observed that “there are few coffee-taverns that are rendered sufficiently attractive to induce working men and women to quit the public house for them.”
She suggested that the coffee-taverns of the future have a “brilliantly lighted
and handsomely decorated bar to take them in,” and she was hopeful that
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
57
“the coffee-taverns will rear their inviting fronts where now the public-houses
stand with their fatal and awful attractiveness.”38
Mitchell’s concluding phrase recalls a comment made by art critic John
Ruskin in his analysis of William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience
(1853). In a letter to the Times published on May 25, 1854, Ruskin observed
that the painting had been widely misunderstood. His description of the painting, which represents a woman rising from a man’s lap in a domestic interior,
is an example of the way Victorian viewers often read architecture and space
for indications of morality or, in this case, immorality: “That furniture so carefully painted, even to the last vein of rosewood – is there is nothing to be learnt
from the terrible luster of it, from its fatal newness; nothing there that has the
old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home?”39 For
Ruskin, the “fatal newness” of the décor indicates the moral decrepitude of
the man and his mistress. Likewise, Mitchell refers to public houses’ “fatal
and awful attractiveness” in order to emphasize the moral dangers she perceived within the walls of that particular kind of drinking space. Whether or
not Mitchell was aware of Ruskin’s art criticism, I would suggest that their use
of similar language reveals how architectural sites intended for drinking came
to be read as morally-loaded visual culture in the nineteenth century.
Women’s Spaces and Women’s Consumption
So far I have been concerned primarily with elucidating intersecting discourses related to the Crystal Palace and gin palaces, which were both perceived
as potentially mind-altering spaces due to the objects and substances that they
offered up for consumption. In the remainder of this essay I critically examine
visual and textual representations for traces of nineteenth-century anxieties
about women’s desire for alcohol, vision, mobility and agency, among other
things.
In a pamphlet published in 1851 Joseph Silk Buckingham observed that
there were fourteen principal gin shops in London at the time of his writing:
two in Whitechapel, three in Mile End, one in East Smithfield, one in the
Borough, one in Old Street, two in Holborn, one in Bloomsbury, and three in
Westminster. In these gin shops, Buckingham remarked, women surpassed the
men “in the grossness and depravity of their demeanor.”40 This statement does
not necessarily reflect a reality in which women engaged in more deviant behavior than men. It is more likely that in Buckingham’s eyes, the women’s behavior was far worse than anything a man could do, because of the long-held
belief that women’s drunkenness was morally more reprehensible than men’s.
In a text published around 1888 entitled Babylonian Cups; or Behind the
Scenes. How they Drink in London, the narrator describes his experiences sitting in a “ladies’ pub” observing the many kinds of women who (according to
him) drink in public.41 Many nineteenth-century writers concerned with alcohol alluded to Babylon in order to draw an imaginary link between that late,
great empire and Britain. As feminist art historian Lynda Nead has shown, the
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
image of London as “Victorian Babylon” was an uneasy one. Babylon had
apparently descended into decadence and disappeared, and writers concerned
with drunkenness warned that London was heading in the same direction.42
Dr. Mitchell remarked that “A nation’s downfall has nearly always been preceded by a period of licentiousness in drink, manners and morals,” and suggested that Britain at the fin de siècle was characterized by decadence and
excess that foreshadowed ruin.43
In the preface to Babylonian Cups, Henry Williams observes that women’s
drinking had increased since the Grocers’ Licensing Act of 1872, and he remarks that before the Act was passed a lady would pause before she or her
maid would actually go into a public house to purchase and consume alcohol,
but with the Grocers’ License “this barrier to indulgence is effectually removed.”44 The barrier Williams refers to, of course, is not only a legal one, but
also a mental one: an imaginary boundary imbued with physical dimensions
(i.e. the doorway of a public house) and constructed by both the ideology of
separate spheres and beliefs about women’s alcohol consumption. The Act,
which permitted grocers to sell wine if they had a magistrate’s certificate,
provided women with an alternative to entering spaces that were perceived
as “masculine,” and nineteenth-century commentators clearly aligned the Act
specifically with women’s alcohol consumption. J. Johnston observed in 1889,
Baneful as is the effect of excessive drink upon men it is infinitely more so upon
women, and, whatever be the explanation, it is undeniable that it exercises a more
potent influence and takes a deeper hold upon a woman who has given way to it
than a man. Reclamation is more hopeless; and it is to be regretted that they have
so many facilities for obtaining drink “on the sly.” Among these are the grocers’
and confectioners’ licenses which do most certainly encourage secret drinking
among women… As a rule a man drinks openly, but a woman does it secretly,
the last persons to suspect her being often her husband and her most intimate
friends.45
Johnston can offer no explanation for why the effect of alcohol is more “baneful” for a woman, nor can he explain why it takes a “deeper hold” of female drinkers. Without providing any empirical evidence, Johnston implies
that women’s alcohol consumption is somehow worse than men’s, whether
morally or otherwise. Furthermore, he suggests that “as a rule” women drink
secretly and not in public spaces, a statement that was repeatedly contradicted
by nineteenth-century images and texts, including Babylonian Cups.
