Gin Lane vs. Beer Street — How One Artist Captured a Pivotal Century in Our Drinking History

The streets are so packed with people in various stages of undress and intoxication that we can barely see them, but the visible slivers are enough to prove that no, these lanes are not paved in gold. Indeed, opportunity of any kind, other than the opportunity to blast your current misery into drunken oblivion, is hard to spot in the teeming crowd. Here are desperate couples hawking their last meager possessions to the unsympathetic eye of a pawnbroker, mothers pouring gin down their crying children’s throats, homeless neighbors lowering one of their own into a makeshift coffin, and dancers flailing with more mania than joy. And is that? Yes, that is an infant impaled on a spike held by one of the revelers. That baby’s fate is much like that of the nearby newborn tumbling headfirst out of the arms of his catatonic mother.

About a half hour’s walk southwest is an altogether less traumatizing scene. Here, the people have apparently found all the opportunity London has to offer, even if the streets still aren’t gold. Merchants have bountiful inventories, which are in turn scooped up by shoppers with the means to buy everything from fish to fabric. No one is without proper clothing, or the privilege of enough food to eat. They are therefore in good spirits, mingling, laughing, and enjoying pints of beer. New businesses are being built, and, according to the newspaper on one man’s table, the king has recently spoken of “the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace.”

These are the scenes in St. Giles, a slum north of Covent Garden, and nearby Westminster, circa 1751. Or, rather, they are St. Giles and Westminster as depicted by William Hogarth in his pair of 1751 prints, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.”

For as long as alcohol has existed in people’s lives—which may have been upwards of 12,000 years ago—figurative art has been an available medium for depicting it. In the 18th century, however, both alcohol and art evolved in a way that made the period a crucial turning point for public drinking habits—and a stage for some of the most famous depictions of booze in art history. 

A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

At the beginning of the 18th century, spirits were becoming more accessible to the average person in the Western world. While the Greeks had started tinkering with distillation to produce drinkable water a couple of millennia ago, the first hard alcohol was not produced until the 10th century, most likely by Arab scientists in North Africa. Later, such tinctures were seen primarily as medicinal, as Mark Forsyth notes in A Short History of Drunkenness. By the start of the 16th century, the very wealthy seem to have discovered the joys of drinking spirits recreationally, but even 100 years later, the trend hadn’t caught on with the general public. Around 1595, Forsyth notes, only one bar in England was recorded to have been selling spirits—aqua vitae, or liquor distilled from wine, to be precise.

But in the second half of the 17th century, that began to change across Europe—the Dutch fell for an early version of gin, for instance, and the French for brandy. At first, Forsyth writes, the English were preoccupied by civil war, but when Charles II was invited back to the throne from his exile in France in 1660, he and his cronies arrived packing all their new French habits, like vermouth and brandy. 

Before this, the English relationship to alcohol was dominated by Ale, which men, women, and children drank with meals. It was low in alcohol, a safe alternative to polluted drinking water, and provided essential daily calories. As English settlers colonized America, that, too, became a place where people made and drank Ale as well as cider. 

Prior to the rise in spirits consumption, what people drank depended largely on culture and agriculture, as impacted by the grape-grain line which laterally bisects the European continent. Further south in Europe, grapes grew better and people drank wine; further north, barley grew well, and people drank beer. 

Drinking, in general, had been on a steady incline thanks to brewing’s increasing commercialization, while globalization was a driving factor in the proliferation of new alcohol categories. As Ale and cider consumption grew in what would become the United States, wine simultaneously spread throughout Europe thanks to Dutch traders’ efforts. 

The Dutch were responsible for a number of drinking trends, in fact: In addition to importing wine, they put gin on the throne in England when one of their own became king and brought his homeland’s drink of choice with him. Dutch influence even saw England’s Ale—then unhopped and flavored with an array of herbs and aromatics—evolve into the hopped drink we’re familiar with today. According to a House of Commons Health Committee report, between the commercialized production of alcohol (established in part by Dutch Protestants settling in England) and the increasing traffic of imports and exports, drinking was ticking upwards between 1550 and 1650.

