From Wikipedia
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 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, . . .
On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; but, as with so many of Hogarth's works, closer inspection uncovers other targets of his satire, and reveals that the poverty of Gin Lane and the prosperity of Beer Street are more intimately connected than they at first appear. Gin Lane shows shocking scenes of infanticide, starvation, madness, decay, and suicide, while Beer Street depicts industry, health, bonhomie, and thriving commerce; but there are contrasts and subtle details that some critics[citation needed] believe allude to the prosperity of Beer Street as the cause of the misery found in Gin Lane. [The last part of this sentence is pure bullshit that relieves the individual of any agency]
Beer St. from Wiki listed as Public Domain
In comparison to the sickly hopeless denizens of Gin Lane, the happy people of Beer Street sparkle with robust health and bonhomie. "Here all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand".[17] The only business that is in trouble is the pawnbroker: Mr. Pinch lives in the one poorly maintained, crumbling building in the picture. In contrast to his Gin Lane counterpart, the prosperous Gripe, who displays expensive-looking cups in his upper window (a sign of his flourishing business), Pinch displays only a wooden contraption, perhaps a mousetrap, in his upper window, while he is forced to take his beer through a window in the door, which suggests his business is so unprofitable as to put the man in fear of being seized for debt. The sign-painter is also shown in rags, but his role in the image is unclear.
The rest of the scene is populated with doughty and good-humoured English workers. 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. Under the sign of the Barley Mow, a blacksmith or cooper sits with a foaming tankard in one hand and a leg of beef in the other. Together with a butcher — his steel hangs at his side — they laugh with the pavior (sometimes identified as a drayman) as he courts a housemaid (the key she holds is a symbol of domesticity).
Ronald Paulson suggests a parallel between the trinity of signs of ill-omen in Gin Lane, the pawnbroker, distiller, and undertaker, and the trinity of English "worthies" here, the blacksmith, pavior, and butcher. Close by a pair of fish-sellers rest with a pint and a porter sets down his load to refresh himself. 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.[b] On the roof, the builders, who are working on the publican's house above the "Sun" tavern share a toast with the master of a tailor's workshop. In this image it is a barrel of beer that hangs from a rope above the street, in contrast to the body of the barber in Gin Lane.[18]
The inhabitants of both Beer Street and Gin Lane are drinking rather than working, but in Beer Street the workers are resting after their labours — all those depicted are in their place of work, or have their wares or the tools of their trade about them — while in Gin Lane the people drink instead of working.[19] 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. Aside from the enigmatic sign-painter, the only others engaged in work in the scene are the tailors in an attic. The wages of journeyman tailors were the subject of an ongoing dispute, which was finally settled by arbitration at the 1751 July Quarter sessions (in the journeymen's favour). Some believe that the tailors serve another purpose, in that Hogarth shows them continuing to toil while all the other inhabitants of the street, including their master, pause to refresh themselves.[19] Much as the tailors are ignored by their master and left to continue working, the occupants of Beer Street are oblivious to the suffering on Gin Lane.
Hogarth also takes the opportunity to comment on artistic pretensions. 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. 9999 and William Lauder's Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in Paradise Lost, all examples, real and imagined, of the type of literature that Hogarth thought fabricated connections between art and politics and sought out aesthetic connections that did not exist. Lauder's work was a hoax that painted Milton as a plagiarist.[20]
The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane — Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking — but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer. No foreign influences pollute what is a fiercely nationalistic image. An early impression showed a scrawny Frenchman being ejected from the scene by the burly blacksmith who in later prints holds aloft a leg of mutton or ham (Paulson suggests the Frenchman was removed to prevent confusion with the ragged sign-painter).[21]
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
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
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| Labour and Art upheld by Thee
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
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| Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
And warms each English generous Breast
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Paulson sees the images as working on different levels for different classes. The middle classes would have seen the pictures as a straight comparison of good and evil, while the working classes would have seen the connection between the prosperity of Beer Street and the poverty of Gin Lane. He focuses on the well-fed woman wedged into the sedan chair at the rear of Beer Street as a cause of the ruin of the gin-addled woman who is the principal focus of Gin Lane. 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. For Paulson the two prints depict the results of a move away from a paternalistic state towards an unregulated market economy. Further, more direct, contrasts are made with the woman in the sedan chair and those in Gin Lane: the woman fed gin as she is wheeled home in a barrow and the dead woman being lifted into her coffin are both mirror images of the hoop-skirted woman reduced to madness and death.
Gin Lane
Gin Lane from Wiki listed as Public Domain
Gin Craze - The gin crisis was severe. 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. Imports of French wine and spirits were banned to encourage the industry at home. Indeed, Daniel Defoe and Charles Davenant, among others, particularly Whig economists, had seen distilling as one of the pillars of British prosperity in the balance of trade.[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.[3])
In the heyday of the industry there was no quality control whatsoever; gin was frequently mixed with turpentine, and licences for distilling required only the application. When it became apparent that copious gin consumption was causing social problems, efforts were made to control the production of the spirit. The Gin Act 1736 imposed high taxes on sales of gin, forbade the sale of the spirit in quantities of less than two gallons and required an annual payment of £50 for a retail licence. These measures had little effect beyond increasing smuggling and driving the distilling trade underground.[4]
Various loopholes were exploited to avoid the taxes, including selling gin under pseudonyms such as Ladies' Delight, Bob, Cuckold's Delight, and the none-too-subtle Parliament gin.[5] The prohibitive duty was gradually reduced and finally abolished in 1743. 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
Gin Lane -- Set in the parish of St Giles — a notorious slum district that Hogarth depicted in several works around this time — Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish serve the gin industry: gin sellers; a distiller (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone.
Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit — as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs — lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old daughter, Mary, from the workhouse where she had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled the girl and left her body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10][11]
In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.[12] Such cases provided a focus for anti-gin campaigners such as the indefatigable Thomas Wilson and the image of the neglectful and/or abusive mother became increasingly central to anti-gin propaganda.[12] Sir John Gonson, whom Hogarth featured in his 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:
Other images of despair and madness fill the scene: a lunatic 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 frantic 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. An ex-soldier, he has pawned most of his clothes to buy the gin in his basket, next to the pamphlet that denounces it. Next to him sits a black dog, a symbol of despair and depression. Outside the distiller a fight has broken out, and a crazed cripple raises his crutch to strike his blind compatriot.
Images of children on the path to destruction also litter the scene: aside from the dead baby on the spike and the child falling to its death, a baby is quieted by its mother with a cup of gin, and in the background of the scene an orphaned infant bawls naked on the floor as the body of its mother is loaded into a coffin on orders of the beadle.[14] Two young girls who are wards of the parish of St Giles — indicated by the badge on the arm of one of the girls — each take a glass.[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. Tom Nero, the central character of the Cruelty series wears an identical arm badge.
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.[16]
In the rear of the picture the church of St. George's Church, Bloomsbury can be seen, but it is a faint and distant image, and the picture is composed so it is the pawnbroker's sign, which forms a huge corrupted cross for the steeple: the people of Gin Lane have chosen to worship elsewhere.
Townley's verses are equally strong in their condemnation of the spirit:
Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
It enters by a deadly Draught
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| Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair
But cherishes with hellish Care
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| Damned Cup! that on the Vitals preys
Which Madness to the heart conveys,
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