Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times
by RONALD PAULSON
VOLUME II
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
(London), Ltd.
by the
Yale University Press, New Haven and London
1971

The Popular Prints
If Hogarth's interest in the London hospitals and charitable foundations led
to his idea to decorate public buildings and exhibit contemporary works by
English artists, it also revealed a growing social awareness. At the same time he
was painting his most successful sublime history paintings, between 1746 and
'48, he also conceived and executed the first of a series of popular prints that
sought to remedy social abuses. The sublime histories themselves were, in-
directly, comments on contemporary social injustice—the lure of luxury for the
poor and the plight of the innocent before a corrupt judge. As so often in Ho-
garth's career, apparent gaps between phases conceal underlying continuities.
Watching him move from the progress of a count and countess to that of
two apprentices, however, one cannot escape feeling that he had been in some
sense disappointed with the response to his most ambitious attempt at "comic
history painting," consciously designed for the connoisseurs and upper classes.
At this point he abandoned the painted modello completely for a drawing, and
turned from a description of high life, in which "Particular Care" was taken,
"that there may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the
whole Work," to the lower classes. In form and subject matter, both "objec-
tionable," he was proclaiming either that (as no one had ever denied) he could
portray the lowest as well as the highest, or, much more likely, that he had
given up the connoisseurs in favor of his true audience and was producing a
more honest and useful art. He no longer had to worry about the discrepancy
between form and content that was obtrusive in Moses brought to Pharaoh's
Daughter.
One cannot say, however, that Hogarth abandoned other sorts of work and
devoted himself to the lower classes. Rather he simply turned one eye in that
direction, adding another kind of work (and another source of income) to his
repertoire. Financially, he wanted (as Vertue suggests) to save money on en-
gravers and reach the large public that could afford only cheap copies of his
other prints. Aesthetically, he sought a new source of inspiration, and in the
process broadened his conception of modern history painting. Morally, he
57

58
probably intended to correct some of the abuses that he observed through his
connection with the hospitals, and that Fielding, the Bow Street Magistrate,
was to analyze at length four years later.
Hogarth's first print after Marriage a la Mode and Garrick as Richard III
was the full-length portrait of Simon Lord Lovat, one of the wiliest and most
newsworthy of the rebels of the '45, a walking symbol of duplicity. His charac-
ter was incorporated in the inventory of his trunk, made in December 1745
when he was taken as a captive to Inverness by Lord Loudoun: "some pieces of
gold, silver and copper coin, a woman's equipage of silver gilt, loaded dice, Glys-
ter pipes, an old silver watch, human hair, false teeth, physick, a brass ring with
a crucifix, a silver medal of the Pretender, etc." Lovat had been discovered by
the British Navy, searching the western coast of Scotland, as he hid in a hollow
tree (or, according to another account, in a cave) on an island in Loch Morar
where, thinking he had the only boat, he felt safe. Brought south, he reached St.
Albans on about 12 August and rested there at the White Hart Inn for two or
three days "under the immediate care of Dr. Webster; who seemed to think his
patient's illness was more feigned than real and arose principally from the ap-
prehension of danger on reaching London." 1 In fact, Lovat was an old man of
seventy and in very poor health.
Hogarth had spent part of July with Garrick at the Hoadlys' in the south of
England, but he was back in London by the end of the month. According to the
Rev. James Harris, in a letter written on 28 August, Hogarth made a trip to St.
Albans to get "a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up." 2 Dr.
Webster told Samuel Ireland that he had invited Hogarth to come up and meet
Lovat during his layover; there would be no further chance once Lovat was in
the Tower. Webster was apparently another case of a Hogarth admirer who in-
vited him to portray some particularly Hogarthian figure—analogous to the
frequent invocations of Hogarth by novelists introducing a striking character,
One story, first recounted by Peter Pindar, has Hogarth coming into the White
Hart just as Lovat was being shaved; the old man leaped up and saluted him
with a "kiss fraternal" in the French manner "which left much of the lather on
his face." The early accounts claim that the two knew each other, but in his
final edition Nichols is careful to state that Hogarth "had never seen him
before;" 3 perhaps the salute should be taken as another case of immediate
sympathy between this artist and his subject.
The portrait, probably a pencil sketch, was made as Lovat talked. Harris,
writing within a month of the event, said "the old Lord is represented in the
very attitude he was in while telling Hogarth and the company some of his
adventures," and he adds that "it is really an exact resemblance of the person it
was done for—Lord Lovat—as those who are well acquainted with him assure
me." Hogarth is said to have told his friends that Lovat was counting out the
"numbers of the rebel forces" (in another account, the clans) on his fingers:

60
"Such a general had so many men, &c." Hogarth "remarked, that the muscles of
Lovat's neck appeared of unusual strength, more so than he had ever seen."
Hogarth returned to London and made a simple etching (pl. 207), one of his
most accomplished works, and published it on 25 August: Lovat had reached
the Tower on the fifteenth, Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino and others had
been executed and other indictments lodged on the eighteenth, and more
rebels arrived in London on the twentieth, with three more rebel officers exe-
cuted two days later. 4 The moment was opportune, and although the presses
worked through the night for a whole week, not enough impressions could be
made to meet the demand. For several weeks thereafter the etchings were said
to have brought Hogarth £12 a day; and the story circulated (said of other
works as well) that when the plate was finished he was offered its weight in gold
by a rival printseller. At a shilling a sheet, and assuming that many of these
must have been sold wholesale to other print dealers, he would have sold some-
thing like 10,000 impressions and earned upward of £300. Nor was the sale a
matter of weeks: the prints were much in evidence at Lovat's trial the following
March. Joseph Spence wrote his friend Massingberd on 23 March 1746/7:
all the world here has been taken up with my L d Lovat's Tryal. There is a
print of him, from a drawing of Hogarth, which is not unlike him; & a
friend of mine has the design of a Satir's head, by Rubens, which is a good
deal more like him: but, to say the truth, they are both likenesses of the
caricatura-kind; for there is something of the Gentleman mixt in his ap-
pearance, w ch is quite sunk in the other. 5
Hogarth would have been amused if not annoyed to hear "caricature" extended
to any representation that did not appear gentlemanly. Vertue was more compli-
mentary of the print, though still critical of the moral implications:
in august, the picture of L d Lovat sketchd drawn by M r Hogarth & etchd
by him from the life in his drole nature & manner, was thought to be sur-
prisingly like, and from his humorous Character, was greatly cryd up &
sold every where at pr. 1 sh many many hundreds.
this is according to the old saying of a Man that has the Vilest character.
and the hatred of all partyes. & besides that a barefaced Rebel. if some per-
sons had Engravd and publisht his picture, it had been highly Criminal—
but as some are winkt at that steal a horse, whilst another is hangd for look-
ing over a hedge.—but in this case Art overcomes Malice— 6
Perhaps the financial success of a shilling print, quickly etched and yet sup-
porting some thousands of impressions, convinced Hogarth that he should
undertake more of the same. Deep and repeated biting produced lines strong
enough to approximate the durability of an engraving, with much less time ex-
pended and no assistance needed. Nonetheless, the next few months were de-

voted to the painting of Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter, and at the same
time he must have been mulling over the twelve designs of Industry and Idle-
ness, making the many drawings that have survived for that series, and be-
ginning to etch some of them (pls. 208-19). He was not planning too far ahead:
there was no subscription for this series, and of course, considering the audience
intended, there could not be.
Moses had not brought Hogarth any money, though Lovat's trial had sold
some more of the Lovat prints. Then, on 18 June Henry Pelham suddenly an-
nounced a General Election to be held at the end of the month, and by the
twenty-sixth Hogarth had brought out another shilling etching, The Stage-
Coach, or the Country Inn Yard. It duplicates exactly the style of Industry and
Idleness, almost to the size, and looks to have been originally simply the picture
of an inn yard—the election allusions must have been inserted for their topi-
cality. 7 Industry and Idleness itself was announced on 15-17 October:
This Day is publish'd, Price 12s.
Design'd and engrav'd by Mr. HOGARTH,
TWELVE Prints, call'd INDUSTRY and IDLENESS: Shewing the Ad-
vantages attending the former, and the miserable Effects of the latter, in the
different Fortunes of two APPRENTICES.
To be had at the Golden Head in Leicester-Fields, and at the Print-
Shops. N.B. There are some printed on a better Paper for the Curious, at
14s. each Set. To be had only at the Author's in Leicester-Fields. Where
also may be had all his other Works. 8
The special paper was a concession to his old audience and a way of distinguish-
ing the Golden Head from the other print shops. They were only a shilling a
plate, but there were twelve plates; one wonders how many Londoners could
afford to expend nearly a month's wages on morality. His mass audience was
probably the merchants rather than the apprentices, and may not have differed
too strikingly from that of his earlier prints. In this case, however, an account of
the public's reaction on the first day the prints were published has been pre-
served. The author of The Effects of Industry and Idleness Illustrated, a simple-
minded moral explanation of the prints, begins his preface: 9
Walking some Weeks ago from Temple-Bar to 'Change in a pensive Hu-
mour, I found myself interrupted at every Print-Shop by a Croud of People
of all Ranks gazing at Mr. Hogarth's Prints of Industry and Idleness. Being
thus disturbed in my then Train of Thoughts, my Curiosity was awakened
to mingle with the Croud, to take a View of what they seemed so much to
admire. Mr. Hogarth's Name at bottom was sufficient to fix my Attention
on these celebrated Pieces, where I found an excellent and useful Moral
discovered by the nicest Strokes of Art to the meanest Understanding. After
61

62
I had step'd into the Shop to look at such as were not stuck up in the Win-
dow, and viewed the whole more calmly, I purchased a Set. . . .
He then decides to take a tour of the print shops and listen to the opinions of
other spectators—to see "the Influence which a Representation of this Kind
might have upon the Manners of the Youth of this great Metropolis. . . ." But
while his head, he says, was full of the prints' moral, and he expected the same
from the other viewers, "I was mistaken"—
for the first I heard break Silence was one of the Beadles belonging to the
Court-End of the Town, who upon viewing the Print of the idle 'Prentice
at play in the Church-yard, breaks out with this Exclamation, addressed to
a Companion he had along with him, G-d Z—ds, Dick, I'll be d—n'd if that
is not Bob ----- , Beadle of St. ----- Parish; its as like him as one Herring is
like another: see his Nose, his Chin, and the damn'd sour Look so natural
to poor Bob. G—d suckers, who could have thought Hogarth could have hit
him off so exactly? It's very merry; we shall have pure Fun Tonight with
Ned; I expect to see him at our Club; I'll roast him. I'll buy this Print, if
it was only to plague him.
Unfortunately this man finds the set too expensive for him and leaves—but, as
the author contends, with no more thought to the set than the identity of Bob
---- . The author walks to St. Paul's Churchyard, stops at another print shop,
and hears beaux identifying the old woman with the pew-keys in the second
plate as a bawd of St. James' Street. They also identify other figures in the print,
including one Polly Glass as the woman with the fan. All of this makes the au-
thor decide he must write down the moral.
He does suggest, however, something of the excitement, and the attraction, of
a new set of Hogarth's prints at the moment of their publication. The series was
topical enough: Idle hangs out in the Blood Bowl house in Hanging-Sword
Alley, a disreputable haunt whose keeper, James Stansbury, had recently been
tried at Sessions for breaking open and robbing a linen-draper's. 10 Pinks, in his
History of Clerkenwell, believes that Hogarth alludes here to a group of mur-
derers known as the Black Boy Alley gang who terrorized Clerkenwell around
this time. They occupied some ruinous tenements in Black Boy Alley, where
whores decoyed gulls, who were then gagged, dragged to one of the dens, robbed,
murdered, and their bodies dropped into the Fleet Ditch. "To so alarming an
extent had this gang carried their attrocities, that the Government lent its aid
to the ordinary police; by means of which the principle members of the band
were apprehended, and nineteen of them were executed at one time." 11 But it is
also clear that Hogarth expected his viewers to read into his prints any like-
nesses they wished; that he aimed at not so much precise identification of his
figures as the viewer's active participation, along the lines of Marriage a la

