[The following takes place during the 18th century Gin Craze in Great Britain.]
Gin, perhaps, because it was a metropolitan, perhaps because it was new and fashionable, was the lady’s favorite. This bothered men, who wrote innumerable pamphlets about how gin made girls licentious and bawdy (which was a bad thing) and drove them to sex, which drove them to pregnancy, during which the consumption of huge amounts of gin damaged the fetuses (this was actually true). And then, when the deformed baby was born, gin made them bad mothers and bad nursemaids. This last bit was true as well, I’m afraid. There was one nursemaid called Mary Estwick who let the child she was meant to be looking after catch fire while she was passed out drunk. You might think that this counted as negligence, but the coroner ruled that she was a good woman and that it was all “owing to that pernicious Liquor.” Anyway, there was another nursemaid who did rather worse when she was putting fuel onto a fire, and mistook the baby for a log with predictable consequences. And there was Judith Defour, who was destined to become the face of gin.
Judith Defour was a poor woman, and she liked her gin. She had a baby girl called Mary who was two years old. The father was long gone and Judith couldn’t afford to feed her child, so she sent her to live at the parish workhouse, which gave her a nice new set of clothes. One Sunday morning Judith walked out from the top of Brick Lane across the fields to the workhouse and asked to take Mary out for the day.
They left at about ten in the morning, and, sometime during the afternoon, Judith met a woman called Sukey and they started drinking gin together. Then at about 7 p.m. they ran out of money. According to Judith it was Sukey who had the bright idea of selling Mary’s clothes to pay for more gin. It was January, so it was already dark. They stripped little Mary of her clothes, and they left her in a ditch in the fields, and they set off back into London to get their gin. But Mary was crying. So Judith Defour went back to Mary, took her out of the ditch, and strangled her until she was dead. Then she put her daughter’s body back in the ditch and went off to get drunk. In her own words: “And, after that, we went together, and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and joined for a quartern of gin.”
Later that night, Judith Defour told her work colleagues what she had done. She was tried, and hanged.
It’s important to note that not all women were murdering their children for gin. According to her mother, Judith Defour “was never in her right mind, but was always roving.”
[…]
Nonetheless, Judith Defour personified everything that everybody hated about gin and led directly to the Gin Act of 1736.
Source:
Forsyth, Mark. “The Gin Craze.” A Short History of Drunkenness. Three Rivers Press, 2017. 163-64. Print.
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One time I was so fucked up, that I could barely walk. Literally throwing my legs out in wild directions as I tried taking each step. I would pause a moment, put my arms out for balance, then continued to swing my legs in wild directions. But I was capable of realizing that I couldn't drive, and sure as fuck wouldn't have thrown a baby in a fire.