Babylonian Cups is presented in the preface as non-fiction, and the anonymous author is identified as a “Special Commissioner” in order to imbue the
text with a tone of disinterested authority, but one must be mindful of the
fact that, just as with images, nineteenth-century texts concerning alcohol
consumption were doing discursive work, and were inevitably informed by
various anxieties, such as, for instance, those concerning women’s desire for
alcohol and their presence in public drinking spaces. Literary scholar Susan
Zieger has shown how female morphine addicts were represented as devious and secretive in nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction.46 As we have
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59
seen, women’s drinking was also described as secretive, in part because some
of it was, but despite the ideological construction of public drinking spaces
as “masculine,” and the deeply rooted belief that women who drank in public were either prostitutes or promiscuous, the presence of women of various
classes in public drinking spaces was widely reported in textual accounts and
frequently represented in graphic art. Although, as Nead has pointed out, visual images should not be viewed as straightforward reflections of reality, it
is noteworthy that in nineteenth-century graphic representations of gin shops
and gin palaces there are always women drinking alongside the men.47
In Thomas Rowlandson’s engraving The Dram Shop (Figure 3), from the
series The English Dance of Death, the women dramatically outnumber the
men. Indeed, they cram the pictorial space from the foreground, where the
counter is depicted, all the way to the upper left corner of the image (the back
of the dram shop) where the viewer can make out two women engaged in a
physical altercation. Compared to the approximately fifteen women depicted
in this space, there are four figures that are obviously male. In the right foreground three women recline on the floor in varying degrees of drunkenness.
One is fully prostrate with her face on the floor, the middle figure leans against
a barrel of Old Tom with both of her breasts hanging out of her dress, and
the old woman behind her sits hunched over with a pipe stuck in her mouth,
looking as though she has taken up full-time residence in the dram shop. The
women in Rowlandson’s engraving are of different ages and different classes.
Physiognomies denote both social status and the length of time the women
have been consuming alcohol. The three young women at the counter, for inFigure 3. Thomas Rowlandson, The Dram Shop, from The English Dance of
Death, 1815-16. Coloured aquatint.
Source: University of Glasgow Library, Gemmell Collection. (Photo: University of Glasgow
Library, Special Collections.) Reproduced with permission.
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
stance, have smooth white faces, and are clearly only beginning their relationship with gin. They are not prostitutes or working women with weather-beaten
faces who have had to stand outside for hours in the sun or rain, but ladies of
the middle or upper classes.48 The women in the background, however, have
faces that are barely finished sketches, which gives them a haggard, even bestial appearance, and they are thus classed as the working poor.
Rowlandson’s engraving probably inspired graphic artist George Cruikshank’s engraving The Gin Shop (1829), which also represents the interior of
a drinking space. Like the earlier engraving, Cruikshank depicts more female
drinkers than male drinkers. Here there are two women, one man, one young
girl and one boy, and one of the women spoon feeds gin into her baby’s mouth,
this being one of the major sources of anxiety for eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury social reformers concerned with women’s alcohol consumption.49 In
Rowlandson’s image a skeleton pours poison into barrels of gin. Cruikshank,
on the other hand, portrays a barmaid who is actually a skeleton, but is shown
holding a mask of young feminine beauty over its skull. As I will demonstrate,
the barmaid is a central figure in the dynamics represented in Babylonian
Cups as well. Finally, whereas Rowlandson’s dram shop is bare of decoration,
Cruikshank’s gin shop is more ornamental, with garlands and coffins being the
primary decorative elements. This inclusion of ornamentation, though clearly
satirical, suggests that Cruikshank was responding to the new trend in decoration apparent in gin shops.