Mode. The viewer recognizes one face and then senses in others a resemblance
within a certain range of possibilities, much as a reader of Pope's satires recog-
nizes one or two obvious figures and then is left to choose whether S—k is the
particular Selkirk or the general Shylock or somebody else. For Pope this flex-
ibility helped solve the question of whether satire is particular or general. It is
also, however, a measure of the cooperation both men demanded of their readers
and the degree to which readers are drawn into their moral world.
Vertue's summary expresses another view of the series:
as the View of his Genius seems very strong & Conversant with low life
here as heretofore, he has given a fresh instance of his skill, rather to com-
pass or gripe the whole advantage of his Inventions & to prevent the shop
print sellers any benefit he has gravd them in a slight poor strong manner.
to print many.—& engross that intirely to himself.—
without being at that great expence he was, of good workmen when he
publishd—his Marriage A la Mode—the cost of which works of engraving,
he paid dear for— 12
Vertue's comments suggest additional motives for the series: an endeavor to
capture the cheap copy market as well as the deluxe, and a way to save on en-
graving costs. Perhaps because of such innuendoes, Hogarth saw fit to defend
his style when he was composing his commentary on this series; these prints, he
wrote, were
calculated for the use & Instruction of youth wherein every thing necessary
to be known was to be made as inteligible as possible, and as fine engraving
was not necessary to the main design provided that which is infinitely more
material viz that characters and Expressions were well preserved, the pur-
chase of them became within the reach of those for whom they [were]
cheifly intended.
He also noted with pleasure that he had heard of a sermon preached on Industry
and Idleness, and that the prints sold well at Christmas. 13
Hogarth's abandoning paintings for drawings was dictated partly by a reac-
tion against the response to the glossy paintings of Marriage a la Mode, but also
no doubt by the knowledge that with the subjects and themes he was treating no
color painting could be in any sense satisfactory.
Twelve plates, coincidentally the number Highmore issued of his Pamela,
was in fact the usual number in the popular Italian and continental print cycles
—those picture stories of harlots and rakes which to some extent originally in-
spired Hogarth, but which previously he had transformed into paintings in the
history tradition. The verses printed under the Rake's Progress had been an ex-
periment that was not repeated; now he placed naively explicit titles (reminis-
cent of those on the cheap reprints of the Harlot) over each design and Bible
63

verses underneath, surrounding his figures with frames containing symbolic
cornucopias and skeletons, coronets with maces and whips with fetters. The
simple yet extraordinarily expressive style of the engraving was patently re-
moved from the French style of Marriage a la Mode, and proclaimed the absence
of preliminary paintings.
By introducing two protagonists, each representing a distinct pattern of be-
havior, Hogarth made the reader choose in a much more active, and "popular,"
sense than in Marriage a la Mode. If the earlier prints offered the audience a
choice that was often problematical, here it is ostensibly an easy one. One might
almost define the popular prints, beginning with Simon Lord Lovat, as designs
in which the choice is obvious. There is no doubt about the choice between
Beer Street and Gin Lane, or between the good boy and the bad in the first plate
of The Four Stages of Cruelty, or between England and France in the Invasion
prints of 1756. In The Gate of Calais, or The Roast Beef of Old England, not
itself in the style of the popular prints but of the same period, the reader is
shown only one alternative, the bad one, and of course chooses England (im-
plied) over France (shown). Beginning with Industry and Idleness, the contrast
is starkly depicted, and strengthened by the blacks and whites of the design. The
folly is much the same as the Harlot's, but now it is called idleness; and, in the
manner of a morality play, its opposite—industry—is also presented. To Ho-
garth, the essence of a popular print was apparently simpler forms and choices,
fewer allusions and less "reading." Behind the story of the apprentices are the
old apprentice manuals, the stories of good and bad apprentices in Eastward
Hoe and The London Merchant, and the whole tradition of Mr. Goodman vs.
Mr. Badman. Whereas Marriage a la Mode illustrates primarily the punishment
for evil, in Industry and Idleness rewards and punishments are precisely bal-
anced one against the other: the industrious apprentice becomes Lord Mayor of
London and the idle one dies on the gallows.
Having acknowledged the primary effect of Industry and Idleness as the
reader's active participation in a morality, condemning the idle and admiring
the industrious and presumably learning from their examples, one may pause to
admire its simple and strikingly monumental forms. Using the excuse of his
popular mode, Hogarth simplified forms, reactions, emotions, characters into
a kind of heroic opposition that is closer to sublime history painting, where gods
or saints opposed devils, than to the complex world of his comic histories. In a
real sense, these prints beginning with the story of Idle and Goodchild and end-
ing with the death of Tom Nero are Hogarth's most bold, original, and power-
ful modern equivalents to history.
Hogarth exploits the popular print and the expectations of the readers of
pious tracts, drawing much of his strength from this simple but powerful source.
However, one must not lose sight of his tendency, since the late 1730s, to move
to the juxtaposition of contrasting values: the pious vs. the profane in the first
71

72
two plates of The Four Times of the Day (church vs. tavern, pious lady vs.
wenches) and the resigned vs. the rebellious (heat vs. fire) in the last two plates.
In Strolling Actresses he simply opposed contrasting values: the costumes vs.
the girls themselves, the role of Diana vs. the pretty, beer-drinking girl en des-
habille who plays her. I find that this sheer contrast, engendering a kind of
comic acceptance, is not altogether absent from Industry and Idleness and ex-
plains the uneasy feeling one may have about those plates. The good and the
bad in Plate 1, for example, are so well documented, each with a contrasting
broadside ballad, Prentice's Guide, loom, and so on, that neither can be accepted
with entire seriousness, and they are finally reduced to contrasting ways of life;
the moral contrast becomes a comic contrast. The series, one recalls, concerns
not a good and a bad apprentice but an industrious and an idle one. Industry vs.
Idleness, with all the consequences attendant on each, is the subject.
The tendency toward balance in the earlier series also involved a shift from
the protagonist as chooser to the reader as chooser; hence his complex reactions
to Marriage a la Mode as he encountered the allusions and found himself being
linked with Medusa or Luke or informed of parallels with Solomon or Pharaoh.
In Industry and Idleness the reader is involved even more powerfully than in
Marriage a la Mode: through his popular emotions and prejudices, which are
played off against more subtle and sophisticated expectations and awareness.
Hogarth allows the popular audience to read him straight as a morality—the
heavy emphasis on poetic justice again reflects a progression from Marriage a la
Mode—but he leaves hints for the sophisticated that there is an unconventional
stand to be dealt with. He is presenting a simpler choice, and of course a judg-
ment—Defoe had declared idleness "a sin against the Holy Ghost" in his Com-
plete English Tradesman—and at the same time showing that the simplicity of
this choice may be illusory. Francis Goodchild surrounded by the greedy, glut-
tonous, but respectable citizens in the Guildhall, Tom Idle surrounded by
brawling, thieving hoodlums in a night cellar: the relationship is underlined by
a man appearing at the door with a petition for Goodchild and a beadle entering
to arrest Idle. In the final two plates—oversized to accommodate the larger pano-
rama—Idleness' reward is the gallows and Industry's is the Lord Mayorship, but
both affairs are essentially spectacles to the multitude and their processions are
very similar. The viewer who is accustomed to reading Hogarth's other prints
will see the parallel as well as the contrast in the two scenes. A very ironic state-
ment, not unlike that of the orb and scepter, the crown and mitre, in Strolling
Actresses, is being made—directed, as in Marriage a la Mode, at society itself.
At exactly what level Hogarth intends the parallel (as opposed to the contrast)
to be grasped is difficult to determine. The apprentices are not as far apart as
Hilaire Belloc's young Jim, who slips away from his nurse and is devoured by
a lion, and Charles Augustus Fortesque, who dutifully eats up all his mutton fat
and does the other things a good child should do and so ends with great riches

"To show what Everybody might/Become by SIMPLY DOING RIGHT."
The effect of Hogarth's series is somewhere between a pun and an ambiguity.
The popular prints exploit the punning that is perhaps central to all his art:
from the passing of Cuckold's Point in Plate 4 to the fleeing rat in Plate 6, a
double meaning of the most obvious sort is involved. Throughout his career he
has used objects which prove to be two different things, from the purely em-
blematic Royalty, Episcopacy, and Law, where a coin is also a king's head, to the
Harlot's Progress, where a curtain knot is also a face, and Marriage a la Mode,
where a picture on a wall is also a witness to the proceedings under it. From
word-puns he goes to objects, and finally to whole pictures: for his total meaning
often hinges on this doubleness. The punning reaches its widest range in the
popular prints, where the device seems the most appropriate. The dream of in-
dustry's success in a cruel world involves the various audiences in a most com-
plex way, playing on their ambivalent feelings about themselves and others. On
the simplest level, Industry and Idleness constitutes an indictment of its idle vil-
lain, and on a more sophisticated level (probably to some extent in the popular
mind as well), it attacks the unscrupulous people around him; but one docs not
cancel out the other. It hails the industrious hero but casts doubts upon the
value of his reward, and perhaps even on his kind of success. The punning art of
these prints can be taken either as a sophisticated exploitation of popular forms
and materials or as part of Hogarth's very nature, which transforms his materials
accordingly. "Configurations which bear the imprint of the primary process," as
Ernst Kris says of puns, "tend to be ambiguous, allowing for more than one in-
terpretation." 14 This can be applied equally to Hogarth's roots in popular im-
ages or to his own subconscious.
In Industry and Idleness, Hogarth portrays a hero for the first time in his
comic oeuvre; and permits this hero to rise triumphantly from climax to climax,
producing a daydream which is immediately qualified by juxtaposition with its
opposite. The fact of two protagonists suggests not only an ambiguity but a
personal split at this crucial point in Hogarth's career. In his progresses of the
1730s he presented people who were trying to rise in the world without the hard
labor entailed, trying to enact a dream of success, to be something they were not,
and in that sense going against the status quo in general—and he showed the
consequences that befell them. Yet he was himself, to some extent, rising in just
the same way: his mingling of art and business, of patronage and popular sup-
port, showed the complexity if not ambivalence of his feelings in his life, while
the Harlot and the Rake showed it in his art.
In Industry and Idleness he first faces the problem head-on, fragmenting the
good from the bad, rewarding the proper social climber who works hard and is
thus perhaps fulfilling himself, and punishing the one who wants to follow the
trade of a gentleman highwayman like Captain Macheath. They remain, essen-
tially, the alternatives of Virtue and Pleasure from the Choice of Hercules. 15
73

