SOURCE: Wagner, Peter. “‘Official Discourse’ in Hogarth's Prints.” In Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution, pp. 101-37. London: Reaktion Books, 1995.

[In the following essay, Wagner discusses Hogarth's work within the context of various contemporary discourses, maintaining that the artist's participation in such discourses was not necessarily something he could completely control.]

It is even probable that there exists one single rhetorical form shared by the dream, literature, and the image.

Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l'image’

Let us go back to the fundamentals of image-making and this time examine it from the other side—from the viewer's gaze. … And from the inside—the social formation is inherently and immanently present in the image and not a fate or an external which clamps down on an image …

Bryson, ‘Semiology and Visual Interpretation’, in Visual Theory

What does it matter if I have added thoughts to the work of a great artist—so long as I have not subtracted or explained away such as are patently present?

Lichtenberg, Hogarth on High Life

After the excursions in the preceding chapters into the framing areas of texts and pictures, where we found that meaning is already being shaped, I want to move into the work of art itself, turning from the parergon to the ergon. The subject for my investigation will be select examples of Hogarth's graphic art. As I indicated earlier, a Hogarthian engraving is not, for me, a closed system or a repository that contains ultimate (and aesthetically appealing) truths we have merely to discover. Nor do I believe in the great master encoder, the genial artist, whose ideas and intention we must re-establish. In fact, I will argue that, more often than not, Hogarth's works contain traces of powerful lines of discourse and mentalités that were probably beyond his control. My aim, however, is not to find out what Hogarth thought about or intended regarding his prints. Rather, I wish to provide an exercise in what the French would call interprétation d'iconotexte. Given the intertextual and intermedial nature of Hogarth's graphic art, I shall be working with the assumption that his prints contain marked (and probably even more unmarked) allusions to various forms of contemporary discourse.

What follows is an example of an intertextual critical reading of some engravings in the light of ideas and theories developed by Foucault and Althusser. Better known as discourse analysis, this theory is interested in the power relations expressed in the discourse that is generated by the ‘state apparatuses’ (e.g., Government, School, Church, Mass Media, etc.) in their attempts to address and interest the individual in society, with the ultimate aim of making people conform to pre-established patterns of behaviour and thinking. If Hogarth's prints may be studied as fabrics in which the lines of past and present verbal and visual discourse establish fascinating knots and nodes, they should also contain traces of those power lines that lie at the heart of each society and mingle with mentalités—so much so that we find it extremely difficult to separate one from the other.

In February 1724, Hogarth, then a young engraver, published his first independent graphic satire. Uncommissioned, it bears the title Masquerades and Operas and, together with A Just View of the British Stage produced in the same year, constitutes Hogarth's conservative attack on ‘the bad taste of the town’, which is the sub-title of Masquerades and Operas. According to the artist's own words (always an interesting, though unreliable, commentary), ‘the then reigning follies were lashd [sic]’ in this picture.¹ The print shows, in the foreground, a man who calls for ‘waste paper for shops’ while carting away master-works of English drama. Carelessly heaped together in the wheelbarrow of this pedlar, book editions of Shakespeare, Otway, Congreve, Dryden, Addison and (in the second state of the engraving) ‘Ben John[son]’ are on their way to ‘Pastem’, a trunkmaker. The sheet bearing the title Pasquin No. XCV refers to a journal dedicated to art and literature. The potential readers for these works seem to be interested in the other attractions surrounding the books on all sides. These popular forms of drama and opera (including hybrid versions such as ballad operas, pantomimes and harlequinades) and the puppet theatres and masquerades were then flourishing; but they were soon to be displaced by more ‘polite genres’.²

In the left part of Masquerades and Operas a satyr and a fool lead the crowd into the Haymarket opera house, where they are already expected by the famous impresario John James Heidegger (shown looking down from a window). A well-known magician by the name of Faux is also giving performances in this building, and his name serves as a polysemous sign (a sign-board, a name, a warning in French), as a form of the visual and verbal punning that Hogarth almost always integrates in his graphic satires. Similarly, the showcloth above the entrance arcade is yet another ambiguous sign: although implicitly mocking the way aristocrats waste their money on Italian stars, it advertises operas.