The author of Babylonian Cups spends a considerable amount of time describing women’s drinking habits. He – and it will become apparent that it is
significant that the author is male – sets out to offer some “sketches” of the
darker scenes of drinking practices in London, and in doing so establishes
himself as a kind of flâneur who observes the goings on in various urban locations and describes what he sees. But his privileged identity as a white male is
complicated, if not entirely undermined, by the gender relations at play in one
particular space. In a chapter on the “Ladies’ Pub,” the author reports that he
entered the pub around 11 a.m., “the time that ‘little sinking’ so well known to
the drinker, is apt to most forcibly develop itself.”50 This space, while related
in some ways to a gin palace, is not the same thing. It has similar, ornate decoration to the space described by Dickens in “Gin Shops,” but the beverage of
choice is sherry.51 The author observes that customers “must retire into semiprivacy, order a cake or a tart, and then the sherry follows as though it were
quite an after-thought on their part – a mere circumstance of the cake, and
not the circumstance which caused them to enter.”52 This exchange indicates
a non-verbal communication between the barmaid and the female customer.
Entering the space, if the customer is a woman, is equivalent to entering a
silent contract: if I enter, I want a drink. Words are unnecessary.
The customers include a “female drunkard… politely called a dipsomaniac,
who is in as clear a state of ‘shakes’ as woman well can be.”53 The female
drunkard’s body gives her away as an alcoholic – her delirium tremens in-
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61
dicate that her body is in withdrawal and needs a drink to reach equilibrium
again; alcohol for this woman is no longer a luxury. It becomes clear to the author that unaccompanied men are not welcome, precisely so that women like
the “female drunkard” do not have to exhibit their addiction to the opposite
sex, although the journey on the streets of London to the pub is another matter. The barmaids “stare such [male] personages frigidly out the shop if they
are weak-minded enough to go, which I was not.”54 The power of the female
gaze is apparent here, claiming ownership over a space intended for female
pleasure (or need) by silently pressuring men to vacate the premises. It is left
to the barmaids to drive men away with their gaze.55 Nonetheless, the female
customers are not described in terms of active looking, whether at men or at
each other. They are therefore easily objectified by the author.
Although the “Special Commissioner” observes that women of the upper
classes continually roll up to the doors in their carriages, thus emphasizing
that they are not skulking in or concealing their identities, the fact remains that
the space under discussion is not a public house in the traditional sense. It is
a space where women go, “unaccompanied,” to drink in “semi-privacy” away
from the prying eyes of men. The women who enter the ladies’ pub are part of
a community, because they have all entered with the same intention and the
same object of desire. The barmaids’ stares are clearly a feeble mechanism for
controlling who enters the space, but this example of the attempt to harness
the power of the gaze destabilizes the dichotomy that has traditionally positioned men as privileged viewers and women as passive objects.56
The gaze was also central to the dynamics in play at the Crystal Palace. The
“exhibitionary complex,” according to Tony Bennett, describes the transfer of
objects and bodies from “enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed… into progressively more open and public arenas.”57
In his discussion of the Great Exhibition of 1851, he argues that the men and
women who went to view the objects on display were also on display themselves. The architectural design for the Crystal Palace allowed for optimal
viewing, and “while everyone could see, there were also vantage points from
which everyone could be seen, thus combining the functions of spectacle and
surveillance.”58
This architectural design was related to that of department stores in both
France and England, where the consumption of commodities was often overshadowed by the spectacle of consumers, and it also recalls the dynamic enacted at the theatre during this period.59 Both the Crystal Palace and department
stores, therefore, had panoptic qualities; the men and women who circulated
in these spaces were aware of being watched, so their self-surveillance was
highly attuned while they performed naturalness, affecting the appearance of
not realizing they were objects of other people’s gazes.
An image published in Punch on May 17, 1851 reveals anxiety, or at least
awareness, about women’s presence, their desire to consume, and the power
of their gazes within the Crystal Palace. Four women are shown lined up,
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
aggressively facing a gentleman in a top hat who leans back with his hands
raised in a gesture of surrender. The women hold their opened parasols as
weapons or shields, and their doll-like faces frame large staring eyes. Entitled
The Ladies and the Police – The Battle of the Crystal Palace, the illustration
positions the women as consuming subjects rather than passive objects. The
accompanying text reads in part: “Nobody doubts the courage of the Police;
but the gallantry of the body is being every day severely tested at the Great
Exhibition… they find it almost impossible to clear the Crystal Palace, when
resisted by the powerful band of ladies who oppose the civil power at the point
of the parasol… Who could stand against a battery from the fire of the flashing
eyes of angry ladies?”60 The women’s desire in this image is not specifically
for alcohol, but rather for the right to be present, to move, to look, to see, and
to consume the things on display. Despite the obviously humorous tone apparent in the text, the Punch illustration points to a very real anxiety felt by many
Victorians, which revolved around women’s desire to consume. When this desire was for alcohol, especially when desire had become addiction (as with the
“female drunkard” in Babylonian Cups), women became increasingly willing
to transgress social expectations and to take up space in public.
