A Drunken Man Is Arrested for Killing His Wife

Plate VII from Cruikshank's The Bottle (1847), a sequence of eight lithographic glyphographs tracing a family's destruction through alcohol. The scene crowds a ruined parlor: a woman lies dead on the floor, her husband — disheveled, wild-eyed, restrained by two constables in top hats — is led away while neighbors recoil in horror and two children look on. Cruikshank's working-class figures carry the pinched, exaggerated physiognomy typical of the era's moral-reform imagery, deploying caricature to mark poverty as both cause and consequence of vice. The sequence belongs directly to Hogarth's Industry and Idleness and Gin Lane tradition — narrative prints unfolding across numbered plates — and anticipates the sequential visual storytelling that would define the comic strip within fifty years.