74
The division must be explained as a kind of self-therapy for Hogarth, because
it oversimplifies and even falsifies the complex vision of his earlier progresses.
It takes little imagination to perceive the obvious parallel between the indus-
trious apprentice and Hogarth, who married his master's daughter and took
over his business, carrying on the art academy, history painting, and defending
Thornhill's name. It is the face of Tom Idle, however, that resembles Hogarth's,
while Goodchild's is idealized almost to the point of caricature, and the strange
muffled shape of Idle's mother (repeated from print to print) bears a disconcert-
ing resemblance—hooded and in mourning attire—to the single portrait Ho-
garth painted of his own widowed mother (pl. 136). His image of a mother
might, of course, unconsciously draw on his own mother without seeking a fur-
ther parallel in the son. But if only to inject enough self-irony to make the por-
trayal palatable in his own mind, Hogarth must have introduced some sense of
himself into his opposite: he was so unlike Idle, so like the industrious one. Yet
one side of him clearly sought, as he put it, his "pleasure" as well as his "studies."
Looking back on his time as an apprentice, both in silver engraving and in
painting at Vanderbank's academy, he later emphasized his idleness, saying that
he required a technique "most suitable to my situation and idle disposition";
the mnemonic system he hit upon was useful because it allowed him "to make
use of whatever my Idleness would suffer me to become possest of." Idleness is
one of the key words he applies to himself in those years. 16 It sounds very much
as if there is a humorous self-portrait included in Tom Idle, hinting at that as-
pect of Hogarth that kept him from finishing his apprenticeship, liked to go
wenching, was deluded by illusions of ease and grandeur, and, perhaps, uncon-
sciously associated the creative act (as opposed to the successful businessman's
practice) with death and mutilation: the Harlot and the Rake in him that
needed to be exorcised.
Hogarth unflinchingly portrays the reality of both worlds. Idle's is an open,
unprotected world full of freedom, temptations, and dangers, with the threat of
some sort of retribution always hanging over him. Goodchild never ventures out
of a safe enclosure, remaining careful, comfortable, and protected. While Idle
sprawls over an open grave in a churchyard and shivers in an open boat on the
Thames, Goodchild is shown within what appears to be St. Martin in the Fields,
and in his master's counting house, obediently following first his heavenly and
then his earthly master. In Plates 6 and 7 both are inside a house, but Goodchild
is in perfect harmony with the outside world that is serenading him, while Idle
is in terror of any noise that may signify the presence of a hostile outside world.
Once the choice is made, outside all is hostile and fearful, full of impiety,
roguery, poverty, whores, failure, and chaos; inside is religion, shrewd business
sense, money, a wife, status, and order. In the final plates, Idle rides in an open
cart, Goodchild in a closed carriage, each to his own fate.

One may suppose that Hogarth turned from the completion of his Moses in
1746/7 to Industry and Idleness. After the unveiling of the Foundling paintings
in April, he was approached by Murray to make a painting for Lincoln's Inn.
Probably, as soon as he published Industry and Idleness he turned his attention
to this project; thus, when he finished Paul before Felix in July 1748 he must
have decided that he needed a rest. The outing he planned sounds rather like
a prosperous version of the "peregrination" of fifteen years earlier. The signal
could have been the armistice that was declared in May (the peace of Aix-la-
Chapelle was at length concluded 18 October). He had been to Paris in 1743,
just before the outbreak of hostilities, and he apparently had enjoyed himself,
coming back with some feeling for the kind of painting being done there, and
some sense of the popularity his engravings enjoyed. Then the war prevented
both a return visit (he may have intended to carry the Marriage a la Mode
paintings over himself) and the employment of some of the engravers he had
hired. He may have welcomed the chance to return.
Though his first trip left him with good memories of France, he hated French
artists in England, and certain aspects of the French style appalled him: their
houses, he remarked in an oft-quoted phrase, were "all gilt and beshit." 17 And
this second trip, in 1748, coupled with the Seven Years' War, seemed to generate
his notorious hatred of things French. Once the preliminaries for peace nego-
tiations had been agreed upon and the passage from Dover to Calais was free,
Hogarth joined with some of the artists who had previously shared in the Found-
ling project (they were also St. Martin's Lane Academy people): Hayman, the
sculptor Henry Cheere, Hudson, and the drapery painter (at that time shared
by Hudson and Ramsay) Vanhacken. In the words of Vertue, who chronicles the
episode, they "resolved and agreed to go to Paris." From Paris the majority
traveled north to Flanders and Holland; but Hogarth and Hayman returned
to Calais. 18
There Hogarth took out his sketchbook and drew some views of the draw-
bridge to the Calais gate—the old English tower fortifications. "I was santering
about and observing [the people] & the gate which it seems was built by the Eng-
lish when the place was in our possession (there is a fair appearance still of the
arms of England upon it)." Walpole's account, written the following December,
which sounds as though it was had from Hogarth himself, says he was taking a
sketch of the drawbridge. Venue's account has both Hogarth and Hayman draw-
ing. Hogarth, according to his own and Walpole's accounts, "was seized and
carried to the Governor"—as a spy. "I conceild none of the memorandum I had
privately taken and they being found to be only those of a painter for [my] own
use it was Judged necessary only to confine me to my lodging till the wind
changed for our coming away to England." In Walpole's account "he was forced
to prove his vocation by producing several caricatures of the French; particu-
75

76
larly a scene of the shore with an immense piece of beef landing for the Lion
d'Argent, the English inn at Calais, and several hungry friars following it. They
were much diverted with his drawing, and dismissed him." It sounds as though
Walpole talked to Hogarth in his studio as The Gate of Calais was unfolding on
the easel, and the story grew in the telling. 19
Nichols got his account from Dr. Ducarel, who had it from the Rev. William
Gostling of Canterbury, with whom Hogarth stayed the night after his return to
England, and whom he regaled with the story. After being carried before the
governor as a spy, and "after a very strict examination," he was "committed a
prisoner to Grandsire, his landlord, on his promising that Hogarth should not
go out of his house till it was to embark for England." Then Nichols adds: "The
same incident, however, has been more circumstantially related by an eminent
English Engraver, who was abroad when it happened." This may have been
Robert Strange, who was in France between 1748 and '50, or Thomas Major,
who was there between 1745 and '48. If it was Major, the story becomes more
poignant, for he had himself been seized one night in October 1746 and taken
to the Bastille, in reprisal for the French and Irish prisoners taken after Cul-
loden, and was only released after the strenuous intercession of Le Bas and
Gravelot with the Marquis d'Argenson. 20 This engraver's account, written down
(and demonstrably embroidered) by Steevens, comes out as follows:
While Hogarth was in France, wherever he went, he was sure to be dis-
satisfied with all he saw. If an elegant circumstance, either in furniture, or
the ornaments of a room, was pointed out as deserving approbation, his
narrow and constant reply was, 'What then? but it is French! Their houses
are all gilt and b -------- t.' 21 In the streets he was often clamorously rude. A
tattered bag, or a pair of silk stockings, with holes in them, drew a torrent of
imprudent language from him. In vain did my informant (who knew that
many Scotch and Irish were often within hearing of these reproaches, and
would rejoice at least in an opportunity of getting our Painter mobbed) ad-
vise him to be more cautious in his public remarks. He laughed at all such
admonition, and treated the offerer of it as a pusillanimous wretch, un-
worthy of a residence in a free country, making him the butt of his ridicule
for several evenings afterwards. This unreasonable pleasantry was at length
completely extinguished by what happened while he was drawing the Gate
at Calais; for, though the innocence of his design was rendered perfectly
apparent on the testimony of other sketches he had about him, which were
by no means such as could serve the purpose of an Engineer, he was told by
the Commandant, 'that, had not the Peace been actually signed, he should
have been obliged to have hung him up immediately on the ramparts.'
Two guards were then provided, to convey him on shipboard; nor did they
quit him till he was three miles from the shore. They then spun him round

like a top, on the deck; and told him he was at liberty to proceed on his
voyage without farther attendance or molestation. With the slightest allu-
sion to the ludicrous particulars of this affair, poor Hogarth was by no
means pleased. The leading circumstance in it his own pencil has perpetu-
ated.
This anecdote, which if true Hogarth may have wished to forget, sounds like
a germ of truth expanded—more likely by Steevens than by Major or Strange."
Whether Hogarth saw France before this experience as he saw it after we shall
never know. His memory of it was grim:
The first time any one goes from hence to france by way of Calais he cannot
avoid being struck with the Extreem different face things appear with at so
little a distance as from Dover: a farcical pomp of war, parade of religion,
and Bustle with little with very little bussiness in short poverty slavery and
Insolence with an affectation of politeness give you even here the first speci-
men of the whole country nor are the figure less opposited to those of dover
than the two shores. Fish wemen have faces of leather and soldiers raged
and lean.
As soon as he arrived back in England he "set about the Picture"—it is not clear
whether he means the one he was sketching when interrupted, although this is
Walpole's interpretation. To this "I introduced a poor highlander fled thither
on account of the Rebelion year before brozing on scanty french fare; in sight
a sirloin of beef a present from England which is opposed to the kettle of soup
meager; my own figure in the corner with the soldier's hand upon my shoulder
is said to be tolerably like."
The painting (pl. 220) was done with speed but is a meticulous performance,
as careful and finished as Marriage a la Mode. When it was cleaned in 1966, the
warm colors disappeared and cool grays and blues and off-reds emerged: though
as detailed as a miniature, its style begins to suggest the broad, almost poster-like
handling of the Election series of a few years later. The engraving, partly done
by Charles Mosley, was published in early March 1748/9:
This Day is publish'd, Price 55.
A Print design'd and engrav'd by Mr. HOGARTH, representing a
PRODIGY which lately appear'd before the Gate of CALAIS.
O the Roast-Beef of Old England, &c.
To be had at the Golden Head in Leicester-Square, and at the Print
Shops.
Vertue, noting the appearance of the print, observes that the title is "a prodi-
gious Blunder of his—for he has represented a Man carrying a peice of (Raw
beef) instead of Roasted—as it appears colour'd only red & yellow in the Middle
77

78
of the print." 23 Unless he had seen a colored version of the print, Vertue must be
thinking of the painting, which no doubt was displayed next to the print in
Hogarth's house. He adds that the "print of him and his dog" (Gulielmus Ho-
garth) was out, selling for 35 6d.
Vertue's comments also indicate that with these two prints Hogarth was fur-
ther publicizing himself; anyone who had not heard the story of his adventure
in Calais by word of mouth would "read" it in his print. If there is any doubt,
however, that Hogarth saw himself dispassionately in this episode it is dispelled
by the blatantly stage-like structure of The Gate of Calais—perhaps more obvi-
ous than in any picture since The Beggar's Opera. Hogarth's self-comment is
that this was a small comedy played out with a motley cast of characters. Never-
theless, here and perhaps in Industry and Idleness too (for those who saw the
deeper import of the success story of the industrious apprentice), he was in a
dangerous sense making himself his subject.

