Extras Index > Gin, Hogarth, and the
Horrible Crime of Judith Dufour
In THE LEOPARD PRINCE
a minor character is described as a “gin whore”…
Gin, Hogarth, and the Horrible Crime of Judith Dufour
Gin
addiction in eighteenth century England was a national scandal. Gin is a distilled
alcohol flavored with juniper berries. The drink originated in The Netherlands
and had been introduced by William of Orange into the country in the late seventeenth
century. In 1690, intending to find a market for poor-quality grain, the English
government put a high import tax on foreign liquor while at the same time making
it possible to make and sell gin without a license. This made gin cheaper than
beer. The result? By 1750 one in four houses in the St. Giles section of London
was a gin shop. Gin shops were houses of ill-repute and often had prostitutes
and fencers of stolen items working out of them as well.
In 1736, the government passed the first Gin Act, which was supposed
to make distributors pay a fifty pound license. Mostly, however, the act drove
the making and selling of gin underground without abating the problem. A second
Gin Act in 1751 had a little more success, but it wasn’t until the government
passed a Sale of Beer act in 1830 which removed the tax on beer, that gin lost
its stranglehold on the poor.
During
the height of the London Gin Craze, William Hogarth, the artist and social commentator,
produced and published two engravings contrasting beer and gin. In Gin Lane, a
pawnbroker haggles in the corner, a man fights with a dog over a bone, an ex-soldier
dies in the foreground, a woman forces gin down the throat of a baby (to keep
the child quiet), the coffin maker does a brisk trade, and there’s a house
literally falling down in the background. In contrast, the happy people in Beer
Street are fat and their buildings are being repaired.
By far the most striking image in Gin Lane, is the nursing mother
dead center of the illustration. She’s so drunk on gin that she doesn’t
notice her baby falling presumably to its death as she takes snuff. It’s
a melodramatic scene, but one that’s probably based on a real one: the case
of Judith Dufour. In 1735, Judith took her two-year-old toddler to the local workhouse
and left the child there. She returned a few days later and claimed the toddler—and
his new clothes. She then strangled her child, left the naked body in a ditch,
and sold the clothes for sixteen pence…which she spent on gin.
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