When I ask about the growing prevalence of alcohol in everyday life during this period, Forsyth points out that Europeans and Americans drank heavily up until the 19th century. 

“You’re not operating machinery and you’re not driving cars, you can kind of drink all day,” he says. “The whole, ‘You shouldn’t have a beer with breakfast,’ ‘Children shouldn’t have beer,’ that comes in with the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. It’s largely pushed by factory bosses who don’t want their workers losing limbs using heavy machinery, which you shouldn’t operate if you’re having a beer with breakfast.”

In the 18th century, then, the time was ripe for consumption: Industrialization was still a century away, and distilled spirits were going mainstream. I asked David McNicoll, author of the The Language of Whisky, if this was indeed the most alcoholic time in modern history.

“Was it the most booze-soaked era?” McNicoll muses. “Hard to say, but it is the best-documented and most-acted-upon by any government until Prohibition in the U.S.”

This was true across a number of countries. According to the International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture by Dwight B. Heath, rural prosperity in France enabled all classes to begin regularly drinking wine by the start of the 1720s, which led to booming business for vintners, while the upper classes could enjoy brandy, too. In Holland, gin production ramped up 400% between 1733 and 1792, as is documented in Robert J. Forbes’ A Short History of the Art of Distillation, which also reports that in 1754, there was one alcohol-serving inn per 88 residents in Stockholm, compared to one restaurant per 700 today. In places like Glasgow and London, McNicoll says, there was about one shop selling booze for every 14 people.

Drinking was so tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life that when spirits emerged, people didn’t stop and realize that their customs should be adjusted for the significant spike in alcohol content. They didn’t have the “cultural framework” with which to consume it like they had with good, old, familiar beer, Forsyth points out.

“People didn’t know how to drink [spirits] or when to drink them. Why not gin with breakfast? And what size are people going to have? People are drinking a pint of beer, so why not drink gin in the same quantity?”

The more people drank, the more negative consequences were becoming apparent—and so the more effort went into curtailing consumption. As the world’s biggest city at the time, and a hub of mercantilism (a system in which the government controls the economy, promoting exports and limiting imports to protect the country’s prosperity), London was naturally primed to be the kind of place where spirits, spirits’ politicization, public drunkenness, and public concern over drunkenness all collided.

FROM CRAZE TO PANIC

Charles II and company brought spirits home to England in 1660, but it was the Dutch who made gin, specifically, the country’s “it” drink three decades later. When the Dutch-born William of Orange was crowned King of England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1689, the spirit of his homeland became dominant among his new subjects. (That gin wouldn’t necessarily be recognized as such by today’s drinkers, however: Gin actually entered England as genever, a Dutch-made, juniper-laced forerunner that could only be made from grains like rye, malted barley, or corn.)

Gin, or genever, arrived around the same time as industry began to grow in England. Seduced by the presumed promise of opportunity, people packed into the city from the countryside and then often found no such luck. These unfortunate new urbanites quickly fell into squalor.

“Drinking was […] an escape from the slums,” McNicoll says. “London was the fastest-growing city on earth, and the largest port, and its growing pains all too palpable. 60% of Londoners did not know where their next meal was coming from in the 1740s.”

Despite not being able to afford much, these people could afford genever. To help fund war with France at the start of the 18th century, the government lifted restrictions on domestic spirits production and slapped imported spirits with massive duties. This created a big market for subpar grain, bolstering tax revenue and benefiting landowners. It is also when genever gave way to gin, which can be distilled from any raw material and is less regulated. Gin was cheap to make and cheap to buy.

Almost immediately, the upper classes—still preferring brandy themselves—realized that they were not too keen on the effects of all these working-class people getting blotto on pints of gin. 

“One of the absolute constants in the history of alcohol is, ‘Alcohol is fine when I’m doing it, but when you’re doing it, it’s very bad,’” Forsyth says. “And specifically when it’s the working class, it’s very bad.” 

