SOURCE: Lawson, James. “Hogarth's Plotting of Marriage à la Mode.” Word & Image 14, no. 3 (July-September 1998): 267-80.

[In the following essay, Lawson analyzes Hogarth's series Marriage à la Mode using multiple critical perspectives.]

Particularly as an engraver, William Hogarth (1697-1764) addressed his audience on matters of social concern. The scene that he presented was the contemporary one, and his mode of address was declamatory. His is a thoroughly extroverted art. Of course, Hogarth was far from unreflective about what was proper to it, considered in terms of autonomy. He wrote The Analysis of Beauty (1753) in order to trace pleasure in art back to formal roots. However, to the extent that the content of his paintings and engravings is capable of subsisting beyond considerations of form, Hogarth's work can be compared directly with the products of other declamatory arts dealing with contemporary realities.

His works, particularly his ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, are comparable with novels and plays of the time. Hogarth was, himself, an enthusiast for the theatre.¹ His composition of these narratives owes much to dramatic staging and at the same time to the other principal narrative form, the novel.² Hogarth identified a source of pleasure in life, literature and art when he wrote, in The Analysis of Beauty, ‘… with what delight does it [the mind] follow the well-connected thread of a play or novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens, and ends most pleas'd, when it is most distinctly unravelled’.³

Of course, there is a kind of drama and a sort of novel that would not count themselves as a Moral Subject in Hogarth's sense. Not all literature possessed the necessary moral force. That is what is wanting in melodrama and the penny dreadful. These are categories of literature; but they should also be thought of as existing by degrees of admixture within the more august forms. These genres are modern or of their moment insofar as they are commodities, to be consumed—immediately to be discarded. Hogarth's ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, however, ally themselves with a literature that is worth revisiting. Unlike the melodrama and the penny dreadful that are disposable because they are given over largely to the sort of plotting, which, having worked itself out in the final act or the final page is concluded, the literature revisited remains essentially unfathomed.

The art and fictional literature that had moral force in the eighteenth century were elaborately and, at the same time, evasively plotted. An architectural sort of structure guaranteed that elements could be compared with care and implications be drawn. But there would be yet more to be discovered. On a small scale it might be a Ciceronian sentence by Samuel Johnson, or on an epic scale it could be like Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. In the novel, structures of axiality and symmetry contained narrative elements, characters, emblems and abstract principles; and the audience which could trace out the system of composition would note any assymmetries, discontinuities or flaws of reason. For the audience to be alert to the ‘architecture’ of composition and to those less obvious features that contradict its classical composure is for it to be alive to irony. Thus, close reading in the literary context is to be equated with close looking in the case of Hogarth's work. The withholding of immediate gratification of curiosity is essential to these works as art and as declamation, for in the midst of that puzzling and pondering, the audience is morally responsible. The audience with a sense of irony provides the missing pieces and corrections that return stability to the work of reason.

An abiding concern of the period was with the coincidence of pleasure and instruction. The discovery of the outline of structure and the provision of the components necessary for its maintenance were, at the same time, pleasurable and morally serious activities. In other words, close enquiry, pleasure and moral instruction were connected. Hogarth subscribed to this system of values. He identified a coincidence of necessity, utility and disinterested pleasure in the act of pursuit. It was the crucial element of his aesthetic theory, applying equally to form and content. He thinks of it literally and figuratively, describing it as ‘the business of our lives’.⁴ It was also something for its own sake: ‘This love of pursuit, merely as pursuit is implanted in our natures, and design'd, no doubt, for necessary and useful purposes’.⁵ The joy in puzzling through the plot of a play or novel is likened to the pleasure of the walker in a garden: ‘The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers …’.⁶ It has its corollary in the visual arts where it is ‘Intricacy of form … that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that [it] gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful’.⁷ Hogarth's engravings were to disclose their details, their hidden symmetries and their covert themes slowly and as reward for intricate enquiry.

The observer of The Harlot's Progress would work out the story and, becoming increasingly familiar with the work, would find it fleshed out with a multitude of corroborative details. With this assimilation of the particular to the general would also come an amplification of the universal significance of the narrative. The audience will find convincing Hogarth's argument, which is that stupidity and laziness are deficiencies that combine fatally in a vicious society that, at the same time, reprehends and exploits them. In The Rake's Progress, a sort of Judgement of Paris in reverse takes place. In general terms, love is rejected where moral education has been neglected. Wealth and power are pursued. They, by their nature, possess no measure, and whoever would be their pursuer will lack all measure in his own conduct. That is to be mad. Hogarth observes human folly and he locates it in society conceived as a system for the reception of such individuals and as a crucible for the conversion of that folly into self-destructive vice.

