SOURCE: Lowe, N. F. “The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth's Graphic Art.” In The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Linda E. Merians, pp. 168-82. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

[In the following essay, Lowe explains Hogarth's many allusions to venereal disease as symbols for immorality and corruption at the highest levels of British society.]

The paintings and engravings that William Hogarth called his “modern moral subjects” were not intended to be pictorial sermons preaching simple messages about right and wrong. Ronald Paulson has argued convincingly that Hogarth's intention was to illustrate a conventional moral theme, beneath which he would then hide a deeper, more subversive reading. In this reading certain themes usually emerge, such as “the forces of society and fashion … against the natural impulses of the individual,” a struggle in which Hogarth usually took the side of the natural.¹ For the same reason, Norman Bryson has called Hogarth “the great master of shifting textual levels.” Bryson asserts that Hogarth achieved depth of meaning by moving between the moral message in the “official text” and the inversion of that message in the “unofficial text.”² In this scheme of things, heroes can become villains, and villains victims, depending on which interpretation the onlooker has chosen to read.

In this essay, I will argue that Hogarth's depiction of venereal disease involves just such a complexity of moral meaning. In the official text, venereal disease is seen as one of the wages of sin. The individual chooses an immoral way of life, and the ravages of the disease follow from that choice. In the unofficial text, venereal disease is used as a symbol of a greater social corruption, and those inflicted with it are to be seen as pitiful victims of a cruel and exploitative element in society.

Hogarth's first pictorial series, A Harlot's Progress, uses the theme of venereal disease in both of these ways. George Vertue claimed the series, begun in 1731, developed from a single picture, the satirical study of a Drury Lane prostitute, awakening at about noon after a night's work.³ This picture became the third in the series of six illustrations that make up the Progress. If the picture is studied as a single satirical portrait, it well serves to illustrate the complexities of Hogarth's thinking …. The conventional moral message is clearly illustrated. The seductive harlot may look contented, but she is about to reap the dreadful consequences of her immoral lifestyle. This moral message was an important one for Hogarth, rooted as it was in the Puritan ethic of the English middle class from which he proudly came. English artists in general and Hogarth in particular could not paint erotic scenes without inserting moral warnings about the consequences of uncontrolled sexual behavior. In this picture, retribution for the harlot's sins appears most obviously in the figure of Sir John Gonson, the magistrate, who is leading in his constables to arrest her for prostitution. It also lurks, less obviously, in the allusions to venereal disease hidden within the picture. Above the picture of Dr. Henry Sacheverell are two vials, suggesting she is trying to cure herself of venereal disease. In addition, the maid who is pouring her tea is in an advanced stage of syphilis. Her nose is eaten away, and the outsize beauty spot suggests a complexion blemished by the disease. These are clues to the ultimate fate of the harlot, who is facing degradation and early death because of her uncontrolled sexual conduct.

Hogarth used this simple moral message to satirize the fashionable French craze for paintings filled with hidden sexual allusions. These erotic paintings often depicted a woman in her bedroom, captured while at some highly personal activity. At a superficial level, the paintings were voyeuristic intrusions into the female boudoir, titillating but innocent. At another level, however, the paintings were filled with erotic intent. The bedrooms would have a beau désordre, where the apparently untidy contents would contribute to the artistic meaning of the painting, and in this disorder, the astute observer could read erotic themes that denied the apparent innocence of the scene. In this way, the artist could lead the spectator to imagine scenarios that could not be depicted with decorum.

A good example of what Hogarth was satirizing is Watteau's La Toilette du Matin, painted in about 1717. During the thirties and forties, the craze for Watteau and his style of French painting was increasing in England. Hogarth had admired this style fifteen years before the fashion reached its height in 1745. Watteau here captures a woman at the moment of rising. She is virtually naked and, with the help of her maid, is beginning her morning ablution in a totally unselfconscious way. Watteau, however, has provided clues to stimulate the erotic imagination of the observer. The disorder of the bed and the cupid's bow motif on the headboard leave no doubt that her washing follows a night of lovemaking. Watteau, however, makes no moral comment: the painting is simply a moment of intrusion into the personal life of the young woman that the onlooker, as voyeur, is allowed to enjoy. Hogarth ostensibly does the same thing in the bedroom scene of A Harlot's Progress, but the beau désordre conceals a message not of erotic intent but of moral and physical decay.