The impact of the Gin Craze among 18th-century Londoners was immediately visible, because people quite literally sold the shirts off their backs to afford their spirits. Textile and labor costs made clothes incredibly valuable at the time, Forsyth explains. This led to rich homeowners stepping out of their front doors to be faced with nearly nude people drunk on gin, and the imagery of this helped turn the Gin Craze to a Gin Panic.

By 1730, about 10 million gallons of gin were being distilled in London annually. There were around 7,000 dram shops, and the average Londoner consumed an estimated 14 gallons per year. The government tried to stomp out gin’s wildfire spread with taxes, but initial attempts just exacerbated the problem when the market for unregulated gin boomed. Notably, the 1736 Gin Act set a tax of 20 shillings per gallon, and made selling gin without a £50 annual license illegal. 

“One of the absolute constants in the history of alcohol is, ‘Alcohol is fine when I’m doing it, but when you’re doing it, it’s very bad. And specifically when it’s the working class, it’s very bad.”

Similar to the subsequent explosion of speakeasies and bootlegging operations in the United States after Prohibition passed, people just started making and selling their own bootleg gin. This meant the basic ingredients of the spirit were free to be loosely interpreted, and a subsequent tax on juniper itself led to creative alternatives for flavoring, like delicious sulphuric acid or turpentine.

The gin of mid-18th-century London clocked in at about 80% ABV, compared to the 40% alcohol content of today’s. Drinking tall pours of this stuff didn’t just lead to people selling their clothes. It wasn’t unheard of for a drinking session to kill an imbiber, especially if a drinking contest was involved. Gin was also blamed for an increase in crime, violence, prostitution, and falling birth rates. It earned its nickname, “Mother’s Ruin,” due to the latter, plus a rise in infant mortality rates as well as infamous, specific examples. 

In Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, Patrick Dillon writes of Judith Defour, who in 1734 strangled her two-year-old daughter, Mary, and sold Mary’s clothes so she could buy gin. In A Short History of Drunkenness, Forsyth tells of Mary Estwick, who, passed-out drunk, let the child in her care catch fire and burn. Another intoxicated nursemaid had an even more direct role in her charge’s death when she mistook the baby for a log and tossed it into a fire.

There were certainly enough societal factors to prompt those in positions of power to crack down on the consumption of spirits, but thanks to ongoing war and colonialism, booze was political, too.

DRINK FOR YOUR COUNTRY

The globalization that fueled spirits’ growth in the 18th century also helped blur cultural borders. This made the ruling classes of many nations feel threatened. As a result, they often sought to wipe certain or all spirits off their maps. These tensions gained urgency during and as a result of war. After a demand for untaxed or lower-taxed rum helped fuel the American Revolution, for instance, newly independent Americans wanted domestically distilled whiskey over imported rum, the supply of which was strangled by severed ties with English trade routes anyway. Brandy fell largely out of fashion in England during its years of war with France, which only paved the way for gin, the destructive drink that too had an outsider origin which would soon be used against it. 

As European countries battled each other (in the Nine Years’ War between France and multiple other European countries, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Anglo-Spanish War, then the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, to name a few) it seemed vital to foster patriotism and loyalty. Citizens were urged to eschew products made in other countries, and consumption of foreign goods was branded as a betrayal: Wasn’t an Englishman drinking brandy while England battled France showing support for the enemy? Governments promoted their domestic drinks, ostracizing all others. 

As the associate curator of textiles at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nicole LaBouff helped organize the museum’s 2019 exhibition, “Alcohol’s Empire: Distilled Spirits in the 1700s Atlantic World.” The installation aimed to discuss alcohol’s geopolitical context, how colonialism and imperialism shaped where alcohol went and how it grew, and how in turn the globalization of alcohol created interactions between different nations. 

“There was a politicization of alcohol at this time,” LaBouff says. “National identities were bound up with certain drinks. Beer in England was inherently English, and gin was characterized as this evil foreign force that made its way into Britain in the 18th century.”

