The Bottle, Plate II

George Cruikshank's lithographic series The Bottle (1847) charts a working-class family's ruin through drink. Plate II shows a man slumped in a chair, hat still on, while his wife negotiates with a pawnbroker's agent at the door — garments in hand, children clinging nearby, the domestic interior visibly stripped of comfort. The caption states baldly: he has been discharged for drunkenness; they pawn their clothes to supply the bottle. Cruikshank drew with the fluid, morally loaded line he inherited from Hogarth's Gin Lane (1751) — that earlier tradition of sequential print narrative in which poverty, vice, and consequence unfold panel by panel. The series sold in enormous cheap editions, reaching working-class readers directly and establishing the visual grammar — recurring characters, serial plates, cause-and-effect staging — that the comic strip would soon formalize.