Gin Lane
1750/1
14” X 11 7/8” (H X W)
View the full resolution plate here.
Reminiscent of Moll’s adoptive “Mother” Needham who initiates her charge’s destruction, "Gin Lane" gives us a fatally negligent mother prominently foregrounded in the plate. Her consumption of the vile substance has led her to drunkenly release her nursling to his death. Derek Jarrett comments that this scene was not an uncommon phenomenon as “Gin was often taken, quite literally, with the mother’s milk” (England 63) He further notes that "Other children, perhaps more fortunate, survived to take gin in a more direct form. . . . In 1769, William Buchan's immensely popular tract 'Domestic Medicine' asserted that half of the children who died in London each year were killed by laudanum, spirits or proprietary sedatives" (England 63). While Buchan's figures are likely an exaggeration, the awareness of a correlation between infant mortality and gin consumption is one that clearly concerned Hogarth and his contemporaries. Gin consumption was associated most explicitly with the poor; Hogarth himself comments that the plate and its companion piece, "Beer Street" were designed to "reform some reigning vices peculiar to the lower class of people" and that "Beer St and Gin Lane were done when the dreadful consequences of gin drinking was at its height. In gin lane every circumstance of its horrid effects are brought to view . . . nothing but (idleness) poverty misery and ruin are to be seen Distress even to madness and death and not a home in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop” (qtd. in Uglow 497). Hogarth forgets the coffin maker, whose office is still in excellent condition. Further horrors are visible in the plate. A man is hanging in the ruins of a crumbling building. A skeletal figure ironically carries in his basket a pamphlet titled 'The Downfall of Madame Gin." An inscription over the door of the bar reads: "Drunk for a penny/ Dead drunk for two pence/ Clean straw for nothing." The poem at the bottom reads:
Gin cursed Fiend with Fury fraught,
Makes human race a prey,
It enters by deadly draught
And steals our Life away
Virtue and Trueth driv'n to Despair
It's rage compells to fly
But cherishes with Hellish Care
Theft, Murder, Perjury
While the gin drinkers are themselves pitable, the most dramatic and tragic aspect of this plate is the effect of this mass drunkenness on the children of the town. The gleefully drunk center figure is not particularly alarming herself, but her child plunging to his death is horrifying. On one side of a print, a mother forces gin down the throat of another infant, recalling Buchan's frightening statistics. A child weeps before a coffin, as a woman’s body—perhaps his mother’s--is lowered into it. Another child is carried on a skewer by an ambling drunk, and two hungry children are forced to share a bone with a dog.
As Moll was either ignored by her potential benefactors (or seduced into prostitution by them), the children of Gin Lane are clearly suffering for the sins of the parents. The blame again falls not on any individual figure here, but on the social conditions which lead to and encourage the behavior exhibited. Although Shesgreen notes that “The instances of the mother compelling her child to drink and the two unaccompanied girls taking liquor suggest that Hogarth saw gin addiction as growing out of social as well as individual causes," the emphasis is on the social (76). As Hogarth's lower classes would have recognized and as Paulson points out, “Beer drinking is a product of prosperity and gin drinking of want" (Popular 6). Furthermore, unlike Hogarth's other print series which develop one character to trace his or her downfall, “Gin Lane” presents us with a montage of alcoholism; there is no one figure here to despise, no lone figure clearly acting on individual impulses. Rather, there seem to be no alternatives in the plate, no options from which to choose. Individuals can be condemned for selecting bad behavior, but acting without alternative affords less culpability. The fault then rests, if Paulson is correct, on that most ultimate of supposed benefactors—the paternal state for allowing such a divide to exist between the prosperous and the wanting.
The caption reads as follows:
Gin cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
Makes human race a Prey;
It enters by a deadly Draught,
And steals our Life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair,
It's Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes, with hellish Care,
Theft, Murder, Perjury.
Damn'd Cup! that on the Vitals preys,
That liquid Fire contains
Which Madness to the Heart conveys,
And rolls it thro' the Veins.