“From the 18th century onward in Europe and Colonial America and the Early Republic, there was a clear distinction seen by people who made and consumed beer, that it’s healthful and nutritious. It was seen almost more as a food than a drink. It was this daily domestic chore to make beer, just like you baked bread.”

Those in positions of power in England sought to create an all-around negative image of gin. It wasn’t just that drinking it was unpatriotic, but it was unhealthy compared to England’s healthful beer. LaBouff says this dynamic played out elsewhere, like when France promoted its own wine over rum, imported from “outsider” colonies. Establishing these binaries was easy because the big, bad foreign drinks were typically distilled spirits: new, strong, unfamiliar, and cause for people to brawl, strip down and sell their garments, toss their babies, and even spontaneously combust. Beer, on the other hand, was long-established, safe, and fun for the whole family.

“From the 18th century onward in Europe and Colonial America and the Early Republic, there was a clear distinction seen by people who made and consumed beer, that it’s healthful and nutritious,” says Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the National Museum of American History. “It was seen almost more as a food than a drink. It was this daily domestic chore to make beer, just like you baked bread.”

The two causes fed each other: Governments wanted to drastically reduce the consumption of spirits because they believed they were causing societal ruin, so they thought convincing people these spirits were unpatriotic could help extinguish them. Governments also wanted to drastically reduce the consumption of spirits because they were imports rather than domestic products, so they took to highlighting the dangerous effects of these liquors.

Almost as soon as spirits burst onto the scene, they spurred drinking crazes, backlash in the form of temperance movements, and politicization, creating an explosive moment in humanity’s relationship with alcohol that would shape consumption for generations to come. In London, the art scene had evolved at a perfect pace for one artist to capture that clash.

ALL THE BOOZE THAT’S FIT TO PRINT

Art of the 18th-century Western world is largely represented by the Rococo movement, spanning from about 1730 to 1770, and Neoclassicism, from about the 1760s to the 1850s. Rococo was ornate, whimsical, and pastel-hued, and within it lived the genre of fête galante. Fête galante saw aristocratic subjects frolicking in bucolic settings; it was all things fun, frivolous, and outdoors. Here, alcohol might pop up as a prop, the greater attention paid to the romance of our central characters’ good times. 

As the Age of Enlightenment blossomed and progressed from 1730 to 1780 (the “High Enlightenment” period), many began viewing Rococo ideals as trivial. They instead sought nobler subject matter in art, representative of the quest for reason and knowledge. Coinciding with archaeological discoveries like the buried city of Pompeii in 1748, this took shape in the form of ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics. 

This is where the road forks. While painters going through art school set their sights on the more formal aspects of Rococo and Neoclassicism, aiming for patronage among royalty and nobility, mercantilism was gaining speed and creating a new avenue for artists, says Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of drawings and prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

“There was a rising regular group of patrons who were merchants, and that created more opportunities to sell paintings, paintings of more secular subjects. More artists started working outside the academy and finding a market for their works. People opened picture shops and sold directly to the public.”

“There was a rising regular group of patrons who were merchants, and that created more opportunities to sell paintings, paintings of more secular subjects,” she says. “More artists started working outside the academy and finding a market for their works. People opened picture shops and sold directly to the public.” This, Tonkovich says, is when we began to see art dealers emerge and auction houses establish themselves. It’s also where, predominantly in England, print culture blossomed. Artists looking to sell to buyers of lesser means figured out the best route was first drawing and then printing those creations, often selling them out of their own shops.

In England, the swell of opportunity to depict everyday people doing everyday things opened the gates for satire, especially because, as LaBouff notes, art was not as heavily controlled by the crown as it was in other countries. During this period, alcohol’s depiction in art was often either aspirational or satirical, says Dr. Richard Johns, a lecturer in the history of art at the University of York. Think wealthy men sharing wine with the utmost dignity (Francis Hayman’s “Portrait of a Group of Gentlemen”) versus the aftermath, men chattering away among knocked-over chairs (Joseph Highmore’s “A Club of Gentlemen”).

