Two prints about booze have proved among the artist's most enduring works
By O.W.
ON THIS DAY 250 years ago William Hogarth, the English painter and printmaker, died suddenly from an aneurysm at his studio in Leicester Square, London. As an artist who portrayed both the tragic and the ridiculous with aplomb, Hogarth was one of the 18th century’s most sparkling talents. His most famous work is perhaps "Gin Lane" (1751) (pictured; click here for larger image), an intricate etching that vividly depicts London’s poor grappling with gin addiction. It demonstrates both his humour and his heartfelt concern for his fellow Londoners.
Although the eye is drawn on the left towards paupers carrying their belongings to the pawnbroker's, and on the right to the men brawling by the undertaker's, the focal point is the figure in the centre. The slatternly, drunken woman is a cypher for Mother’s Ruin, contemporary slang for gin. Her legs are covered in syphilitic sores and she is letting her baby tumble headfirst towards the gin shop as she takes a pinch of snuff. Slumped below her is a wretch even closer to death: a skeletal soldier holding a cask, with a ballad—“The Downfall of Madam Gin”—peeking out of his basket.
Behind this dismal pair are two orphan girls, wearing St Giles badges to show that they are nominally in the care of the parish, drinking by the gin barrels. Hogarth included these children not only for their emotive quality, but because alcohol abuse by children was a genuine problem among London's poor. The care of impoverished children was of lifelong concern to the artist—he was one of those involved in setting up the Foundling Hospital, one of the great philanthropic successes of the age, which opened in 1739.
Hogarth completed his image with a reminder of governmental impotence. A statue of George I in classical garb looks down at the chaos from the steeple of St George's Bloomsbury in the distance, neatly serving as an indictment of Britain’s uncaring political establishment. From the angle of St George’s, it seems that Hogarth positioned "Gin Lane" roughly behind where the Centre Point building now stands on Oxford Street. In the 18th century this area was known as St Giles, a maze of narrow streets notorious in Georgian London as the heartland of the gin craze.
"Gin Lane" was created as part of a pair; its lesser-known counterpart is “Beer Street". By juxtaposing the two, Hogarth was illustrating the difference, as seen by contemporaries, between gin, a drink for the desperate and disenfranchised, and beer, a wholesome beverage for the working man. While alcohol also flows freely in “Beer Street", it is presented as being a just reward for honest labour. Or, as Hogarth explained: “Beer Street...[is] a contrast; where that invigorating liquor is recommended, in order to drive the other out of vogue. Here…Industry and jollity go hand in hand.” Hogarth was prescient: 19th-century politicians would indeed use beer to wean people off Mother’s Ruin.
Hogarth himself, although greatly distressed by the gin craze, was by no means puritanical about alcohol per se. He was a sociable man, and was often seen around London, with his pet pug at his side, drinking and dining into the small hours. Nevertheless, having experienced life in a debtor’s prison as a child when his family’s coffee house went bankrupt, he felt a duty to publicise the plight of London’s poorest. In “Gin Lane” he brought together in one vision everything for which gin was blamed by contemporary society: violence, poverty, crime, disease, debauchery, moral decay and, ultimately, death. Even if gin is rather better regarded now, and beer a little worse, it is a scene that has lost none of its punch—the sign of truly gifted artist.