Another painting of the sort that Hogarth was satirizing is François Boucher's La Toilette, painted in 1742. In this boudoir scene, Boucher depicts a woman tying a garter onto her leg as she prepares for her evening out on the town. Her fresh face and pure expression dominate the initial impression made by the painting: the artist has apparently captured an innocent young woman at a moment of personal intimacy. In the beau désordre around her, however, there are numerous allusions to her real intent. The cat between her legs was a traditional symbol of sexual receptivity.⁴ The word chat in French has the same double meaning as the word pussy in English. In the hearth we see a pair of tongs with an oddly phallic protuberance where the two “legs” of the tongs meet. Birds fill the picture: several on a screen behind her, one on the mantelpiece, and one on the fire brush in front of her. Birds signified male genitals, so this ornithological theme in her room instantly lends itself to a prurient interpretation of what is going on. Behind the screen hangs a portrait of a woman with a flower in her hair. She seems to be peeping over the screen, an innocent pastoral shepherdess observing the preparations of an urban temptress. When these clues are read, her posture, with her legs apart and a thigh exposed, takes on a different meaning. She is not an innocent caught in a moment of innocent déshabillé: she is a worldly woman planning a night of lovemaking. Like Watteau, Boucher makes no moral statement about the woman. The main purpose of these French paintings was simply to delight the onlooker by exciting his erotic imagination through a superficially innocent picture. The moment of unintentional déshabillé combines with the portents of sexual gratification to provide a picture charged with eroticism, a scene to be viewed, interpreted, and enjoyed by those clever and worldly enough to read the clues.

In the third picture of A Harlot's Progress, Hogarth adopts these conventions in order to undermine the hidden eroticism by combining it with allusions to the dangers of uncontrolled sexuality. Hogarth, in the French manner, captures the harlot, Moll Hackabout, at a moment of déshabillé, with her breast exposed, but the effect is not unintentional and innocent. She is portrayed looking cheekily at the onlooker, careless of her state of undress. The stolen watch she is gloating over reveals her amoral attitude toward life. Like the woman in Boucher's La Toilette, she also has a cat at her feet. However, her cat adopts a blatantly sexually receptive pose, suggesting nothing innocent about the sexuality of its owner. The more the disorder of the bedroom is examined, the more the theme of moral condemnation and punishment emerges. There is a birch cane above her bed. Next to the picture of Macheath is a portrait of Henry Sacheverell, who was put on trial for attacking the Revolution Settlement. The title of the sermon that led to his impeachment was “In perils among false brethren,” a text highly pertinent to Moll's life in London and which is easily adapted to the deeper underlying reading of this series. In this context, the two vials to cure her venereal disease are ominous tokens of the horrible fate ahead of her.

In the fourth engraving, the Bridewell scene, Hogarth cleverly reverses all the conventions of these French erotic paintings. Instead of the convention of showing a pretty courtesan dressing while her maid works or attends her, Hogarth depicts Moll Hackabout at work beating hemp while her maid is dressing. As in Boucher's picture, the woman is putting on a garter. However, the maid's ragged clothes, the hole in her stocking, and her ravaged syphilitic appearance make her anything but seductive. The glimpse of thigh is not erotic but grossly physical, especially as she is portrayed next to a woman crushing a flea between her thumb and forefinger.

This official text condemns the harlot's sexual immorality. The unofficial text, however, allows the onlooker to see her with some sympathy. This reading, which depicts the harlot as a victim, is explicit in the first picture of the series. Moll Hackabout is portrayed as an innocent and naive young woman. Hogarth cleverly makes her resemble the dead goose she has brought down to London for her “Lofing Cosin.” She is about to become an offering to the predators who are laying a trap for her. The disorder around this innocent, whose virgin state is symbolized by the hat firmly fixed to her head, is filled with allusions to the moral corruption and depraved sexuality of the society she has entered. Here, Hogarth is playing most mischievously with the conventions of French erotic painting. He surrounds the innocent young woman with clues to her impending loss of virginity, but the intention is not erotic titillation. Hogarth pointedly condemns the society that preys on young women. In the official text, Moll is turning her back on religion. In the unofficial text, religion is ignoring the plight of Moll and the other women like her. The clergyman is totally preoccupied with the address of the Right Reverend Father in London who will help to advance his career. He ignores the women newly arrived from York, even though they are innocents in need of protection. Their fate is symbolized by the pile of pots falling over nearby, which the clergyman also ignores. Pots, baskets, and hats were allusions to female genitalia, and falling or broken pots symbolized lost virginity, so Hogarth is depicting the clergy as indifferent to the way people are exploited all around them by a corrupt society.