One particular artist, William Hogarth, forged a lasting reputation within print culture and satire. Born in 1697 in London, Hogarth became an apprentice to a silver engraver at 16. He later set up his own engraving shop and attended art school. By the age of 30, he’d garnered a following of wealthy patrons for whom he painted scenes of men and women at leisure. Bored by this, he started sketching and engraving humorous scenes of everyday life.

What Hogarth would become famous for—satirical works examining vice and morality—began with “A Harlot’s Progress,” a series of six paintings that told the story of a young London woman’s corruption and eventual death. Later, he released “The Rake’s Progress,” another series chronicling one man’s downfall at the hands of gambling, sex, and alcohol. In 1745, his “Marriage A-la Mode” spoke directly to his middle-class clientele by ribbing the aristocracy. 

By 1750, Hogarth had become disillusioned with his status in the art scene, due in large part to how little money his paintings went for at auctions. He got involved in charitable causes and began focusing on social issues like poverty in his work. Even a passing glance at poverty in 1750s London meant confronting the Gin Panic. 

In February of 1751, Hogarth debuted a print duo, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.” It was well timed for the Gin Act of 1751, which effectively shuttered small gin distillers with the goal of wiping out much of the available product. “Gin Lane” captured a motley scene of poverty-stricken people in St. Giles at various stages of ruin thanks to the spirit, while “Beer Street” depicted happy, successful merchants and customers in Westminster coming together over a pint of England’s own healthful, beloved beer.

“Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” were hardly subtle in their moral judgments: Gin is bad, beer is good. People who drink gin will end up selling all their earthly possessions for another sip, they’ll murder their own children, they’ll die in the gutter. People who drink beer will help fuel the country’s progress as a world center of mercantilism and prosperity, they’ll commune with their neighbors, they’ll raise wholesome families. Hogarth released these prints at a time when the government sought to drastically reduce the quantity of spirits the working class could consume, and when marketing spirits as bad and “other” versus beer as good and “ours” was a key strategy.

As a set, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” succinctly capture this scramble with spirits. They also depict the resulting breakdown of social order, convey class judgments around drinking, contribute to the politicization of alcohol, and make plain the split between liquor and beer.

Because of the timing, “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” are often viewed as a work of moral propaganda, and some have speculated they were commissioned by the government to help reach gin’s working-class imbibers. Tonkovich points out this is not the case, however, because that working-class target couldn’t have easily accessed these prints. 

“These prints would not have been affordable for the working class,” she says. “They might have seen them in a tavern or through a window, but they couldn’t buy prints, so who is the audience for these? People of the press and the merchant class.”

The two prints, Johns notes, were luxury items in their day, inviting middle-class owners to vicariously live in that chaos while holding themselves above the roughery of the scenes on Gin Lane. 

“‘Gin Lane’ invited the viewer to recognize the problem of gin-drinking in London in 1750, but also to enjoy Hogarth’s technical skill as a printmaker,” Johns says. “It was voyeuristic—people could look closely at this desperate position gin drinkers are in, and how the viewer relates is not at all straightforward, either. Are we sympathetic to the mother and baby at the center, or are we condemning them? That’s what makes this a powerful, lasting image. Ambiguity is a broader aspect of satire; it both engages with moral questions and is a form of entertainment.”

TEAM FERMENTATION VS. TEAM DISTILLATION

By the time “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” appeared in 1751, gin consumption had already dropped from a 1743 peak of 18 million gallons to seven million gallons. By 1758, it plummeted to under two million. Bad harvests drove grain prices up, and food costs rose while wages fell, making it impossible for London’s poor to continue affording gin. Industrialization was gathering steam, motivating anti-liquor efforts directed at workers, while stigmatization of drunkenness became a real, widespread perspective for the first time in modern society. Over the next two centuries, these causes, coupled with religious movements, led to the rising popularity of temperance and of course, in the United States, full Prohibition.

