Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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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, between 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
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Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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