Marriage à la Mode is more complicated than the Progresses. Briefly, Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode is the tale of an arranged marriage and its disastrous consequences. Instead of a meeting of hearts, a commercial transaction sees the forging of the bonds between the couple. Lord Squanderfield marries off his son for the money that will enable him to resume his interrupted life of profligacy. By this marriage of his daughter, the Merchant will have bought a pedigree. The daughter is shown to be sulky, snobbish and lustful, and the son restive, vain and wrathful. The audience follows a complicated plot, amplified by a multitude of corroborative incident, up to the deaths of the young people and a third party. Infidelity and violence come into disastrous collision. Described in this way, the principals of the story are all guilty of error, and society has changed their weaknesses of thought and feeling into vices with tragic consequences.⁸

However, there is also indication of a complementary thread of plot running through the narrative. Furthermore, it is one that has not been remarked upon by students of Hogarth's work. It points to an even deeper venality than that which the familiar interpretation indicts, and makes for a bleaker and more universal tragedy. The additional narrative thread that is being suggested here concerns vice—but not of the merely topical kind, the stuff usually believed to be Hogarth's principal concern, a matter of social delinquency. Instead, an altogether more biblical—we could say ‘classic’ or ‘chronic’—evil is the additional theme.⁹

The results of a reading of Hogarth's narrative in terms of its own internal consistency, and an acceptance of his invitation to ponder the moral and social implications of the action are worth reporting.¹⁰ Hogarth's ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ are scripted with prodigious elaboration. The observer/reader/audience is addressed by a painter/narrator/pamphleteer/dramatist. It is necessary to be ready to adopt a variety of critical and analytical approaches to the work, to don a multitude of different hats.

In scene I, Lord Squanderfield postures. He can be thought of as posing for his portrait. The audience is given his ‘better side’: we are invited to admire his noble profile. Now, a simple but easily overlooked fact here is that the young Viscount, who is to be married off, presents his profile too: and it is unlike Squanderfield's. The idea of posing, which is so clear in the case of the Earl, is easily transferred, with appropriate modification, to the Viscount. Whereas the Earl has an aquiline nose, the Viscount has one that turns up at the end. There seems to be no coincidence in this dissimilarity.

And not only in this particular is the Viscount different from the Earl. Another physical feature of which the Earl is proud has not been inherited by the Viscount, namely the well-proportioned calf. The Viscount is spindle-shanked. Obviously, in the real world, such differences can be accounted for in various ways, not least the genetic contribution of the mother. In the present dramatic context, however, these differences indicate that the very matter of lineal descent is being called into question. Lord Squanderfield can point to the document in the form of his family tree but not to the authentic document in the form of family likeness in the Viscount. There does seem to be some question of true paternity—though it passes the merchant by, so much is his attention fixed upon legal documents, and lucre. Long sightedness and short sightedness are clearly contrasted in scene I. Whilst the merchant myopically scrutinizes what is minute and legalistic, the Earl ‘sees’ past and future—respectively, his family tree and his yet-to-be-completed house. Neither sees what is really before them. The son and daughter share their distractedness. True seeing is epitomized in the horrifying stare of the head of Medusa on the wall. If there is indeed a question of true paternity here, a further, and dramatic, element is added to the satirical narrative.

Pursuit of the conjecture involves attempting to reconstruct the plot, with the sort of symmetries in which the novel and the drama of the age so delighted. Ought not what is true of the Viscount be true of the Merchant's daughter? The Earl is not scrutinizing the goods of the transaction either. Indeed, the daughter also looks unlike her father. If unlikeness is relevant where the father and son are concerned, it ought also to be relevant vis-à-vis father and daughter. The comparisons of profile are made relatively easy for the observer or audience by the ingenious mirrorings of fathers and children, the former facing towards and the latter away from one another.

So, Earl and Merchant are involved in a commerce where, on closer scrutiny, it seems they do not have, so to speak, a biological interest. All these years ago—it would follow—someone else had sexual access to their wives. It is easy to imagine how they would have been blind to the infidelities. The one was dedicated to libertinism and lofty fantasizing, whilst the other sought money with the eager and myopic perspective of a truffle hunter. The merchant's moral kinship with a pig is implied in the form of his purse on the floor—looking like two ears and a snout.¹¹

The plot would be weak at this point if there were no means of pursuing an enquiry into the ‘true’ paternity of son and daughter. But Hogarth does seem to lay clues. For one thing, while the matter of physical likeness and unlikeness is in mind, it is clear that the son and daughter, so unlike their ‘fathers’, are like no one so much as one another. Their profiles are similar, and Hogarth seems to have posed them, in scene I, addorsed, as well as to indicate their indifference to one another, for ease of comparison by the audience. Such a heraldic mode of presentation had once been habitual for Hogarth, the young engraver of silver plate. The idea that the figures are addorsed, in the sense of mirroring, is strengthened by the extension of the symmetry of the group to include the lawyer, Silvertongue, who appears twice—once in material form and once in reflection. R. Paulson identified the reflection as that of the Viscount.¹² Close scrutiny of the engraving shows clearly that this is not the case. It means, of course, that the vanity of the Viscount is not, after all, such a prominent vice, for the point is not a narcissistic one. If this observation about the physiognomies of the couple is made in scene I, study of scene II tends to confirm the prejudice that is forming. The tone is darkly ironic in this juxtaposition of husband and wife. The truly chilling thought comes that a marriage of half-brother and sister is about to take place in scene I.