Gin Lane
Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)
This agitated scene illustrates in a somewhat exaggerated manner the ill effects of gin drinking on the working classes. In the right foreground a ballad seller (he holds “The downfall of Mdm Gin”), half-naked because he has pawned his clothes and wasted away to a virtual skeleton, dies clasping a glass in one hand and a large bottle in the other. In contrast to the pretty girl with the key in the same pose in “Beer Street,” an unkempt, stupefied woman, her tattered clothes hanging off her, takes snuff; her unattended son plummets to his death in front of the “Gin Royal.” The cavernous pub, bearing the invitation “Drunk for a Penny/ Dead drunk for two pence/ Clean Straw for Nothing,” seems more a stable than a tavern.
Above it a dog and a man, indistinguishable in their animal ferocity, fight for a bone. Next to them, a person sleeps so soundly that a snail crawls up his arm. A carpenter pawns his coat and saw (his means of livelihood) to the exploitative “S. Gripe Pawn Broker,” the most perverse figure in the print; he examines the goods with an assumed skepticism. An anxious woman stands behind the carpenter to pawn her kitchen utensils. Gripe’s flourishing house, together with the tavern, the undertaker’s, the distiller’s and the church which stands noticeably above and distant from the scene), are the only firm and solidly built houses in the neighborhood.
In the background a beadle oversees two figures lowering a woman’s body into a coffin; beside the coffin, the woman’s child weeps. Behind this burial scene three men in a funeral procession (?) are about to be killed by a collapsing building. Close by, an insane alcoholic, chased by a screaming woman, dances down the street with a pair of bellows on his head and a live child skewered on a staff. Next to him, a woman feeds gin to another infant being wheeled home in a barrow. Behind them a man has taken away a blindfolded cripple’s crutch and uses it as a weapon against him. The staggering cripple aims a stool at his tormenter; a crowd enjoys the cruel battle. In the ruins of a house a barber has committed suicide, possibly from loss of trade and alcoholism. Several figures are being waited on at “Kilman Distiller.” Behind them two unchaperoned young girls from St. Giles (one bears “GS” on her shoulder) parish school drink openly. In front of them a mother forces gin on her unwilling infant. The instances of the mother compelling her child to drink and the two unaccompanied girls taking liquor suggest that Hogarth saw gin addiction as growing out of social as well as individual causes (76).
Gin Lane
Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)
In Hogarth’s Gin Lane the architectural and human decline is plainly the consequence of drinking gin, but there are no signs of crime, only terrible accidents and self-destruction. If we look around to see what led to the gin drinking, we find (besides the distiller) only the pawnbroker who permits, indeed encourages, these people to drink themselves to death. The only other hint is the distant church spire, which indicates an absence rather than an active cause. Hogarth has chosen the church of St. George’s Bloomsbury, the one London church with a king on its steeple (George I), and had substituted by an optical illusion the pawnbroker’s sign in the foreground for the cross. The fortuitous grouping materializes a sign of the conjoined authority of church, state, and pawnbroker. As the local representative of church and state, the pawnbroker allows the drinking to go on. Let me suggest that this peripheral detail, this “mistake” in the employment of compositional perspective (of the sort Hogarth ridiculed in False Perspective) would be seen by a naïve viewer, unconcerned with laws of perspective, in a surer and more immediate way than by the reader of Fielding’s Enquiry—and carries a message quite outside the range of Fielding’s argument.
A church steeple is closer and more prominent in the pedant Beer Street, and the king is manifested front-center in George II’s printed Address to Parliament, which is being read by fat, prosperous tradesmen. The king’s Address offers plans for the “Advancement of our Commerce,” which in terms of the metaphor of fat/beer versus thin/gin means making them fatter. The two prints are as much about the absence of royal/ecclesiastical authority as about the drinking of beer or gin.
The fact is that the government encourages distillation and sales of gin in order to support the landed interest (encourage the production of spirits distilled from home-grown cereals) and provide itself with revenues. As one historian of gin has concluded, “the rise and decline of gin drinking can be related directly to taxation and legislation.” In 1743 Parliament repealed the 1736 Gin Act and adopted a more moderate one, drafted by a prominent distiller of the time. Lord Bathurst’s argument was that since it was impossible to prevent the retailing of spirits, it would be better to license it instead, as this would reduce usage by increasing expense and also provide money for the European wars. The new law, known as the Tippling Act, increased the price of gin, granted licenses only to alehouse license holders, and forbade distillers to retail. But in 1747 the distillers petitioned for the right to retail, and the act was modified accordingly. Once this right was restored to the distillers, gin consumption, which had waned slightly since 1743, rose markedly; drunkenness increased, population declined, and in 1750 a commission reported that in some parts of London one in every five houses was a ginshop. Whether or not Hogarth had this information, he assumes some such situation when he includes the spire of St. George’s in Gin Lane and juxtaposes with this print of the emaciated gin drinkers the prosperity of the fat merchants in Beer Street. The basic cause and effect relationship would be understood by the poor: not that beer drinking leads to prosperity and gin drinking to want, but the reverse. Rather, beer drinking is a product of prosperity and gin drinking of want.
