Gin Lane

Beer Street and Gin Lane were 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 alongside Hogarth’s other work, The Four Stages of Cruelty, the prints continued a movement which he had started with Industry and Idleness, moving away from depicting the laughable foibles of fashionable society (as he had done with Marriage à-la-mode) and towards a more cutting satire of the problems of poverty and crime.