On the other side of the street additional signs and figures vie for the attention of the audience. Here, in the theatre of John Rich, the trailblazer in the highly successful new genre of pantomime, a harlequinade entitled ‘Dr Faustus’ is to be performed. The whole iconography of Hogarth's print suggests that some people must be held responsible for the evidently bad, perhaps even dangerous, taste of the general public. The culprits can be found in the background where, in front of Burlington Gate, three aristocrats adore the figure-topped structure. The rhetoric of the print argues that it is the aristocrats, with their preference for Italian and French art and ideas, who have brought about the deplorable state of English culture depicted in this scene.³

The rhetorical means employed in this engraving urge us to believe its message. There is, to begin with, a sophisticated mixture of visual and verbal signs with multiple meanings, including those providing a realistic effect (a ‘real’ scene in London, ‘genuine’ people such as Fawkes/Faux, Heidegger etc.), which create what Genette terms ‘vraisemblance’.⁴ The paratext (i.e., the verses accompanying the first and second states of the image) supports this reading. Like the visual rhetoric, the verses of the second state argue that the precious and useful classics are no longer read, having been replaced by the superficial entertainments of commercialized culture:

O how refin'd how elegant we've grown!
What noble Entertainments Charm the Town!
Whether to hear the Dragon's roar we go,
Or gaze surpriz'd on Fawke's matchless Show,
Or to the Opera's or to the Masques,
To eat up Ortelans and empty Flasques
And rifle Pies from Shakespeare's clinging Page,
Good Gods! how great's the gusto of the Age.

But the conservative, if not reactionary, argument of Hogarth's print is not new. And if we look more closely at the satire of the time, we notice that the artist merely repeats a stereotype (classical works now only serve as waste-paper) that had already been in vogue around 1710 and was used a few years after that for similar purposes (a critique of popular culture) by Swift and Fielding. Hogarth's Masquerades and Operas is thus part of the bourgeois discourse in early eighteenth-century England that first conquered the organs policing public taste (for instance, periodicals such as the Tatler and Spectator) and then launched an attack on particular forms of entertainment in modern mass culture.⁵ The guardians of the rising bourgeois aesthetics were especially concerned with what Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘la distinction’, that is, the attempt of social groups to create distinctions by trying to prove the superiority of (their own) specific tastes over other, and especially neighbouring, ones. This usually works through the establishment of highly exclusive canons. As the fair and the theatre became interfused, the moral fear of contamination grew among the new journalistic arbiters of taste, such as Addison, Steele and, a little later, Dr Johnson. Looking for ‘distinction’, the speakers for the rising middle class tried to define what separated high from low culture. Canons of literature was one means. Putting down popular entertainments was another. Beginning in the later part of the century, the grotesque related to the culture of folk humour as well as carnivalesque forms were denied the status of polite entertainment. Gottsched's demand in Germany that the character of Harlequin be expelled from what he termed the ‘serious and respectable stage’ found open ears in England; it was merely a symptom of the gradual exclusion of popular forms of entertainment, including reading-matter for plebeians, from public life. The term culture was redefined by the middle class; this meant that popular culture became branded as merely the occupation of the vulgar in contrast to the more purely intellectual pleasures that characterized the refined and educated.⁶

It seems to me that during the celebration of the rise of the novel, literary criticism has been ominously silent about the dark sides that accompanied that act of liberation of the middle class within the larger matrix of cultural consumption. A suppression and then a loss of cultural forms of entertainment occurred in the so-called Age of Enlightenment; it is in the early part of the century especially that we can find these forms. Hogarth was initially on the side of the conservative guardians of bourgeois taste and morality. Like many other artists he looked for a camp to join, starting out as an emulator and imitator. But his graphic work displays a growing awareness of the negative, repressive, development in the discursive policing of cultural consumption. If in 1724 he still voiced the arguments of bourgeois elite culture, the engraving The Enraged Musician (1741) provides a radically different evaluation of popular culture: ballads and Gay's The Beggar's Opera appear together with a representative of high culture (the musician in the window), and the rhetoric of the picture now scrutinizes and criticizes both forms of entertainment, giving preference to neither one of them.⁷

The commercialization in the eighteenth century of art and literature as part of cultural consumption is undeniable, but it is also the case that people continued to read Shakespeare and other high cultural works.⁸ If Hogarth's prints from the 1720s and early 1730s take a stand both ideologically and rhetorically on the issue of what is acceptable in cultural consumption, we must resist the temptation to believe the visual rhetoric of the pictures. They are not illustrations of socio-cultural phenomena that can be used as ‘objective’ historical evidence; they are tendentious palimpsests or visual re-presentations of pictures and texts that must be analysed as interpretations.

