Cruikshank's Alcoholics and The Addict in Austerity

George Cruikshank’s series, The Bottle (1847) and, it’s sequel, The Drunkard’s Children (1848) present the apparently ruinous consequences of alcohol consumption. In these stark yet melodramatic narrative sequences, convivial drinking inevitably spirals into all-consuming addiction.

These works were a departure from the alcohol fuelled sociability of Cruikshank’s youth and his family circle. The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children also indicated a shift from his earlier engagement with a range of potentially disruptive graphic forms: transgressive physical satire in the tradition of James Gillray, radical political agitation in his collaborations with William Hone and immersion in urban hedonism with the illustrations for Pierce Egan’s Life in London produced in collaboration with his brother Robert. By contrast, the Victorian temperance sequences emerged within a changing social order where respectability, morality and self-control were gaining currency. Amid the revolutionary fervour of European politics, the British political establishment and its critics alike frequently adopted languages of self-regulation.

This paper will argue that the bodies of Cruikshank’s alcoholics appealed to their contemporary viewers as sites where excess and disorder could be imagined in a dominant culture of control. This is emphasized in his evocation of physically and emotionally charged dramas with a deliberately limited set of pictorial means. Economical yet eloquent line and tone represent the alcoholic as a spare, deprived yet overindulged and insatiable body. Was the contemporary resonance of these prints, therefore, indebted to their sophisticated projection of lost inhibition within visual and moral economies of austerity?