The Drunkard's Children, Plate II

George Cruikshank's etching is Plate II of his eight-plate moral series The Drunkard's Children (1848), a sequel to his earlier The Bottle. The caption beneath reads: Between the fine flaring gin-palace and the low dirty beer-shop, the boy-thief squanders and gambles away his ill-gotten gains. The crowded beer-shop interior swarms with figures rendered in Cruikshank's characteristically dense, agitated line — sunken-cheeked women, leering men, a central youth raising a glass in mock triumph. Working-class bodies are distorted with the broad physiognomic exaggeration typical of the era's moral-reform imagery, where poverty and vice were coded as physical deformity. Cruikshank stands directly in the tradition running from Hogarth's Gin Lane through Rowlandson, and this sequential, captioned plate format is among the direct ancestors of the modern comic strip.