Conclusion
My objective in this essay has been to be attentive to two very different architectural structures as both visual culture and material sites that had significant roles in discourses concerning alcohol consumption, desire and women’s
presence in public spaces. I have set out to present new perspectives on both
the Crystal Palace and the gin palace by reading these structures against each
other through a framework of visual culture studies that has been informed by
feminist theory.
In my discussion of Rowlandson’s representation of a dram shop, my intent
was not to argue that this image necessarily reflected the reality, statistically,
of male drinkers and female drinkers in public drinking spaces, but rather that
in producing graphic representations that would have been widely circulated,
and that appeared to criticize the drinking spaces themselves, graphic artists
portrayed women drinking alongside men – indeed, they represented more
women drinking than men – because the reality of female drunkenness and
women’s addictions was very often perceived as more threatening to the social body than male drunkenness and addiction.61 Furthermore, I suggest that
women’s desire for alcohol was a powerful motivating force for transgressing
gendered spatial boundaries and entering ostensibly “masculine” spaces, or,
in the case of the ladies’ pub, finding spaces intended for a female community.
In reading both the Crystal Palace and gin palaces as architectural sites that
provoked anxieties about consumption in general and women’s consumption
in particular, I have attempted to show how visual and textual representations
were used in the nineteenth century to construct discourses regarding women
and alcohol. Intersecting discourses related to the Crystal Palace and gin pal-
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
63
aces were not always related to gender, but the textual and visual representations that I have discussed reveal that anxieties about these architectural sites
often hinged on women’s presence within them, as well as on women’s desire
to consume.
Concordia University, Montreal
[email protected].
Endnotes
I am extremely grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for
a Doctoral Fellowship that permitted me to undertake research in Britain for this essay and for a
Postdoctoral Fellowship that provided me with the luxury of time needed to complete the editing
process. Many thanks to my anonymous readers at The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs for
their very helpful comments and insights, and also to Janice Helland, Katherine Romba, Robert
Morrison, Clive Robertson and Mary Hunter for reading an earlier version of this essay. Finally,
I wish to thank Angela McShane and James Kneale for their work on this special issue of SHAD.
1. Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 21.
2. Ibid., 22, 24, 26.
3. The Witch of Endor and the Dram Shop (London: John Mason, 183-?), 3. The tract is bound
in a collection of 97 other tracts published by John Mason. It is held in the V&A archive at Blythe
House, London, and is dated based on the period of activity of the printer, James Nichols, whose
press was located at 46 Hoxton-Square, London.
4. See Peter Clark, “The ‘Mother Gin’ Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 38 (1988): 63-84; Jessica Warner and
Frank Ivis, “Gin and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 24
(Spring 2000): 85-105; Jonathan White, “The ‘Slow but Sure Poyson’: The Representation of Gin
and its Drinkers, 1736-1751,” Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003): 35-64.
5. The new Crystal Palace burned down in 1936.
6. Peter Gurney, “‘A Palace for the People’? The Crystal Palace and Consumer Culture in
Victorian England,” in Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, eds. James Buzard,
Joseph W. Childers, Eileen Gillooly (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,
2007), 44.
7. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York
and London: Routledge, 1995), 111.
8. Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 17.
9. For an important discussion of the separate spheres ideology and modern art by a feminist
art historian, see Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 1988):
50-90.
10. For further discussion on this issue, see Julia Skelly, Addiction and British Visual Culture,
1751-1919 (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming), especially chapters 1 and 3.
11. On the masculinity of public drinking spaces in nineteenth-century England, see Peter
Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830 (Essex: Longman Group Limited,
1983), especially 13, 115, 131-32, 225, 341.
12. Joseph Paxton, What is to Become of the Crystal Palace? (London: Bradbury & Evans,
1851).
13. Greville, An Answer to ‘What is to Become of the Crystal Palace?’ (London: John Ollivier,
1851), 16. Emphasis in the original.
14. Charles John Vaughan, A Few Words on the Crystal Palace Question (London: John Murray, 1852), 21.
15. For a discussion on the history of Sabbatarianism in England, see Bryan W. Ball, The
64
Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 25 (2011)
Seventh-Day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales, 1600-1800 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
16. John Rose Butlin, The Sabbath Made for Man or, Defence of the Crystal Palace (London:
Saunders and Otley, 1853), 10-11.
