Beer Street and Gin Lane

Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin (then a generic term for grain-based distilled spirits) as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer.

Issued together with The Four Stages of Cruelty, the prints continued a movement started in Industry and Idleness, away from depicting the laughable foibles of fashionable society (as he had done with Marriage A-la-Mode) and towards a more cutting satire on the problems of poverty and crime.

From 1689 onward the English government encouraged the industry of distilling, as it helped prop up grain prices, which were then low, and increase trade, particularly with England's colonial possessions.

[1] (Both later changed their minds – by 1703 Davenant was warning that "'Tis a growing fad among the common people and may in time prevail as much as opium with the Turks",[2] while by 1727 Defoe was arguing in support of anti-gin legislation.

Francis Place later wrote that enjoyments for the poor of this time were limited: They had often had only two: "sexual intercourse and drinking", and that "drunkenness is by far the most desired" as it was cheaper and its effects more enduring.

[6] By 1750 over a quarter of all residences in St Giles parish in London were gin shops, and most of these also operated as receivers of stolen goods and co-ordinating spots for prostitution.

As the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the Author has published them in the cheapest Manner possible.

[8] The prints, like The Four Stages of Cruelty, had moralising verses composed by Rev James Townley and, on the surface, had a similar intent – to shock the lower classes into reforming.

[12] Sir John Gonson, featured in Hogarth's earlier A Harlot's Progress, turned his attention from prostitution to gin and began prosecuting gin-related crimes with severity.

[13] The gin cellar Gin Royal below advertises its wares with the slogan: Drunk for a penny Dead drunk for twopence Clean straw for nothing Other images of despair and madness fill the scene: a disturbed man cavorts in the street, beating himself over the head with a pair of bellows while holding a baby impaled on a spike – the dead child's mother rushes from the house screaming in horror; a barber has taken his own life in the dilapidated attic of his barber-shop, ruined because nobody can afford a haircut or shave; on the steps, below the woman who has let her baby fall, a skeletal pamphlet-seller rests, perhaps dead of starvation, as the unsold moralising pamphlet on the evils of gin-drinking The Downfall of Mrs Gin slips from his basket.

[15] Hogarth also chose the slum of St Giles as setting for the first scene of The Four Stages of Cruelty, which he issued almost simultaneously with Beer Street and Gin Lane.

In front of the pawnbroker's door a starving boy and a dog fight over a bone, while next to them a girl has fallen asleep; approaching her is a snail, emblematic of the sin of sloth.

It is George II's birthday (30 October) (indicated by the flag flying on the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in the background) and the inhabitants of the scene are no doubt toasting his health.

In the background, two men carrying a sedan chair pause for drink, while the passenger remains wedged inside, her large hoop skirt pinning her in place.

[18] Exceptions to this rule come, most obviously, in the form of those who profit from the vice in Gin Lane, but in Beer Street Hogarth takes the opportunity to make another satirical statement.

Tied up together in a basket and destined for use as scrap at the trunk-maker are George Turnbull's On Ancient Painting, Hill on Royal Societies, Modern Tragedies, Polticks vol.

[20] There is a celebration of English industriousness in the midst of the jollity: the two fish-sellers sing the New Ballad on the Herring Fishery (by Hogarth's friend, the poet John Lockman), while their overflowing baskets bear witness to the success of the revived industry; the King's speech displayed on the table makes reference to the "Advancement of Our Commerce and the cultivating Art of Peace"; and although the workers have paused for a break, it is clear they are not idle.

The builders have not left their workplace to drink; the master tailor toasts them from his window but does not leave the attic; the men gathered around the table in the foreground have not laid their tools aside.

Townley's patriotic verses further refer to the contrast between England and France: Beer, happy Produce of our Isle Can sinewy Strength impart, And wearied with Fatigue and Toil Can cheer each manly Heart.

The free-market economy espoused in the King's address and practised in Beer Street leaves the exponents prosperous and corpulent but at the same time makes the poor poorer.

He appeared in preliminary sketches as another jolly fat archetype of Beer Street—but by the time of the first print, Hogarth had transformed him into a threadbare, scrawny, and somewhat dreamy character who has more in common with the inhabitants of Gin Lane than those who populate the scene below him.

[23] In his notes in Walpole's Anecdotes of painting in England, James Dallaway adds a footnote to this statement about Liotard saying, "Hogarth has introduced him, in several instances, alluding to this want of genius.

Beer Street and Gin Lane with their depictions of the deprivation of the wasted gin-drinkers and the corpulent good health of the beer-drinkers, owe a debt to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's La Maigre Cuisine and La Grasse Cuisine engraved by Pieter van der Heyden in 1563, which shows two meals, one of which overflows with food and is populated by fat diners, while in the other the emaciated guests squabble over a few meagre scraps.

[29] Charles Lamb considered Gin Lane sublime, and focused on the almost invisible funeral procession that Hogarth had added beyond the broken-down wall at the rear of the scene as mark of his genius.

He singled out Gin Lane and The Enraged Musician as particular examples of Hogarth's imagination and considered that "the invention shewn in the great style of painting is poor in the comparison".

Like Hogarth, Dickens noted that poverty rather than gin itself was the cause of the misery: Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance that, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour.The vast numbers of prints of Beer Street and Gin Lane and The Four Stages of Cruelty may have generated profits for Hogarth, but the wide availability of the prints meant that individual examples did not generally command high prices.

[e] Other minor variations on Gin Lane exist – the second state gives the falling child an older face, perhaps in an attempt to diminish the horror,[36] but these too were widely available and thus inexpensive.

Steve Bell reused it in his political cartoon Free the Spirit, Fund the Party, which added imagery from a Smirnoff vodka commercial of the 1990s to reveal the then Prime Minister, John Major, in the role of the gin-soaked woman letting her baby fall,[37] while Martin Rowson substituted drugs for gin and updated the scene to feature loft conversions, wine bars and mobile phones in Cocaine Lane in 2001.

^ This woman appeared as she does here, wedged into a sedan chair with her hoop skirt pinning her in place, as the subject of a painting displayed in Hogarth's Taste in High Life, a forerunner to Marriage à-la-mode commissioned by Mary Edwards around 1742.