Engraving London

...Prostitution and sex crimes were also widespread...

...It's another way of saying "the richness of life...

...Hogarth was born in 1697 in Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for The Weekly Standard...

...If such curiosity is the moralist's stock-in-trade, then today we use the word "moralist" as the opposite of what other generations understood it to mean...

...Drury Lane's Rose Tavern was home to a bouncer called Leathercoats, "a giant of strength who would lie down in the street and let a carriage roll over him for the price of a drink...

...Like Fielding, Hogarth was a publicly compassionate man...

...There was a strong moralizing side to Hogarth, but there was a journalistic side as well...

...This was A Harlot's Progress, six tableaux describing the step-by-step degradation of a Yorkshire girl left to her own devices on the streets of London...

...Hogarth understands, among other things, that much of the moral correction in which people engage is done for the sheer delight of it—as the leering, whip-toting guard in the prison scene of A Harlot's Progress makes clear...

...That he was a satirist didn't put him at odds with his country's culture, any more than with its politics...

...The Victorians praised him as a voice of commonsense morality...

...Uglow is right to feel an "uneasy sense of Hogarth's own aesthetic pleasure in portraying cruelty...

...He loved singing and sing-alongs, dressed flashily, and became a Mason in 1725...

...By one estimate, half the infants who died in London had been overdosed on the laudanum and gin used to sedate them...

...The money (one and fourpence) was spent on gin and was divided with a woman, who (she said) instigated the crime...

...The over-responsible and rigidly righteous father is the author of his dissolute son...

...Such subjects suited him...

...Hogarth's own idea of "excellence" emerges in Uglow's rigorous examination of his art...

...In a London that was fast becoming urbanized, criminals—as the novelist Tobias Smollett put it—were "more desperate and savage than they had ever appeared since mankind was civilized...

...Enthusiasm for Hogarth hasn't waned since his death in 1764...

...In the background, a man is throwing a cat out of a fourth-story window with makeshift wings to see if it will fly...

...Gin is sinful, but the English ideal is not abstinence: It's beer...

...Hogarth's continuing appeal is often chalked up to his racy moder-nity—the prostitutes' bedrooms with their syringes and condoms, the drunken dandies, the crowds outside the opera...

...It is this "thinking" that provides Hogarth's art a more nuanced morality than can usually be accommodated in a picture...

...Looking at Pope or Hogarth that way, we fall prey to the romantic conviction, still largely dominant in Western countries today, that the artist is alienated necessarily from the body politic...

...The artist's father, a Low Church teacher of Latin who had arrived from the north with literary ambitions, spent much of Hogarth's youth confined to debtors' prison...

...Months into the feud, he died...

...No view could be further from Pope's own...

...She strangled it and left it in a ditch in Bethnal Green in order to sell its clothes...

...This was a commonplace of eighteenth-century life...

...There's a boy tying a bone to a dog's tail...

...He inveighed against cruelty to animals and doted on children...

...Now, on the tercentenary of his birth, two new books—a full-scale biography by English literary critic Jennifer Uglow and a study of Hogarth the satirist by English art historian David Bindman—pro-claim his continuing irresistibility...

...In this disdain for extremes, he was a kindred spirit of Henry Fielding, a rake-turned-magistrate who, until his death in 1754, remained Hogarth's friend and ardent defender...

...In the Rake's Progress, signs of Tom's father's parsimony are everywhere: the coins tumbling out of their hiding places as carpenters work, scales in the closet, a portrait over the mantel of the father counting money...

...For him, the poet was or should be part and parcel of the body politic, and his task remained what it had been, at least in theory, for both his classical and his Renaissance forerunners: to discourage evil-doing by dragging it to the light and burying it with obloquy, and to quicken excellence of all kinds by offering it eternal fame...

...Hogarth's solution to his time's excesses was a well-developed notion of moderation...

...And after a lifetime keeping his distance from party, he did something many aging people do, though no one has ever explained why: He became a rabid and unthinking partisan, taking the side of the newly crowned George III against William Pitt and backing the King's preferred adviser, the Earl of Bute, who sought a premature end to the Seven Years' War...

...Increasingly common were stories like that of Judith Dufour, who, according to M. Dorothy George's London Life in the Eighteenth Century, fetched her two-year-old child from the workhouse, where it had just been "new-clothed," for the afternoon...

...What is valuable in him is something we've lost: the ability to steer clear of sin without shrinking from the spectacle of it...

...Europe's Edwardian leftists hailed him as a fellow revolutionary...

...Yet Hogarth's father-in-law, as an ex-MP and royal serjeant-painter, benefited handsomely from Wal-pole—and let some of the patronage (for engraving salvers and seals) trickle down to Hogarth himself...

...Books and food are ample...

...One Harrow headmaster, Samuel Parr, loved flogging so much he asked his charges if he could whip them in advance, promising that he would let them off, the next time they did something wrong...

...Hogarth sought in many ways to become a pillar of his community...