Venereal disease emerges as a theme in the face of the bawd, recognizable as the notorious Elizabeth Needham, who ran a brothel for the aristocracy. The beauty spots on her face are pockmarks rather than a cosmetic affectation. While Mother Needham is seducing Moll into her brothel, Colonel Charteris, the infamous rapist, lurks in the background. He stands with his servant, Jack Gourly, in the doorway, fondling himself in anticipation of another victim. Charteris was wealthy and had escaped punishment for his crimes by using his social power. For Hogarth, he represents the evil that corrupts the innocent, and it is this evil, symbolized by venereal disease, which eventually infects and kills Moll.

In the fifth picture, Hogarth depicts her death at the age of twenty-three. She again resembles the dead goose in the first picture. The venereal disease that killed her may be retribution for her sin, but Hogarth, on the second level, again portrays her as a pathetic victim. She is being robbed of her few last possessions by an unknown woman, but the real villains are the two doctors, Dr Richard Rock and Dr Jean Misaubin, who have taken all her money in return for their useless quack remedies.

The Marriage à la Mode series is an extended illustration of venereal disease as a direct consequence of the social corruption created by the idle and extravagant aristocracy. Hogarth could be illustrating the following quotation from Jonathan Swift: “That, our young Noblemen are bred from their Childhood in Idleness and Luxury, that, as soon as Years will permit, they consume their Vigour, and contract odious Diseases among lewd females; and when their Fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some Woman of mean Birth, disagreeable Person, and unsound Constitution, merely for the sake of Money, whom they hate and despise. That, the Productions of such Marriages are generally scrophulous, rickety, or deformed Children; by which means the family seldom continues above three Generations.”⁵

In the eighteenth century, venereal disorders were popularly known as the “alamode disease.” In 1732, Daniel Turner wrote in his book on syphilis, “As to what relates to the Cure of this first Injection [sic] or French Disease, (which whether theirs or not, has one of its Epithets, Alamode, thence borrowed).”⁶ A German treatise on venereal disease by Lewis Wilhelm de Knorr, published in 1717, was called Venus à la mode. The term alamode disease was common enough to appear in advertisements for cures of venereal disease,⁷ so the very title Marriage à la Mode would have led the eighteenth-century observer to look for venereal disease as a theme. With this secret disease as his topic, it is not surprising that Hogarth should assert, in the advertisement he placed on 2 April 1743 in the London Daily Post and General Advertiser, “Particular Care will be taken that there may not be the least objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole work.” Given the indelicate subject to be illustrated, he needed to point out that it would be handled with extreme delicacy and refinement. The observer was being alerted, however, to an encoded theme that would be hidden from innocent eyes.

The first picture in the series contains numerous clues to the fact that the earl and his issue are being ravaged by the disease. Lord Squanderfield is obviously crippled by gout. One cause of gout was held to be syphilis, which was known in England as French gout. Jean Astruc explains, “The three Humours which are prepared by Nature to facilitate the Motion of the Joints, give easy Admittance to the Venereal Infection.”⁸ He goes on to explain that the “mucilaginous Glands” become enlarged, and the circulation of the blood obstructed, so that “an arthritic Pain is produced, attended with Tension, and Pulsation, Heat, Redness and Inflammation of the Joint” [2:16]. Squanderfield's bandaged foot, therefore, signals more than excess of certain foods and drink. It indicates advanced venereal disease, and his very prominent crutches, which carry his crest to show they are part of his regular way of life, signal the extent to which his health is crippled.

To make his point even more explicit, Hogarth surrounds the earl with numerous symbols and indicators of the venereal infection. The earl is pointing to the top of his family tree, which is less vigorous near the top, and which oddly grows from the stomach of his ancestor, the duke of Normandy, suggesting the entire family line is rooted in greed and excess and is dying off, like the branch that is dead and falling from the tree.

The large painting by the window is a portrait of the earl as a young man. He is depicted as Jupiter, but he holds a ridiculously small thunderbolt in his hand. From the region of his groin, a cannon emerges, firing a peculiarly small cannonball, significantly about the same size as the round mark on his son's neck. If there is doubt that this cannon is meant to be a phallic symbol, firing inadequate ammunition, another clue reiterates the message. The earl is staring at a portrait of Medusa. Athena changed Medusa's hair into serpents, and as a result all who looked on her turned to stone. After Perseus beheaded Medusa, Athena placed her likeness in the center of her shield or breastplate. She was a virgin divinity whose heart was inaccessible to the passion of love. The fact that Medusa now stares out from the center of the earl's wall, not from the breastplate of Athena, suggests the family is also impervious to love.