This thought finds circumstantial confirmation when we return to the physical peculiarity of the Viscount—his spindleshankedness. The nature of muscles, as fibres taking winding paths about the bones into which they are inserted, was intimately involved with Hogarth's notion of the ‘Line of Grace’ as he explains in chapter X of The Analysis of Beauty.¹³ However, ‘… when these lines lose so much of their twists as to be come almost straight, all elegance of taste vanishes’. He goes on to refer to the ‘sticky manner’—when forms are ‘dry, stiff and lacking moisture’.¹⁴ For all his affectation, the Viscount is a figure without grace in Hogarth's terms. Health, morality and beauty are connected, for Hogarth, when he writes of, ‘… the principles of that grace and beauty which is to be found in well-turn'd limbs, in fine, elegant, healthy life …’.¹⁵

Symmetries of incidence, character and plot are crucial to Hogarth's narrative style. It is typical of the art of his age. Here, the audience is drawn on to consider the state of health of the merchant. Hogarth's hints are often very oblique and on this, as on other occasions, there is the danger of forging rather than finding connections. However, it is notable that the Merchant's pig-like purse on the floor in scene I still has one gold coin in it, while the rest of its contents are on the table in front of the Earl. The implication is perhaps to be drawn that the Merchant has in the past been a victim of scrofula, or the King's Evil. Scrofula was a tubercular disease, and the sufferer had subcutaneous swellings or lumps, most conspicuously on the neck. The cure had been the monarch's touch. Ceremonies were organized at which patients would receive the laying on of the royal hand and a gold coin. So long as the gold coin was retained, the cure was effective. The practice, or therapy, was discontinued at the death of Queen Anne (1714). The merchant's retention of the one gold coin could be a reference to this ancient superstition.¹⁶ A final point to add is that the word ‘scrofula’ derives from the Latin for a sow.

The theme of standing up or not runs through the narrative. Lord Squanderfield cannot stand on his own two feet, both figuratively and literally. Of course, his disability is self-inflicted, gout usually being associated with heavy drinking. The Viscount is shown sitting throughout the story, until his last appearance when he totters, supporting himself by a hand on a table. The sword on the floor in scene II has not been broken in a brawl or some other outdoor escapade, otherwise the two parts would not have made it home. More likely, he has broken it while using it as a stick, with which to lower himself onto his chair.¹⁷ By virtue of his position within the picture field, he is obviously to be compared and contrasted with the seated invalid Earl, in the previous scene—a further chance to note the disparities between them. It is a strong stick with a ferrule that he brandishes in scene III.¹⁸ That he should look up at the person whom he offends by the gesture with the stick and who responds with anger, expressed as clearly as if it were by Charles Le Brun, remains perplexing; but part of the explanation of the oddity of this passage of action could be that the Viscount cannot get to his feet with the alacrity of the Procuress. There is reason to believe that he suffers from a specific weakness.¹⁹ There is no sure evidence that Hogarth read Nicholas Andry's Orthopaedia, but it is the sort of work that he would have been drawn to. Moral and physical deformities were of great interest to him. The book's subtitle was ‘The art of correcting and preventing deformities in children’. Hogarth was also interested in parental education, as narrator in The Rake's Progress, where he traced the roots of the tragedy to Tom's want of parental education, and as a governor of the Foundling Hospital. The subtitle of Orthopaedia continues: ‘By such means as may easily be put into practice by parents themselves, and all such as are employed in educating children’. N. Andry quoted La Bruyère: ‘… a fool neither enters a room, nor retires, nor sits down, nor rises up nor stands, nor walks like a man of parts’.²⁰Orthopaedia was published in 1743, and appeared in translation in English in the same year, two years before the publication of Marriage à la Mode.

The visual evidence cannot, of course, be so conclusive where the wife/sister is concerned. But in the light of suspicions about their true relationship, it is perhaps legitimate to give special weight to the fact that, in scene II, she spreads her legs in similar fashion to the exhausted Viscount. The angle of her lower leg may be construed from the fact that the base of the heel of her shoe is visible. The pose recurs approximately as she dies away in the final scene.

Throughout the narrative, the Viscount and the Countess, for all their affectations, adopt inelegant postures. In The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth acknowledges the value of dancing and fencing.²¹ But these are accomplishments which the Viscount lacks, one of them with tragic consequences. The Countess has engaged a dancing master in scene IV, but he stares distractedly into space, his services presumably neglected. The Countess's art-loving but remiss chaperone is moved by the music of the castrato and the flautist.

