Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.
[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the
workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.
[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.