The Drunkard's Bible

A wood engraving after George Cruikshank — the great moralist illustrator who renounced alcohol and made temperance his crusade — shows a respectable-looking man in a frock coat standing over his wrecked household: a haggard wife clutching an infant, two ragged children huddled on a bare floor, and a figure prostrate in bed, hands raised in supplication. The scene's stagey tableaux and tight cross-hatching descend directly from Hogarth's Gin Lane (1751) narrative tradition, in which sequential images and single loaded scenes argued social policy through pity and disgust. Cruikshank's working-class figures are rendered without the grotesque ethnic distortion common in Gillray or Rowlandson — his caricature here is moral, not physiognomic. This lineage of sequential moral imagery fed directly into Victorian illustrated papers and, eventually, the comic strip itself.