Talks
Dutch Courage & Mothers’ Ruin: The Gin Craze
by Dr Richard Barnett
Date: Tuesday 3 December 2024
We’ll take a walk down Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’, exploring the realities behind this notorious episode of Enlightenment history.
William Hogarth, ‘Gin Lane’ (1751)
For more than two centuries William Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ has offered a potent vision of the history of gin – Scorch-Gut, Kill-Me-Quick, Strip-Me-Naked, a cheap, fiery spirit fuelling poverty and annihilating the fabric of urban society. In this talk we’ll take a walk down Gin Lane, to reveal the cultural and political realities behind this notorious episode. We’ll find a microcosm of the fault-lines in English society at the beginning of the Enlightenment; we’ll encounter pamphleteers railing against gin, politicians legislating against it, bootleggers smuggling it; and we’ll witness the creation of the greatest work of satirical art in history.
Dr Richard Barnett is a writer, teacher and broadcaster on the history of science and medicine. He studied medicine in London before becoming a historian, and has taught at Cambridge, UCL, and other leading institutions for more than a decade. His first book, Medical London: City of Diseases: City of Cures, was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and his The Sick Rose, an international bestseller, was described in the Guardian as 'superbly lucid and erudite'. Seahouses, his award-winning first poetry collection, came out in 2015. He writes for the Lancet and the London Review of Books, and has presented TV & radio documentaries for broadcasters around the world. Find him online at richardbarnettwriter.com.
Photograph of speaker by ktgphotography