In ensuing decades, a number of artists engaged in satire targeted at the vice of drinking, like Goya in his print, “You’ll See Later,” circa 1816-20. Others took an even more straightforward approach, aiming to use their art as a tool to persuade the public. Inspired by Hogarth, George Cruikshank released a series of eight prints titled “The Bottle” in 1847, which he purposefully made inexpensive so that poorer classes could afford them. Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” are unique, however, in how profoundly they capture such a specific moment in time. And yet, they continue to feel relevant when applied to persistent attitudes toward drinking and vice in general, poverty and the government’s hand in it, and beer versus liquor. The print duo is still called back to today, albeit with contemporary updates: take, for instance, the Royal Society for Public Health’s 2016 commission of a modern “Gin Lane” retelling by Thomas Moore.

While art has long been a powerful medium to express individual views on society (as well as depictions of alcohol), those threads seemed to crystallize during the 18th century. Most prominently anchored by Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street,” this period gave way to further artistic exploration of the role that booze played in society, from sedate socializing to ruinous debauchery.

Think of Impressionist painters capturing the allure of absinthe followed by its lonely come-down, like Edouard Manet’s “Absinthe Drinker” or Edgar Degas’ “In a Café”; of David Wilkie’s 1812 painting, “The Village Holiday,” which seems to take pity on men weak for the sauce; of Peder Severin Krøyer’s 1888 work, “Hip-Hip-Hooray!,” with alcohol a source of cheer among a happy family. Much more recently, Richard Bellingham has used photography to work through his experience growing up with an alcoholic father.

As a writer, artist, and masters degree candidate in art history at Hunter University, June Scalia has researched different art movements’ portrayals of beer and how, from an artistic perspective, beer became seen as the drink of good, common folk. In addition to looking at the Dutch Golden Age and depictions of beer as a part of life, Scalia examined movements like American trompe l’oeil in the 19th century. 

John F. Peto’s 1880 piece, “Still Life with Mug, Pipe, and Book,” expresses a nostalgia for the joy of idle beer-drinking lost in America’s new industrial rush. Scalia also discussed the context of alcohol in Cubism, like Picasso’s 1914 still life, “Ma Jolie,” in which the artist paints a bottle of Bass Ale. Cubist painters, Scalia writes, included everyday things in their average environments, like the Parisian café, presenting the revolutionary claim that art was for regular people with regular lives. This harkens back to the 18th century’s rise of art for the mercantile classes, when artists were suddenly able to paint scenes of daily life for the consumption of middle-class buyers. 

Speaking by phone from her home in New York State, Scalia recounted the story of “Harvest Time” by Doris Lee. Lee was commissioned by an advertising agency working in the beer industry in 1945 to paint a scene conveying beer’s wholesome, all-American identity. In it, farm workers gather together for a home-cooked lunch, washed down with fresh beer. 

“Beer has had this affiliation for a long time, and what the Doris Lee painting is getting after is that beer can be a substitute for food,” Scalia says. “As opposed to gin and spirits, it has such a low alcohol content that people can drink it all day and still be productive, which is essential to the American ethos.” Scalia adds that even during the Civil War, doctors were consulted and the consensus was yes, soldiers should drink beer because the calories would help keep them strong. Both Scalia and McCulla cited a painting that unites beer and battle: “Custer’s Last Fight” by Cassilly Adams (1888). Adolphus Busch had it reproduced as a lithograph; it hung in taverns as an advertisement for Budweiser, repackaging a work of art to broadcast patriotic values about beer.

The differing roles Hogarth ascribes to spirits and beer have persisted as societal attitudes ever since. McCulla says that after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, breweries began rallying together and distancing themselves from distilleries, thinking that if there were another clampdown on alcohol, it might only be for the higher-ABV spirits and not all-American, family- and community-friendly beer.

“Gin Lane” and “Beer Street,” and the works that would follow, mark the period of time when society first had to start thinking about all of this. Is beer safer and better than spirits? Why? How and when do we drink spirits compared to beer? Along with these questions came debates about how we as individuals and community members should interact with alcohol—reflections that are still echoing around the public domain today.

Words by Courtney Iseman
Illustrations by Colette Holston