The Bottle

In 1847, George Cruikshank, a British artist and temperance activist, created a series of sequential illustrations entitled "The Bottle," which became so popular that printers could not keep up with the demand. The eight plates depict the devastating effects of alcoholism on a middle-class family. The narrative begins with a comfortable domestic scene and progressively shows the family's descent into poverty and tragedy. The father's drinking leads to job loss, domestic violence, the selling of household items, and his children's deterioration into poverty and crime. The series culminates in the father killing his wife in a drunken rage and ultimately going insane.

Cruikshank created this temperance-themed artwork to promote abstinence from alcohol during Britain's growing temperance movement. Followed by another series, the "Drunkards' Children," “The Bottle” is an example of the common theme in all temperance literature and art, showing the progressive nature of alcoholism and alcohol's ability to reduce prosperous individuals to the ruined condition that became the stereotyped image of the alcoholic. 

--Adapted from A discussion leader's guide to Temperance Tales and the Alcoholic: Creation of a stereotype, 1850-1930

The eight plates served as an illustration for the article “GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. The Evils of Drunkenness as Sketched by George Cruikshank. With Reproductions of his Etchings The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children” written by Mark Keller, published in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol in 1944, Vol.5 (3), p. 483-504 as part of the Classics of Alcohol Literature series. The plates used to create these reproductions were from the collection of the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.