Therefore, when I read Hogarth's prints it is not their socio-cultural background that I find most interesting, but rather their partisan encoding in a new satirical form of other verbal and visual discourse. What makes Hogarth's graphic art fascinating for me is not its ironical commentary on eighteenth-century life, fascinating though that may be. I am intrigued by the sense-making arrangement of signifiers, the incorporation of texts, and the seductive appeal to mentalités harbouring stereotypes, fixed ideas and prejudices from popular thought and art. Conflating verbal and visual signs, low and high forms of art and literature, and allegorical elements from what is beyond doubt an iconoclastic (if occasionally conservative) viewpoint, Hogarth's graphic satires can be a paradise for the semiotician. Unfortunately, this paradise also contains mazes in which one can easily get lost. Exploring the allusive signs and complex sign-systems in Hogarth's prints, I am also interested in an archaeology of mentalités as suggested by Foucault,⁹ in the exploration of what is never said (and perhaps cannot be expressed) but is always present.¹⁰ I want to uncover not merely the hidden texts in the pictures but especially their semantic (progressive and/or repressive) functions, for it is precisely in the thorough exploitation of the semantic potential of ambiguous signs, and not in authorial intention, that I perceive the value of Hogarth's art.

Complementing what I have written elsewhere on the function of reading-matter in Hogarth's prints (e.g., the Bible, crime literature, ballads, conduct books, and erotica),¹¹ I now want to focus on Hogarth's depiction of what I call ‘official’ discourse. This is a generic term for publications intended for a large audience: the Pastoral Letters and the Acts of Parliament, including the organs in which they were sometimes advertised (the newspapers). These publications can be understood as attempts by the Church and the State to exercise control with the help of texts.

As a distinct and widely known form of discourse, the Anglican Pastoral Letter assumes a semantic function that, particularly in A Harlot's Progress of 1732, must not be underestimated. There is sufficient historical evidence to prove the importance of the Pastoral Letter for the eighteenth century. Thus the Letters of the then Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, who turns out to be one of the victims of the satire in the Harlot's Progress series, were boosted to reach a wide public. Frequently announced in newspapers, they appeared in large editions, they were reprinted and, more often than not, reappeared in ‘neat Pocket Volumes’ that were again heavily hyped in contemporary periodicals. The fact that the Pastoral Letter, being an extremely well known if not necessarily ‘popular’ form of ‘official’ discourse, also became the butt of satire, only contributed to its publicity.¹² Alluding to it in his graphic art, Hogarth could be sure that everybody knew this particular form of writing.

In plate 3 of A Harlot's Progress a Pastoral Letter lies on the stool, between the servant and the heroine who is to be arrested. The addressee(s) of the Letter cannot be identified (the text ends after ‘to’). We might read this as an empty sign that has something to tell about the effect of the Bishop's Letter on two of his flock. In the open drawer, on the right, appears another letter that may serve as a continuation or even as a key to the ‘unfinished’ Pastoral Letter, for in this second epistle the addressee's name is mentioned: M[ary or Moll?] Hackabout is of course a telling name that denotes a person and connotes a profession. Hogarth's image does not make clear what the Pastoral Letter is actually concerned with. We are told, however, that it is very useful—it serves the Harlot as a wrapper for her butter. Since Moll could have availed herself of the letter (from a lover or client?) in the drawer for this purpose, the misuse of the Pastoral Letter constitutes an important semantic message. However, it is again typical of Hogarth's subversive art that the signifier (the Letter from the Bishop) creates indeterminacy rather than clarity when we explore its relations. We cannot doubt that Moll Hackabout could read the Letter if she wanted to, for the series makes clear repeatedly that the Harlot has achieved at the least a rudimentary level of literacy (in this scene, for instance, a paramour has written her a letter; and in plate 1 she (or someone in her family) has addressed a note, now attached to the neck of a goose, to her ‘Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London’). Perhaps she has even read the Pastoral Letter. But her misuse of the paper, and the discourse the sign stands for, surely indicates that the contents of the Letter are of no interest to her.

As far as the subject of the Letter is concerned, it is relevant to know that the Bishop used Pastoral Letters as a polemical and ideological weapon against the writings of Thomas Woolston, a Deist he pursued and sued.¹³ Armed with this information we can recognize that the Pastoral Letter on the harlot's stool has not one but several functions. As a visual sign it refers to the attempt of the Anglican Church, or rather the Bishop, to exert discursive influence; as a sign representing a text (and the contents of that text), it also indicates the uselessness of the Letter for the addressees in the image (Moll and her servant). The disdainful use of the Pastoral Letter can therefore be interpreted as a reaction of the poor, as an indication of the irrelevance to the underclass of the theological controversy between the established Church and Deists such as Woolston.¹⁴ Finally, the Bishop's Letter is also a signifier designating a genre or corpus of texts produced by Anglican churchmen.

