GIN LANE.
From contemplating the health, happiness, and mirth flowing from a moderate use of a wholesome and natural beverage, we turn to this nauseous contrast, which displays human nature in its most degraded and disgusting state. The retailer of gin and ballads,[42] who sits upon the steps with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, is horribly fine. Having bartered away his waistcoat, shirt, and stockings, and drank until he is in a state of total insensibility; pale, wan, and emaciated, he is a perfect skeleton. A few steps higher is a debased counterpart of Lazarus, taking snuff; thoroughly intoxicated, and negligent of the infant at her breast, it falls over the rail into an area, and dies an innocent victim to the baneful vice of its depraved parent. Another of the fair sex has drank herself to sleep. As an emblem of her disposition being slothful, a snail is crawling from the wall to her arm. Close to her we discover one of the lords of the creation gnawing a bare bone, which a bull-dog, equally ravenous, endeavours to snatch from his mouth. A working carpenter is depositing his coat and saw with a pawnbroker. A tattered female offers her culinary utensils at the same shrine: among them we discover a tea-kettle pawned to procure money to purchase gin.[43] An old woman, having drank until she is unable to walk, is put into a wheel-barrow, and in that situation a lad solaces her with another glass. With the same poisonous and destructive compound, a mother in the corner drenches her child. Near her are two charity-girls of St. Giles', pledging each other in the same corroding compound. The scene is completed by a quarrel between two drunken mendicants, both of whom appear in the character of cripples. While one of them uses his crutch as a quarterstaff, the other with great goodwill aims a stool, on which he usually sat, at the head of his adversary. This, with a crowd waiting for their drams at a distiller's door, completes the catalogue of the quick. Of the dead there are two, besides an unfortunate child whom a drunken madman has impaled upon a spit.[44] One a barber, who, having probably drank gin until he has lost his reason, has suspended himself by a rope in his own ruinous garret; the other a beautiful woman, whom by direction of the parish beadle two men are depositing in a shell. From her wasted and emaciated appearance, we may fairly infer she also fell a martyr to this destructive and poisonous liquid. On the side of her coffin is a child lamenting the loss of its parent.
The large pewter measure hung over a cellar, on which is engraved "Gin Royal," was once a common sign; the inscription on this cave of despair, "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing," is worthy observation; it exhibits the state of our metropolis at that period.
The scene of this horrible devastation is laid in a place which was a few years since properly enough called the Ruins of St. Giles'.[45] Except the pawnbroker's, distiller's, and undertaker's, the houses are literally ruins! These doorkeepers to Famine, Disease, and Death, living by the calamities of others, are in a flourishing state.[46]
Mr. Hogarth seems to have received the first idea of these two prints from a pair by Peter Breughel (frequently called Breughel d'enfer), which exhibit a similar contrast. In the one entitled "La Grosse" are a number of comely and well-fed personages; in the other, which is baptized "La Maigre Cuisine," the characters are meagre and wasted: seated on a straw mat are a mother and child, which very much resemble the wretched female we see upon the steps in the print under consideration.
To the perspective little attention is paid, but the characters are admirably discriminated. The emaciated retailer of gin is well drawn. The woman with a snuff-box has all the mawkish marks of debasement and drunkenness. The man gnawing a bone, a dog tearing it from him, and the pawnbroker, have countenances in an equal degree hungry and rapacious.
A print entitled the "Gin Drinkers," which bears strong marks of being one of Hogarth's early productions, may perhaps have been the first thought on which this print was built.
On the subject of these plates was published a catchpenny compilation from Reynolds' "God's Revenge against Murder," entitled "A Dissertation on Mr. Hogarth's six prints—'Gin Lane,' 'Beer Street,' and the 'Four Stages of Cruelty.'"