The raw side of London life

ON FEBRUARY 8th 1750, after an unusually warm winter, a strong earth tremor shook London. That was bad enough, but exactly a month later the earth shivered again, this time more violently, bringing down houses and exciting widespread, superstitious terror of even worse to come.

People were not slow to attribute such events to divine displeasure at the debauched state of the capital. Soon afterwards, William Hogarth published what is still possibly his best-known print, “Gin Lane”, a scene of drunkenness and squalid despair in which tottering buildings provide a queasy backdrop to a desolate cityscape, wherein a blind ballad-singer lies dying in the gutter and a despairing mother pours cheap, analgesic gin into the open mouth of her hungry, crying child.

Hogarth's pictures, even more than the novels of Dickens, hold a steady, unflinching mirror to the worst of London life. He was born in 1697 in Smithfield where the meat-market, three prisons and the old hospital of St Bartholomew shared the same environment, the same inadequate and tainted water-supply. It was a place where slaughter and healing, disease and punishment went hand in hand.

When William was ten, his father, a proud author and teacher from Westmorland, was sent to prison for debt. Five of eight children died and he himself lived little longer. He left a determined widow, two resourceful daughters and one stocky, brave, vulnerable and talented son, soon apprenticed to an engraver.

In Jenny Uglow*, Hogarth has found the best biographer you could desire. Initially attracted by the fact that Hogarth drew ordinary, flawed people, that he told powerful stories, “bawdy and violent, appealing and grim”, she set out not simply to write about this life but to read those pictures, to decipher—as far as is possible after more than 250 years—all their subtle and complex coded messages.

To this end, her book contains well-placed illustrations of every significant picture Hogarth created. The reader is carefully informed of the public events that provoked the subject and of the developments in the private life of the painter which drove him to paint it. So much information allows a rare chance to appreciate the subtlety, the levels of meaning and the impact of such famous works as “A Rake's Progress”, “A Harlot's Progress” and “Marriage à la Mode”.

This thoroughness does mean that the book is enormous, yet you would not wish it shorter. For all her scholarship, Miss Uglow's touch is light and her narrative skill such that her history reads with the pace of a thriller. Her affection for Hogarth is appealing, though she is not blind to his faults—which lay, largely, in his stubbornness and his vanity.

He was a great innovator—the first to protect the copyright of engravers; to found a democratic academy of art; to provide public exhibition space for pictures; to sketch ( on dark paper) in a theatre while a play was in progress; to engrave the likeness of a murderess; to create a “conversation piece” out of multiple portraits; to tell a story with a series of drawings. Though he longed for royal commissions, his best subjects were common people. Like his friends and contemporaries—Defoe and Swift, John Gay, Fielding and Sterne—he saw in his fellow men and women all the drama and sadness of humanity. Though his satire can seem savage, it is often betrayed by compassion, for Hogarth was a true philanthropist, a patron of Barts and of Bedlam, a generous benefactor and a constant friend.

He married Jane Thornhill and, though childless, they helped start London's Foundling Hospital. In old age, beset with taunts from younger satirists, he entertained its orphans at his Chiswick house, where each year they were invited to feast on the fruit of his mulberry tree.

*“Hogarth: A Life and a World”. Faber & Faber; 794 pages; £25. Farrar, Straus; $40