17. Sermons in Glass: or, A Sunday Visit to the Crystal Palace Defended, by the Ghosts of
Calvin and Luther (London: J. Chapman, 1854), 17.
18. Ibid., 20-21.
19. Stone the First at the Great Glass House. To be Completed in Six Stones (London: William
Edward Painter, c.1851), 5.
20. Susan Zieger has shown how some Victorians compared the reading of sensation novels
with dram-drinking. Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2008), 16. See also Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
21. James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly, “Introduction,” in Buzard, Childers
and Gillooly, Victorian Prism, 1.
22. See Peter Bailey, “Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?: Towards a Role Analysis
of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12 (1979): 336-53.
23. Stone the First, 10.
24. Helen Keane, “Smoking, Addiction, and the Making of Time,” in High Anxieties: Cultural
Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 133.
25. John Rose Butlin, The Sabbath Made for Man or, Defence of the Crystal Palace (London:
Saunders and Otley, 1853), 11.
26. Isobel Armstrong, “Language of Glass: The Dreaming Collection,” in Buzard, Childers
and Gillooly, Victorian Prism, 57.
27. Charles Dickens, “Gin Shops,” in Dickens’ London (London: Folio Society, 1966), 71.
Originally published in 1836.
28. Dickens, “Gin Shops,” 72.
29. Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (New York: Random
House, 2002), 55.
30. Quoted in Warner, Craze, 56.
31. Clark, The English Alehouse, 296.
32. See Thomas L. Reed, The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Co.,
Inc., 2006), 49.
33. Girouard, Victorian Pubs, 32.
34. Ibid., 21.
35. Rev. Henry Worsley, Juvenile Depravity (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849), 129.
36. Girouard, Victorian Pubs, 21.
37. Of course, despite my wish to be precise about what I mean by “gin palace,” it is clear that
Victorian commentators were concerned about any space where alcohol was available, whether
they called it a public house, gin shop, gin palace or dram shop.
38. Kate Mitchell, The Drink Question: Its Social and Medical Aspects (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. and British Women’s Temperance Association, c. 1889), 253, 254.
39. Quoted in Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1999), 96. Emphasis added.
40. James Silk Buckingham, An Earnest Plea for the Reign of Temperance and Peace, as Conducive to the Prosperity of Nations. Submitted to the Visitors of the Great Exhibition, in which are
Collected the Rich Treasures of Art and Industry form all Quarters of the Globe (London: Peter
Jackson, late Fisher Son, and Co., 1851), 33.
41. “Special Commissioner,” Babylonian Cups; or, Behind the Scenes. How they Drink in London (London: E.W. Allen, c. 1888).
42. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3.
Skelly: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.
65
43. Mitchell, The Drink Question, 26.
44. Henry W. Williams, “Preface,” in Babylonian Cups; or, Behind the Scenes. How they Drink
in London (London: E.W. Allen, c.1888), 6-7.
45. J. Johnston, Alcohol from a Medical Point of View (London: Barret, Sons and Co, 1889),
10.
46. Zieger, Inventing the Addict, 131.
47. See Lynda Nead’s critique of reflection theory in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of
Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 4.
48. On representations of working women, see Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working
Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
49. Alvin E. Rodin, “Infants and Gin Mania in 18th-Century London,” Journal of the American
Medical Association 245 (1981): 1237-39.
50. Babylonian Cups, 16.
51. The space is described as a “handsomely-decorated saloon – not a saloon of garish show –
that would never suit the customers; but a saloon rich and luxurious, crimson silk hangings, velvet
lounges, chairs cunningly devised to support the small of the back, marble tables.” Babylonian
Cups, 16.
52. Ibid., 16. Emphasis in the original.
53. Ibid., 18.
54. Ibid., 21.
55. For an illuminating discussion on the barmaid as a figure who carefully marshaled her
own sexuality and the desire of her male customers (in part through her gaze), see Peter Bailey,
“Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype,” Gender & History 2
(1990), 163.
56. For a discussion of the gaze that has been fundamental for many feminist theorists, see
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989).
57. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (1998), 74.
58. Ibid., 78.
59. See, for example, Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to
the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
60. “The Ladies and the Police – The Battle of the Crystal Palace “ Punch, vol. XX (1851),
202.
61. For more on this see Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, “‘Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded
heart’: The Drinking Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Canada,” in Drink in Canada: Historical Essays, ed. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1993): 70-114.