Athena was the daughter of Jupiter, who symbolized power, and Metis, who symbolized wisdom, and so she was the harmonious blend of both qualities. It was Athena who gave the state strength and prosperity. The lonely earl, the Jupiter figure in the portrait, has lost his wife. He is Jupiter without Metis, power without wisdom. He is, however, a sickly figure whose power is in rapid decline because of excess and sickness. Hogarth leads the observer to conclude that the earl has lived a life without love and that his excesses have left him and his sperm (the puny cannonball) enfeebled. His gout shows the debilitation caused by sexual dissipation, and his scrawny son reveals a further decline in the strength of the line.

The prominent mark on the viscount's neck also indicates the taint of venereal disease. Robert Cowley, in his book on the Marriage à la Mode series, describes the beauty spot as “a large plaster on his neck.” He goes on to explain:

Scrofula attacks the lymphatic glands of the neck as a consequence of the malnutrition of the tissues which then become vulnerable to the spread of tuberculosis carried in the infected milk. The disease also attacks the nerves of the eyes (as Dr. Johnson knew to his cost), a weakness which could conceivably lie behind the Viscount's fatal lack of perception. Scrofula was a baffling evil in the eighteenth century. Subscribers would have seen the son's sore as an inheritance of the father's excesses and many would have interpreted it as a sign of congenital venereal disease.⁹

Of the viscount's child in the sixth picture Cowley comments:

The boy has a sore on his cheek, a depressed forehead, blubber lips, an enlarged head, a weak leg and a stunted body. The weakness would be a sign of rickets or, more probably, tubercular osteitis caused, like his father's scrofula, by infected milk. The patch is not directly over the child's lymphatic glands so that it may have been meant as a symptom of a congenital disease rather than a scrofula. A depressed forehead can also be a symptom of either rickets or a congenital defect. … The symptoms are consistent with each other and a range of common disabilities which contemporaries were likely to regard as inherited “sins” and this must be Hogarth's essential point.

[150]

Cowley could have been more explicit. Two works by Jean Astruc, whose influential work on venereal disease was first translated into English in 1737, make it quite clear that Hogarth was portraying venereal disease in both Viscount Squanderfield and his child. In his discussion of the “pocky degenerative virus,” Astruc notes that some authors claim that the “lues venera,” or French pox, “ill cured in the father may degenerate into the rickets in the son.”¹⁰

The viscount's beauty spot is a “Venereal bubo, or tumour” of the lymphatic gland. Astruc points out that “Venereal Buboes” are caused by an “old Venereal Taint,” or a “Venereal Infection just admitted.” The gland affected is determined by the laws of circulation. Apart from the neck, armpits, and groin, he specifically cites “the side of the lower jaw,” the location of the black spot on the child (1:338).

The location of the black spot on the child's cheek in Hogarth's picture is not random but exactly placed over the salivary gland. Astruc's reasoning would lead to a diagnosis of a venereal bubo developed from sucking. The advanced age of his nurse would suggest that the infected milk would have come from the mother. As Steele's essay [Spectator, no. 246] implies, the practice of the mother breast-feeding her own child was being recommended to protect the child from the Evil, scurvy, and other infections, so the irony of this child being doubly infected by the parents may well be Hogarth's intention, for it is also clear that the child was born with syphilis.

The rickets, which Cowley suggests might be tubercular osteitis, was also strongly linked to congenital syphilis in the eighteenth century and long after. Astruc asserts that syphilitic mothers bring “puny, broken-backed, large headed, crooked, bandy-legged, variously distorted, and thick jointed” children into the world [2:37].

