Tag: gin craze

Hop-Pickers and Pagan Ritual, from the 1750s to the 1930s

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I’m still working on a series of posts on the South Sea Bubble. It’s kind of fractal: the more you look, the more you see, and it all links so complexly that it’s hard to fit into a single series of posts. So anyway, in the meantime, here’s another subject I’ve been reading up on: the tradition of hop-pickers. It seems like there’s been a surge of nostalgic memory for the tradition of Londoners from the East End making their yearly pilgrimage–a pilgrimage involving 250,000 people at its height, at the beginning of the 20th century–out to East Kent, where a large proportion …

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The Georgian Postal System(s), and Cross-Writing

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As I’ve been harping for a while now, modernity didn’t just spring out of nowhere… it got built out of chaos, and it got built, primarily, in the form of systems, since people realized that systematization was an effective way of converting chaos into order. Modernity thrives on order, for better or worse, but as is clear to anyone living in a big city where modernity is a recent import (and not yet completely metabolized), you cannot have a modern metropolis without highly functional, highly integrated systems. As I’ve mentioned lately, it seems to me that it was in the Georgian era that a lot of …

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Write-a-Thon Final Progress Report, Week 6

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Week 6 of the Write-a-thon ended, for me, yesterday. (I did the writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday.) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.) Clarion West is still taking donations for the next couple of weeks, if you’re interested in supporting an amazing workshop program.

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Books For Malt-Worms

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Today, a light post, but still relevant to beer and brewing in the early 1700s, following my recent post on “Books of Secrets.” Like all industries, beer and brewing are connected to both the industries that produce their raw materials, and spawn other industries as well. One of the more interesting industries that has been spawned by the beer business is the “beer book” business. Most homebrewers think of “beer books” as books on homebrewing–either style guides and recipes or technical manuals. Some beer history buffs will also think of books on beer history, of which a few great ones exist out there. The former has been …

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Bookes of Secrets (and How to Read Them)

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Books of Secrets (also called Secreta) are a whole genre of books I didn’t even know existed a little while ago. Genres (I mean like the novel, the epic poem, the Christian hagiography) are like media: they peak, and then they convalesce, and sometimes they die. The book of secrets is an example of a dead literary genre… sort of, though the conceptual basis and the ideology are alive in well, in transmuted form. In their original form, one might look at them basically as recipe/how-to books–and it was through the translation and distribution of books of secrets that alchemical knowledge proliferated in …

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Geneva: a Poem. (1729)

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Today, another post with some fun stuff (more fun than fungemia, at least) from my ongoing novel research… Back in the early Georgian era, pamphlets were used to do the kind of advocacy and political consciousness-raising we see going on today on Youtube and other social networking sites. One of the more famous ones–and certainly, a poem of interest to anyone concerned with the conflict between gin distillers (who were linked to free-marketeers) versus brewers (who were linked to religious and social reformers) was Elias Blunt’s “Geneva: a Poem” (1729). The full title text is: Geneva: a Poem. Addreſs’d to the Right Honourable Sir R— W—. By Alexander Blunt, Distiller. In …

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Fungemia

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This week, I’ll be posting some “fun” snippets from bits of research devoted to my current novel project.  Probably mostly of interest to people who homebrew, or are interested in yeast and brewing, brewing history, and weird cultural stuff that went on in Renaissance Europe or in Georgian England. Today? Fungemia… which is: fungal infections of the blood. Don’t worry, I don’t have any gory pictures of anything, though if you want, there are plenty of those online, only one google search away. Did you know, you can get a yeast infection in your blood? Well, you can. And even some strains of humble brewer’s/baker’s …

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Write-a-Thon Progress Report, Week 5

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Week 5 of the Write-a-thon has just ended, for me. (For me, since I’m doing my writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday.) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.)

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Stephen Hart’s Canting Lexicon, & More

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A very quick post, because I’m running  against several deadlines but wanted to at least add something here… For those interested in the “rogues’ cant” of Georgian England–something that interests me, though it’ll only get a certain amount of use in my ongoing project (since most of the characters aren’t criminals)–Stephen Hart has the best and most accessible canting lexicon index I’ve managed to find online. He has a bunch of pages of canting words and corresponding definitions arranged by topic or theme. The canting word lists are accessible from here. It’s a very useful resource for anyone in a position like mine, who’d like to look …

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Write-a-Thon Progress Report, Week 4

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Week 4 of the Write-a-thon ended yesterday night. (For me, since I’m doing my writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday, that is, but since I was sick last night I took a night off…) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.)

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