In September 1749 Hogarth took the final step of buying a villa in the coun-
try. It is likely that he had rented one—possibly the one he now bought—for
some years, going back (if one can believe his friend Morell) to within a few
years of his marriage, perhaps becoming more permanent after Anne moved in
and could be counted on to handle business while her brother was away. The
Hogarths had lived in Leicester Fields now fifteen years, growing more pros-
perous and better known; a country house was clearly called for.
Chiswick, the location they chose, was one of the loveliest of the Thames-side
towns. John Bowack, in 1706, described it as Hogarth would have known it:
The pleasant village of Chiswick, tho' but small, is so very pleasantly sit-
uated out of the road and free from noise, dust and hurry that it has for
many years past boasted of more illustrious and noble persons than any of
its neighbours, nor is it at present without a good number of persons of
great quality and worth. The Thames, taking an oblique course from Ful-
ham and Hammersmith, but gently salutes this place, and the several little
islands, or eights, so pleasantly scattered in it, considerably weaken its force.
The greatest number of houses are stretched along the Waterside from the
Lyme Kiln, near Hammersmith, to the Church, in which dwell several
small traders, but for the most part fishermen and watermen, who make up
a considerable part of the inhabitants of this town. 24
The town derived its name from Old English cese or ciese and wic, the cheese
farm, and a cheese fair was supposed to have been held there within Hogarth's
lifetime. 25
The house he settled in, assessed at £10 and rated 5s, was a very modest ver-
sion of Thornhill Hall. 26 A brick structure, it is of an irregular, almost wedge-
like shape; its bare back wall is continued in a high wall that surrounds the
whole garden and cuts it off completely from the outside world. Except for a
couple of small windows in the servants' quarters, all the windows look inward
to the garden. On the ground floor is an entrance passage, from which one turns
to the left into a parlor (or dining room) and right to the stone-flagged kitchen.
On the first floor is a small hall where the stairway rises; from the stairs one turns
right into a bedroom, left into the best parlor with a large hanging bay window
above the entrance door, and beyond that a second bedroom. All the rooms are
paneled. On the upper floor were the servants' quarters.
A lane, now called Hogarth Lane and Church Street, ran past the house, past
the parish church and down to the Thames. It is now cruelly split by one of the
most violent of English roundabouts and the main road from London to Rich-
mond, Staines, and parts west. On the hill overlooking the river is St. Nicholas
Church; though largely rebuilt, it retains its old tower of Kentish stone and
chalk, built in the time of Henry VI (who had a residence in Chiswick in his
79

early years). Hogarth's teacaddy-shaped tomb also remains, though all design is
worn away and the inscriptions have been restored. The Feathers Tavern still
exists but probably not in its original location; the Burlington Arms still stands
in Church Street.
Hogarth's house is largely as it was, the sole alteration being the demolition
of his stable and studio and the addition of a room, possibly where the studio
once was (pl. 221). A visitor in the mid-nineteenth century said he saw the stu-
dio over the stable. It had a large window and a very narrow stairway, and so
"his paintings, I presume, would be let down through this window, for trans-
mission, in his carriage, to town." 27 On one side of the house and walled garden
is now the Hogarth Laundry with its sign an adaptation of Hogarth Painting
the Comic Muse; on the other is the enormous expanse of Chiswick Products,
whose most publicized ware is Cherry Blossom Shoe Polish. But inside Ho-
garth's garden one feels much as he must have felt 200 years ago—as though the
torrent of traffic outside did not exist. All is still and green here, and the mul-
berry tree, from which the Hogarths are supposed to have given the village chil-
dren fruit every year, still produces fruit in September.
The inside of the house was described by John Ireland in the 1780s, when it
was still unchanged. None of Hogarth's own prints were on the walls, but there
were engravings of Thornhill's St. Paul paintings around the parlor, and the
Houbraken heads of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dryden. In the garden, over the
gate, was "a cast of George the Second's mask, in lead," and in one corner "a
rude and shapeless stone, placed upright against the wall," the marker for a pet
bulfinch:
ALAS, POOR DICK!
OB. 1760
AGED ELEVEN.
Underneath were two bird crossbones surmounted by a heart and a death's head
scratched with a nail, and at the bottom were Hogarth's initials. 28
In Hogarth's time the house stood alone, and fields stretched beyond, across
which he sketched and etched his friend Dr. John Ranby's house on what is now
Corney Road (pl. 222). Thomas Morell lived nearby in Turnham Green, Ar-
thur Murphy in Hammersmith Terrace, William Rose in Bradmore House in
Chiswick Lane (where for thirty years he kept an academy), Ralph Griffiths of
the Monthly Review in Linden House, and James Ralph in various houses in
the neighborhood. Fielding had a house not far away at Fordhook, on the Ux-
bridge Road, about a mile from the village of Acton, at the eastern extremity of
Ealing. The only house other than Hogarth's that has survived from the period
is Chiswick House, the prototypical Palladian villa which Lord Burlington built
and lived in, where he entertained William Kent and others, including Pope
and Hogarth's own friend Garrick. Indeed, in the summer of 1749 Garrick had
81

82
visited Lord and Lady Burlington and sent current prints from London out to
the latter. 29
Very little is known about Hogarth's private life during these middle years,
aside from minutiae such as the fact Samuel Ireland discloses, that he could not
distinguish fresh from salt butter till he had taken a bit of cheese at breakfast.
And there are anecdotes about his forgetfulness or absentmindedness, traits
often attributed to artists, but in his case perhaps a byproduct of his remarkable
visual memory. One need only imagine him deeply immersed in some problem
of his latest painting or print: "At table he would sometimes turn round his
chair as if he had finished eating, and as suddenly would re-turn it, and fall to his
meal again." Nichols, who tells this story, adds that he once addressed a letter to
Benjamin Hoadly simply "To the Doctor at Chelsea," which did however reach
its addressee and was preserved by Hoadly "as a pleasant memorial of his
Friend's extraordinary inattention."
Another remarkable instance of Hogarth's absence was related to Mr.
Steevens, in 1781, by one of his intimate friends. Soon after he set up his
carriage, he had occasion to pay a visit to the Lord Mayor. When he went,
the weather was fine; but business detained him till a violent shower of rain
came on. He was let out of the Mansion-house by a different door from that
at which he entered; and, seeing the rain, began immediately to call for a
hackney-coach. Not one was to be met with on any of the neighbouring
stands; and our Artist sallied forth to brave the storm, and actually reached
Leicester-fields without bestowing a thought on his own carriage, till Mrs.
Hogarth (surprized to see him so wet and splashed) asked where he had
left it. 30
Hogarth's absentmindedness or his being not yet used to a carriage could be
equally at issue here. In 1776 George III, in the course of a conversation with
Benjamin Wilson, Hogarth's old friend,
observed that he supposed that Hogarth told a story very well. Wilson an-
swered, 'Pretty well, but he was apt sometimes to tell the wrong story.' 'How
is that?' said the King. 'Sir,' he answered, 'Mr. Hogarth was one day dining
with Sir George Hay, Mr. Garrick and others, when he said he had an ex-
cellent story to tell which would make them all laugh. Everybody being so
prepared he told his story, but instead of laughing all looked grave, and
Hogarth himself seemed a little uncomfortable. After a short time, how-
ever, he struck his hand very suddenly upon the table and said that he had
told the wrong story. This caused no small amusement, and when he told
the right one at last it was so good in its way that all the company laughed
exceedingly.' 31
As the first of these stories suggests, by this time he had set himself up with an

equipage and was very conscious—as the self-portrait too might indicate—of his
dress. Nichols talked with a barber who claimed often to have shaved Hogarth,
and commented that he persisted in wearing a scarlet roquelaure or "rockelo,"
the loosely-fitting many-buttoned cloak popularized by the Duc de Roquelaure
in the reign of Louis XIV, even after the fashion died away. Benjamin West
recollected him as "a strutting, consequential little man;" James Barry saw him
strolling about in a sky-blue coat, and others remembered "his hat cocked and
stuck on one side, much in the manner of the great Frederick of Prussia." John
Ireland noted that he always wore his hat in such a way as to show off the deep
scar in his forehead, which Ireland says he received as a child, and which also
appears prominently in the self-portrait with Trump. 32
We have seen him in the company of the Hoadlys and Garrick, of Fielding
and Richardson. Another friend was the Rev. Arnold King, who became rector
of St. Michael, Cornhill, in 1749; he chose the verses for Industry and Idleness,
many passages of which are marked in Hogarth's family Bible. It was to King
that Hogarth addressed his punning invitation to dinner at the Mitre Tavern
by drawing a circle for a dish with knife and fork as supporters; within the dish
he placed a pie with a mitre on top of it, and around it wrote his invitation: "M r
Hogarth's Comp ts to M r King and desires the Honnor of his Company at dinner
on thursday next to Eta Beta PY" (pl. 223). 33 With these people he was obviously
at ease. But unlike Garrick, for example, he was evidently not comfortable with
the upper classes. There is the story of Horace Walpole's inviting him to dinner
with the poet Thomas Gray, very likely in order to observe the confrontation of
these two diametrically opposite characters. "What with the reserve of the one
and the want of colloquial talent in the other, Walpole never passed a duller
time than between these representatives of Tragedy and Comedy." 34
Among the artists, he was most at ease with the most convivial—Hayman,
Lambert, and Ellys. With Lambert and Ellys, the mutual attachment to the
stage and scene painting probably contributed to the friendship. He seems to
have liked people who were something besides artists. This was especially true
of the younger generation, where he increasingly found his best friends. Benja-
min Wilson, to whom I have referred more than once for anecdotes of Hogarth,
was as much a scientist as a painter and published books on electricity. Allan
Ramsay wrote as well as painted, and Samuel Scott was interested in music.
Hogarth's early life had been one of powerful relationships, with his family
and with Thornhill, indicating an obvious personal need for security and for
models. Once he was married, however, with his father, mother, and Thornhill
dead, and the success and security he desired a reality, the remaining relation-
ships are more difficult to assess as to importance and purpose. The majority
were either convivial or professional, that is public, associations. For example,
it is very difficult to document the personal relationship between Hogarth and
Fielding, though much can be said about the public one. It is discernible in
83

