Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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