Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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
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