Another pair of details is relevant. In the background of Beer Street a fat, encumbered upper-class woman is being crushed in her too-tight sedan chair (related to the fat beer drinkers in the foreground), and in Gin Lane a poor, emaciated dead woman lies in her coffin. Each woman has two attendants and a box to hold her. Such details may have been overlooked by the audience of responsible citizens to which Fielding addresses himself, but the poor would have seen them straightaway. And once the women are seen as a pair, the fat one becomes a cause of the emaciated, dead one, as do the fat, beer-drinking purveyors of essential commodities in the foreground.
The two plates convey an implied contrast between the state’s paternalist duty to regulate on the old mercantilist basis and the new ideal of supply and demand in a free market (“advance our commerce,” as the king’s Address says) which wishes to regulate itself and determine its own level of profit and cost. “Whereas the first appeals to a moral norm—what ought to be men’s reciprocal duties—the second appears to say: ‘This is the way things work, or would work if the State did not interfere.’” From the point of view of eighteenth-century bread rioters, the assumed the shape of the man (here the pawnbroker, but any merchant) who seeks private gain at the expense of his own neighbors, who accordingly can only riot or sink into gin and crime. For the poor man of this period, as Francis Place wrote, “none but the animal sensations are left; to these his enjoyments are limited, and even these are frequently reduced to two—namely sexual intercourse and drinking . . . Of the two . . . drunkenness is by far the most desired” since it provides a longer period of escape and costs only a penny. The people of Gin Lane could not have afforded beer; gin alone was within their competence (5-7).
By implication, all Gin Lane’s world of hunger and want is rejected in Beer Street, as the verses under Brueghel’s print emphasize: “Beat it, Thinman! Though you are hungry, you are wrong,/ This is Fat Kitchen here, and here you don’t belong!” I do not know to what extent we can extrapolate the content from the model in this case; Brueghel’s prints cannot have affected Hogarth’s popular audience. But they do draw our attention to the extremes of fat and thin, of eating and starving in Hogarth’s plates (250).
Gin Lane
Trusler, Rev. J. and E.F. Roberts. The Complete Works of William Hogarth. (1800)
From contemplating the health, happiness, and mirth flowing from a moderate use of a wholesome and natural beverage, we turn to this nauseous contrast, which displays human nature in its most degraded and disgusting state. The retailer of gin and ballads, who sits upon the steps, with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, is horribly fine. Having bartered away his waistcoat, shirt, and stockings, and drank until he is in a state of total insensibility; pale, wan, and emaciated, he is a perfect skeleton. A few steps higher is a debased counterpart of Lazarus, taking snuff, thoroughly intoxicated, and negligent of the infant at her breast, it falls over the rail into an area, and dies, an innocent victim to the baneful vice of its depraved parent. Another of the fair sex has drank herself to sleep. As an emblem of her disposition being slothful, a snail is crawling from the wall to her arm. Close to her we discover one of the lords of the creation gnawing a bare bone, which, a bull-dog, equally ravenous, endeavours to snatch from his mouth. A working carpenter is depositing his coat and saw with a pawnbroker. A tattered female offers her culinary utensils at the same shrine: among them we discover a tea-kettle, pawned to procure money to purchase gin. An old woman, having drank until she unable to walk, is put into a wheel-barrow, and in that situation a lad solaces her with another glass. With the same poisonous and destructive compound, a mother in the corner drenches her child. Near her are two charity-girls of St. Giles’s pledging each other in the same corroding compound. The scene is completed by a quarrel between two drunken medicants, both of whom appear in the character of cripples. While on of them uses his crutch as a quarter-staff, the other, with great good-will, aims a still, on which he usually sat, at the head of his adversary. This, with a crowd waiting for their drams at a distiller’s door, completes the catalogue of the quick. Of the dead, there are two; besides an unfortunate child, whom a drunken madman has impaled on a spit. One, a barber, who having probably drank gin until he has lost his reason, has suspended himself by a rope in his own ruinous garret; the other a beautiful woman, who, by the direction of the parish beadle, two men are depositing in a shell. From her wasted and emaciated appearance, we may fairly infer, she also fell a martyr to this destructive and poisonous liquid. One the side of her coffin is a child lamenting the loss of its parent. The large pewter measure hung over a cellar, on which is engraved “Gin Royal,” was once a common sign; the inscription on this cave of despair, “Drunk for a penny—dead drunk for two-pence—clean straw for nothing,” is worthy of observation; is exhibits the state of our metropolis at that period.