Volume 17, Number 10 · December 16, 1971
Hogarth's Progress
By J.H. Plumb
Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times
by Ronald Paulson
Yale, two volumes, 1,115 pp., $40.00
This book is vast—a great river of words, flowing majestically on, but like most great rivers, it loops and winds and backtracks. Half a million words on Hogarth! Every parish register, every rate book, all the London newspapers have been ransacked for facts about Hogarth's parents, even his uncles and cousins. Methodically Ronald Paulson takes us through Hogarth's father's life—a record of steady failure: he was in turn schoolmaster, textbook writer, coffee house keeper, and succeeded at none of these. For most of Hogarth's childhood they lived close to Smithfield Market, as violent, as coarse, and as vital a part of the city of London as one could find; the home of that yearly fiesta of bucolic culture that Bruegel would have reveled in, St. Bartholomew's Fair with its deformities, conjurers, tricksters, and vulgarities of every hue—an epitome of raw human life at once tawdry and pathetic. Paulson carefully re-creates this tough, cruel world in which Hogarth grew up and, in some ways, the description gains force from this careful, factual, and topographical treatment.
Review, 1566 words
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