What was "Mother's Ruin"?

Gin drinking in 18th Century England rose significantly after the Government allowed unlicensed gin production and at the same time imposed a heavy duty on all imported spirits. This created a market for poor-quality grain that was unfit for brewing beer, and thousands of gin-shops sprang up throughout England, a period known as the Gin Craze. Because of the relative price of gin, when compared with other drinks available at the same time and in the same geographic location, gin began to be consumed regularly by the poor. Of the 15,000 drinking establishments in London, not including coffee shops and drinking chocolate shops, over half were gin shops. Beer maintained a healthy reputation as it was often safer to drink the brewed ale than unclean plain water. Gin, though, was blamed for various social problems, and it may have been a factor in the higher death rates which stabilized London's previously growing population.

The reputation of the two drinks was illustrated by William Hogarth in his engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), described as "arguably the most potent anti-drug poster ever conceived." The negative reputation of gin survives today in the English language, in terms like "gin joints" to describe disreputable bars, or "gin-soaked" to refer to drunks. The epithet "mother's ruin" is a common British name for gin that derives from this period.