The argument whether rickets and syphilis were linked continued throughout the nineteenth century and has even surfaced recently. For example, J. Parrot, a pioneer radiologist, argued in 1886 that syphilis affects every bone of the infant skeleton and that rickets was a later lesion of congenital syphilis.¹¹ As recently as 1969, Robinson revived the argument by suggesting that the absence of bossing in the cranium was due to unrecognized rickets.¹²

There is good reason for this controversy. Congenital syphilis, like rickets, leads to craniofacial malformations that include a high cranium or “tower skull,” sloping skulls, beetled brows, and collapsed saddle nose deformities. Involvement of adjacent structures can also lead to a short maxilla and a high palatal arch. The result is a face with a “dished out look.” The tibia suffers anterior bowing because of periostitis of the long bones, and the teeth are affected in terms of structure, size, and enamelization, which Murphy and Patamasucon conclude “undoubtedly contributed to the historical confusion of the disease with rickets.”¹³

It is quite clear, then, that Hogarth was depicting in the child an accurate picture of congenital syphilis. The child is the center point of the final picture, clinging pitifully to its dead mother. It is a moving illustration of Swift's remark that “the Productions of such Marriages are generally scrophulous, rickety, or deformed Children; by which means the family seldom continues above three Generations.”

There are two other children blighted by congenital disease in Hogarth. The first of these is Moll Hackabout's son, who appears in the fifth and sixth pictures of A Harlot's Progress. Though he is sturdy in comparison to Viscount Squanderfield's son, his domed forehead and uncomprehending manner suggest he has not escaped the consequences of his mother's way of life. The second is the young boy in the illustration for Evening in the Four Times of the Day. In his book Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition, Shesgreen notes that “he carries empty symbols of male supremacy in the ironically phallic cane and the gingerbread king, changed from a cookie in the painting to underline the picture's theme of male impotence.”¹⁴ However, his weak little legs and domed head suggest that the cause of his impotence is venereal disease, the result of his mother's adultery.

The second picture of the Marriage à la Mode portrays Viscount Squanderfield as a handsome and bored young man, and his wife is depicted at her nubile best. Hogarth, however, provides several clues to the venereal disease attacking them both within.

The Viscount's pose, as Cowley points out, “was a well known metaphor of sexual intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” [58]. The pose implies sexual exhaustion, but the broken sword gives a different message. It has been broken without being drawn, a symbol of the owner's impotence. Again the black mark on his neck links his state to venereal disease. A further clue is above him on the mantelpiece. In the center is a Roman bust with a broken nose. Astruc wrote in his book on venereal disease, “The Mucus of the Nose is affected in the same way … from hence the whole Arch of the Nose being destroyed, and the Bridge of it falling in, those who before had an aquiline Nose become flatfaced like an ape” (2:14). The statue looks like the bust of a syphilitic and hints at the syphilis eating away at the couple below. Behind this statue is a painting of a cherub playing the bagpipes, a traditional symbol of discord and again intended to comment on the atmosphere in the Squanderfield household.

In his pocket, Squanderfield has stuffed his mistress's bonnet, and the family dog is sniffing at it. This is a delightful use by Hogarth of one of the conventions of French erotic paintings. Dogs were the traditional symbol of fidelity, but dogs were also used to suggest sexual excitement. A frisky dog alongside languid lovers was frequently used to suggest the hidden sexual arousal and tension. Here, Hogarth depicts such an excitable little dog, but its excitement comes from its discovery of the illicit mistress's bonnet, itself a symbol of female genitalia. It is a tableau depicting fidelity gone wrong. It is a fine example of how Hogarth can gain additional effect by playing around with standard images.

Lady Squanderfield's pose, with her knees apart and her stays revealed, conveys her increasing sensuality and immodesty. The pocket mirror she holds above her head looks like a halo which has slipped and which she is removing. A red mark on her lip is possibly the first hint of a venereal sore.

This scene is Hogarth at his artistic and satirical best. The profligate ways of the aristocracy, their poor taste, and their sexual indulgence are all satirized. In the disorder of the room, we witness the debt, disease, and confusion that this way of life has brought about. In Lady Squanderfield, we see the portrait of a fallen woman, reveling in all the vices that come with the aristocratic way of life, and we also see the first hint of venereal disease, which she has acquired from the same source.

The third picture in the series reiterates how the aristocracy are a source of degeneracy and disease. In a room full of the images of illness and death, Viscount Squanderfield is set apart. He alone is seated, and he alone has a carefree and grinning face. The pill box he is holding out to the quack, with the lid significantly near his groin, are clearly useless remedies for venereal disease. Given his long history of infection, with the disease being passed to him at conception by his father, it is not unlikely that the pills were a quack remedy to prevent reinfection and transmission. Astruc attacked all such methods of prevention, as they not only did not work but also led people to risk the dangerous effects of promiscuous sex. “Once,” he wrote, “the Fear of Infection by which Men are restrained from Intemperance, is removed, then the Reins of Lust will be let loose” [1:283].

