Volume 44, Number 20 · December 18, 1997
The Pleasures of Reading Hogarth
By P.N. Furbank
Hogarth: A Life and a World
by Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 794 pp., $45.00
The Analysis of Beauty
by William Hogarth, edited with an introduction and notes by Ronald Paulson
Yale University Press, 162 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy
by David Bindman
University of California Press, 208 pp., $29.95 (paper)
William Hogarth, the tercentenary of whose birth falls this year, is an appealing subject. He is also an intriguing one, reminding us of Michel Butor's remark in his essay 'Words in Painting' that the presence of words 'ruins the fundamental wall erected by our education between letters and the arts.'[1] Words certainly are to the fore in Hogarth. In the cause of storytelling he will exploit, sometimes skillfully and sometimes fairly ham-handedly, not only signs and symbols easily translatable into words, like emblems, blazons, rebuses, and enacted proverbs, but also words in all their nakedness: inscriptions, manuscripts, scraps of newspaper, title pages, and missives. By squinting very hard at the first plate of A Harlot's Progress, one discovers that the paper the country clergyman is clutching bears the address of the Bishop of London, and this is a detail very important to the satire. For a yard or so away, an innocent country girl is falling into the clutches of a procuress, yet the pastor notices nothing: his mind is altogether elsewhere, running upon a fat benefice. The message, on Hogarth's part, is not very elegantly delivered—not half as imaginatively, shall we say, as the letter in David's Death of Marat—but somehow this seems to matter less than it might. Hogarth (rather like his friend Henry Fielding) is feeling his way into an unexplored genre and is not overbothered with rules.
Review, 6501 words
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