SOURCE: Kunzle, David. “William Hogarth: The Ravaged Child in the Corrupt City.” In Changing Images of the Family, edited by Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff, pp. 99-140. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

[In the following essay, Kunzle discusses Hogarth's sympathetic representation of children who were, in his view, neglected by their parents as well as by society as a whole.]

The rich iconography of the child and family in Western painting since the Renaissance remains a great source of untapped information for the social historian. Philippe Ariès has looked at many pictures and considered them within broad lines of development, but specialized studies which take into account the problems peculiar to the study of imagery, as opposed to other sources of documentation, are generally lacking. The iconography of any given period and place may both confirm and seem to contradict conclusions drawn on the basis of literary or archival materials. The image of the child developed in Italian Renaissance art, for instance, belies the impression we have of that era as one largely indifferent to the special characteristics of children and their various stages of development. The splendid figures of adolescents ranging from early puberty to near manhood, familiar from the masterworks of Italian Renaissance and Mannerist art, have no discernible points of reference in the literature. The sense developed by Leonardo da Vinci of the uniqueness of each stage of the infant's or child's growth, or the ability manifest in many painters to see ideal and heroic proportions in the infant male without his appearing one whit less of a child—these were obviously foreign to Montaigne, no observer of the visual arts, who saw in children “neither mental activities nor bodily shape.”¹ It is almost the rule that in Italian art children have a great deal of bodily shape, and show much mental as well as physical activity. In the earth-based putti of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, the gaze eloquent at once of adult wonder and childish curiosity, the pose which bespeaks the mature intellect while the form remains so infantile, contributed essentially to the canonization of the painting by the popular taste of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Another iconographic area which should reward extensive investigation is that of Dutch seventeenth-century art. The privileged status of the child, the relatively liberated condition of women, and the humane treatment of servants in that precociously bourgeois republic are attested in memoirs and other literary documents.² Painting, notably that of Pieter de Hooch, reveals as no other medium can the particular triangle of relationships which existed between three traditionally inferior elements in society: child, woman, and servant. They, rather than the men, are the natural denizens, makers, and emanations of the Dutch home. The rendition of space and atmosphere in Dutch middle-class houses, their hushed penetration by exterior light (Vermeer) should be studied in conjunction with what social historians can tell us of Dutch family structures and domestic habits.

The relatively idyllic view of child, mother, and family life generally, which is transmitted by the Dutch painters, stands in sharp contrast to the embittered and contentious view of women, marriage, and family responsibilities which comes to us from German Protestant broadsheets of the same period. In the brutal power struggles between husband and wife the children do not, however, appear as primary victims.³ But there is a rich and untapped source of information about family habits and family morality in the German sixteenth- and seventeenth-century broadsheets, which are satirical, moralistic, and also pedagogic in the sense that some served to instruct the young. They illuminate the cult of domesticity, certainly part-inspired by the teachings and example of Martin Luther, in an early bourgeois Protestant society.

William Hogarth drew on both the tradition of the satiric broadsheet, politically acclimatized in England by the eighteenth century, and that of Dutch domestic genre painting, which was eagerly collected in that country. Hogarth has not lacked interpreters; his work has always been acclaimed in general and quarried piecemeal, as the most significant single body of hard facts about English manners of his age. What follows is an attempt to show that Hogarth's perception of the child was as an essentially parentless creature in a society which reneged upon parental responsibility within both the private nuclear family, and the public family formed by social institutions. The public responsibilities Hogarth took upon himself, establishing himself as moralist, educator, and social activist—as father-figure to middle- and lower-class society, and gadfly to the upper classes—in a way unprecedented for any artist in any country, and comparable only to Dickens in the nineteenth century.

The term “Hogarthian London” popularly conjures up a teeming, steaming city of ramshackle slums, filthy garrets, gloomy gambling dens, and taverns rank with prostitutes, drunkards, and thieves. It is the view of a particular artist at a particular moment of the eighteenth century, which appears to us as a projection into a later age, paralleled in literature by the social criticism of Dickens and Mayhew rather than the still rural vision of Hogarth's friend and literary counterpart Henry Fielding.

Dickens accepted Hogarth's view of London as morally and to a great extent physically his own, despite the fact that the novelist would hardly have recognized the geography of London in 1730, still a collection of villages compared with what it had become a century later. Hogarth touched many of what Dickens considered, and we today still consider, the characteristic evils of industrial life, long before the Industrial Revolution had even started. Dickens was very familiar with Hogarth's work, displayed it in his Gad's Hill home, and referred admiringly to it on several occasions. He saw in the artist a sensitivity like his own, singularly well tuned to the derelictions, corruptions, and cruelties engendered by city life. Like Hogarth, he saw the city as the destroyer of family, a vulture battening upon childhood. But there are major differences, of course, in their definition of the concepts of childhood and family, and in the remedies they offer for the destructive process.

Like most writers of the post-romantic era, Dickens sought in the countryside escape from urban corruption. Hogarth did not. He is unique among major British painters in having shown only a very minimal pictorial response to landscape, then a popular artistic category in itself. It is true that later in his life he acquired a small house in Chiswick, then well outside London, but he does not appear to have needed the countryside as a refuge from the town, nor did he conceive it as possessing particular aesthetic merits lacking in the interior and street scenes which were his constant subject matter. This is not merely because Rousseau was not available to him; well before that apostle of nature, ever since the beginning of capitalism and urbanization, and carried in part by the revival of the pastoral tradition in the Renaissance, the feeling had been growing that the countryside and only the countryside, only the simpler, rustic life, could regenerate the corrupt, commercialized character of urban social relations.

It seems as if Hogarth was so obsessed with this corruption, and yet at the same time so imbued with a faith that it might still be reformed or cured, that the question of an alternative environment never arose. Since the mid-eighteenth-century city did not stand as the universal, ever-expanding, and overwhelming phenomenon which it was to become a century later, reform rather than outright escape may have yet presented itself as a viable way of dealing with it. But if Hogarth worked with a vision of reform through private philanthropy, he saw very clearly that it was not individual and separate abuses that had to be reformed, but a whole structure which was the basis and vehicle of corruption—social custom, law, church, constituted authority in its various forms—a structure which, having usurped the systems of rural or feudal community, was unable to offer any protection or security whatsoever.