84
terms of their works, not of themselves: Fielding refers to "my friend Hogarth"
in Tom Jones. And the Rev. James Townley, who assisted Hogarth with verses
for his Stages of Cruelty and was to help correct The Analysis of Beauty, wrote
him (28 February 1750): "I wish I were as intimate with you ... as your Friend
Fielding." 35 There are signs of affection but no very clear indication of what
kind of friendship it was or what Hogarth put into it or got out of it.
Closer to home, his sister Anne and he remained in the same house for over
twenty years, but nothing is known of their relationship save that she served him
well and faithfully. His business situation was changing in the 1740s, most nota-
bly with the addition of his trade with the Continent and the increasing sale of
bound volumes of his prints. The sisters, who were living close to William by
1736, appear as ratable tenants in Cranbourn Passage from 1739-42. On Friday,
20 November 1741, Mary died and was buried three days later near her mother
in the churchyard of St. Anne, Soho. 36 Anne remained in Cranbourn Passage
into 1742; but by the end of that year she had given up the shop and moved in
with William in Leicester Fields, and thereafter her signature begins to appear
on receipts, bills, and the like, and she remained with her brother's family until
her death in 1771. William may even have put money into Anne's shop before
she came to live with him; certainly he supported her thereafter. In his will he

stipulates that "I do hereby release, and acquit, and discharge my sister Ann
Hogarth, of and from all claims and demands which I have on her at the time
of my decease." 37 He left her £80 a year for life out of the profits of his engrav-
ings; and if Jane had remarried, the Harlot, the Rake, and Marriage a la Mode,
evidently the most popular of the prints, would have gone to Anne.
As to Jane, more can be said about the origin of their relationship, and what
it meant in 1729, than about its later development. The only letter that has sur-
vived was written to her on 6 June 1749: he was in London, probably working
on The March to Finchley, his most ambitious "comic history painting" since
Marriage a la Mode, and she was in the country:
Dear Jenny
I write to you now, not because I think you may expect it only, but be-
cause I find a pleasure in it, which is more than I can say of writing to any
body else, and I insist on it you don't take it for a mere complement, your
last letter pleased more than I'll say, but this I will own if the postman
should knock at the door in a weeks time after the receipt of this, I shall
think there is more musick in't than the beat of a Kettle Drum, & if the
words to the tune are made by you, (to carry on metafor) and brings news of
your all coming so soon to town I shall think the words much better than
the musick, but dont hasten out of a scene of Pleasure to make me one [I
wish I could contribute to it-s.t.] you'l see by the Enclosed that I shall be
glad to be a small contributer to it. I dont know whether or no you knew
that Garrick was going to be married to the Violette when you went away.
I supt with him last night and had a deal of talk about her. I can't write any
more than what this side will contain, you know I wont turn over a new leaf
I am so obstinate, but then I am no less obstinate in being your affectionate
Husband
W m Hogarth 38
Up the side he has written, "Complement as usual," referring to Lady Thorn-
hill, who would have been with Jane in the country. He sends some money but
makes no comment on business or on the project-that engages his attention at
the moment. He gossips about their close friend Garrick, who was about to
marry Eva Maria Veigel, an Austrian dancer whose stage name was Violette: the
marriage took place on the twenty-second, when the London Evening Post (of
20—22 June) described her as "a beautiful Lady, with a Fortune of 10,000 I."
The tone of Hogarth's letter combines good-natured gallantry with affection,
how much real and how much an automatic gesture it is impossible to say.
I have found no record of any children of the Hogarths, either in the parish
registers or in the family Bible. One might leave the matter at that, were it not
for Hogarth's apparently free-and-easy social habits, the difference between his
origins and his wife's, and certain rumbling sounds from the early anecdotists.
85

86
Responding to a typically ungenerous and vague description by Steevens of Ho-
garth's childless marriage, Thomas Morell, who knew the Hogarths well, wrote
to Nichols:
I knew little of Mr. Hogarth before he came to Chiswick, not long after his
marriage; but from that time was intimate with him to his death, and very
happy in his acquaintance. His excellencies, as well as his foibles, are so
universally known, that I cannot add to the former, nor shall I attempt to
palliate the latter. To assert, however, that he had little nor no acquaint-
ance with domestic happiness, is unjust. I cannot say, I have seen much
fondling between Jenny and Billy (the common appellation of each other);
but I have been almost a daily witness of sufficient endearments to conclude
them a happy couple. 39
Although the popular prints are obviously concerned more with morality and
society than with art and the artist, their underlying subject matter should be
understood in relation to the prints that began with The Distressed Poet and
ran from Marriage a la Mode, with its indirect emphasis on the artist, to the self-
portrait with Trump and even Garrick as Richard III (to the extent that Ho-
garth uses Garrick as an analogue for himself as artist). The Gate of Calais, of
course, includes Hogarth himself in the act of sketching the Gate, and Industry
and Idleness is in its way as much about Hogarth as this or as the self-portrait.
Two contrary aspects emerge: the respectable and the unrespectable, the astute
businessman and the naif, the orderly and the disorderly, and, not least impor-
tant, the admired and the suspect. One side is constantly striving for union with
the master by succeeding to his business, marrying his daughter, winning his
honors, buying a house in the country; this side seeks governorships of prestig-
ious institutions and the friendship of Lord Mayors. The other side includes the
artist of the grotesque and caricature (which is called "comic history painting"
and "character" by Side One): this side is constantly tending toward his "pleas-
ures," toward entropy and, in the major prints and paintings of these years, bal-
ances this disorder, almost equating it with Nature, against various kinds of
excessive and meaningless order. In short, in these years of his middle age Ho-
garth was beginning to look back, take account, study himself, and wonder
where to go from here: he was attempting new forms, vacillating from sublime
history to a "comic history" of high life to the most popular blockprint sort of
broadsides—which, moreover, were increasingly focused on himself or (what
amounted to almost the same thing) his art.
The great synthetic work of this period, before he settles down to art as his
subject on the one hand and purely popular prints on the other, is The March
to Finchley (pl. 224a), and here, though Hogarth does not appear as one of the
dramatis personae, there is a direct confrontation of opposites: order, in the lines

of troops marching to defend England against the Pretender, is juxtaposed with
disorder in the muddle of soldiers getting ready to leave their wives or mistresses,
the foragers and deserters, the camp followers, all the idle apprentices in and out
of uniform, and all the natural instincts that operate against regimentation,
duty, and prudence—a confrontation that seems almost to be between art and
nature. In the middle foreground is another obvious version of the Choice of
Hercules: a grenadier with his pretty young Protestant (English) lover, a ballad
vendor, is accosted by his Jacobite wife or ex-lover, a newsvendor, wielding a
"Rembrancer" (an anti-Cumberland periodical). That the latter is Jacobite is
established by the Jacobite's Journal she sells and by the cross she wears. Min-
gled with love, pleasure, food and drink, sports and recreation, are their conse-
quences: the demands of women, venereal disease, children, drunken collapse,
and thievery, in the midst of which even conspiracy (two Jacobites whispering)
can take place. Although Rouquet was writing for his French audience—a tick-
lish matter with this print—and speaks with irony, he leaves the contrast as much
in the air as Hogarth does. The orderly column of soldiers, he notices, is con-
trasted with the foreground, where "la discipline est moins observee." But, he
goes on, "si vous vous plaignez de ce choix, on vous dira bonnement que l'ordre,
& la subordination ne convient qu'a des esclaves; car ce qui s'apelle license par
tout ailleurs s'arroge ici l'auguste nom de liberte." 40 The matter is further com-
plicated by the inscription Hogarth added to the engraving made from the
painting: "To His MAIESTY the KING of PRUSIA and Encourager of the
ARTS and SCIENCES! This Plate is most humbly Dedicated."
A contemporary would have taken The March to Finchley, with its dedica-
tion to the King of Prussia and its moiling confused troops, as a commentary on
the Mutiny Bill being violently and spectacularly debated in Commons in
1749-50, and continuing in 1751. The supporters of the Duke of Cumberland
and Henry Fox, on the side of the bill, might have seen the print as depicting the
current chaos of English martial discipline, as opposed to the Prussian standard
o£ order and precision advocated by the Duke as chief of the armed forces.
Horace Walpole, however, remarked of the proposed bill: "The penalty of
death came over as often as the curses in the Commination on Ash-Wednesday.
Oaths of secrecy were imposed on Courts Martial; and even officers on half-pay
were for the future to be subject to all the jurisdiction of military law." 41 Ho-
garth's basic ambiguity would allow opponents of the bill to read The March
to Finchley as a comment on the frequently-heard assertion that the Duke, the
incarnation of "Prussianism," treated his soldiers "rather like Germans than
Englishmen." The Prince of Wales, the Duke's political enemy (and sponsor of
The Rembrancer), might have read the dedication as a reference to his brother.
Then again, one could take the reference to the King of Prussia as "An En-
courager of Arts and Sciences!" as an ironic allusion to George II's notorious
indifference to the arts. The references are there, though neither obtrusive nor
87

90
partisan, and with an ambiguity similar to that of the Industry and Idleness
plates. In any case, the subject of art and nature is central. Hogarth had Rouquet
begin his commentary with an ironic apology for the painting's faults: it is too
new, he says, and bears too great a resemblance to the objects it represents. This
painting, he goes on, "a le defaut d'etre encore tous brilliant de cette ignoble
fraicheur, qu'on decouvre dans la nature, 8c qu'on ne voit jamais dans les
Cabinets bien celebres." It lacks the signatures of smoke, varnish, and dirt that
endear paintings to the connoisseurs. Implicitly contrasted with this scene of
the real muddle that precedes the falling into formation and marching to war
are all the sublime representations of heroic battles in which all is order, victory,
and heroism, perhaps generalized by the wearing of togas. Hogarth's view is al-
most indecently particularized: if there is any truth in the story of George II's
horror at seeing the print, it lies in the fact that this is not the way he would have
wanted to see his army portrayed. Being shown the print by a third party and
asked to accept Hogarth's dedication to him (so the story goes), he cried: "I hate
bainting and boetry too! Neither the one nor the other ever did any good! Does
the fellow mean to laugh at my guards?"—"The picture, an please your Majesty,
must undoubtedly be considered as a burlesque."—"What a bainter burlesque
a soldier? he deserves to be picketed for his insolence! Take his trumpery out of
my sight." 42
Published only a year after Tom Jones, The March to Finchley is Hogarth's
response to Fielding's masterpiece: here is the "comic history painting" on its
largest scale, with an epic scope, but unlike Fielding's novel Hogarth's painting
takes no sides, only illustrating the relationships. If there is a choice, it is once
again, as in the histories of the late 1730s, left up to the viewer. It is probably
no coincidence, however, that Hogarth chose to illustrate the same historic
struggle that hovers in the background of Torn Jones, where it acts as a correla-
tive to the sundered families, confused loyalties, and egregious misunderstand-
ings of the main plot. Termed more accurately than his other works a "history"
painting, The March to Finchley portrays a particular historical moment in
early December 1745 from the perspective of 1750. Like Fielding's novel (and
the presence of the Jacobite's Journal alludes to Fielding), its context is not the
patriotism of 1745-46 but the later discontent in an unhappy England ruled by
an unpopular foreign family and swarming with dissident elements; and more
immediately, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), from which England had
gained little or nothing, and the current attempt by the victor of Culloden to
bring the British army up to a German standard of order and precision.
Hogarth could not have made such a painting within a shorter time of the
events it portrays because the forces of patriotism might have seen it as Jacobite
(as Wilkes attempted to do, in retrospect, in North Briton No. 17). The only
gap in his work schedule when he could have undertaken such an ambitious