It is in the final scene that the tragic consequences of this unfortunate coupling are shown, extended to the deformity of the child. Two spindle-shanked people produce—so the theory of selective breeding goes—a child who can only stand on callipers. P. de Voogd suggests that the child's wearing of callipers connects with the grandfather's dependency upon crutches.²² This would be an example of plotting by emblem rather than causal connections. Hogarth will, indeed, have intended that the parallel be drawn. However, he could also draw other connections at the same time. Of two analyses of plotting, that dwelling upon causal links has more force, especially in view of the argument of de Voogd's book, that Hogarth's narrative resembles a literary one. The Earl's invalidity is self-inflicted. In that respect, he is unlike the child, the cause of whose disability is to be found in the parents. Andry, in Orthopaedia, quotes Claude Quillet's Callipaedia, which offered four rules for those intending to marry. The third rule was ‘that neither of them have any considerable deformity of body’.²³ At the same time, it must be allowed that Hogarth has another way of accounting for physical traits: over-development of parts or atrophy are consequences of use or disuse. He compares the upper-body development of rowers with the lower-body development of chairmen.²⁴ Of course, the matter of use of limbs does not apply to the young child.

The child has inherited something specific here. This is not just a general act of vengeance on Nature's part for the couple having been forced into a loveless marriage. The inheritance of the Viscount's syphilis is sufficiently indicated by the black mark on the child's cheek. A customary reading of the plot finds an insufficiently compelling reason for the child's deformity and, as a consequence, the story is somewhat weak at this crucial point. Moreover, an element of plotting of such a kind was anathema to the Enlightenment: it would be essentially unreasonable. As an event that could have occurred within the normal telling of the story, it would have been explainable by reference to unnatural or unreasonable causes—within the cosmology, in other words, of the superstitious and the gullible.²⁵ Surely, the child's deformity is the working out of Nature's impartial law.

If it is fair to say that the dissimilarity of a profile and a leg indicate that the Earl and the Viscount are not related by blood, the similarity of these features suggests the presence of such a relation. Here, it seems that the young couple may be half-brother and sister as well as husband and wife.²⁶ In this event, there was one man with entry to the house of the Earl and of the Merchant. And he has to have had the characteristics that the Viscount and the Merchant's daughter share.

A candidate is provided in Hogarth's narrative, in the person who conducts the business between the Earl and the Merchant in scene I. He is a banker or, with his plump money bags so contrasting with his own dessicated form, probably more specifically a usurer.²⁷ He has the profile, so far as can be seen, the line of calf, and had, no doubt, the opportunity. He has made himself rich at the Earl's and Merchant's expense. It is easy to imagine him being an opportunist in other ways too. Then, there is a detail that, although it does not point directly to his paternity, does mark him out as the focus of horror in the scene: the head of Medusa on the wall, epitomizing ‘true’ seeing, looks at him. In addition, if the Usurer can be thought of as a replica of Medusa, he is perhaps to be thought of as also possessing a vision that others lack. The evidence is not enough to draw a confident verdict of guilty from a jury, but an examining magistrate would be prompted to continue his investigations. There is an instance of opportunist theft in the final scene where an emaciated, two-tone grey dog stands on the Merchant's chair and steals the pig's head from the table.²⁸ If this dog is indeed a parallel to the Usurer, it is worth remarking that the dogs chained together in scene I, which parallel the young couple, are white, brown and black. There is perhaps a mongrel randomness in the placings of the black patches.²⁹

This is not the place to discuss Hogarth's participation, through his ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, in the debate around the Lockean view that moral conduct is learned rather than inherited. Here, it can be said that, if there is a physical inheritance from the parents, considered biologically, there is a moral one to be derived from their example, considered socially. The example of the ‘step’-fathers is plain to see. So is the genetic contribution of the ‘true’ father. The mothers are absent from the drama. But it is possible to sketch something of the psychological and moral nature of the mothers of the young couple from the evidence of the behaviour of their husbands and children—unless the mothers had also been neglectful of their parental duties, handing their offspring over to that other great enemy of virtue in eighteenth-century children, the wet-nurse.³⁰

The conduct of neglected wives is so much to be expected in the context of this sort of narrative that failure to delineate it only makes the audience conjecture. Squire Western's wife in Tom Jones comes to mind. When we discover that she was neglected by her husband, our first reaction is to check father against daughter. And indeed, Sophia is in many respects unlike. However, like him, she is headstrong. Learned or inherited? It is not clear that Fielding is implying that Western was a dupe in the same way as the Earl and the Merchant are—though whether Western the huntsman ever played the sexual poacher is another question. But the text is worth close scrutiny here.

