Gin Lane - The Story Behind the Classic Image of the Gin Craze
On the other hand, I bet she was fun to drink with.
Chances are that even if you’ve not heard of ‘Gin Lane’, you’ll be familiar with the maniacal grinning harlot in its centre, tossing her feeding baby to one side, distracted by her box of snuff. She’s the literal poster girl for alcoholic psychosis, the matriarch of mother’s ruin and an icon of the of the era. So who is this tragic woman and what is the story behind 18th century satirist and painter William Hogarth’s 1751 print?
Before I discuss the picture itself, I need to give you a very quick summary of the events that led to its creation...
The Gin Craze
At the end of the 17th century, the government allowed the unlicensed production of distilled spirits. It was an act of protectionism as it was coupled with an increase in duty on imported spirits from Europe. It also provided a use for the barley that had been deemed not good enough for beer. In short, it made production of the recently popularised drink ‘gin’ very cheap and consequently accessible to many. The government of the time were about to learn about a part of the national character - our passion for drinking ourselves into trouble..
So it came to be that just over 300 years ago, England experienced its first moral panic over drinking - ‘the gin craze’. The first half of the 1700s saw a series of desperate and infrequently successful attempts by the governments at the time to curb the public’s consumption of the strong liquor, or rather it sought to stop its boozified behaviour. The streets of London were littered with the drunken poor, and gin was considered a cause of crime in the city.
The gin craze was the English discovering binge drinking. It turns out we were pretty good at it and we weren’t prepared to give it up in a hurry. Laws were passed by the government to limit the affordability of gin to both drink and produce resulting in discontent, rioting and creative ways of circumventing the law which led to a vast black market, but no significant change of habit. The Gin Act 1751 was more successful as a piece of regulatory law than previous attempts. It seeked to stop the proliferation of gin selling in London by ensuring that gin distillers could only sell to licensed merchants. Those licences were expensive and only available to property owners.
England had no moral issue with alcohol up to this point but until the gin craze, England’s most popular drink had been beer, far weaker than the ales we drink now. The English were encouraged to drink beer as a safer and more socially responsible alternative to gin. Which brings us to William Hogarth’s Gin Lane which was designed to be viewed next to another print - Beer Street.
Beer Street
Gin Lane and Beer Street
Hogarth sold them at a reduced price in the hope that poorer people would buy them and heed its lessons and indeed they were a common sight in the city’s taverns who heartily approved of the message of buying beer and eschewing the black market of distillation.
Gin Lane and Beer Street depict opposing scenes. Beer Street is a scene of bonhomie. Businesses are thriving and there is construction going on. There are people drinking but they’re drinking to reward themselves after a hard honest day’s work and are raising a glass for George II’s birthday, which is told to us by the flag flying at St Martin-in-the-Fields church. It’s not good new for everyone. The pawnbroker’s house (denoted by the Pawnbroker’s sign of 3 Spheres) is dilapidated as he is short of patrons saddled in debt. Meanwhile in Gin Street, he is fine fettle.
There is an extraordinary amount of detail in both scenes, but in Gin Street, depicting St Giles (southern end of Camden) the details are positively apocalyptic. The woman dropping the baby is a prostitute, as evidenced by the sypilyptic sores on her legs. Elsewhere a lunatic can be seen skipping through the scene holding a pike with a dead baby impaled upon it, with the dead child’s mother screaming not far behind. A barber can be seen hanging, having taken his life, his business collapsed due to everyone spending their money on gin.
Gin Lane and Beer Street are fascinating insights into the values of the time and a reminder that we haven’t changed all that much. We still use nightmarish and exaggerated imagery to dissuade people from doing drugs and there are industries we still consider as exploiters of hardship and poverty. Hogarth may have had the pawnbroker, while we have payday lenders.
So did Hogarth’s propaganda and the Gin Act work? It was considered yet another failed government tactic but gin consumption did decrease. It still directly brought about new problems that affected the established taverns but that’s a story for another day. The Gin Act was certainly the start of the turning tide and Gin Lane is a graphic reminder of gin’s reputation and the infant-dropping woman a clue to why it’s called ‘mother’s ruin’.
So what of that woman? Was she a work of pure fiction, a symbol for how love for spirits can make you turn your back on the responsibility of motherhood? Well, while she was certainly not typical of the average contemporary drinker, the story of the gin-soaked neglectful mother was a potent character fuelled by a few real-life examples, most notably that of Judith Dufour. Ms Dufourt, having heard that the workhouse had given her two year old infant new clothes, reclaimed the child from them and murdered it in order to sell the clothes for gin, or at least that’s what official records say about her. More likely she was simply yet another powerless individual reduced to a set of simplistic motives designed to make her a parable about a modern evil of the time, much like the parents on benefits with 8 children wheeled out by the tabloids to exemplify benefit fraud by modern tabloids. So there it is, the story of the birth of binge drinking and perhaps Britain’s first example of anti-drugs propaganda.