painting was late in 1749. It must have been nearing completion in the spring
if 1750 when events made it an even more appropriate image of the times. On
the night of 8 February London suffered an earth tremor, and a second more
violent one followed exactly one month later. Charles Wesley and the Bishop
of London issued a sermon and a pastoral letter respectively admonishing the
nation to repentance, which alone could avert the just chastisement of God. A
Lifeguardsman ran around London prophesying a third earthquake that would
swallow the city on 4 April, one lunar month from the second earthquake. Panic
set in, and in three days 730 coaches were counted passing Hyde Park Corner
"with whole parties removing to the country"—in effect, another "march to
Finchley." On 1 April, as Horace Walpole vividly described it, great mobs of
people left their houses and gathered on commons in carriages to await the
end. 43 The General Advertiser of 13 April viewed the affair, logically enough,
in terms of a satire by Hogarth:
Not a Fribble, Bully, Wicked, or Damn'd-Clever Fellow was left in Town
on Wednesday last Week.—The First Class own'd their Fright, and pleaded
their Nerves. The Second sneak'd out. The Third and the Last swore
furiously, on their Return, that they never flinch'd an Inch.—We hear that
a True List of these Demi-men will be soon published.—If Mr. Hogarth
were to oblige the Town with a Print of these woeful Wretches in their
Fright and Flight, it could not be disagreeable.
Already on 16 March, in the same paper, Hogarth had published an adver-
tisement announcing just such a project:
Mr. HOGARTH Proposes to publish by SUBSCRIPTION,
A PRINT representing the March to Finchley in the Year 1746, en-
graved on a Copper-Plate 22 Inches by 17, Price 7s. 6d.
Subscriptions will be taken at his House the Golden-Head in Leicester-
Fields till the 30th of April next; during which Time, the Picture [i.e. the
painting] may be seen and not longer, to the End that the Engraving may
not be retarded.
Note, Each Print will be Half a Guinea after the Subscription is over;
and in the Subscription Book will be seen a Proposal, which being complied
with during the above Time of subscribing, will entitle a Subscriber to the
Picture, which shall be delivered as soon as the Engraving is finished.
The portrayal of chaos and inglorious mismanagement in time of crisis, to be
seen at the Golden Head, may have reminded people of their own "fright and
flight." Even the subscription ticket, A Stand of Arms (pl. 225), reflected an
anti-heroic view of war: the contrast between the Scots' outmoded weapons and
the modern English ones shows that the English were far superior, but also
91

92
intimates the pathetic discrepancy. (The Scottish weapons may have been
sketched by Hogarth from the arms captured at Carlisle and displayed, early
in 1746, in the Tower.)
As a painting, The March to Finchley shows that Hogarth had not yet given
up the attempt at painting a comic history begun in Marriage a la Mode. The
size of the canvas (40 by 52 1/2 inches) is indicative, serving to narrow the usual
Hogarthian separation between print and painting until both can legitimately
be called monumental. The color scheme, built around the red-white-blue of
the British flag being waved in the center of the picture, is beginning to re-
semble the cool blues and reds Hogarth was to use in the 1750s. Both scale and
color scheme anticipate the Election, but he has not yet adopted the broad
poster-like application of paint that characterizes those paintings. The shifting
shadows and varying focus used in the paintings of the 1730s works to good
effect in this restless, crowded composition. The group of the piper-woman-
drummer, the central grenadier with his competing vendors, and the two
soldiers in the right foreground stand out in -clear focus, illuminated by sun-
beams falling between clouds. The rest are in varying degrees of shadow; bits
of light and clear focus are scattered throughout the wide canvas, as, for example,
to juxtapose the pregnant girl's face with the baby's to her right, or to highlight
the boxing bout which serves as a contrast to the war.
The originality of the composition as well as the subject becomes evident if
one tries to find a precedent. A suggestive resemblance may be observed in Rem-
brandt's great "militia piece," The Night Watch, which Hoogstraten com-
mended for its avoidance of the domino-like rows of figures usual in such large
military compositions. Though the size of the figures in relation to the picture
space is different, one cannot fail to notice the similar treatment of subject and
composition: in the use of lighting, which on the face of it is rather odd in the

oad daylight of Finchley; the interrelation of the three lighted groups at
right, left, and center; the same unfurled flag rising near the center background;
and, above all, the s-shaped movement, forward and back, of the various groups
of figures. To draw any valid conclusions about inspiration or influence, one
would have to establish whether Hogarth had access to either the original or a
copy. 44 But the analogy at least points to the essentially Rembrandtesque solu-
tion employed by Hogarth. If such a connection is not fanciful, it would be
neither the first nor the last time that Hogarth turned to Rembrandt.
The General Advertiser for 23 April added further information on the sub-
scription: it would end on the thirtieth and, as to the painting: "In the Sub-
scription-Book are the Particulars of a Proposal whereby each Subscriber of 3s.
over and above the said 7s. 6d. for the Print, will, in consideration thereof, be
entitled to a Chance of having the original Picture, which shall be deliver'd to
the winning Subscriber as soon as the Engraving is finish'd." A few days later
Hogarth announced that on Monday, 30 April, at 2 P.M. the box would be
opened and the drawing made. The London Evening Post for 28 April to 1
May reported:
Yesterday Mr. Hogarth's Subscription was closed, 1843 Chances being
subscribed for. The remaining Numbers from 1843 to 2000 were given by
Mr. Hogarth to the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of ex-
posed and deserted young Children. At Two o'clock the Box was open'd, in
the Presence of a great Number of Persons of Distinction, and the fortunate
Chance was drawn, No. 1941, which belongs to the said Hospital; and the
same Night Mr. Hogarth deliver'd the Picture to the Governors. His Grace
the Duke of Ancaster offer'd them 200 1. for it before it was taken away, but
it was refus'd. 45
Judging by this report, Hogarth, though he had originally announced that he
would keep the picture till the print was finished, evidently changed his mind-
no doubt to take advantage of the publicity while it was still in the public mind
and to get the picture up where it could be seen. This gesture could not, of
course, stimulate subscribers, but it could advertise his comic history painting
and lure people who had not subscribed to buy the plate once it was out. Ho-
garth himself explained later that it was "disposd of by lot (the only way a living
Painter has any probability of being tolerably paid for his time)"; he remem-
bered it as bringing him £300. The whole subscription must have earned him
£920 and, counting only the 3s addendum for the lottery, the painting alone
brought £276. 46
Vertue's comments on the subscription and disposal of The March to Finch-
ley may have been symptomatic. After explaining the terms of the auction, he
notes that faced with the choice everyone naturally
93

94
rather subscribed half a guinea than 3 half Crowns; by which means he
gatherd about 1800 for Ticketts subscription before hand—thus cunning
& skill joynd to gether. changes the proverb, (say well is good, do well is
better.)—for here in this case he valud the painting at 200 pounds its said—
a great unbounded price, however, by this means, he raised 900 hundred
pounds, and still has the Engraved plate to dispose of prints at half guineas
more— therefore, it may well be said, do well is good, but say well is better)
such fortunate successes are the effect of cunning artfull contrivances,
which men of much greater merritt, coud never Get or expect— 47
At the annual Court of Governors of the Foundling Hospital on 9 May, with
Hogarth (and, of the artists, Pine and Zincke) present:
The Treasurer acquainted the General Court, that M r Hogarth had pre-
sented the Hospital with the remainder of the Tickets M r Hogarth had left,
for the Chance of the Picture he had painted, of the March to Finchley in
the time of the late Rebellion; and that the fortunate Number for the said
Picture being among those Tickets, the Hospital had received the said
Picture.
Resolved
That the thanks of this General Court be given to M r Hogarth, for the
said Benefaction; which the Vice-President accordingly did.
This was the first meeting he had attended since he put through the resolution
about engraved copies of the history paintings donated to the Hospital. He did
not attend another until October 1754. But it must have been with some satis-
faction that he attended this meeting. He had now placed on public display one
work "in each of the styles of painting which he had attempted" and which he
could claim as his own. 48
That summer or fall Rouquet wrote his account of The March to Finchley
as an addendum to his Lettres de M. * *. This seven-page pamphlet, which was
bound in with the Lettres, can be dated only roughly: it obviously postdates
February 1749 when Tom Jones was published, because it makes reference to
that novel, and antedates January 1750/1, because Rouquet apologizes for
describing the painting before the print was made, using his correspondent's
impatience as his excuse. More probably, he had to leave for France himself.
Hogarth had Luke Sullivan, a talented young engraver who may have worked
his way up in Hogarth's shop, make a carefully detailed drawing—and I think it
likely that he himself drew the heads (as usual, for expression). 49 The painting
presumably remained with Hogarth, however, until Sullivan was finished.
Finally, in the London Evening Post (which throughout advertises and reports
Hogarth's progresses, although it appears itself as a Jacobite periodical in
Finchley) of 29 December—1 January 1750/1 the print was announced as ready

for subscribers on 3 January. The appearance of the print was closely followed,
on 17—19 January, by a translation (without acknowledgement) of Rouquet's
commentary in The Midwife; or, The Old Woman's Magazine; and on 7-9
March an original explication by Bonnell Thornton or one of his colleagues
appeared in The Student; or, Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany. 50
Perhaps the best grasp of the direction Hogarth was taking in this monumen-
tal composition, however, was shown by James Moor in an "Essay on the Com-
position of the Picture described in the Dialogue of Cebes," read before a
literary society in Glasgow on 1 March 1754. "There are two ways," writes Moor,
for a painter, to represent a variety of actions, which are supposed to have,
all, one tendency; concurring to produce one event, and uniting in one
final issue, the first is, by a Series, to be seen successively; the latter, still,
connecting with the former; each representing some one of these actions;
and, the whole, together, as ONE set, exhibiting the ONE final tendency
of all. such kind of united sets of pictures are, Hogarth's Progress of a Rake;
and, of a Harlot; and, of Industry, and Idleness.
The other way, Moor explains, is to include a variety or spectrum of actions in
a single plate:
this way is, likewise, practiced by Hogarth; in his March to Finchly-com-
mon, and his Bartholomew [sic]-Fair; in which last, all the various scenes,
of clamorous riot, dissolute diversions, and ludicrous accidents; which, at
one time or other, commonly, happen, in the course of that fair; he exhibits,
in one piece, together; as going on, all, at one time; but, among different
persons; and, in the different booths, and quarters, of Smithfield, this, tho'
just EXACTLY according to nature; yet, is a liberty universally allowed,
in all the imitative arts; wherever, the effect of the whole will be stronger,
by having all the parts, together, at once; than, by introducing them,
severally, in succession. 61
This, he argues, is the method of Cebes, except that the tabula is an allegoriza-
tion of life in general. The point, however, would seem to be that in Southwark
Fair and The March to Finchley, as opposed to the progresses, the fair or the
march could represent life in general; a protagonist, divided into two alterna-
tives in Industry and Idleness, could be fragmented into a great range of possi-
bilities.
Moor's paper, published in his Essays of 1759, shows one rationale behind the
diminution of the protagonist and the increasing crowd-orientation of the
monumental compositions of the 1750s culminating in the four great Election
plates, each an independent "life" in the sense meant by Moor. It is also useful
to note that by the third plate of the Election, if not sooner, the direct allegoriza-
tion of experience of the Tabula Cebetis has begun to reemerge with the popu-
95

