Analyse af William Hogarths 'Gin Lane'

Gin lane the place for the porest and the most helpless people 1751

In the poorest streets of London, we see helpless people who drink themself to dead. Why may you ask. If we look at the picture here from the street of Gin Lane. We can see poor people that seems to smile. But they are drunk because they want to get away from the day of all this unwholesome stuff. Some of them do not have the money to drink. And on the picture, you can see one person committing suicide in the top right corner of the picture. We can also see in the middle and a little bit to the right of the picture that there is a lot of people protesting against the kingdom because of the terrible things they do to their people, and they will not accept to be treated this way.

If we get deeper into the street of Gin Lane, we can see that there are people who is going to bury a person, In a coffin. He could be dead, because he does not have enough money to survive. By that, I mean he could not afford to pay for food and shelter for himself. But in this environment, we can also say there will be people who are stealing from each other. In the left corner we can se a man who is cutting a person’s robe, with a saw to get him back to freedom. The person has maybe been doing something wrong. But was now free to go. Normally in these centuries they punish thieves in a way that we don’t use today. Like cutting their hands off and legs so they can’t steal, and so people can see they are thieves.