It’s Gin Lane all over again

Hogarth’s satire is as appropriate now as it was 250 years ago, says Dan Jones. What we need is a new approach to our age-old drinking problem

In 1751, as the great Gin Craze was winding down, William Hogarth produced a series of six prints. It included ‘Gin Lane’, his cruel masterpiece. In the foreground a syphilitic old slapper lolls across a dirty flight of steps, pinching from the snuffbox as her baby tumbles to its death in the cellar of a gin shop. Behind her kale-eyed rioters tear themselves and their surroundings to pieces. Brawlers wield furniture as weapons. As Hogarth later wrote, ‘In Gin Lane… nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin are to be seen; distress even to madness and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.’

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Sound familiar? It should, because there’s still a Gin Lane in every town and city centre you care to look at.