—The scene of this horrible devastation is laid in a place which was, some years since, properly enough called the Ruins of St. Giles’s. Except the pawnbroker’s, distiller’s, and undertaker’s. the houses are literally ruins. These doorkeepers to Famine, Disease, and Death, living by the calamities of others, are in a flourishing state. To the perspective little attention is paid, but the characters are admirably discriminated. The emaciated retailer of gin is well drawn. The woman with a snuff-box has all the mawkish marks of debasement and drunkenness. The man gnawing a bone, a dog tearing it from him, and the pawnbroker, have countenances in an equal degree hungry and rapacious. Our modern Gin Temples form a striking contrast to those of Hogarth’s time, and are aptly described in the London daily press:--“The expense incurred in fitting up gin-shop bars in London is almost incredible, every one vying with his neighbour in convenient arrangements, general display, rich carvings, brass work, finely-veined mahogany, gliding, and ornamental painting. The carving of one ornament alone in the Grapes gin-shop, Old Street Road, cost £100: the workmanship was by one of the first carvers in wood in London. Three gin-shops have been lately fitted up in Red Lion Street, at an expense, for the bar alone, of upwards of £2000. Time was when gin was only to be found in by-lanes and blind alleys—in dirty obscure holes, ‘yclep’d dram-shops; but now gin has become a giant demi-god, a mighty spirit, dwelling in gaudy gold-beplastered temples, erected to his honour in every street, and worshipped by countless thousands, who daily sacrifice at his shrine their health, their strength, their money, their minds, their bodies, wives, children, sacred home, and liberty. Juggernaut is but a good to him; for the devotees of Juggernaut, though they put themselves into the way of being crushed to death beneath his chariot wheels, are put out of their misery at once; but the devotees of the great spirit of Gin, devote themselves to lingering misery: for his sake they are contented to drag on a degraded, nasty existence—to see their children pine, dwindle, and famish; to steep themselves in poverty to the very lips; and die at last poor, sneaking, beadle-kicked, gruel-swoln paupers! In these temples of the great spirit Gin, may be seen maudlin, unwashed multitudes—the ancient, and the infant of a span long, old men and maidens, grandsires and grandams, fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, and children, crowding, jostling, and sucking in the portions of the spirit which the flaunting priestesses dole out to them in return for their copper offerings” (130).
Gin Lane
Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)
The great historian of London’s poor, Dorothy George, called Hogarth’s Gin Lane “a historical document whose essential truth is confirmed in numberless details incidentally recorded in the Old Bailey Session Papers”. One case was that of Judith Defour, who fetched her two-year-old child from a workhouse where it had been given new clothes, strangled it and left the stripped body in a ditch in Bethnal Green so that she could sell the clothes. This 1s 4d she made was spent on gin, divided with the woman who suggested the crime. Next day Judith confessed. She was, said her mother, “never in her right mind but always roving” (494).
Surely the memory of the earthquake underlay this print, with all its associations of guilt and fear, as the houses topple and the baby falls? The whole scene is deathly. A straw-hatted women throws back her head in an open-mouth stupor, so numb and rock-like that a snail crawls without fear from the wall to her shoulder. A beggar shares a bone with a dog. Desperate for gin, ragged citizens hand over their clothes, the tools of their trade and even their pots and pans to the pawnbroker. Livelihoods are lost, and lives. In the background lie the heaped-up slums of St. Giles, with the steeple of St. George’s Bloomsbury behind (its spire topped by a monarch, not a cross). In the middle distance the parish beadle watches as the naked body of a woman is dropped into her coffin and her orphan child weeps on the ground.