In this case the aristocrat has infected the whore. The young girl, possibly procured for him because she was a virgin, is dabbing at a syphilitic sore on her lip. The implication is that the viscount has infected her in the same way he has infected his wife.

The viscount is threatening the quack, though not very seriously. He would seem to be blaming the inefficacy of the medication for causing the infection of the young girl, rather than his own degeneracy. Cowley points out that the tall woman is holding “a folding scalpel or bistoury,” but suggests there is no evidence it was intended for surgery. In fact, textbooks abound with references to surgery for venereal disease. Turner, an English doctor, in his book on syphilis, wrote, “These accidents being likewise attended at some times with great Fluxion and Inflammation, as appears by the feverish Disorder with which they are affected, it is requisite at such times … to empty their veins by bleeding” [256]. There is a brass shaving and bleeding dish available on the top of the glass cabinet, so such a procedure is part of Dr Misaubin's repertoire. Given that both the doctor and the tall lady are annoyed by the attitude and antics of the viscount, and the young girl is clearly ill and distressed, it is likely that they realize how severely she has been infected, and the scalpel may suggest drastic procedures are envisaged. The tall woman may be annoyed because the viscount seems to see it all as a joke.

Cowley concludes that the tall woman is angry because of the “insinuation that the common miss, presumably sold to her patron as a virgin, gave the viscount the disease which the doctor's pills fail to cure” [87]. It makes better sense, given what we know of Viscount Squanderfield, to see him as the source of contagion. He is the cause of the corruption of the young woman's health and morals, just as his aristocratic taste for luxury and indolence have corrupted his wife and left her infected with the same disease.

Luke Sullivan explained the mark on the tall woman's chest as a brand marking her as a convicted prostitute. Cowley reads them as “FC” for female convict or criminal, and he compares her to Mrs Needham in the first picture of A Harlot's Progress. I have suggested in an earlier article that Hogarth frequently used beauty spots as an emblem of venereal infection.¹⁵ Beauty spots were, of course, a fashion in the eighteenth century. In Spectator, no. 50, Addison poked fun at the way women changed their spots: “The women look like Angels, and would be more beautiful than the Sun, were it not for little black Spots that are apt to break out on their Faces, and sometimes rise in very odd Figures. I have observed that these little Blemishes wear off very soon; but when they disappear in one Part of the Face, they are very apt to break out in another, insomuch that I have seen a Spot upon the forehead in the Afternoon, which was upon the Chin in the Morning.”

Now these “little blemishes” are nothing to do with the loosely disguised sores that Hogarth sometimes depicts. Again, contemporary medical texts give clues as to what Hogarth is doing. Turner describes the face of one young woman suffering from venereal disease as follows: “A Gentlewoman six Months gone with Child, most part of that time incommoded with Tubercles on several parts of her face, a Serpigo on the chin, with two or three others upon the Cheek and side of her Nose, giving her great Uneasiness by the Trouble, as also disfiguring her countenance, sent for me to give Directions to her Surgeon” [256]. A few pages later, he describes “a Gentleman having a small Pustule broke out above his Eyebrow, and in Company with the Surgeon belonging to his Family, desir'd a Patch, who accordingly applied a Bit of Common Plaister upon black Silk” [271]. The pustule turned out to be a venereal sore.

Several Hogarth characters acquire beauty spots that may signal the secret disease. The most obvious ones are the prostitutes in the third painting, the Tavern scene, in A Rake's Progress. Six women have large black spots. The one stealing Tom's watch has two large spots on her cheek and a large spot and a small spot on her forehead above her nose. The woman behind Tom has four large spots, which tend to dominate her face rather than draw attention to her better features, and the three women at the table also have prominent facial marks. In the front left of the picture, Hogarth again uses the style of French erotic painting for satirical purposes in portraying “the posture woman,” who is preparing for her performance. She is in the pose of the women in French boudoir paintings, like the one by Boucher discussed above. She is putting on her shoe and seems unaware of her exposed breast. Unlike the woman in Boucher's painting, however, she looks the reverse of innocently erotic. Her tired and bored expression suggests fatigue rather than sexual excitement, and the large beauty spot on her forehead is unsightly enough to have a venereal connotation. At her feet is a chicken, the remains of their late night feast. A dead bird was a conventional symbol for lost virginity, just as a living bird was a symbol of male sexuality. This bird, however, is anything but a virile and fertile emblem of male sexuality. It is a dead carcass stabbed through the abdomen with a fork. The pregnant woman in rags behind her, singing bawdy songs, is another portent of the fate that lies ahead of the prostitute who has lost her marketable value.