The humanitarian movement which spread under the reigns of William III and Anne decayed rapidly under the first two Georges. The Poor Laws were modified toward a greater rigidity; provision for orphans, whose numbers increased with the wars of Marlborough and the general growth in population, diminished. The cost of Poor Law Relief actually fell from £819,000 in 1698 to £689,000 in 1750.⁴ No parliamentary assistance was given to charity schools. Crime, pauperism, and drunkenness increased. Hogarth grew up and matured as an artist during this period of humanitarian decay. Nowhere is his satire sharper than when he considers the fate of children, and the forces which determine that fate. Children, the embellishment of so much family portraiture and genre painting of the baroque era, are in Hogarth like festering sores on a rotting body politic: children unwanted and rejected, the fruit of loveless marriages, capricious lecheries, or depraved professions; the offspring of parents who pass on to them only their physical diseases and moral vices.

They are not however—unlike in Dickens—deliberately and ritually beaten, despite the fact that we assume the beating of children to have been normal and widespread at this period. In Hogarth, children get morally, not physically, beaten. Hogarth's are the children of all social classes, but especially those of the lower orders who appear to have been born parentless and thrown in infancy upon the cruel world, where they live as prematurely aged and vitiated adults. They are incarnations of the social principle that the fruit of rotten trees ripens rotten, and is either crushed underfoot when it falls, or else survives to add to the surrounding rottenness.

Hogarth's first really important and independent enterprise, A Harlot's Progress, was planned and executed in 1730, at the time he married and was under particular pressure to establish himself as an artist and provider. Hogarth's marriage, as far as we can tell, was happy, but he was to have no children of his own. He developed, however, a fierce instinct which we may legitimately term “paternal,” an aggressive sense of propriety, toward a kind of artistic offspring which would be to his credit socially and aesthetically, and profit him economically. He had hitherto, in the 1720s, engaged in artistically “illegitimate” or socially and economically marginal activities which had yielded only poor results—book-illustration and broadsheet satires, all badly paid, constricting in subject matter, and open to plagiarization and exploitation by middlemen. Henceforth, with the Harlot's Progress, he would initiate and control all aspects of the genesis, evolution, and distribution—the begetting and rearing—of his productions. As a particularly crucial measure of protection, he got Parliament to pass England's first artistic copyright act (known ever since as “Hogarth's Act,” 1735).

We are presented at the outset with what is now discernible as a centuries-long historical evolution, which Hogarth compresses into the few years of the harlot's career, an evolution which had begun long before Hogarth was born, and was to reach its maturity only deep into the nineteenth century: the movement from the countryside to the town, from innocence to corruption, from the “natural family” life to lonely competition for survival, from work with a materially productive community to domestic and sexual service productive only of distress and disease. Hogarth's harlot progresses rapidly from virginal girlhood to premature old age and death—making along the way a child which, born into the city itself, and formed by the same circumstances which ruined its parent, is doomed from the start. Sociologists have tracked this movement over the nineteenth-century period, with reference to the transformation of country girls, become superfluous and a burden at home, into the domestic servants of the urban rich, into factory workers, beggars, and prostitutes, beyond the reach, care, or control of parents, thrown upon their own devices and treacherous or coldhearted parent-substitutes.⁵

Hogarth's buxom country wench, who is called Mary or Kate Hackabout, falls into temptation at the very outset. She has been sent to London in the York waggon (the cheap way—her family must be poor) in care of her cousin Tom, for whom she has brought a present of a goose; but poor goose that she is, she is left unprotected, at her point of disembarkation, against the lusts of wolves and wolverines. Two other young girls arriving, with the same purpose, in the same York waggon, have what would appear to be the proper protection, a clergyman engaged in reading the direction of the place to which he is bringing the girls to safety.⁶ Prudently, the girls stay inside the waggon, although one wonders whether they, too, will not be exposed to temptation, and are not doomed to fall, like the pots nearby, disturbed by the munching horses of the careless rider. The clergyman, the church, standing within a yard or two, chooses to ignore the vicious seduction initiated in the foreground—it is none of his business, and he is impotent anyway before those who usurp parental authority and offer these debased parodies of parental attention. The bawd was identified as the notorious Mother Needham; the man behind, hand in pocket masturbating at his prospects, was recognized as the wicked “Colonel” Charteris who, we read in a biography published at the time when he was on trial for rape, employed “some noted Procuress to furnish him from time to time with a variety of fresh Country Girls, which were to be hired (to prevent Suspicion) to live with him as Servants.”⁷ Charteris was a friend of the prime minister, so he escaped punishment.

Country girls arrived in London with social ambitions. By the second plate, Kate has become an accomplished courtesan, provided with an exotic child-servant from a “child-race”—the Negro—and an exotic pet which apes her antics and dress. Expelled for infidelity by her wealthy Jewish keeper, she rapidly declines, is arrested in a garret for receiving stolen goods, or else simply as a common harlot (scene III), and is sent to Bridewell women's prison, in the company of children too young and idiotic looking to be considered responsible for whatever crime they are charged with (scene IV). Hogarth is clear on this, and this is what differentiates him from the long tradition in popular moralization: the girls have sinned, but they are victims of evil social forces and cruel laws which punish them and leave their seducers to prosper.⁸ The authorities which conspire against her are: the ruthless harlot-hunting Justice Sir John Gonson (a notorious figure in real life), entering in the third scene and himself hanged in effigy by an inmate graffitist, in the next; the villainous and sadistic jailer and his thieving wife (scene IV); and the doctors who engage in a trivial and despicable quarrel about the relative merits of their cures, at the very moment the harlot is dying, thus mocking the misery of their patient, and ignoring that of her child, who scratches his verminous head as he tries to smoke a piece of bread (scene V).