In other words, the title, Marriage à la Mode, can be taken to refer not just to the marriage of the young couple. Three marriages conspire to create the tragedy, and it is possible to reconstruct the scene in the households of the Earl and the Merchant. From the evidence of the conduct of fathers and children it is clear that the Merchant's wife was a snob in her infidelity while her husband's attention was absorbed by his money-grubbing enterprises and that the Earl's wife philandered with a social inferior while her husband was engaged in his lordly profligacy. The Viscount follows his mother's taste for what is low (scene III) and is indifferent to his father's ambition for the lofty, whilst the Merchant's daughter has social ambitions and in her frivolity rejects his prudent example (scene IV.) The two pass one another on the stairs so to speak. For all the contrast in the social interests of the two parties, they share the characteristic that their lives are contradictory in themselves. The Countess has lofty ambitions, and a gross appetite for Silvertongue. The Viscount is, socially, a slum-dweller, pleased to immerse himself in a materialist existence. Yet he goes to the quack. He is a superstitious fool or, at least, he believes what is scientifically unsound. He has the experience of an empiricist but he is incapable of drawing reasonable conclusions from it. Neglected by their fathers, the children learn the vices of their mothers.

The story, then, seems to be about incest. In that light, the villainy of the Usurer, if he is the father, goes to depths immeasurably deeper than those that normally accommodate his avocation. Here is a deeply evil panderer performing his office in scene I.

The blackest evil is forged in the crucible of knowledge. The four principals of the drama are less culpable, because they are victims of calculating evil and, in different ways, of their own folly. A narrative that can trace the tragedy to beginnings in folly denounced society rather than Nature. However, in so far as the tragedy was caused by factors beyond the control of the actors, the problem of evil itself, and therefore the culpability of Nature (or the incompetency or malignity of God), has to be considered. Here, the agents are knowing, and the matter of knowledge being stratified—in the possession of some and denied to others—is present elsewhere in the narrative. Certainly, the puzzling scene III is to be interpreted as an encounter between different levels of knowledge: the quack and the procuress have sure knowledge of some sort.³¹ Silvertongue's seduction of the Merchant's daughter is a particularly insolent act of betrayal—both of his clients and of his profession. Perhaps his monologue directed at the Merchant's daughter in scene I concerns bonds of love—a blasphemy on St Sebastian's bonds in the picture which he half-mimics on the wall behind him—and on the binding contract, in the writing of which he has blunted his pen. Cutting metal and feather could permit a reference to Cupid's darts. More obviously, they ridicule St Sebastian's arrows. However, within the dramatic action itself, shorn of the coincidences of symbolism and irony, Silvertongue's sharpening of his pen while he courts the daughter indicates a totally unprincipled indifference to the meaning of law and contract—though it might be no such serious offence in Nature if there is a blood relationship between the married couple.

Silvertongue has, of course, a key role in the unfolding tragedy. But the proposition here of the relationship of the couple being incestuous requires that he have more than the role of seducer and assassin. At any rate, the suggestion of this additional thread to the narrative requires that the drama too be enriched. The degree of Silvertongue's knowledge of the relationship is a function of the dramatic force of scene V. It is not enough that, at the point of death, the Viscount should look into the fire and, recalling the sins of his life, see the flames and the instruments of torture, and foresee his eternity in Hell. With this additional thread of plot, he must also see the greater enormity as prelude to his perdition. A strong drama would have had his rival, after delivering the fatal blow, tell him the truth.

Unfortunately, there is no sure evidence that Silvertongue knew about the paternity of the couple. There is, instead, the possibly rather attenuated reading of the implications of the way in which some of the pictures within the pictures are hung. Picture-hanging should obey the hierarchy of earth and Heaven as well as of genres. It is therefore anomalous, in scene IV, that the portrait usually identified as being of Silvertongue hangs above the picture of the Rape of Ganymede. The implication is—besides sexual irregularity—of a super-Olympian perspective. In a sense, it is pendant to the picture of St Luke over the door on the other side of scene V. Now, Lord Squanderfield had claimed an Olympian perspective in scene I. He had himself represented as a military commander in the armour of an earlier age, with the attributes of Jupiter, in the picture above the head of the Usurer (Hogarth's sarcastic point is perhaps that it was during the Earl's military service—one no doubt less heroic than that depicted—that the Viscount was conceived by a lesser mortal). The argument would run that Silvertongue looks down upon the Viscount, or more specifically his household, because he is privy to information that ridicules the Viscount, of which the latter is ignorant, and that has come from its unique source, the Usurer. It might also be noted that the three-quarter portrait, viewed from within the picture space, could be construed as looking at the bed. This could be an indication of simple lust. However, Hogarth is at pains, in this scene, to remind the audience of the Earl, by the relics that populate the room. The bed is clearly of an earlier epoch, and the scene of earlier couplings.³² The pictures do not fit the panelling, as the bed sits inconveniently in the recess. Nothing quite fits in the new Palladian residence. If Silvertongue, in his painted form, is to allude only to the lawyer's lust and not to his knowledge of the past, the plotting would be pretty crude here. An additional allusion may be contained in Silvertongue's name. That tongue that, like Cupid's arrow, seduces the wife perhaps stabs the husband with its dreadful intelligence.

