Mother Gin and the Bad Examples: Figuring a Drug Crisis, 1736–51

Abstract

The most memorable figure of the London “Gin Craze,” a furor over cheap spirits from approximately 1720 to 1751, is the woman in the foreground of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751), so deep in stupor that she fails to notice her tumbling child. Hogarth draws on a longer tradition throughout the Gin Craze of using individual drinkers—particularly women—to rhetorically invoke a drug crisis. This essay asks how such figures of individual drinkers come to betoken a larger crisis, and how they establish gin as the cause of that crisis, rather than a symptom of underlying dispossession. I explore how various portrayals of drinkers in Gin Craze discourse each work to exemplify the crisis and to posit gin as its cause. Further, I offer formal as well as historical explanations for why these figures are so often women: how the cultural institutions of eighteenth-century femininity, including maternity and coverture, convinced artists, authors, and readers that women were particularly well-suited to exemplify gin’s compulsions and depredations.