All this apparent chaos is consummately composed. The pawnbroker’s sign and the barber’s pole pierce the centre of the print like spears, their straight lines offsetting the curving gin signs. The angle of the undertaker’s board, a coffin on a gibbet-like pole, is echoed by the sight of the hanging man, dangling in the ruins of his house. Beneath this sign a fearful emblematic figure dances a jog, a wild cook, like Satan, with the bellow for fire balanced on his head and a baby impaled on his spit. Allegory and hyperrealism mix. The sturdy stone building of “S. GRIPE PAWN-BROKER” is mocked on the far side by the rickety booth of “KILMAN DISTILLER”. In front of his numbered barrels cripples fight with begging stools and crutches, charity girls raise their glasses, and a mother tips gin into her baby’s open mouth.
The whole print is cut through by harsh, broken diagonals. Even its three planes slide sideways—the sky with the signs and spire and tumbling houses the varied groups in the centre; the bleak wall and steps in the foreground. The wall divides life from death and the steps lead down to the abyss. At their foot sits a blind ballad-singer, dying of starvation, with the skeletal face and limbs of a medieval memento mori. The music of Hogarth’s silent prints, which always ring with sound, is reduced to the wails and cries of the drunken crowd and the protesting ballad that tells it all, “The downfall of Madam Gin”.
James Townley provided the verses, testifying to the way the “deadly draught” preys on mankind and fosters theft, murder, and perjury; a liquid fire “Which Madness to the Heart conveys/ And rolls it through the Veins”. But the most potent verses are the commonplace lines over the cellar door:
Drunk for a Penny
Dead Drunk for two pence
Clean Straw for Nothing.
Hogarth was extremely proud of these prints, and explained their “reformist” origin carefully in his autobiographical notes:
Bear St and Gin Lane were done when the dredfull consequences of gin drinking was at its height. In gin lane every circumstance of its horrid effects are brought to view, in terorem nothing but Poverty misery and ruin are to be seen Distress even to madnes and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but the Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.
Bear Street its companion was given as a contrast, were the invigorating liquor is recommend in order drive the other out of vogue, here all is joyous and thriveing Industry and Jollity go hand in hand the Pawnbroker in this happy place is the only house going to ruin where even the smallest quantity of the linquer flows around it is taken in at a wicket for fear of farther distress.
Even he describes Gin Lane first.
The difference in the impact of the two scenes is heightened by the viewpoint of the artist, directing our gaze. In Beer Street our feet are safely on the ground, as if we were walking towards the people and on into the street beyond. In Gin Lane we hover dizzily, somewhere in the air, above the bony ballad-singer, above the falling child. We look across the chasm whose floor we cannot see. We are gazing down, being sucked in. We too may fall. There is something eager, intent and cold, about the way Hogarth draws every detail of this self-imposed hell. Compulsively and carefully, with deliberate crudeness and deliberate caricature, he drove his graphic art to new pitch (495-497).
Gin Lane
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)
CAPTION:
Gin cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
Makes human race a Prey;
It enters by a deadly Draught,
And steals our Life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair,
It's Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes, with hellish Care,
Theft, Murder, Perjury.
Damn'd Cup! that on the Vitals preys,
That liquid Fire contains
Which Madness to the Heart conveys,
And rolls it thro' the Veins.
The scene is the slum known as the Ruins of St. Giles, St. Giles' Parish, Westminster. The pawnbroker, distiller, and undertaker are the only successful persons in this neighborhood. The inscription above the pawnbroker's door is "S. GRIPE PAWN-BROKER." Gripe is taking in a carpenter's coat and saw as a pledge for money for more gin; and behind the carpenter in line is a housewife selling her kettle, sauce- pan and fire tongs. In the foreground is the descent into a gin-cellar with its flagon emblem ("GIN ROYAL") and characteristic inscription over its door:
Drunk for a Penny
Dead drunk for two pence
Clean Straw for Nothing.
A stupefied woman leans against the parapet, a snail crawling up her shoulder to suggest that she has been in this position for some time (cf. The Lottery). A man and a dog are fighting for a bone; a drunken mother, with syphilitic chancres on her legs, drops her baby in order to take a pinch of snuff; and an itinerant gin- and ballad-seller, one of those whose cry was "Buy my ballads, and I'll give you a glass of gin for nothing," sits dying or dead at the foot of the steps. The ballad in his basket is "The downfall of Mdm Gin"; he has sold most of his clothes to buy gin—which was popularly called "Strip-me-naked." A diagonal board behind him shows that the whole house is propped up to keep it from collapsing. Both the bare-breasted mother with her child, and the man starving to death are taken from Brueghel's La Cuisine Maigre.