The child, moving rapidly into the center of the European social stage, is the centerpiece of Hogarth's final plate. While the sisterhood, the harlot's colleagues, pay their last respects with hypocritical and drunken wailing and sniveling, and with lecherous gestures, the chief mourner, the pathetic remnant and fruit of the harlot's career, is left to play with a top—a symbol, perhaps, of the emptiness of his existence. No one takes the slightest notice of him. Officialdom—clergyman, undertaker—is occupied in pursuit of its own amorous designs.

Hogarth followed up his tremendously successful Harlot's Progress with the progress of her male equivalent, the rake, in eight scenes. Tom Rakewell, like Kate Hackabout, is thrown as a mere adolescent upon the temptations of the town, made available to him through the fortune left by a miserly and neglectful father (scene I). The Harlot had been of low, rustic origin, and rose socially, only to fall into the deepest degradation; her male successor is of middle-class, nouveau-riche origin, and is also ruined by social ambition. At the outset, however, he is put in the position of being not only the exploited—the willing victim of tailors, thieving lawyers, and the sundry artists and sportsmen he patronizes (scene II)—but also the exploiter: of the simple country girl whom he, as a student, had seduced on the promise of marriage, and who now honorably spurns his attempt to buy her off with money. She remains faithful to him in the most heroic and improbable fashion: after his debaucheries (scene III) she rescues him with her meager savings from arrest for debt at the hands of the villainous-looking minions of the law (scene IV); she attempts to interrupt his marriage to a rich old hag (scene V); and finally, when, having lost his all gambling (scene VI), Tom is reduced to debtor's prison and madhouse, she assumes the role of mourner—the role, ironically, of Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute of the Bible, mourning the dead Christ, whose position in an unmistakable iconographic parallel Rakewell near-duplicates (scene VIII). She has, quite properly, left their child at home for this truly frightening scene; but in the previous one the child adds her strident voice and efforts to comfort and revive her mother, who has fainted on encountering her beloved, already half-mad in his debtor's jail.

The girl's counterpart, on the other side of this plate, is the boy demanding money for the beer he has brought; he might be the harlot's son, whom we last saw, three years earlier, when he was about five, and now, at age eight, is imbued with an air of hardened cruelty. Once again the social parent-substitutes, the representatives of authority, the law (I and V), the military (III), and the aristocracy (V and VI) are the active instruments of corruption. Hogarth shows that authority has broken down in various symbolic ways also: the Tablet of the Ten Commandments is cracked (V); the law, as represented by the portraits of Roman emperors (III), has been desecrated: the good emperors have had their heads torn out, only Nero is intact. Here the world itself (or a map of it) is set on fire. And in the madhouse (VII) it is the same: the upper classes, represented by two elegant young tourists peering in hypocritical dismay and curiosity at the naked, urinating man who, thinking he is a king, unconsciously mocks the very concept of royalty—these fine young ladies incarnate the ultimate corruption of a society which, having driven people mad, mocks them in their madness.

It was not only in paintings and prints that Hogarth gave voice to his distress at the plight of unwanted children. He became a social activist on their behalf. In the first half of the eighteenth century, to counter the governmental and official torpor we noted above, there was much practical response to the new concern for children, in the creation of numerous philanthropic institutions, notably charity schools and hospitals of various kinds, including for maternity. These were not municipal or ecclesiastical foundations, but the result of individual humanitarian efforts. Hogarth was involved in many of them, such as the prison reform committee of 1729, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the Bethlehem or Bedlam Hospital (the same where his Rake had died), and in particular the Foundling Hospital, which has been called “the most imposing single monument erected by eighteenth-century benevolence.”⁹ Hogarth was no mere figurehead director; he contributed not only money but also labor and time in committee work, and his art. His Progresses pleaded, indirectly, for just such a charitable institution as the Foundling; but he also donated to the hospital building large, impressive paintings in a serious style and of a more traditional subject matter: Christ Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda, which includes a mother with a crippled child being brutally pushed away, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, two canvasses for St. Bartholomew's Hospital, still in situ; and among the paintings he presented to the Foundling were Moses Brought before the Pharaoh's Daughter, and a portrait of Thomas Coram, chief instigator of the hospital, also happily still in situ. The portrait of Coram, the kindly old sea captain, like Hogarth childless after many years of happy marriage, is regarded as a major monument in the history of art, and in the development of the heroic bourgeois portrait. A new type of man, the middle-class philanthropist, brought forth a new category of art.

Hogarth was personally present at the opening of the hospital on 25 March 1741. He must have noted the great crowd, the manner in which the mothers were received, and the condition of the children. The women who brought the children were dismissed with no questions asked. As an eyewitness saw it:

On this occasion the expressions of grief of the women whose children could not be admitted were scarcely more observable than those of some of the women who parted with their children. So that a more moving scene can't well be imagined. All the children who were received (except three) were dressed very clean, from whence and other circumstances they appeared not to have been under the care of the parish officers, nevertheless many of them appeared as if stupefied with some opiate, and some of them almost starved, one as in the agonies of death through want of food, too weak to suck, or to receive nourishment, and notwithstanding the greatest care appeared as dying when the governors left the hospital, which was not until they had given proper orders and seen all necessary care taken of the children.¹⁰

In that first year, 136 infants were admitted, more than twice the number originally planned for; but of those who lived to be sent into the country, and to be apprenticed, the survival ratio appears to have been good.

Moses Brought before the Pharaoh's Daughter, the subject which old Coram had put on the seal of the corporation, as well as that of Hogarth's presentation painting, reproduces the hierarchy of social classes which constituted the hospital. The numerous artistocrats elected as governors in the original charter, who included twenty-three dukes, thirty-four earls, and twenty-two members of the Privy Council, could identify with the Egyptian princess in her palace. The middle-class governors and managerial staff could identify with the steward or treasurer (described as imbued with “austere dignity”):¹¹ the lower servants with Moses' mother and the princess's servants whispering to the right; and the children of course with the foundling Moses himself, confronting the ruling class itself, as they must frequently have done in the hospital buildings and grounds which became a kind of cultural club and rendezvous for the rich. (Some of the foundlings, incidentally, grew up to become, if not leaders of a nation, relatively successful citizens, who later visited the hospital in fancy carriages.)