What this scene shows, then, is an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Church to influence a (lower) part of society with the help of an established form of discourse. There is an implicit criticism here of the absence of the writer/author of the Letter, who should be looking after his sheep (‘pastoral’ recalls the role of the shepherd). But Bishop Gibson, who supported Walpole, engages in theological disputes that serve not his sheep but his own career. As an inactive writer of useless letters the Bishop is, ultimately, also responsible for Moll's tragic failure: from this scene, we can look backwards and forwards in the series, and in each case we discover clergymen, especially Anglicans, who fail in their capacity as shepherds because, like the Bishop, they are driven by self-interest. Like the doctors, lawyers and judges, clergymen constitute merely one of the many social groups that are branded as parasites in Hogarth's art. Thus, in plate 3 of A Harlot's Progress we also find a portrait of another theologian (at the left) on the wall. This is Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724) who, despite his inflammatory anti-Government sermons given in 1709, managed a lucrative career. In his usual ‘accidental’ manner, Hogarth shows Sacheverell beside the portrait of another ‘great’ man, the highwayman Macheath from The Beggar's Opera. The position—one might even say constellation—of the pictures on the wall invites a comparison between the highwayman and the theologian and also between the clergymen to whom the visual and verbal signifiers allude (the portrait and the Pastoral Letter). Selfishness and cruelty is the hallmark of the clergymen in Hogarth's satires. In the final plate of the series on the Harlot, for instance, a representative of the Church of England marks the dramatic high-point of egoism around the dead Harlot. Entirely ruled by sexuality, he masturbates another harlot near the coffin.

Looking back through the series we recognize that the Bishop of London's Letter and person also contribute to the meaning of plates 1 and 2. Moll's arrival in London is depicted as the exploitation of an innocent girl by a corrupt society, which is one of the series' major themes. In terms of signifiers or emblems in the picture, one could also read her fate as that of a silly goose (in the foreground at right) trying to find her ‘Lofing Cosen’. Behind Moll Hackabout, another selfish parson neglects his office because he is more interested in deciphering the address on a letter of recommendation to the Bishop than in the life of the girl next to him. The address of the letter promises a career. With his eyes fixed only on his letter, the clergyman does not notice the impending catastrophes nearby: the symbolic tumbling of the buckets and (to come) the more tragic fall and death of the innocent country girl who is already surrounded by human vultures. The parson will prevent neither fall. Again, the implication is that the discourse and the person of the Bishop of London, marginal though they may seem in this and other cases, generate fatal consequences.

One might of course also construct an author-oriented theory in the case of the Pastoral Letter. Always concerned with Hogarth's intention, Paulson, for instance, is of the opinion that the artist's satirical allusions to the misbehaviour of the Anglican clergy are an indication of ‘something obsessive’ provoked by personal motives. It is indeed tempting to read A Harlot's Progress in view of the fact that, shortly before 1690, Hogarth's father probably came to London in the company of Edmund Gibson. Whereas Gibson rose to the most powerful position in the Anglican Church, Richard Hogarth, an educated but poor man, attained the less attractive position of inmate in the debtors' prison.¹⁵ But reading Hogarth's graphic art primarily under such biographical aspects (trying to explain authorial intention, motives and themes with recourse to allegedly important events in the artist's life) seems to me to be both speculative and reductionist. As I indicated in chapter One, I want to stick to what is expressed in the engravings, to an analysis of the signifiers and their arrangement. As far as the Pastoral Letter is concerned, it can be stated that the series on the Harlot plays with the meaning and importance of the Letter as a form of ‘official’ (Anglican) discourse.

Sometimes the allusions to this reading-matter and those that produced it are less obvious than in plates 1 and 3 of the Harlot's Progress. The Bishop of London, for instance, also makes an appearance in the second plate, although it is rather difficult to identify him in the paintings of Moll's keeper. To a large degree, meaning in this scene depends on the relations we establish between the pictures on the wall and between the pictures and the people. It is not quite clear whether these are real paintings or part of the tapestry: the door cuts into a ‘painting’, suggesting that the pictures are merely a trompe-l'œil, which opens another fascinating dimension for the understanding of the entire scene. The painting on the right, if painting it is, represents a biblical scene from 2 Samuel 6. In the Bible, which Hogarth frequently introduces with such pictorial allusions, it is Jehovah who kills the impious Uzzah (who is not a Levite) when the latter reaches out to steady the Ark. But in Hogarth's scene a mitred Anglican bishop has been substituted for Jehovah's vengeance. In the painting on the wall, the bishop stabs Uzzah in the back. Beneath and beside the biblical scene, two small portraits are attached to the wall. These have been identified as the portraits of two Deists, Thomas Woolston and Samuel Clarke. I have already mentioned that Gibson attacked Woolston in his Pastoral Letters. As a result of these diatribes, Woolston was found guilty and went to prison where, lacking the money to buy his way out, he eventually died. This contemporary background allows us to make the relation between the ‘killing bishop’ (a Levite in the original text) and the impure (Deist) Uzzah-Woolston.¹⁶