The booth on the right of the print is marked "KILMAN DISTILLER" and contains barrels numbered from "4" through "9," from which people are drinking gin. A nursing baby is fed gin by its mother, and two charity girls, ignored by their guardians, toast each other in gin (the "GS" on one's arm, reversed, stands for St. Giles' Parish). Two beggars fight, one swinging the stool he sits on when he begs. A drunken cook is carrying a bellows on his head and waving a spit on which a baby is impaled: either he has gone berserk with drink or the baby has been dropped from a window by a careless mother. The man in the distance holding a staff and supervising the burial of a naked woman is the parish beadle; a funeral procession is glimpsed in the distance. The other two houses on the street are (by their signs) an undertaker's and a barber's. The barber has hanged himself (because nobody cares enough about his appearance or health to seek a barber's services?).
The print offers several parallels to Beer Street: the viewer's vantage point is again in front of a building looking out into a street; there is a pawnbroker's house and a church steeple in the distance. In Beer Street a barrel of beer is suspended from a building, in Gin Lane it is a coffin (the one from a warehouse, the other from an undertaker's). Life, love, eating, and growth are the subjects of the one; death, apathy, starvation, and decay of the other. The church spire in this case belongs to St. George Bloomsbury, and while the spire signalized the prosperity of the neighborhood in Beer Street, it is here the only glimpse of a Good in this world-distant and inaccessible over piles of ruins. Another norm against which to judge this activity, the healthy baby falling to its death from its mother's arms, has been withdrawn in the third state by Hogarth's turning it into another denizen of Gin Lane. It is dead before it falls. Dickens pointed out, characteristically, that besides the pawnbroker the only sober person in the print is the beadle, "and he is mightily indifferent to the orphan-child crying beside its parent's coffin.” And he adds, “The church indeed is very prominent and handsome; but . . . quite passive in the picture, it coldly surveys these things in progress under the shadow of its tower . . .” (John Forster, Life of Dickens, Bk. VI, Chap. 3) (210-211).
Gin Lane
Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)
It is probable, however, that the total abstainers of to-day would regard the bloated prosperity of Beer Street as scarcely less dangerous than the pinched emaciation of Gin Lane. With the lusty beer-drinkers everything prospers but the pawn-broking business; with the consumers of “Bung-your-eye” or “Lay-me-down-softly” everything is the reverse, and the dweller at the sign of the “three balls” is driving a roaring trade. We cannot linger on these plates further than to call attention to the inimitable professional complacency of the ragged sign-painter in Beer Street (in those days there was a regular sign-market in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane), and to the appalling figures of the itinerant gin-seller and the maudlin mother in the companion print. Charles Lane has left an enthusiastic description of Gin Lane (Reflector, No. 3 ,1811).
[Dobson also quotes Dickens on the print:] “I have always myself thought the purpose of this fine piece to not be adequately stated even by Charles Lamb. ‘The very houses seem absolutely reeling,’ it is true; but beside that wonderful picture of what follows intoxication, we have indication quite as powerful of what leads to it among the neglected classes. There is no evidence that any of the actors in the dreary scene have ever been much better than we see them there. The best are pawning the commonest necessities, and tools of their trades; and the worst are homeless vagrants who give us no clue to their having been otherwise in bygone days. All are living and dying miserably.
Nobody is interfering for prevention or for cure, in the generation going out before us, or the generation coming in. The beadle is the only sober man in the composition except the pawnbroker, and he is mightily indifferent to the orphan-child crying beside its parent’s coffin. The little charity-girls are not so well taught of looked after, but that they can take to dram-drinking already. The church indeed is very prominent and handsome; but as, quite passive in the picture, it coldly surveys these things in progress under the shadow of its tower. I cannot but bethink me that it was not until this year of grace 1848 that a Bishop of London first cam out respecting something wrong in poor men’s social accommodations, and I am confirmed in my suspicion that Hogarth had many meanings which have not grown obsolete in a century” (Forster’s “Life,” Bk. vi Ch.3) (105-106).