...In fact, his appeal may lie in his antiquity...

...The delinquent gets a condign comeuppance in the fourth panel, when he's dissected in an operating theater after having been hanged, with a surgeon carving out an eye as if coring an apple...

...For Hogarth, temptation is temptation because it's tempting, and moral theories that take no account of that (like "Just Say No") are worse than useless...

...This stance set him against prevailing opinion and left him open to the attacks of the rabble-rousing opportunist John Wilkes, champion of the unemployed, hater of Scotland, embezzler, and inventor of the sexual autobiography...

...Yet no one laughed a few years ago when a prominent historian summed up the whole period as the "Age of Hogarth...

...He was fascinated by the dregs of society, in a society that offered plenty of dregs...

...It was in 1725, howev-er—when he was commissioned to illustrate Hudibras, Samuel Butler's poetic send-up of Puritanism—that he began to show his characteristic mastery of composition, his firm and idiosyncratic line, and his talent for capturing both the movements and emotions of crowds...

...She's not wrong...

...This reluctance should not be mistaken for toadyism...

...According to Uglow, when Hogarth placed Mother Needham and, especially, Colonel Charteris in the first scene of A Harlot's Progress, he invited Britons to see themselves as used by the government in like fashion...

...One can enter a Hogarth series and look at it for hours, as if reading a novel...

...There is always something voyeuristic about artists of great moral imagination: a curiosity about the occasions of sin, a fascination with temptation's cunning...

...Engraving London William Hogarth and the Eighteenth-Century City By Christopher Caldwell The mid-eighteenth century saw the birth of the modern British state, the opening up of the British empire, stirrings of independence in the American colonies, and the final enclosure of the common lands...

...It was Wilkes whom Samuel Johnson had in mind when he defined patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel...

...The point is even clearer in two didactic panels that Hogarth intended to be affordably purchased by the poor...

...It was under Wal-pole and his Whig allies that Defoe claimed, "Trade is the Lifeblood of the Nation...

...Beer Street, though, is England as it should be, with everyone guzzling but hard at work, reading newspapers and poetry...

...Her discussion of A Rake's Progress, his 1735 follow-up to the Harlot series, extracts a Hogarthian ethic: Tom Rakewell is "a young bourgeois . . . attractive, open, innocent—and weak," one who "imitates rakes but can never be one of them" and never appears at ease with the prostitutes and obscene "posture women" whom he frequents...

...As a young man, Hogarth established himself as one of London's gifted calling-card designers and salver-engravers and dabbled in a fairly pedestrian type of political cartooning...

...One colleague claimed of A Harlot's Progress that "this whore's desabille careless and a pretty Countenance & air" were big selling points, and the allure of the prostitute who betrays the idle apprentice in Industry and Idleness is practically pornographic...

...His was an anti-yuppie populism avant la lettre, and he was denied some patronage opportunities by enemies in the Walpole-dominated government...

...Gin arrived in England from Holland after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and by the mid-eighteenth century the English had mastered both large-scale and bathtub production...

...Charteris, however, an associate and financial contributor to prime minister Robert Walpole, was saved by a royal pardon...

...When Hogarth made The Times, a two-part series that cast Bute as a hero and Pitt as a warmonger, Wilkes devoted an entire issue of his North Briton magazine to Hogarth...

...But it's no exaggeration to say the quarrel killed Hogarth, who had already been weakened by a series of strokes...

...Bindman exonerates him of the charge of glorifying drunkenness, even if such drinking blowouts as A Midnight Modern Conversation have been copied onto hip flasks and punch bowls for the last two-and-a-half centuries...

...At the root of London's flowering crime rate was gin, which overwhelmed the eighteenth-century city in a way that makes our own crack problem look mild...

...Here is the perfect metaphor for Hogarth's ideal of moderation...

...The chief delinquent is pushing an arrow into a dog's rectum, while a figure whose face we cannot see (Satan...

...Hogarth's sympathies, like those of Swift and Pope, lay with the country party...

...Britain, pivoting decisively into the modern era and an unprecedented global dominance, had as its representative spirit William Hogarth—a hard-drinking, working-class en-graver who never reached five feet tall and could barely spell, and whose work chronicled sadists, sex offenders, drug addicts, gamblers, prostitutes, dissipated aristocrats, political extremists, and a parade of thieves and drunks...

...The system was sybaritic and nepotistic, but it laid the groundwork for the mercantile prosperity of the eighteenth century...

...Early in his career he had done lucrative engravings of convicted criminals between conviction and hanging: the beauty Sarah Malcolm, for instance, who had strangled an eighty-year-old woman and slit the throat of her seventeen-year-old maid...

...Hogarth occasionally poked political fun, but never attacked Walpole directly...

...The Harlot engravings sent his name across Europe and America...

...They're not...

...Smithfield, a narrow-alleyed North London neighborhood spared by the Great Fire of 1666, popular among immigrants, prostitutes, Nonconformists, and Grub Street journalists...

