Beer Street and Gin Lane

Uncommon card · No. 162478

Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. 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. At almost the same time and on the same subject, Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding published An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers. 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. On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English small beer and ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; but,...

Read on Wikipedia · Image William Hogarth, Public domain