96
lar strain in Hogarth's work. Between Finchley and the Election come Beer
Street, Gin Lane, and The Four Stages of Cruelty, continuing the return to the
tabula in their own way.
Something of the effect Hogarth wished to achieve with his "popular" prints
can be seen in Fielding's efforts in the same direction. Industry and Idleness
appeared in October 1747, and on 28 March 1748 Fielding opened a puppet
theater in Panton Street, just a block from Leicester Fields, which operated
with great popular success until he closed it in June. 52 Fielding had expressed
in the True Patriot of 11-18 February 1746 his desire for a return from sophisti-
cated modern plays to the vigor of the ancient Punch and Judy show (specifically,
he adds, as a vehicle for satire). With the success of Hogarth's "George Barnwell"
morality play before him, he opened his theater, which to evade the Licensing
Act he passed off as entertainment accompanying "breakfast." His fare con-
sisted of the old puppet plays seen by generations of Londoners at the fairs:
Bateman, Fair Rosamond, and Whittington and his Cat—plus, significantly, a
revival of his own Covent Garden Tragedy. The whole subject came up again
in Book XII, Chapter V, of Tom Jones, where Tom argues for the truth and vigor
of Punch and Judy shows as against the Provok'd Husbands of today. Hogarth
may have had these matters in mind a few years later when he introduced a
Punch and Judy show on the signboard in the second plate of The Election.
In 1747-48 Fielding edited a pro-Pelham periodical, the Jacobite's Journal,
for which Hogarth is said to have designed the headpiece. 53 Then in the winter
of 1748-49 he became a Westminster magistrate. Tom Jones, which he was still
writing as he took up his puppet theater and his police duties, came out at the
end of the year, with its quota of Hogarth references. 54 But Fielding was now
devoting himself wholeheartedly to the business of presiding over the Bow
Street police court and his efforts to reform the community. His last novel,
Amelia, reflects this experience; in the meantime he was writing tracts urging
practical solutions to the problem of crime in London.
Fielding faced criminals day after day in his courtroom. Hogarth's personal
contact with the encroachments of poverty, crime and violence in the metropolis
was less direct. He lived in a respectable and elegant square. The usual news-
paper notices describe the physical improvements inhabitants were making in
their park. The Penny London Post for 3-5 August. 1748 announces that "The
Inhabitants of Leicester-square have ordered the Statue of his Majesty King
George I. lately put up there, to be gilt with all Expedition." The park, however,
demanded attention of another sort; the St. James' Evening Post of 8-10 Sep-
tember, 1747, reports that
as a Fellow, who appeared almost naked, and goes by the Name of the
Trembling Beggar, was stationed in Leicester-fields upon his usual Occu-

pation, he was accosted by one who knew him for a sorry Fellow, saying,
'That is a Pickpocket;' upon which the Vagabond untied the List which
confined his Right Arm to make him appear disabled, and demanded Satis-
faction; a Battle ensued, in which the Vagabond was handsomely drubbed,
notwithstanding he used both his Arms and all his Joints with great
Strength and Alacrity.
This may have been the beggar Hogarth later recalled seeing "who had clouted
up his head very artfully, and whose visage was thin and pale enough to excite
pity, but his features were otherwise so unfortunately form'd for his purpose,
that what he intended for a grin of pain and misery, was rather a joyous laugh." 55
Some idea of the progress of crime in Leicester Fields can be gained from the
London Evening Post for 25-28 May 1751. The preceding Friday, 24 May, be-
tween 11 and 12 midnight,
Mr. Howard, an eminent Peruke-maker, in Castle-Street, Leicester-Fields,
was knock'd down near his own Door by a Ruffian; but recovering himself,
he immediately seiz'd the Fellow by the Collar, and calling the Watch, the
Villain thought proper to make off, leaving Mr. Howard in Possession of
the Fore Part of his Coat, which was torn off in the Scuffle from the Neck to
the Bottom. Mr. Howard was desperately wounded in the fore Part of his
Head by the Violence of the Blow.
Hogarth, no doubt, would have shared the reporter's indignation, and in gen-
eral Londoners saw these vagabonds as threats to their welfare rather than un-
fortunates to be helped and corrected. They were put away in workhouses with
madmen or in prisons and forgotten.
In May 1749 Fielding, in his first year as magistrate, was chosen chairman of
the Quarter Sessions of the Peace, and so delivered the annual charge which had
been made famous by Justice Gonson; he delivered his first on 29 June and it
was published three weeks later. Full of precedents and legal references, it was
as much a charge to the citizens of Middlesex as to the law enforcement officers;
trying to anticipate crime at its source he spent much time on minor offenses,
and, like Gonson, found its roots in the brothels and the dance halls, "where idle
persons of both sexes meet in a very disorderly manner, often at improper hours,
and sometimes in disguised habits."
It is difficult to say whether Fielding had any influence on Industry and Idle-
ness, produced back in 1747 before he was a magistrate. The influence of Ho-
garth's prints, in their emphasis on "idle persons" and idleness as a source of
crime, and even in some of their images, may, however, be felt in Fielding's
writings. There was certainly no coincidence in the appearance, with almost
synchronized precision, of major attacks in January and February 1750/1 by
both Fielding and Hogarth.
97

98
Fielding's Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers appeared in
mid-January. Its main attack is a remarkable restatement of the ideas of his
early fiction and Hogarth's early progresses. In his Charge to the Grand Jury he
had, unlike Gonson, distinguished between the poor and the rich: it is the poor
who lose most through gambling, he argues, whereas "for the rich and great, the
consequence is generally no other than the exchange of property from the hands
of a fool into those of the sharper, who is, perhaps, the more worthy of the two
to enjoy it." The emulation of the "great"—which is interestingly absent from
the story of Tom Idle—becomes in the Enquiry the basic cause of crime in Lon-
don. Each rank in society, Fielding says, is now emulating the expensive pleas-
ures of the next rank above. He is not, he says, much disturbed by the nobleman
"who emulate[s] the grandeur of a prince" or by the gentleman who "will aspire
to the proper state of the nobleman"; but there is reason for concern when
the tradesman steps from behind his counter into the vacant place of the
gentleman. Nor does the confusion end here; it reaches the very dregs of the
people who aspiring still to a degree beyond that which belongs to them,
and not being able by the fruits of honest labor to support the state which
they affect, they disdain the wages to which their industry would entitle
them; and abandoning themselves to idleness, the more simple and poor-
spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of
more art and courage become thieves, sharpers, and robbers. 56
Practically speaking, Fielding has turned his attention on "the lower order
of people," but the Enquiry does not imply that the rich are without vice. Its
point is that they can afford their vices, unlike those who are ruined through
emulating them—and there is legally nothing to be done about it. "Let the great
therefore answer for the employment of their time to themselves," says Fielding,
"or to their spiritual governors." If I read its irony properly, the Enquiry says
that the real evil is in the false ideal offered by the great, but the subject is the
poor fool who copies it and inhabits the middle area that is called, in the preface
to Joseph Andrews, affectation. His object, Fielding says in his preface, is "to
rouse the civil power from its present lethargic state;" this is achieved partly
through irony that implicates the great, but primarily by focusing on practical
measures that might conceivably alleviate the problem of crime among the poor.
Fielding's first chapter is on emulation; his second is on the poor's own escape
from the status quo, one within reach of the lowest—gin. He agrees with Isaac
Maddox, the Bishop of Worcester, whose sermon on Easter Monday, 1750, laid
all the prevalent crimes in England at the door of gin. Delivered before the Lord
Mayor and the Magistrates of London, it was entitled "The Expediency of
Preventive Wisdom," and was later widely distributed. The worst vice which
has attended the idleness and emulation he has described, Fielding says, is a

"new kind of drunkenness . .. which, if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy
a great part of the inferior people"—that is, gin-drinking, which he has "great
reason to think is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than
a hundred thousand people in this metropolis." Giving examples of the conse-
quences of this "diabolical liquor," he sounds as if he is recalling the gin-seller's
baby in The March to Finchley, emaciated and evidently nourished only on its
mother's wares: "What must become of the infant who is conceived in gin?
with the poisonous distillations of which it is nourished both in the womb and at
the breast." 57 In Gin Lane Hogarth has one mother pouring gin into her baby's
mouth and another (the central figure) with exposed breasts that suggest she
has been feeding her child, who is now falling to its death (in a later state Ho-
garth gave the child a gin-ravaged face).
As The March to Finchley was being engraved by Sullivan, Hogarth must
have been working on his equivalent to Fielding's Enquiry. In the London
Evening Post of 14-16 February he announced:
This Day are publish'd, Price I s. each.
Two large Prints, design'd and etch'd by Mr. Hogarth, call'd
BEER-STREET and GIN-LANE
A Number will be printed in a better Manner for the Curious, at 1s. 6d.
each.
And on Thursday following will be publish'd four Prints on the Subject
of Cruelty, Price and Size the same.
N.B. As the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reign-
ing Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of
more extensive use, the Author has publish'd them in the cheapest Manner
possible.
To be had at the Golden Head in Leicester-Fields, Where may be had
all his other Works.
It is well to remember that Hogarth (like Fielding) is portraying vices "peculiar
to the lower Class of People," but that while he has "publish'd them in the
cheapest Manner possible," he has also had a number "printed in a better Man-
ner for the Curious" at 6d more. The "cheapest Manner" must have referred to
the light paper and the broad execution: relatively few lines were used. He had
gone so far as to employ John Bell to make woodcuts of two of the Stages of
Cruelty, but the project had to be abandoned because it proved more expensive
than copper engraving. The impressions "printed in a better Manner" make one
suspect that the aesthetic effect—which was striking—was as important to Ho-
garth as the need to reach the "lower Class of People."
The advertisement was repeated frequently, and in the London Evening Post
for 23-26 February the third paragraph was revised to read: "This Day were
99