...As Maynard Mack notes in his magisterial biography of Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century had no notion of attacking the party in power in order to prove the artist's artistic bona fides...

...This —sweet revenge—is the best-known rendering of Wilkes that has come down to posterity...

...He would send his servants, according to a contemporary account, to waylay unsuspecting women, "none but such as were strong, lusty and fresh Country Wenches, of the first size, their B— tt—cks as hard as Cheshire Cheeses, that should make a Dint in a Wooden Chair, and work like a parish Engine at a Conflagration...

...Hogarth fought back with the portrait of a googly-eyed Wilkes holding the name of liberty on a pike with lecherous self-importance...

...His own marriage being childless, he brought orphans into his house and helped the colonial lumber magnate Thomas Coram open a Foundling Hospital...

...It's a natural understanding of how frail is the material we have to work with...

...Actually being a pillar, however, proved harrowing...

...After a career of crime that included perjury and fraud, he was sentenced to death for raping at gunpoint a servant-girl he had barricaded in his house...

...He was a great joiner, a founder of the still-surviving Sublime Society of Beefsteaks— with its motto, "Beef and Liberty...

...Hogarth had an uncanny gift for cramming his pictures with puzzles, riddles, detail, and imagery that turn them from flat drawings into three-dimensional stories...

...Fielding said of Hogarth in his preface to Joseph Andrews, "It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe...

...Walpole was opposed by Tories of the "country party," who distrusted all taxes, even those that paid for wars (their stinginess eventually contributed to an inability to hold the American colonies) and police (there was none in London until Henry Fielding and his blind brother, Sir John, founded the "Bow Street Runners" in the 1740s...

...Epicureanism ran up and down the social scale: Hogarth's era was so impatient with non-sensual pleasures that the dramatist Thomas Betterton achieved a smash hit by cutting the slower passages out of Henry IV, Part II and added to the play the subtitle The Humours of Sir John Falstaff...

...helps him pry the dog's legs apart...

...Hogarth remains a critically respected painter, particularly of portraits, but it is these engraved series, which he called "modern moral subjects," that are at the core of his work—particularly A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Marriage a la Mode (a tale of marrying for money and rank), and Industry and Idleness (a tale of two apprentices on their upward and downward trajectories...

...Gin Lane is indeed hell on earth, with a drunken, pustule-covered mother dropping her child into a gutter, ragpickers fighting dogs for food, and the pawnshops doing a flourishing trade...

...Hogarth, of course, is open to the same charge of exulting in the conduct he pretends to upbraid...

...Mother" Needham, madam to the royal court, kept dozens of women until she was stoned to death in the pillory...

...Beer Street and Gin Lane, "calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People," are often read as cautionary tales that share a single message...

...In the first panel of The Four Stages of Cruelty, two men are hoisting cats upside down by their tails so they'll scratch each other's eyes out...

...Colonel Francis Charteris was universally reviled as the "Rape-Master of Great Britain" and bragged of having violated a hundred girls...

...In 1736, the city had 7,000 gin shops...

...The Tory Vision of small government was time-honored in England, but it took for granted a certain unruli-ness that Walpole, who favored a modern bureaucracy, sought to undermine at every turn...

...The artist was accused of toadying to the crown, of being more comfortable with vice than virtue, of being unhappily married...

...No such indulgence is possible for Hogarth's sexual situations: Most of his prostitutes and slatterns are temptingly lovely, and meant to be...

...Present in all Hogarth's work is a critique of what historian Paul Langford has called mid-eighteenth-century England's most pervasive concern: luxury, and how to keep the pursuit of it from tearing society to pieces...

...Wilkes was dizzy with infatuation for Pitt and warned (correctly, as it turned out) that Britain would be swindled by Spain if it sought peace too early...

...Made serjeant-painter to the king, as his father-inlaw had been, he was soon under attack by Joshua Reynolds in Samuel Johnson's Idler...

...In 1732, he decided to invent and illustrate a story of his own...

...In the 1720s, when a fraudulent scheme to pay off the national debt led to the South Sea Bubble and fiscal collapse, Walpole stepped into the breach and virtually invented the job of prime minister by allying himself with commercial interests and using their financial clout to create a near-invincible regime of parliamentary patronage...

...The only house on the street that is not spic-and-span is a pawnshop...

...but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause than they seem to think...

...Igor Stravinsky based an opera (with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman) on one of his series, and the painter David Hockney has paid him homage...

...When grain prices collapsed after several consecutive bountiful harvests, gin suddenly became so cheap that the very poorest and most desperate could render themselves paralytic for pennies— and did...

...He studied with James Thornhill (a painter of historical scenes who later became serjeant-painter to the king and the first British artist to be knighted) and married Thornhill's daughter Jane in 1729...

...There's a cockfight...

...His morality is something more than a sneaking prurience...

...Young Hogarth became a silversmith's apprentice and learned to engrave copperplate designs...