Gin Lane
Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)
Only in Gin Lane does Hogarth seem to have worked with as much imagination as moral fervor. Horace Walpole pronounced it “horridly fine”; and the demonic intensity of Hogarth’s vision raises it far above the level of mere copybook morality. Yet the subject-matter was derived from everyday life; and none of his contemporaries complained that his treatment was in the least exaggerated. The stupefied seller of ballads and gin, whose ribs start through the flesh and whose face has shrunken to a skull-like mask, was an apparition actually encountered and drawn: “his cry was, ‘buy my ballads and I’ll give you a glass of gin for nothing’”. A drunken woman lies on the steps, taking snuff and smiling to herself in euphoric coma, while the child rolls from her knees and pitches headlong into the alley below; and the loss of innumerable children, through neglect, disease or infanticide, was one of the chief evils that provoked the passing of the Gin Acts. “What must become of an infant (Fielding demanded in his Enquiry) who is conceived in gin, with the poisonous distillations of which it is nourished, both in the womb and at the breast?” Beneath the steps, a dram-shop opens its jaws: above stands the thriving establishment of S. Gripe, Pawn-Broker; and a committee, appointed by the Middlesex Sessions in the year 1735, had already reported that weavers, and “other persons of inferior trades concerned in out manufactures”, were in the habit of selling their journeymen daily draughts of gin on credit, “whereby at the week’s end” the workers “find themselves without any surplusage to carry home to their families”; which would inevitably drive them first to the pawn-broker, afterwards to starvation or parish-relief. Hogarth’s scene is laid in St. Giles’s a district in which gin-shops were particularly numerous; and the pyramidal spire of St. George’s Bloomsbury, completed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1730, looks down over the dilapidated house-tops—a symbol of national prosperity and dignity to set of the horrid vision of proletarian degradation (210-211).
Gin Lane: Bone
Trusler
Another of the fair sex has drank herself to sleep. As an emblem of her disposition being slothful, a snail is crawling from the wall to her arm. Close to her we discover one of the lords of the creation gnawing a bare bone, which, a bull-dog, equally ravenous, endeavours to snatch from his mouth (130).
Gin Lane: Coffin
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
Another pair of details is relevant. In the background of Beer Street a fat, encumbered upper-class woman is being crushed in her too-tight sedan chair (related to the fat beer drinkers in the foreground), and in Gin Lane a poor, emaciated dead woman lies in her coffin. Each woman has two attendants and a box to hold her. Such details may have been overlooked by the audience of responsible citizens to which Fielding addresses himself, but the poor would have seen them straightaway. And once the women are seen as a pair, the fat one becomes a cause of the emaciated, dead one, as do the fat, beer-drinking purveyors of essential commodities in the foreground (6).
Gin Lane: Coffin
Trusler
other a beautiful woman, who, by the direction of the parish beadle, two men are depositing in a shell. From her wasted and emaciated appearance, we may fairly infer, she also fell a martyr to this destructive and poisonous liquid. One the side of her coffin is a child lamenting the loss of its parent (130).
Gin Lane: Corpse
Shesgreen
In the right foreground a ballad seller (he holds “The downfall of Mdm Gin”), half-naked because he has pawned his clothes and wasted away to a virtual skeleton, dies clasping a glass in one hand and a large bottle in the other (76).
Gin Lane: Corpse
Trusler
The retailer of gin and ballads, who sits upon the steps, with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, is horribly fine. Having bartered away his waistcoat, shirt, and stockings, and drank until he is in a state of total insensibility; pale, wan, and emaciated, he is a perfect skeleton (130).
Gin Lane: Corpse
Uglow
a blind ballad-singer, dying of starvation, with the skeletal face and limbs of a medieval memento mori. The music of Hogarth’s silent prints, which always ring with sound, is reduced to the wails and cries of the drunken crowd and the protesting ballad that tells it all, “The downfall of Madam Gin” (496-497).
Gin Lane: Corpse
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
an itinerant gin- and ballad-seller, one of those whose cry was "Buy my ballads, and I'll give you a glass of gin for nothing," sits dying or dead at the foot of the steps. The ballad in his basket is "The downfall of Mdm Gin"; he has sold most of his clothes to buy gin—which was popularly called "Strip-me-naked." A diagonal board behind him shows that the whole house is propped up to keep it from collapsing (210).
