Gin Lane - Definition and Overview

William Hogarth produced the twin engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane at the height of what became known as the London Gin Craze in 1751. They were printed at the same time as Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding published his contribution to the debate on gin: An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers.

Gin Lane is an image of urban decay at its most demonic. The central figure is a gin-addled mother, too drunk to notice that she has let her new-born baby fall to its death as she reaches for a peck of snuff. All around her are scenes of death and destruction: houses tumbling into the streets, mothers pouring gin down the throats of babies, ragged workers pawning the last of their tools to pay for more drink, even a madman marching through the street with an impaled child in one hand and an appropriately diabolical pair of bellows in the other.

Like its companion piece Beer Street, Gin Lane appears to be a simple - if terrifying - warning against the horrors of gin. However, it is a far more powerful imaginative feat than Beer Street; its hellish but oddly ambivalent vision led the writer (and serial drinker) Charles Lamb to describe it some years later as "sublime". Other notable admirers of the piece included William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens (who noted that the real message of the piece was to warn against the horrors of poverty, not simply alcohol). It remains one of the most memorables image of 18th Century London and is further evidence of Hogarth's historical importance as both an artist and a penetrating social commentator.