But Hogarth has also, I believe, inserted into the painting certain criticisms which have hitherto passed unnoticed. The major one is of the attitude taken toward the children by the foster-parents with whom they were boarded out for the first few years. Moses' foster-mother (hired and treated as such, although she is also the real mother) gazes with evident pleasure at the money the grumpy old steward pours into her hand.¹² Since the recent cleaning of the painting, the coins (again) glisten with particular brilliance, and it is evident that the artist meant to emphasize this money transaction, and the two parties' involvement in it: he the parsimonious treasurer displeased at having to disburse so much for a mere single child, of an inferior and subject people; she the foster-mother so pleased at getting paid off as to raise the suspicion that money was her primary motivation in accepting the child; neither showing any concern for the child who is thus bought and sold, and who is so obviously—and naturally—afraid at this moment, overawed by the magnificent princess, and clinging nervously to his mother's sash.

Hogarth's critical excursion here is all the more remarkable in that it is not justified by the biblical text, which is inscribed on the frame “Exodus II Chap 10th Verse: And the child grew; and she brought him unto Pharaoh's Daughter; and he became her Son; and She called his name Moses.” The payment is mentioned not in this verse but in the preceding one, given to another painter, Francis Hayman, to illustrate. The inscription below Hayman's painting, whose position right next to Hogarth's on the hospital wall facilitates comparison,¹³ runs “Exodus II Chap. 9th Verse: And Pharaoh's Daughter said to her, take this Child, and nurse it for me and I will give thee thy Wages.” Hayman's picture, presented at the same time as Hogarth's, to a degree in rivalry, and so unlike it, is all sweet sentiment and maternal tenderness. The (foster) mother reaches eagerly for the infant, which is lovingly cradled by the princess's maid. The gesture of the pharaoh's daughter toward Moses, that of directing the child to be given away to the nurse, is more or less repeated by Hogarth in the reverse situation. The gesture of Hogarth's princess, as well as her aristocratically languid reclining pose, seems to us, and was perhaps even intended by Hogarth, as that of a lady whose adoption of a child of the lower classes is an act of public policy rather than a movement of the heart. The bourgeoisie tended to see the aristocracy as deficient in maternal feeling. Artists later in the century, under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, moralize the theme “Return from the Nurse” by showing the child fearful at being thrust suddenly into an alien and luxurious environment, clinging to the nurse, as in Hogarth, and the unnatural, aristocratic parents annoyed at having to take their child back. (The princess's pose in Hogarth's painting is actually rather similar to that of the unmaternal and flighty Countess Squanderfield at her levee in Marriage A-la-Mode, which Hogarth had recently published and which we shall describe shortly.) Her lack of apparent enthusiasm may be taken in conjunction with the whispering of the servants behind her: the “Ethiopian” was judged by a contemporary critic¹⁴ to be passing on to her companion the rumor that Moses was in fact the illegitimate child of the princess; she could not, therefore, afford to show too much affection toward him. Whatever Hogarth may have intended in this respect, he has conceived of Moses, despite his two mothers, despite the biblical story, despite the ostensible purpose of the picture which was to show the philanthropic exemplar sanctified and in action, as a child afraid and alone.

The Foundling Hospital became a fashionable enterprise, and was certainly of good publicity value for Hogarth, as recent writers on the artist have not failed to stress. By the 1740s he was fairly well known as a printmaker and satirist, and also as a portrait painter, although he never became a fashionable face-painter as Reynolds was shortly to become. His most ambitious portrait after the Coram was, logically enough, a painting of children—the children, significantly, of the apothecary at the Royal Hospital for war veterans at Chelsea. Hogarth already had considerable experience with family portraiture, which became very popular among the English aristocrats who wished to demonstrate their commitment to the new (bourgeois) concept of the family. But these “conversation pieces,” as they were called, tended to be very small in scale, and cramped and crowded in their arrangement. One feels that the children do not really have enough room to run around in, despite the grandeur of the spaces they inhabit; that their childish antics are self-conscious performances, or that they are inhibited by the grown-ups.¹⁵ In The Graham Children and The MacKinnon Children,¹⁶ parents are altogether absent, which is still unusual in family portraiture, although there are scattered examples from earlier periods, especially seventeenth-century Holland. One wonders whether the choice was more Hogarth's than that of the parents, at this time when the painter was intensively occupied with the foundlings. The Graham Children, unlike the usual family portrait, is not about a family hierarchy but about spontaneity and freshness, feminine and gracious in the girl, of an animal vivacity in the boy, over whose shoulder the cat watches the bird with fearsome intensity.

Such pictures represent a brief and private respite from Hogarth's abiding public preoccupation with the child as victim, a theme to which he returned in his most exquisite narrative painting, and in his most carefully elaborated and engraved satirical story, Marriage A-la-Mode. The child appears only at the very end, but once again he starts with a demonstration of parental irresponsibility and selfishness, within a convention still largely accepted in practice by all classes at this time: the marriage arranged for economic and social advantages. It is now a matter not only of implicit or explicit neglect, although moral neglect is certainly one of the issues. It is a matter also and primarily of the active exploitation of children in order to promote corrupt socioeconomic ambitions: the middle-class, nouveau-riche father who buys his daughter a titled husband, and the aristocrat of ancient lineage, physically and financially crippled by his sexual and artistic-architectural extravagance, who sells his son to the highest bidder.

