An Election Entertainment, 1755"Drinking, whenching, stealing."
According to Professor Tim Hitchcock, artist and social critic William Hogarth [1697-1764] "depicted drunken mothers dropping their newborn babies to their deaths, and Acts of Parliament were repeatedly and ineffectually passed between the 1730s and 1750s in a vain attempt to control the abuse of ‘Mother Gin’; leisure activities of London's working class became the stick with which to drive forward an ever more intrusive social policy."