100

102
also publish'd, four Prints on the Subject of Cruelty, Price and Size the same."
They made a set, aimed ostensibly at the poor, but in fact with an audience
pretty much the same as Fielding's Enquiry—the threatened property owners.
Choice is clear and unambiguous in Beer Street and Gin Lane (pls. 226-27).
Hogarth draws on a long tradition, going back at least as far as Defoe's Augusta
Triumphans (1728), in which beer is opposed to gin as good to evil and, of
course, industry to idleness. 58 There is almost no doubt about the contrast here
between order and chaos. The crowd that was getting a bit too disorderly and
dangerous in The March to Finchley has here been divided. The lusty folk of
The Four Times of the Day and The Enraged Musician, accompanied by their
pretty girl, are in Beer Street; the drunks, thieves, and sharpers of Finchley
(those Fielding called "the thoughtless and tasteless rabble") are now isolated
in Gin Lane. They are totally out of control, destructive and self-destructive;
particularly horrible, beyond the collapse of buildings and the rather melo-
dramatic skewering of a baby, is the perversion of the pretty girl, the stereotype
06 mother and child, in the grim figure slouched in the middle of the picture.
The contrast is between life, love, eating, and growth, and death, apathy, starva-
tion, and decay; a suspended beer barrel in the one becomes a coffin in the other,
a church steeple celebrating the birthday of George II in the one becomes the
remote spire of St. George Bloomsbury in the other, and the bankrupt pawn-
broker becomes the successful ruler of Gin Lane.
Hogarth's early heroes were destroyed because they opted for the fashionable
convention against their nature; his emphasis was on the horrible consequences
resulting from such a choice, as the structure itself closed in and stifled them. In
his middle years he stepped back and merely juxtaposed the two. Then with
Marriage a la Mode he returned to the earlier assumptions, but with more
emphasis on the oppressiveness of the structure and the human being's lack of
choice. His subject extended beyond the foolish individual who chose for
fashion to the fashion itself and the artificiality of society in general, which of-
fered the individual no choice but simply crushed him. This, I think, was the
import of Industry and Idleness too: whether idle or industrious, one is simply
swept along by the conventional structure of society, and it hardly matters in
the end whether one takes the route that leads to Tyburn or to the Guildhall.
Looking back now to Fielding's Enquiry, one can say that the "lower order of
people" are Hogarth's subject too, but he no longer presents them in terms of
emulation: gin-drinking is simply a means of escape from intolerable reality.
The upper classes are still, however, to some extent present. The king's opening
speech to Parliament, calling for more trade, functions in Beer Street, and there
is the fine lady who intrudes on the scene in her sedan chair with her hot weary
chairmen. Beer Street is still a microcosm of respectable London, where charac-
teristically the one shabby person besides the pawnbroker is the artist. Hogarth
is observing, incidentally, that the artist remains outside the national prosperity,

however great, and can only earn money by painting signs. (Poetry has dedicated
itself to praising the new industries, as in Lockman's poem on the Herring
Fisheries, and so the artist paints an ale flask.)
Only in a very minimal way—perhaps in the obese burghers—does Hogarth
draw attention to the other tradition of contrasting views, Brueghel's maigre
and grasse cuisine, with comically neat balancing of fat and lean. Throughout
the two series of prints, however, runs the contrast set forth in the steeple in
Gin Lane between these poor people and the remoteness and perhaps indiffer-
ence of their religion and government. This steeple is at once the Christian
ideal against which all social corruption should be measured, and a symbol of
the authority that should be looking out for the "lower order" but is distant,
aloof, and devoted to its own concerns. By choosing the steeple of St. George
Bloomsbury, which is topped with a statue of George I, Hogarth paralleled the
immanence of George II in Beer Street. The steeple in question was, however, a
subject of mirth for Hogarth's contemporaries, one of whom wrote:
When Henry the Eighth left the Pope in the lurch
The Protestants made him the head of the Church;
But George's good subjects, the Bloomsbury people
Instead of the Church, made him head of the steeple. 59
The sign of the pawnbroker, the ruler of Gin Lane, makes an adventitious
cross, exactly above the steeple. Far from emphasizing the steeple as an ideal,
it suggests not only that it is too remote but also that the only place crosses ap-
pear in Gin Lane is in the sign for a pawnshop. As usual, Hogarth's implications
are more revolutionary than Fielding's—perhaps because he knew that in his
medium the cautious reader would stop before probing to the most disturbing
depths.
In The Four Stages of Cruelty (pls. 228-31C) Hogarth is concerned with a
broad subject, the brutality and callousness of the times, which, like Fielding, he
links to criminal behavior. The boy torturing a dog or a cat will grow up to be
the thief and murderer. But in eighteenth-century London cruelty was much
more than a source of criminal behavior; it was a way of life. The dog-bull fight
Hogarth depicts in Plate 2 was an everyday event, with occasional notes in the
paper that an onlooker had been gored to death. "Yesterday a Boy was flung off
of a Dray by Dog-house Bar," one reads, "the Wheel of which went over his
Head and one of his Arms, and he died immediately."
Yesterday Morning was found in a Pond in St. Mary le bone Fields, a
Sack, in which was the Body of a Man, with his Head cut off and not to be
found, his Belly ript open and his Bowels taken out, and one Leg and one
103

104

108
Arm cut off and gone: In this Condition the mangled Corpse was carried to
the Brazen Head in the aforesaid Fields, and expos'd to publick View.
If this were a murderer's handiwork, he could expect a fitting recompense:
Monday the Entrails of a Man, and the entire Skin, except the left Ear,
were found in a Pond in a Field between Oliver's Mount and the End of
Dover-street, which some People suppose to belong to the Body of one of
the Malefactors executed last Week at Tyburn, that has been anatomized
by the Surgeons. 60
The last plate of Industry and Idleness showed how much the populace enjoyed
executions, which offered more excitement than the pugilists or bear-baiters.
Dissections of malefactors following execution were also often public and were
included as part of the sentence imposed on the prisoner.
The Stages of Cruelty are Hogarth's most shocking, most purely expressive
prints; they were clearly intended both to horrify ("to rouse," as Fielding had
put it) his usual customers and to appeal to a lower, more general audience.
They move from Tom Nero torturing a dog and being restrained by a respect-
able-looking boy of the upper classes, to Nero beating his horse to death, with
a respectable young man taking down his number to report his cruelty. And
this second plate includes other examples of cruelty, extending from the man
beating a sheep to the drayman asleep and unaware that he is running over a
child, to the respectable lawyers who have crowded so many into Tom Nero's
cab to save fares (the sign "Thavies Inn" shows that they are taking the longest
possible shilling-fare to Westminster Hall, where they work) that the horse has
collapsed under their weight, leading to Nero's brutal assault. In Plate 3 Nero's
cruelty (he has now murdered his lover) is reflected in the eyes of the men who
have captured him; they brandish sticks, muskets, and pitchforks, holding him
as he and his friends held the poor dog in Plate 1. By the time the reader has
reached the last plate he has perhaps begun to sense the complexity in Hogarth's
picture of cruelty, but he is not prepared for the turning of the tables—certainly
one of the most powerful graphic images of Hogarth's career—in which the re-
spectable viewer himself becomes the agent of cruelty. 61 The criminal, however
evil, seems no worse than the powerful social elements, like the cold unfeeling
surgeons, who surround him: they are as cruel in their way as the cutthroats who
are tried and condemned and the public that enjoys the exhibition.
The climax of the Stages of Cruelty implies that the great can get away with
behavior that is in its way no different from that of the poor—in a sense, that the
poor suffer for the enjoyment of the rich. This is how Hogarth's so-called popu-
lar prints operate. It is impossible to fix his own opinion somewhere along the
spiral of reading deep into the prints, but one suspects that he was darkly
amused at the case of the jail fever carried up by prisoners from their noisome

cells to the court house of the Old Bailey in May 1750. The disease infected and
killed the Lord Mayor, an alderman, a baron of the exchequer, a judge of the
Court of Common Pleas, the under sheriff, most of the Middlesex jury, and some
of the spectators.
Whatever ultimately disruptive elements may lurk in these prints, Hogarth
liked to maintain publicly the simple pose of the moralist. A Mr. Sewell, book-
seller in Cornhill, used to go to the Golden Head for subscription prints, and
once, around the time of the Wilkes-Churchill affair—when Hogarth would
have been particularly anxious to appear the moralist—he told Hogarth it must
have given him great pleasure to see his works so generally admired. "Sir," re-
plied Hogarth,
it gratifies me very highly, and there is no part of my works of which I am
so proud, and in which I now feel so happy, as in the series of the Four
Stages of Cruelty, because I believe the publication of them has checked
the diabolical spirit of barbarity to the brute creation, which, I am sorry to
say, was once so prevalent in this country. 62
If this was his aim it was, in a minimal way, rewarded. A new gin law was passed
in 1751 reducing the number of gin shops, more than doubling the tax, increas-
ing the police authority, and offering rewards to informers. However, the stories
of the reform accomplished by Fielding and Hogarth are exaggerated. They
both probably served as useful propagandists, but the old accounts that pre-
sented Fielding as a powerful influence for progressive reform on the Ministry
and the Parliamentary Committee that was appointed in 1751 to investigate the
problem of poverty, and as the probable author of the subsequent legislation,
are unfounded. From the little evidence that exists, it appears that, being Bow
Street Magistrate, he was doubtless consulted, and that his Enquiry was simply
his independent publication outlining the views he had offered. Moreover, the
opinions of the Enquiry and the Proposal that followed are relatively conserva-
tive even by the standards of Fielding's day, as compared with contemporary
pamphlets and even the legislation projected by the Committee itself. 63
Hogarth's own statement in his manuscript notes, written about the time of
his interview with Mr. Sewell, was that he would rather have been the author
of the Stages of Cruelty than the Raphael Cartoons, "unless I lived in a roman
Catholic country"; and when he repeats the statement on another page he says
he speaks as a man, not as an artist. 64 What he means, of course, is that his kind
of Protestant country calls for a different kind of "history painting"—one with-
out superstition, which must be based on the public's benevolence, charity, and
the virtue of works. These prints must be regarded as another phase of his search
for a kind of contemporary history, this time toward popular, almost folklore-
istic roots, and toward a stark simplicity and monumentality that none of the
earlier prints achieved. The third Stage of Cruelty, with the girl's wounds like
109

110
"poor, dumb mouthes" crying for justice, looks like an illustration for Fielding's
Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment
of Murder; and this is exactly the sort of primitive strength Hogarth was trying
to draw upon.
To understand the intention behind the "popular" prints, one must see them
as part of Hogarth's reaction against the ultimate in complex reading structures,
Marriage a la Mode. A sort of crisis, we have seen, followed that elaborate work,
and he produced a series of pure oil sketches: which, as sketches, express formal
structures not yet completely represented or finished, not yet clothed in mean-
ing. These sketches did not lead into engravings. However, on the engraving
front, with Industry and Idleness and the prints that followed, the reading struc-
ture itself is radically simplified; while inscriptions are lengthened, the meaning
is conveyed less through words or objects than through relationships of form.
The juxtaposition of large shapes with the Idle 'Prentice, of crowds with isola-
tion, of inside with outside—these represent another aspect of Hogarth's attempt
to move away from verbal or emblematic structures toward a more expressive,
more purely visual form, which reaches its climax in the powerful last plate of
the Stages of Cruelty.
The popular prints were also, in fact if not in Hogarth's recollections, related
to his preoccupation with the subject of art, theory and practice, around 1750.
In the earlier works, and continuing as late as The Election, he imitated the
tradition of late baroque in order to identify it with the corruption of the insti-
tutions he presented: in the climactic image, Chairing the Member (see pl. 251),
subject and method are indeed one, in a decadent, overripe way. But beginning
with Industry and Idleness, and most notably in the brutal prints of 1750/1, he
produced "popular" prints in which the forms and subject matter were equally
brutal, and the intention was at least partly an assault on the tender sensibilities
of taste-hardened art fanciers. To this segment of Hogarth's audience these
plates revealed a known area of life not generally portrayed in art (at least out-
side the popular print) except under the stylized guise of a saint's martyrdom.
The Reward of Cruelty, for instance, is strongly reminiscent of Poussin's Mar-
tyrdom of St. Erasmus with the long rope of intestine being drawn out. In the
Stages of Cruelty, Hogarth was countering the tyranny of taste with apparent
tastelessness. The subject, the method, underlined by the brutal woodcut effect,
constituted an attack on the institution of art analogous to the attack on aca-
demic art theory in The Analysis of Beauty a few years later. The advocacy of
expressive form also stressed in the Analysis was the other prong of Hogarth's
argument.