In their forced, loveless marriage, the children are seduced into artistocratic vices. The young low-born countess compensates for the boredom of marriage, and expresses her new status by the acquisition of bad art on various levels, and later, bad artists of various kinds; the young Earl Squanderfield reveals his moral turpitude through his liaisons with pathetic child prostitutes and, when venereal disease threatens, through his recourse to the lowest class of quack physician (III). The countess repays his infidelity with one of her own (IV); and even as she makes the assignation, she shows her contempt for the sacred duties of maternity. A mother she is, as we know by the coral bauble over her chair; but the family to which she commits herself is an entourage of more or less suspect artistic performers and groupies. Here is the child she and her friends dote upon: a gross, enameled, effeminate Italian castrato singer, who warbles in an unnatural treble voice for the pleasure of those with infantile musical tastes. The countess's taste in fine art embraces both the senile and the infantile: she has bought old, smoky, violent paintings of mythological seduction and rape, appropriate to the senile sensibility of an aristocracy looking backward to exhausted continental and Catholic models; and, on the floor, the latest acquisition at the latest auction, absurdly childish, primitive or Oriental knickknacks. The only object which makes any sense at all does so in a satirical fashion. The Actaeon figure symbolizes the earl's impending cuckoldry, and mocks the depravity at once of artistocratic artistic taste and aristocratic morals. The mockery here is incarnated in another child representative of the child-race: the Negro servant boy. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—and primitive people—shall come forth satiric truth. There are other occasions when Hogarth uses the child to mock adult foolishness.¹⁷

Sinner as she is, the countess is capable of a kind of heroism, pleading for forgiveness before her husband, who dies in a duel of honor with her paramour in a masquerade bagnio, the place of the illicit rendezvous; and, finally, committing suicide by an overdose of laudanum, because she has lost both her husband, killed by the lover, and the lover, executed by the law. In these circumstances the child, hitherto present only in the form of the coral amulet, makes a belated, but tragic appearance. Crippled and deformed as he is, he attempts to deliver a departing kiss, his unhealthily flushed face contrasting with the deathly pallor of his mother's cheek. Her father, the alderman, meanwhile, with an expression of pained concern, withdraws from his dying daughter's finger the wedding ring which he had led her into defiling (her feelings about the marriage in the first place were eloquently expressed in the opening scene, where she idly draws this same ring through a handkerchief). Avarice dictates the father's last ritual gesture, which actually defrauds the crown, in English law at this time the sole legal heir to a suicide's estate.¹⁸

The child is surely a male.¹⁹ Most art historians and commentators, misled by the female dress customary for infant boys, have taken him to be a girl, who would normally wear a cap (as we remember from the Rake's daughter, and the three Graham daughters). The fact that it is a boy is of some moment: chance has favored the degenerate artistocratic line by producing in the nick of time the necessary male heir, and guaranteeing the perpetuation of the name; but nature, punishing the family by transmitting the physical taints of the father onto the child, has already rendered further propagation unlikely. The child has a leg brace for his rickets, and a black patch over his (perhaps) hemophiliac taint, in almost exactly the same place as that of the father, in the first scene.²⁰

In his later work Hogarth gives no indication that, despite his efforts with the Foundling Hospital and other charitable endeavors, he saw any sign of improvement in the social situation, especially vis-à-vis children. While his personal financial situation continued to improve, his reputation polarized, and he became himself the butt of much personal abuse and satire. More combative than ever, in his late middle and last period, he conjures up the most desperate vision of the plight of the urban child.

Hogarth attempted to follow up Marriage A-la-Mode with the complementary story of a happy marriage, which was to have a rural setting in contrast to the urban one of the first. But, having executed a few sketches of wedding ceremonial—dance and banquet—and finding himself confronted with the inevitable scenes of connubial and family bliss, he gave up, in the realization that happiness and virtue and the rustic life did not lend themselves to moral exegesis, to comic or interesting effects. There is another parallel with Dickens here, of which I am reminded by Sylvia Manning's essay on Dickens, who concludes his epic narratives of unhappy families with rapidly sketched epilogues of happy families. Like Hogarth's, Dickens's remain mere sketches, a few perfunctory and quite unconvincing paragraphs, showing how in the next generation, somehow, miraculously, in a kind of never-never land, the happy family shall arise.

But Hogarth was already or soon to be at work on another subject which was to provide for a demonstration of virtue of a kind, and to be ingeniously interwoven with a life of vice. He called it Industry and Idleness (1747). He starts with two fatherless youths, first shown as apprentice weavers. The master-weaver is reinforced in his traditional role of parent-substitute, but it is significant, I think, that he is not shown as physically present in the room, supervising the work, watching over his charges. They are left basically to their own devices, to work or fall asleep, to read good Christian or bad popular literature. The essentially absent master merely looks in to threaten the physical punishment of Tom Idle. Such punishment looms nearer, in a much less well-intentioned way, in the third plate, where the parish beadle is about to smite Idle, and roll him, perhaps, right into the open grave gaping beside him, as he gambles his life away. The group of children around him are already hardened criminals in the making, as much gripped by the game as adult professionals. Gambling vagrant children must have been a very common sight in London; and Hogarth later added a boisterous little knot of seven boys to his much earlier depiction of the Rake's arrest, in the second state of the engraving.

We have to assume that Idle and Goodchild, despite their names, start with equal chances, both apprenticed, perhaps, out of the Foundling Hospital. They are old enough to be responsible, and it is by choice that Idle casts off both his apprenticeship and the church he profanes—that institution Hogarth does not believe in anyway, and which serves Goodchild only for purposes of courtship and professional advancement, as he shares his hymnal with his master's daughter and wife-to-be (II). While Idle is sent to sea (V), spurning at once his mother's tears and the warning of the gallows, Goodchild, now a partner in the business, celebrates his wedding. His hard work and virtue qualify him to become a good father, but, characteristically, we never see his biological family, his private family, not even his wife, except in a glimpse through the window here, for they are of no interest to Hogarth. We see only the wider social family for which Goodchild, rising in the scale of civic office, assumes responsibility. And here things go wrong from the start, through factors beyond Goodchild's control. At the wedding breakfast customary compliments are exchanged: the groom gives a money gratuity to the well-dressed guildsmen who come to congratulate, but nothing to the pathetic crippled ballad-singer, whose dog knows better than even to beg for payment for their music. At the banquet celebrating Goodchild's election as Sheriff of London (VIII), it is only the fat and gluttonous and undeserving officials who get to eat, while the poor and hungry are rudely turned away. When he administers justice (X), Alderman Goodchild tearfully condemns his former fellow apprentice who is certainly guilty of some crime, but not necessarily that for which he is to be hanged: he is a thief, but not necessarily a murderer, and the oath sworn against him by his treacherous accomplice is sworn on the left hand by an usher who accepts a bribe behind his back. The poor mother of the accused, meanwhile, is rudely pushed away and prevented from seeing her son.