This reading can be supported by reference back to scene I. Conversation takes place between Silvertongue and the Merchant's daughter. The nature of the ‘conversation’ is clear enough, and the word was used at the time with the connotation of love-making or even sexual intercourse.³³ At the same time, the composition on that side of the scene has axial symmetry, with the Viscount and Silvertongue's reflection in the mirror corresponding with the bride and the lawyer. The shadowy reflection of the lawyer can be thought of as being in another kind of conversation with the Viscount or, to put it another way, the image can be interpreted as a prefiguration of a future conversation—that in scene V. The speculation that Silvertongue knows the true parentage of the young couple depends upon there being communication between himself and the Usurer. The connection is perhaps to be read from the fact that, in scene I, the Usurer has his hat under his arm. The implication is that he is not party to the formal proceedings, but has made a sudden and, from the Earl's point of view, probably unwelcome appearance. How did he know that the Earl was on the point of being in funds? His most likely informant was the lawyer.

While a reading of Marriage à la Mode concentrates upon the matter of arranged marriage, and sees the first movers of the tragedy as the Earl and the Merchant, the larger cause of the evil reveals itself as a tendency in society to confuse human relations with economic ones. The vanity of the Viscount and the weak spiritedness of the Merchant's daughter have their parts to play in bringing about the tragic conclusion. But when the question of the Viscount and the Merchant's daughter having a blood relationship is considered, something more fateful is afoot. Yet this is not altogether to exonerate the young couple: Sophia Western and Clarissa Harlowe had character enough to resist the tyranny to which fops and wimps bend the knee. Their moral security, despite all social perils, was guaranteed by their obedience to Nature. They were natural enough to recognize their true inclinations. Their obduracy is in fact their constancy. It is an affirmation, and is heartening.

However, Hogarth's young couple are weak, and are therefore incapable of functioning outside the artificiality of society. Like Hogarth, Abbé Laugier, in his Essai sur l'Architecture (1753), insisted upon the necessity of keeping intact our memory of Nature, and advised us ‘never to forget our little wooden hut’. Architectural monsters would result if we lost our touchstone. After Hogarth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid out his system of education in Emile (1762). Its aim was to forge indestructible bonds with Nature in the youth, so that the adult would be armed against the social perils of self-interest, unreason and artificiality. Hogarth spoke a familiar (if not universal) moral language.³⁴ But by including a species of evil in the formation (if not the conjoining) of the couple he introduced a quality of Jacobean horror to the drama. Was their fate, then, irresistible?

The narrative of the Earl's son and the Merchant's daughter is a pessimistic one. It argues that society's dictates are irresistible, to the extent that, in the face of indifference and even disinclination, the marriage yet produced a child. We have been witnesses to a most comprehensive denial of Nature. The culpability of the principals survives because that denial was wilful and wrong. As the rest of the drama makes clear, they were not people without will: so resistance could not be demanded of them. Fielding stated the matter in Amelia:

Hence, my worthy reader, console thyself, that however few of the good things of life are thy lot, the best of things, which is innocence, is always within thy own power: and though Fortune may make thee often unhappy, she can never make thee completely and irreparably miserable without thy own consent.³⁵

Notes

1. From among the multitude of notices that could be presented to confirm this point it is perhaps enough to refer to his early success with his picture of The Beggar's Opera of which several versions are known.

2. Famously, Henry Fielding recognized common purpose with Hogarth, who is invoked several times in Tom Jones and, of course, in Joseph Andrews, where the author enunciated Hogarth's distinction between character and caricature. P. de Voogd, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondences of the Arts (Amsterdam, 1981).

3. W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) ed. J. Burke (Oxford, 1955), p. 42.

4. Ibid., p. 41.

5. Ibid., p. 42.

6. Ibid.

7. Hogarth connected plotting, hunting and gardening (or ‘improving’) in his chapter V, ‘Of Intricacy’. He expresses the same preference as Stephen Switzer, the writer of Ichnographica Rustica (1718 and 1741/2), ‘… the Beauty of … Regularity is easily seen at once, and then the Mind is by Nature soon cloy'd of it, … but how pleasingly does it rove uncontroul'd thro' the promiscuous Scenes of a Country’, quotation by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 156.

8. The story is elaborated with a prodigious amount of detail. For a summa of the analysis of the matter of the story, see R. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works (London and New Haven, 1975).

9. The art historian's customary recourse for corroboration to documentation of the social, economic and political issues of the age—in this case, the morally topical—will be useful, but it will not be sufficient. Matters of style and chronology are equally peripheral. It is the student of literature whose learning is called upon principally here. Hogarth's semi-concealed extra thread of plot will be the more plausible if other narrators of the period can be shown to have attempted similar things.

