From the Bar of the Gin Shop to the Bar of the Old Bailey it is but One Step

From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record

In 1847, satirist George Cruikshank issued a series of low-cost prints, entitled The Bottle, which encouraged Britons – particularly the working poor – to renounce alcohol. The Bottle depicted a fictional family ravaged by alcoholism: the father is committed to an asylum, an infant dies, and the mother is murdered. The following year, Cruikshank issued an eight-part sequel, The Drunkard’s Children, from which this print derives. The series charted the courses of the family’s orphaned son and daughter. Among their misadventures are drinking, gambling, theft, and a visit to the courthouse where the brother is sentenced to life imprisonment in Australia, then a penal colony. A former heavy drinker, Cruikshank joined the temperance movement around the time he produced The Drunkard's Children; in 1856 he became vice president of the National Temperance League. While Cruikshank saw alcohol as a cause of crime and misery, many of his contemporaries regarded its abuse as a symptom of poverty. England, Europe