THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

moves to give relief to English Catholics also brought home the unabated force not only of bigotry but of
‘enthusiasm’. The riots reinforced the steady awareness in eighteenth-century literature and painting that society,
rather than being exclusively subject to orderly influence from above, was liable to disruption from below, and indeed
that that disruption and anti-social behaviour remained endemic. It was not insignificant that, seventeen years after
Captain Cook’s first landfall on the unexplored eastern coast of Australia in 1770, the Government should feel
pressed to colonize New South Wales by establishing a penal colony at Botany Bay for the convicted rejects of British
society.
To see the culture of the period as exclusively a reflection of ideas of order and proportion is inevitably to see it
partially, even distortedly. As the work of the most popular English painter of the age reveals, beauty did not lie solely
in demonstrations of the grand style, in further refinements of classical precedent, or in an observation of nature
according to Newtonian precepts. William Hogarth (1697-1764), who in 1745 painted an image of himself resting on
volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift, saw himself as the pictorial heir to the dramatic, epic, and satiric tradition
already established in English literature. In 1761 he added his own couplet to his satirical etching, Time Smoking a
Picture: ‘To Nature and your Self appeal, | Nor learn of others what to feel’. Hogarth’s volume of aesthetic theory,
The Analysis of Beauty (1753), had earlier attempted to define an equally personal concept of beauty according to a
three-dimensional serpentine rhythm, arguing for the principle of intricacy in art. ‘The active mind is ever bent to be
employ’d’, he wrote, ‘Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure.’
This notion of ‘pursuit’ leads directly to a definition of intricacy or ‘that peculiarity in the lines, which comprise it,
that leads the eye a wanton kind of chase, and from the pleasure that it gives the mind, entitles it to the name of
beautiful’. Hogarth’s idea of ‘intricacy’, linked as it is to ‘peculiarity’ and ‘wantonness’ in the chase, manages to
suggest a freer and less strictly regulated response to observed nature. The busy mind is stimulated by the diverse
business of humanity, not simply by human pretensions to live out an elevated and rational image of universal order.
Hogarth’s most famous images-the narrative series showing the Harlot’s and the Rake’s progresses (1732, 1735) and
the blighted marital relationship of Marriage à la Mode (1743)-achieved wide circulation by
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being distributed as engravings which, to cite a contemporary witness, ‘captivated the Minds of most People persons
of all ranks & conditions from the greatest Quality to the meanest’. These modern moralities show London fraught
with temptation, indulgence, violence, murder, disease, and the consequences of selfishness; they chart declines not
simply from prosperity to destitution but from innocence to depravity. When Hogarth shows us a paragon, as in the
series of engravings charting the divergent fortunes of the idle and the industrious apprentices, he also hints at an
immoderate degree of smugness on the part of his serene model of industry; when he paints criminals, as in his
portrait of the triple murderess Sarah Malcolm in Newgate (1732/3), he can be as probing of the outward traits of
character as when he considers the features of a worldly Whig bishop such as Hoadly of Winchester (1743). If Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government propose the ideal of a consenting civil society ruled by law, Hogarth’s four depictions of
a corrupt provincial election of 1754 observe both an inherent ludicrousness in the political process and the untidy
energy of humanity. In the last picture, Chairing the Member, the newly elected Member of Parliament is both
supported and effectively toppled by the vitality of embattled life swirling underneath his precarious chair.
Jonathan Swift
In a letter of December 1703 Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) described the activity of ten days of ‘the highest and
warmest reign of party and faction’ that he had either known or read of. This particular period of fractious political
and ecclesiastical manoeuvring at the court of Queen Anne was concerned with the privileges and exclusive influence
of the Established Church in national life; but it had had such a universal effect on the nation, Swift whimsically
added, that even the dogs in the streets were ‘much more contumelious and quarrelsome than usual’. Throughout his
career Swift remained in part compelled, in part repelled by politics; he also remained fascinated by reflections of, and
parallels to, human behaviour in the animal world. Swift was born in Dublin of newly settled English parents; he was
educated according to Anglican principles in Ireland, and was ordained into the Irish Church in which he held
benefices throughout his priesthood. He also consistently, but unsuccessfully sought promotion in the better endowed
sister-Church of England. If much of his propagandist writing is dedicated to the cause of Irish independence from
English interference, and if he has also often been viewed as the quintessential voice of the eighteenth-century
Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, he seems steadily to have thought of himself as a stranger and an unhappy exile in
the land of his birth. He was, however, equally awkward in identifying himself with England, or at least with what
became the Whig mainstream of English politics in the latter half of his life. His writings — characterized throughout