In the last two plates the procession celebrating Goodchild's election as Lord Mayor of London is almost as chaotic and drunken as that following Tom Idle to the gallows. In the former, a child is injured (significantly, center foreground) while oblivious royalty beams down upon the riotous crowd. In the latter, ecclesiastical paternal authority is derelict in its duty: the fat Anglican prison chaplain rides comfortably in his coach, neglecting Idle who is exhorted to repent by a lower-class non-Conformist, a Wesleyan minister. And the public execution, instead of serving as a moral warning, becomes a pretext for drunken rioting and quarreling, in the course of which a baby is trampled underfoot, and an unattached older child is subjected to the kind of temptation that started Idle off on his evil career. He stands with folded arms, undecided as yet whether to steal the gingerbread which a vendor cries to the crowd.

Hogarth did not make any paintings of Industry and Idleness as he had of his previous three stories. He was aiming, increasingly, at a cheaper and more popular market, at the master craftsmen and tradesmen responsible for the moral welfare of the young apprentices, and at the city fathers themselves. He was working with the Fielding brothers, Henry the novelist and the blind magistrate Sir John, who were enquiring into the causes of poverty, crime, drunkenness, and infant mortality, seeking out not individual and moralistic, but structural, that is legal and administrative explanations for social abuses.

The city fathers of London, so proud of the city's independence of crown and parliament, its democratic government, its system of elected officials, its legal autonomy, and—not least—the flourishing of its trade and manufactures, had not provided a humane framework for society. For all the private philanthropic energy, little was legally, or substantially, or visibly changed. The charitable institutions were insufficient. It is a charity boy from St. Giles Parish, called Tom Nero, who begins his career in Cruelty, in the four-part progress of that title, by torturing small animals—dogs, cats, and birds. This scene groups twenty-one children in a street. Childish vice is prophetically punished in effigy by child art—the graffito, which was a matter of more than casual interest to Hogarth.²¹ In the next plate, although gainfully employed, Tom enlarges upon his cruel instincts. Fully grown now, he vents his fury upon larger animals. His savage beating is provoked, be it noticed, by the starved horse collapsing and the coach overturning because it had been overloaded with lawyers too mean to pay separate fares, and too cowardly and callous to protest the coachman's cruelty. Meanwhile, in the background, a small child is run over and killed by another accident, this one caused by simple negligence and slothfulness. In the third plate, called Cruelty in Perfection, Nero slaughters his mistress, his unwilling accomplice in theft, committing a sadistic murder, which leaves gaping slashes at wrist and throat, a double murder too, for she was pregnant.

The authorities take a revenge which punishes cruelty with more cruelty, butchery with butchery. The doctors who with full moral and scientific sanction dissect and disembowel the corpse of a hanged man (disemboweling had been in Elizabethan times the final and most degrading stage in the execution itself—now it was used to further scientific progress)—the doctors, barbarian-surgeons, are clearly as morally corrupt, in their own way, as the criminal himself. The only justified revenge is that taken casually by the dog who eats his former tormentor's heart—the pre-child here and the only innocent in this macabre judicial atrocity.

Hogarth was very proud of his Cruelty sequence, which he believed had actually reduced the incidence of cruelty to animals in the streets of London. Certain animal sports became prohibited by law. Hogarth sold these plates together with a pair called Beer Street and Gin Lane; he called the group of six “Hard Prints for Stony Hearts,” advertised them heavily in the popular press, produced and priced them as cheap as possible. Beer Street and Gin Lane were made as part of a campaign aimed at raising the price of gin, the lethal drink of the poor, and lowering that of beer, the healthy beverage of the productive laborer. Henry Fielding believed gin to be at the root of all the most prevalent crimes, the “principal substance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis.” Fielding continues, “What must become of the infant who is conceived in gin? With the poisonous distillations of which it is nourished both in the womb and at the breast.”²² The Gin Act of 1751 (the date these prints were published) is regarded as a turning point in the social history of London; it certainly helped check the marked decline in population which demographers have noted during the years 1730-60.

Gin Lane is perhaps Hogarth's most famous single plate. It is, with the Reward of Cruelty, the most horrible scene Hogarth ever devised. It imprinted itself indelibly on my memory when I first saw it in an old album of Hogarth's collected prints, reengraved from the original copper plates.²³ I discovered this album, which I could barely lift, and which is still the largest volume I have ever held in my hands, as an eight- or nine-year-old, in a huge ornate cupboard in my grandfather's house, a cupboard which was a building in itself, a magical house full of real and false drawers, twisted pillars and ornate locks and hinges, containing a fairyland of objects, strange old games and foolish old puzzles. The books in the house of my grandfather (a wealthy but rather uncultured man), which included apart from the Hogarth album many Dickens first editions, had been acquired by a less uncultured uncle. He had died young, as I believed, of tuberculosis, a disease surrounded by much deadly mystery for me as a child, the same which I was led to suppose had also deprived me of my father, in unexplained circumstances, when I was two. So the Hogarth album offered me, at the outset, a link with the mystified immediate family past. I perused it with fascination and fear. Hogarth has never left me since. It was, I am convinced, that first impression, the emotion of that particular childhood encounter, which much later decided me, after many necessary detours, to enter the history of art as a profession. My family context was one in which death, disease, cruelty, hatred, and anger were all carefully suppressed. My family was not only culturally but also emotionally innocent. A cultural sensibilization and a profound, if vicarious, emotional experience first came together for me in Hogarth. Disease, cruelty, and terror first spoke to me directly in Hogarth's Reward of Cruelty and Gin Lane. What my family suppressed, Hogarth revealed. Hogarth knew how to talk to children. The particular horror I have to this day of physical political torture or medical mutilations has had the curious effect of turning me toward those pictorial distortions, dismemberments, and assaults which we call cartoon and caricature, and toward that threshold which caricature and satiric art often occupies, between the tragic and comic. The threshold is also that between the world of the child, where fantasy and distortion is natural, and that of the adult, where distortion is—or used to be—considered inappropriate. Hogarth felt himself precariously poised between the primitive, caricatural, anarchic, spontaneous, magical world of the child, which was also that of the people, and the sophisticated, aesthetically controlled world of the adult, which was that of the elite—the wealthy art connoisseur who prized neoclassical decorum. Hogarth had the instincts of the childish graffitist, whom he loved to show in action, and the ambition of an academic painter, whom he sought to rival.