Similarly, the woman lying in a faint in the engraving called Enthusiasm Delineated has two huge black marks on her cheek. This woman has been identified as Mother Douglas, a notorious bawd from Covent Garden, so both these women of ill repute are marked out in the same way. It is possible that Hogarth is simply illustrating the tasteless makeup of lewd women, but a comparison between these outsize spots and the cosmetic beauty spots discreetly decorating the actresses in the print Strolling Actresses in a Barn suggests Hogarth intends a deliberate ambiguity.

At least two kinds of plaster could be taken for beauty spots. One kind was a patch of material with an adhesive substance that was placed over a sore to hold a curative unction in place. Turner described one such plaster using black silk. Hogarth sometimes draws these as rectangular to denote that they are plasters. There is one below Tom's right nipple in the final scene of A Rake's Progress, and the man sprawling in the foreground of A Midnight Modern Conversation wears two geometric plasters on his head. The other plaster was formed by adding wax to the unction to give it “a due consistence,” and this wax patch would hold the curing agent, normally mercury for the pox, over the sore. Mercury was mixed with turpentine in a mortar until a brown or black powder was obtained, which was then mixed with hog's lard until the ointment was of the right consistency. Wax replaced some of the lard for a plaster, and when applied to the sore it could resemble a beauty spot.

The woman walking through Covent Garden in Morning, the first of the Four Times of Day series, is an interesting example of this ambiguity. She has two spots above and two below her left eye. Shesgreen suggests that her prudish exterior masks her real intent, which is a clandestine sexual assignation in the church.¹⁶ There are other clues to suggest she is not as respectable as she seems. Just behind her is an advertisement for a cure by Dr Rock, who made his money by selling useless cures for venereal disease. He appeared in Plate V of A Harlot's Progress. In a literal sense, the woman has a venereal cure behind her, so Hogarth may wish the observer to draw the obvious conclusion. The beauty spots on her face might hide a darker secret. The woman begging in front of her is also enigmatic. David Dabydeen thinks she represents a crouching black beggarwoman. “Shivering in the cold,” he writes, “and wrapped from head to toe in an old blanket, she is far removed from her reputed nakedness in the tropical climate of Africa.” Dabydeen points out that this black woman is paired off from her white social superior for satirical purposes. One eighteenth-century convention used blacks to illustrate the two extremes of existence, “the black representing obscenity and paganism, the middle-class white representing civilized religion, moral rectitude and so forth.”¹⁷ The black woman's nose, however, is markedly collapsed, so she might be a prostitute reduced to begging and ravaged by venereal disease. The white woman, as Dabydeen asserts, is a portrait of fraudulent piety because of her indifference to the cry for charity. Everything about her is fraudulent. She represents Aurora, the personification of the birth of the day, who had come to be associated with youth and fertility. Hogarth's Aurora is an aging figure pretending to be young, whose bony flat chest suggests anything but fertility. She is going to the church, but her lack of concern for the freezing page carrying her prayerbook and her lack of charity for the beggar suggest she is not a real Christian. If she has been treated for venereal disease and is off to a sexual tryst in the church, then her apparent respectability hides a profounder obscenity than is to be seen in the pitiful black. The only real difference between these two women may well be the poverty of the black woman, who cannot mask her state behind a hypocritical exterior.

Hogarth, then, can use beauty spots as a sexual allusion. At times they signal prurience, and at other times they are an emblem of venereal disease. The tall woman in the third scene of the Marriage à la Mode series may be such a character. Most commentators take her to be a procuress, an ex-prostitute tainted and branded by the profession.

In the glass case, a skeleton is propped against an anatomical model so that it appears to be sexually groping the model while whispering in its ear. Cowley points out that this tableau offers “a precise and extensive comment on the central situation,” but he reads it as a symbol of the viscount's experiencing “the first caress of contagious death” [93]. Death, in the form of venereal disease, has kissed three of the main characters, and the skull of a victim of the contagion on Dr Misaubin's table signifies how he lives off these deaths. The skull, incidentally, is marked with black spots. Cowley takes these to be holes in the skull, which has been eroded by syphilis [91].

