Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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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