The academic or “grand manner” painter looked to the art of the past for his themes and stylistic models; the graffitist or comic artist to the present reality. The work of the satirist in art tended to be regarded as childish or low, and it is a curious paradox in the history of our culture, which some Marxist theory of art might explain, that interaction with the present (that is, the attempt to determine the future) was viewed as a sign of immaturity, while obedience to the past (Renaissance, classical antiquity) alone could generate truly “great,” that is epic or tragic art. Hogarth raised the infant comedy to the level of “maturity” and respect traditionally commanded by tragedy. He integrated the comic with the tragic by creating a profoundly tragic world out of what are essentially comically degraded (or regressive) forms.

There are, perhaps, a few farcical or tragi-farcical elements in Gin Lane—the man, perhaps, chewing on the bone in rivalry with his dog. But there is no doubt as to the seriousness of Hogarth's purpose, and his own horror at what he depicts. Goya, in scenes of comparable physical brutality, at least could assume, in the captions, postures of detachment.

The gin is force-fed to starving babies, to silence them. It is also fed to the crippled and insane. Little charity girls drink it, in the shadow of those literally blinded and rendered murderous by it. Previously, Hogarth had depicted mad people only in the hospitals; now they fill the streets. The London street is a madhouse, and a charnel house. Passivity and activity are equally lethal. Next to an impromptu burial of the dead, an insanely dancing man has skewered a baby. In the foreground, a mother, in her diseased and drunken stupor, lets a child fall to its death from the gin-soaked breast he has been sucking. The distinction between life and death is elided; the man in the corner foreground is both alive and dead, with his hand still clutching glass and bottle. And London, that is the world, collapses all about.

These late prints were specifically directed at the lower classes, or (as the buying public) those immediately above and in contact with them. As a representative of the upwardly mobile middle class, Hogarth wished to expose the vices he saw particularly threatening to the lower classes, although these same vices were practiced, with much impunity, by the upper classes, whom the lower, by a natural social law, tended to imitate. The lower classes stood in relation to the upper as children do to parents. Focus upon the lower classes is another manifestation of Hogarth's concern for children, and vice versa. From the mid-eighteenth century and particularly from the 1760s with the advent of conservative Tory administrations, the reforming impetus of the first half of the century on the one hand dwindled into sentimental idealization of the lower classes, particularly the peasant, and his equivalent in the family hierarchy, the child; on the other hand, this same impetus hardened into an outright hostility toward the poor and their children, which sharpened, of course, immeasurably after the French Revolution.

Hogarth, whose late work overlaps chronologically with the early work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was never for a moment tempted by the sentimental view of either the lower classes, or the child. He sought no escape from reason into emotion, from the adult into the childish or rustic world, from the larger social into the private, nuclear family. He did not segregate them. He saw few situations from which children would normally be excluded, whether it be a cockfight, a gambling den, or a debtor's prison; he never depicted a scene from which adults would be categorically excluded—such as a schoolroom. The adult made the child what it was, society made the family what it was. Society was the family and the real dereliction was not that of the biological parent, but that of the authority structure. This may be regarded as an archaic, premodern, preindustrial conception. But within it, children are already primary victims, and this is decidedly modern.²⁴

Associated with his feeling for the child, and inseparable from it, is Hogarth's real sympathy, such as no artist before him had evinced so consciously, for the weaker and lower and oppressed classes, especially women, prisoners, and servants. (The servant is often also a child, thus doubly subject.) As Hogarth himself grew out of and superseded what he consciously saw as his own state of childish or youthful economic servitude and exploitation, as he rose from hack engraver to become the father of the first native British school of art, as he rose from the lower-middle class, the son of a petty schoolmaster who had been imprisoned for debt when William was a child (there is another parallel with Dickens here), to enjoy the status of prominent citizen of moderate wealth and a household of five servants—Hogarth never lost sight of what he had been. He painted his servants with all the human sympathy he felt for his friends and equals—perhaps more, for there is some suffering in these simple faces. This document, which one may take together with the portrait of the Shrimp Girl, is unique in the history of art. It reminds us that already in Hogarth, embryonically, we may detect that essential nexus of feeling which sees the child not merely as the center of the private family in the nineteenth-century sense, with the strength of innocence and natural virtue, but as the biological quintessence of the socially childish—that is, the weak, vulnerable, presently inferior strata in society as a whole.

Dickens is to wrestle mightily with this feeling, and all too often suppress its proper development. Stephen Blackpool, in Hard Times, his only working-class hero, whose social oppression the novelist dramatizes with crystalline clarity, is ultimately infantilized by the author, and left to die in total and childish confusion and ignorance. Like Stephen Blackpool about his social condition, Victorian writers were “all in a muddle” about childhood. Hogarth was much clearer, and his clarity may serve as a beacon when we seek to clarify all the muddles about family and childhood that have developed since then.

Notes

1. We may therefore pause to doubt the generalization of Philippe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 38. “Most people probably felt, like Montaigne, that children had ‘neither mental activities nor bodily shape.’” Emphasis added.

