Gin Lane Revisited: Intoxication and Society in the Gin Epidemic

Abstract

The massive increase in gin consumption which occurred in eighteenth-century London produced a marked shift in the cultural understanding of alcohol consumption. Prior to the formalization of addiction as a medical concept, gin consumption produced both sustained legal intervention and a wealth of concerned social commentary. This suggests that the medical construction of addiction is pre-dated by a social and political problematization of intoxication, and in many ways emerges from that process. Using William Hogarth's 1751 prints Beer Street and Gin Lane as its focal point, this paper argues that intoxication raised specific political and metaphysical problems for an emergent modernity. On the one hand, Hogarth reflects a series of common anxieties over urbanization, consumption, mass production and economic prosperity. On the other hand, he articulates a relationship between art, intoxication, and social class that prefigures modernist aesthetics and practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper explores both the ways in which intoxication was problematized in the gin epidemic and how that process inflected contemporary and subsequent representations of modern life in the arts.