As it happens, Viscount Squanderfield is killed by his wife's lover before syphilis can complete the task. The lover is executed, and his wife commits suicide, but the dance of death continues as his sickly child will be the last of the line. A skeletonlike dog apparently whispering into a dead pig's ear is a clever reworking of the skeleton in the closet in the third scene. The pig's head, with its gaping mouth, also resembles the expression on the face of the dead Lady Squanderfield, who is being embraced by the pitiful child, who is also kissed by death. As Swift wrote in the passage quoted above, “the family seldom continues above three Generations.”

Ronald Paulson believes that Hogarth's sympathies are always on the side of the common people. He attacked the luxury of the aristocracy and the decadence of the social institutions that maintained them. While he attacked the middle classes for aspiring to emulate and enter into the aristocracy, he admired the tradition of hard work and clean living that existed in the trading classes of Protestant England. Moll Hackabout, the innocent young girl who comes to London as a dressmaker, fell because she tried to acquire wealth without work. The same is true of Lady Squanderfield, who is made wealthy by the hard work of her alderman father but who becomes corrupted by the aristocratic way of life. They both acquire venereal disease from the higher classes, whose idle decadence is the source of their downfall.

Tom Rakewell in The Rake's Progress also uses his father's accumulated wealth in dissipation, but in the eighth picture, the Bedlam scene, it is not venereal disease that has destroyed his mind. The connection between syphilis and mental illness was not discovered until the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, madness and sex were linked because of excessive stimulation of the brain. In his 1758 Treatise on Madness, William Battie proposed that the nervous system and its connection to the brain at the medulla caused “laxity in the overloaded vessels.” He cites “many instances of madness occasioned by praemature, excessive or unnatural venery, by Gonorhoeas ill cured with loads of mercury and irritating salts, by fevers and such like convulsive tumults.”¹⁸ Overloading the nerves and medullary substances could also be caused by the endless thinking of “infirm and shattered philosophers” and by gluttony and idleness. The latter causes madness by failing to give “due propulsion of the fluids” and adequate stimulation to the nervous system. Tom, then, goes mad because of overindulgence and consequential overstimulation of the brain and its nervous system. His fine physique in the picture contrasts with his diseased and disordered mind. His head has been shaved to cool the brain and relieve the pressure caused by this overstimulation, but he remains raving mad.

In conclusion, Hogarth, in his representations of the manners and morals of English society, used allusions to venereal disease to make a satirical attack on various forms of decadence and immorality. At the simplest level, he used it as a warning against unrestrained sexual behaviour. He vividly depicted the disease as the terrible consequence of promiscuity. At a deeper level, Hogarth used venereal disease as a symbol of a wider social corruption in society, presided over by an idle and profligate aristocracy who, in satisfying their excesses, exploited and corrupted poor and innocent people in the process. Finally, Hogarth used venereal disease to satirize the French fashion for erotic paintings, which used partially clad females and suggestive nudes to advocate the delights of uncontrolled sexual indulgence. In Hogarth's system of morality, fashionable trends of questionable taste received as much censure as immoral conduct. Both offend against decency, and Hogarth attacked them relentlessly throughout his life.

Notes

1. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971). See esp. 1:474-75.

2. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 148-49.

3. George Vertue, Notebooks, 6 vols. (Oxford: Walpole Society, 1934-55), 3:58.

4. For a full discussion of these sexual allusions see Mary D. Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990).

5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 2d ed., ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 261.

6. Daniel Turner, Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on Venereal Disease, 4th ed. (London, 1732), 68.

7. British Library, Collection of 185 Advertisements, C112. f.9, 41. See also Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660-1850 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1989), 150.

8. Jean Astruc, A Treatise of Venereal Diseases, rev. ed., 2 vols. (London, 1754), 2:15.

9. Robert L. S. Cowley, Marriage à la Mode: A re-view of Hogarth's narrative art (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1983), 39-40.

10. Jean Astruc, A general and compleat Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Children (London, 1746), 216.

11. J. Parrot, La syphilis herreditaire et la rachitis (Paris, 1886).

12. R. C. V. Robinson, “Congenital Syphilis,” Archives of Dermatology 99 (1969): 599.

13. F. K. Murphy and P. Patamasucon, “Congenital Syphilis,” in Sexually Transmitted Diseases, ed. King K. Holmes, Mardh Per Anders, P. F. Sparling, and M. D. Wiesner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 352-74.

14. Sean Shesgreen, Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 113.

15. N. F. Lowe, “Hogarth, Beauty Spots, and Venereal Diseases,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (Spring 1992): 71-79.

16. Shesgreen, Hogarth, 116.

17. David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987), 121.

18. William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London, 1758), 56.