10. Hogarth did intend that his work should be read in its own terms. He rejected the idea that a baggage of theory was necessary. As an opponent of charlatanism in all its forms, he especially despised art experts, believing them to be involved in the deceit of themselves and others; to be guilty, in other words, of false vision. These attitudes emerge through a reading of The Analysis of Beauty, and the Autobiographical Notes. He wrote in the latter, ‘I have hope of succeeding a little with such as dare (?) think for themselves and can believe their own eyes’ (p. 21).

11. Here and elsewhere reference will be made to such ‘similes’ or ‘puns’. Hogarth was acutely aware of the ability of the mind to make, of a single sensation, a number of interpretations. In The Analysis of Beauty, he wrote of, ‘… the surprising alterations objects seemingly undergo through the prepossessions and prejudices contracted by the mind’ (p. 25). In chapter XIII, he writes, ‘… the mind itself may be so imposed upon as to make the eye see falsely as well as truly’ (p. 119). An obvious example of punning objects is the wigs in The Five Orders of Periwigs.

12. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 269.

13. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 67ff.

14. Ibid., p. 73.

15. Ibid., p. 74.

16. C. Mettler, History of Medicine (Philadelphia and Toronto, 1947), p. 398.

17. The broken sword may also carry the implication that the Viscount is sexually spent. A reading of the sword point in phallic-symbolic terms is prompted by the ridicule which is clearly intended in scene I where it emerges pathetically from between the merchant's legs. Perhaps the money-lender's plump money bags are, by their location, to be construed as making a contrasting sexual allusion. However, in scene II, the Countess is perhaps intended to be communicating lasciviousness by pose and expression, and it is possible that the audience is to interpret this scene as the prelude to the conception of the child. Hogarth makes clear that the parentage of the child is not in doubt by hanging the teething coral on the wife's chair in scene IV, before the assignation with Silvertongue, which results in the events of scene V.

18. The precise content of this scene has remained unclear to students of the work of Hogarth, and it therefore continues to hold some secrets of plotting. This fact makes the present suggestion of a semi-concealed thread of plot less implausible. Scene III remains largely mysterious as is perhaps proper to a scene denouncing superstition in the same breath as quackery. However, one of Hogarth's points is perhaps worth remarking upon in passing. The group of the visitors to the Quack seems to burlesque the Laocöon. A couple of points in The Analysis of Beauty support what is suggested by the composition itself. Hogarth remarks (p. 39) upon the sculptors providing adult anatomy at half-scale for the sons. The young girl in scene III is their heir. Her ‘sister’ is in every respect, not least the massiveness of her hooped substructure, her opposite. Physically, the latter is massive and bulbous, while she is thin and straight. Psychologically, the one is sudden and violent whilst the other is passive and miserable. Hogarth notes that the sculptors made the sons small in the interests of the pyramid of the composition. Laocöon's triangular neatness is replaced by an x-shape, thanks to the stick and the narwal horn. The Viscount's pose, gesture and psychological state are ridiculed by comparison with Laocöon's. The Laocöon group is also psychologically pyramidal whilst here, the composition arcs from the young girl up and across to the Procuress, the central character far from heroic. Hogarth used the Laocöon also for his picture of David Garrick as Richard III (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). In this case too, the movement of the figure is to be reconstructed by the observer. Garrick's previous position was hieratic and symmetrical, perhaps like an image of a medieval king on his seal. It would have been a fine theatrical moment in performance when Garrick threw himself out of his static pose, into that of Laocöon, with the naturalism of emotion which that implies.

19. An important theme within the cycle is sickness and medicine. One of the readings of scene III would include hearing an argument about the merits of pills or bleeding as remedy. The Procuress with the knife supports, literally or metaphorically, the argument in favour of bleeding. In addition, provided with the narwal horn, she is perhaps to be construed as some sort of unicorn-barber. The unicorn part gathers in the virgins, and the barber part bloods them. The theme runs right through the cycle, but is particularly the content of scene III. The preoccupations with superstition, idleness and profligacy that are legible here also Mark Samuel Garth's poem, The Dispensary, 8th edn (London, 1718). Of the dupes of quackery he writes, ‘religion's bright authority they dare, / And yet are slaves to superstitious fear (p. 26). Disease is ‘Begot by sloth, maintained by luxury’ (p. 29).

20. N. Andry, Orthopaedia, 2 vols. (London, 1743), I, p. 226.

21. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 149. The Merchant's daughter, in scene I, clearly has ‘bad posture’. In fact, in her pose, she resembles the illustration of bad posture in Andry's Orthopaedia, I, p. 86. Andry recommended dancing: ‘… there is nothing properer than this exercise, for forming the bodies of young people’ (I, p. 228). He also advocated fencing: ‘… there is no exercise where the joints are moved with greater force and quickness, especially those of the arms and legs, and consequently there is none more proper for strengthening those parts’ (II, p. 215)

22. P. de Voogd, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondences of the Arts (Amsterdam, 1981), pp. 95-6.

23. Andry, Orthopaedia, vol. I p. 26.

24. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 99.