2. See Paul Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). Ariès does not seem to regard Holland as unique or as a vanguard society in the development of European domesticity.

3. See David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), chap. 8.

4. R. H. Nichols and F. A. Wray, The History of the Foundling Hospital (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 2-5.

5. See Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, “Women's Work and the Family in 19th-Century Europe,” in The Family in History, ed. Charles Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 145.

6. Many writers have assumed the clergyman is Kate's father. Among them are Rouquet, Lettre de Monsieur xx à un de ses amis à Paris, 1746, p. 4; John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, 1781; G. C. Lichtenberg, The World of Hogarth, Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's Engravings, translated from the German and with an Introduction by Innes and Gustav Herdan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 4ff.; and Ronald Paulson in Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 1:144, cautiously countenances the possibility. It seems to me extremely unlikely that Hogarth intended such an identification, first because of the inherent implausibility of a daughter being seduced within yards of a father come expressly to protect her from this very eventuality, and second because, as this essay will show, Hogarth is throughout his life concerned with the concept of the father-substitute in a world where real fathers are absent or delinquent. The eighteenth-century writers evidently assumed the father was present because they knew he should be present.

7. The whole scene is more or less duplicated by Steele in The Spectator 1711/12. Steele “projects the same mixture of pity, tenderness and prurience,” in the view of Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), 1:239.

8. Cf. Kunzle, Early Comic Strip, pp. 272-81, with seventeenth-century Italian examples of the careers of harlots and courtesans where the girls are presented as individually to blame for their fate.

9. David Owen, English Philanthropy 1660-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1964), quoted by Paulson, Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times, 2:35.

10. Nichols and Wray, Foundling Hospital, p. 39, with spelling and punctuation modernized.

11. Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes, p. 31. My own interpretation of his expression is different (cf. below).

12. In the painting the smile on her face is unmistakable. Even if we accept that her eyes are directed at the child rather than the money, why should she show pleasure at the prospect of having to surrender her son? In the engraving after the painting, however, which was done some years later (1752), her expression has been radically altered to one of distress. Perhaps someone influential pointed out to Hogarth the impropriety of his meddling with the biblical story where nothing suggests that Moses' mother is anything but virtuous and maternal. It is not even stated that she receives the foster-parent's fee on handing over the child, only that it is promised to her when she is given the baby to nurse.

13. It is reproduced by Paulson in Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times, vol. 1, fig. 203.

14. Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes, p. 31.

15. For instance, The Cholmondeley Family, repr. Paulson, Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times, vol. 1, fig. 109.

16. Repr. Paulson, vol. 1, fig. 179.

17. For instance, in Chairing the Member from the Election series (1753), the children—again Negroes—are perched on the gatepost upper right.

18. Martin Davies, The British School, 2d ed., rev. (London: National Gallery Catalogues, 1959), p. 65, n. 81.

19. Davies, p. 65, n. 85, deduced this from the costume. With characteristic caution he adds: “A girl is not excluded; but it was usual that even very young girls should wear a cap.” The earliest commentary, published the year after Hogarth's prints and therefore representative of contemporary opinion (Marriage A-la-Mode: An Humorous Tale in Six Canto's in Hudibrastick verse; being an Explanation of the Six Prints Lately Published by the Ingenious Mr. Hogarth. London, 1746, p. 58), recognizes the child as a male: “Nurse with a rueful aged face, / Brings Master for a last Embrace.”

20. Even to the watchful eye, this taint has seemed so unnatural as to be simply unthinkable. The designer at the University of California Press, which published my Early Comic Strip, carefully whited it out on the detail photograph I supplied, mistaking it for a technical blemish of the photograph.

21. See Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, 1753, fig. 105, pl. 1 (Joseph Burke edition, Oxford, 1955), p. 136. For Hogarth's theories on the facial character and posture of the child, cf. pp. 136-37, 140-44, 154-55.

22. Paulson, Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times, 2:99.

23. The Works of William Hogarth from the original plates restored by James Heath, Esq., R. A. … [with] Explanations … by John Nichols, London, printed for Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1822. The volume measures 25 [frac12] by 20 inches.

24. It may be useful to complete the panorama by listing other examples in Hogarth's satiric oeuvre of oppressed and/or vitiated children, apart from those already mentioned (there are virtually no examples of happy or cherished children). The numbers refer to plates in Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, vol. 2. Rake's Marriage (145)—small boy in tattered clothes, serving mercenary wedding in church. Morning (164)—small footboy numb with cold. Noon (165)—little girl ravenously picking spilled food from gutter. Evening (166)—boy in tattered clothes, sleeping in street. Strolling Actresses (168)—screaming baby being spoon-fed by older child (?); drunken children. Enraged Musician (170)—small boy exhibitionist urinating before shocked little girl; bawling baby. Mayor Goodchild (191)—little girl in foreground hurt by falling furniture; small boy selling (no doubt gruesome) ballad of Tom Idle. Election Entertainment (215)—small boy center foreground pouring more wine for already drunken revelers; small girl extreme left stealing ring from political candidate; child extreme right loudly complaining at neglect by father, a pious hypocrite about to be bribed and, ironically, also a tailor who leaves his son with shoes and stockings completely out-at-toe. Cockpit (228)—children joining in the betting and in certain instances indistinguishable from stunted and wizened men. Times I (233)—allegorical print attacking desperate state of nation reduced to poverty by Pitt government, with family groups foreground right victimized by minister's aggressive military policy: woman huddled and dying in street, with naked baby prostrate (dead?) beside her; another mother bringing collapsed (dead?) baby to crazily fiddling soldier; despairing mother with wailing children. March to Finchley (277)—terrified child foreground left clings to father, an enlisted soldier, who callously ignores both him and his weeping mother; another guardsman, centerpiece of whole composition, gloomily indifferent to or morally paralyzed by strident accusations of pregnant woman that he is abandoning her and their imminent child; far right, alarmed and hollow-eyed baby, precariously perched on shoulder of mother serving liquor to already drunken soldier.