Gin Lane: Corpse
Quennell
The stupefied seller of ballads and gin, whose ribs start through the flesh and whose face has shrunken to a skull-like mask, was an apparition actually encountered and drawn: “his cry was, ‘buy my ballads and I’ll give you a glass of gin for nothing’” (210)..
Gin Lane: Dropped Baby
Reminiscent of Moll's adoptive “Mother” Needham who initiates her charge’s destruction, "Gin Lane" gives us a fatally negligent mother prominently foregrounded in the plate. Her consumption of the vile substance has led her to drunkenly release her nursling to his death. Derek Jarrett comments that this scene was not an uncommon phenomenon as “Gin was often taken, quite literally, with the mother’s milk” (England 63)
Gin Lane: Dropped Baby
Shesgreen
In contrast to the pretty girl with the key in the same pose in “Beer Street,” an unkempt, stupefied woman, her tattered clothes hanging off her, takes snuff; her unattended son plummets to his death in front of the “Gin Royal” (76).
Gin Lane: Dropped Baby
Trusler
A few steps higher is a debased counterpart of Lazarus, taking snuff, thoroughly intoxicated, and negligent of the infant at her breast, it falls over the rail into an area, and dies, an innocent victim to the baneful vice of its depraved parent (130).
Gin Lane: Falling
In contrast the prosperity reflected in the new construction of “Beer Street,” “Gin Lane’s” buildings are falling around the street’s inhabitants.
Gin Lane: Kids
Shesgreen
Behind them two unchaperoned young girls from St. Giles (one bears “GS” on her shoulder) parish school drink openly. In front of them a mother forces gin on her unwilling infant. The instances of the mother compelling her child to drink and the two unaccompanied girls taking liquor suggest that Hogarth saw gin addiction as growing out of social as well as individual causes (76).
Gin Lane: Pawn
Unlike the pawnshop of “Beer Street,” the only building in ruins, the counterpart here is in excellent shape amid the falling buildings. Various patrons sell their essential items for money, ostensibly for purchasing gin. The fact that tradesmen are giving up the tools they need for working suggests that gin leads to unemployment in this way as well.
Gin Lane: Pawn
Shesgreen
A carpenter pawns his coat and saw (his means of livelihood) to the exploitative “S. Gripe Pawn Broker,” the most perverse figure in the print; he examines the goods with an assumed skepticism. An anxious woman stands behind the carpenter to pawn her kitchen utensils. Gripe’s flourishing house, together with the tavern, the undertaker’s, the distiller’s and the church which stands noticeably above and distant from the scene), are the only firm and solidly built houses in the neighborhood (76).
Gin Lane: Pawn
Trusler
A working carpenter is depositing his coat and saw with a pawnbroker. A tattered female offers her culinary utensils at the same shrine: among them we discover a tea-kettle, pawned to procure money to purchase gin (130).
Gin Lane: Pawn
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The inscription above the pawnbroker's door is "S. GRIPE PAWN-BROKER." Gripe is taking in a carpenter's coat and saw as a pledge for money for more gin; and behind the carpenter in line is a housewife selling her kettle, sauce- pan and fire tongs (210).
Gin Lane: Pawn
Quennell
above stands the thriving establishment of S. Gripe, Pawn-Broker; and a committee, appointed by the Middlesex Sessions in the year 1735, had already reported that weavers, and “other persons of inferior trades concerned in out manufactures”, were in the habit of selling their journeymen daily draughts of gin on credit, “whereby at the week’s end” the workers “find themselves without any surplusage to carry home to their families”; which would inevitably drive them first to the pawn-broker, afterwards to starvation or parish-relief (211).
Gin Lane: Riot
Trusler
The scene is completed by a quarrel between two drunken medicants, both of whom appear in the character of cripples. While on of them uses his crutch as a quarter-staff, the other, with great good-will, aims a still, on which he usually sat, at the head of his adversary (130).
Gin Lane: Sign
Trusler
The large pewter measure hung over a cellar, on which is engraved “Gin Royal,” was once a common sign; the inscription on this cave of despair, “Drunk for a penny—dead drunk for two-pence—clean straw for nothing,” is worthy of observation; is exhibits the state of our metropolis at that period (130).
Gin Lane: Sign
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
In the foreground is the descent into a gin-cellar with its flagon emblem ("GIN ROYAL") and characteristic inscription over its door:
Drunk for a Penny
Dead Drunk for two pence
Clean Straw for Nothing (210).