25. Hogarth shows, in The Rake's Progress, the fate of those who favour unnatural and irrational forms of explanation. In the final scene, the man with fantasies of absolutism is to be seen in one cell, and the man who believes he has special access to God is in the other. To have power over the world without science and understanding of design in the world by introspection are delusive fantasies.

26. Allusion to incest is perhaps to be found in incidental detail within the stage-setting of the tale. In scene III, a picture of a hermaphrodite with two heads hangs on the wall behind the quack (Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works). It could serve as an emblem for the young couple in scene I and is, of course, very like the situation of the two dogs chained together in the same scene. Below the hermaphrodite in scene III are two mummy cases. Presumably, the marriage customs of the rulers of Egypt were as notorious in the eighteenth century as now.

27. Paulson (ibid) explains that he is identifiable as a miser from the three pins in his sleeve. It might be remarked, in addition, that they look rather like three-fifths of the coronet with which the Earl has decorated his possessions, including the dispirited dog in the foreground of the scene (in the engraving). A small point perhaps worth noting is that two of the five points of the coronet on the canopy of the Earl's throne are obscured by shadow, leaving three clearly illuminated.

28. The chair is the merchant's because the food on the plate has been consumed. The other plate—that of the widowed Countess—is still charged.

29. It is worth adding the observation here that, whilst the Merchant's purse in scene I resembles a pig's ears and snout, the Earl's handkerchief, draped over the arm of his chair, can be read as a dog, pawing the scroll with the family tree. This is a reading that works better in the painting than in the engraving. The part of the dog stealing the pig's head in the final scene would have been taken by a metaphorical cut-purse in the first scene. Whoever was possessing himself of the Merchant's money in scene I was, by the rule of narrative symmetry, stealing from his table in scene VI. But, of course, in the action of scene I, the Usurer—an interloper in the proceedings as his carrying of his hat shows—is acquiring the Merchant's gold at second hand, in return for the Earl's mortgages. So, if, by the strict letter of the law, no theft is taking place in scene I, but yet theft is being alluded to, it is necessary to cast around for some other sort of theft happening—in other words, not the theft of chattels but of some metaphysical property, like chastity or good name or trust. de Voogd, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth, p. 96, interprets the action of the dog in the light of the slang expression for a serious mistake, the pulling of the ‘wrong pig by the ear’, and has it refer to the Merchant having made a bad contract with the Earl. However, the logic of the proposal that is being advanced here is that, pedigree and purse being brought into a marriage with one another, the pedigree is being stolen by the ‘dog’ in scene I and the purse is being stolen in the final scene. The standard reading of the Marriage does not include the suggestion that the substance of one-half of the deal, the pedigree, was fallacious. It should be remarked that Hogarth included an episode of a dog stealing food in The Distressed Poet. The argument of that engraving is that the poet, with his eye vainly on fame and his attention elsewhere, allows what belongs properly to his own life to drain or be spirited away. His folly is not too distant from the Earl's folie de grandeur.

30. The campaign against the employment of wet-nurses was carried on by many in the period. For example, Rousseau wrote in impassioned terms on the matter in Emile (1762). Andry spoke against the practice in Orthopaedia, II. And it is surely a wet-nurse whose neglect leads to the injury of the child in Hogarth's Gin Lane.

31. Some of the apparatus of this scene, especially the alligator perversely suspended from the ceiling, recalls Hogarth's engraving, Visiting Sidrophel, for his Hudibras series. Samuel Garth's poem, The Dispensary, contains a description of a quack's premises: ‘Here, mummies lay most reverendly stale … Aloft in Rows large Poppy Heads were strung. / And near, a scaly Alligator hung’; quotation by L. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1958), p. 15. The illustration to canto III in the 8th edn (London, 1718) shows the alligator hanging from the ceiling. An explanation of the content of Marriage à la Mode was published on 8 February 1746 in the London Evening Post entitled ‘Marriage à la Mode: an Humourous Tale, in Six Cantos, in Hudibrastic Verse’. There is a challenge to the buyer's critical independent mindedness here, for Hogarth's narrative is very much elevated above the visual equivalent of doggerel. Nevertheless, the scene of the death of the Viscount in Marriage à la Mode has certain similarities to the engraving, Hudibras Catechised.

32. See Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, plate II, figure 63, bottom right.

33. The OED refers to Joseph Addison and Fielding for eighteenth-century usages in this sense.

34. The moral language dovetailed with the matter as it related to artistic imitation. Hogarth explained, in the Introduction to The Analysis of Beauty, how the connoisseur could become confused: ‘… for by having thus espoused and adopted their first notions from nothing but imitations, and becoming too often bigotted in their faults, as their beauties, they at length, in a manner, totally neglect, or at least disregard the works of nature …’ (p. 24).

35. Amelia, VIII, 3; II; quotation in de Voogd, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth, p. 135.