In this second picture of the series, the Pastoral Letter and its author play a marginal, though not unimportant, part in the relations between objects and people, relations that we must recognize and pursue to make sense of the details. Moll is surrounded by works of art. They are the property of her Jewish lover. But neither she nor he are alert to the iconotexts on the wall—to them both they are decorative, like furniture,¹⁷ i.e., signs that count not for their content or meaning but rather for the social status they indicate. If Moll or her lover could understand the meaning suggested by the signifiers in the paintings, the scene tells us, they might escape their individual destinies. Moll's life ends in disaster (suggested in the next plate), and the fate of the Jewish merchant is indicated by the cuckold's horns which the tapestry (or rather the perspective we are given in the image) places above his head.

Summarizing the functions of Hogarth's graphic treatment of the attempt by the Church to influence members of the lower class with the help of the Pastoral Letter, one notices several ironic levels. We witness how a powerful ecclesiastic tries to propagate his opinion with what is surely a repressive form of writing, for Gibson uses the Letter to warn against Deist ideas. At the same time, however, the relevant pictures in A Harlot's Progress also show that the attempt fails miserably. It fails because the potential readers of the Letter are not interested in its discourse or ignore it (perhaps because they feel that these texts ultimately serve the purposes of those who write them), and because the readers are instinctively opposed to the aims of the text: they do not want to be conditioned and socialized in the prescriptive ways outlined in the Letter. Hogarth's prints discussed above thus dramatize and comment on a ticklish political problem in the society of his day and age—the relation between power and its exercise or upholding through specific discursive forms. The prints probe the question whether such writing can at all address specific social strata or groups in order to keep them within predetermined limits. The rhetoric of the prints seems to suggest they could not, at least as far as the lower echelons of society were concerned.

The contemptuous attitude of lower-class readers towards the ‘official’ printed word is also a typical feature in Hogarth's depiction of other discursive forms produced by the state apparatuses. Conduct books, for instance, as well as laws and proclamations (in the form of broadsheets) share similar aims with the Pastoral Letter; newspapers, however, are a special case. Before turning to Hogarth's graphic commentary on the treatment of printed Acts of Parliament by the common people, I must at least mention the artist's most persuasive depiction of the conflict between the individual and the repressive discourse of society. It is in Industry and Idleness that success and failure in English society are closely associated with the behaviour of the reader. Throughout the series the Industrious Apprentice appears in the role of the diligent and pious (but also hypocritical) reader, whereas Tom Idle's tragedy is a partial consequence of his rejection of society's prescriptive discourse. To the very hour of his death he refuses to read and honour the written word in conduct books, indentures and the Bible. As with the Harlot, it is not a question of Tom Idle's ability to read: what Hogarth (who gave Idle his own facial features) stresses is the apprentice's refusal to obey commands and to agree to the (written) demands of society as expressed in what I term ‘official’ discourse. In the first plate of the series Tom neglects The Prentice's Guide (by comparison his colleague's copy is in mint condition); later on, he defiantly throws his indenture into the water. Finally, when he becomes a reader (of the Bible) on his way to the gallows, we see how society subjects and takes possession of the penitent victim by delivering him into the hands of a fanatic Methodist and by exploiting the story of his life: the ballad sold in the foreground indicates that the tragic life and death of the rebel from the lower class will now serve as a moral warning. Ballads and similar texts will mythologize him for didactic reasons. He has finally returned to the fold of society, but at the cost of his freedom and life.

One tends to forget sometimes that Industry and Idleness dramatizes two kinds of tragedy. To be sure, there is the fate of the one who tries to preserve his personal liberty by rejecting all forms of writing and the obeisance it implies. But the success of the Industrious Apprentice, Francis Goodchild, a keen reader of Bibles and 'prentice's guides and laws, is a success only at first glance. It speaks for the artistic quality of Hogarth's series that the series also suggests a kind of tragedy for Goodchild, for it is precisely because of his reading and the concomitant acceptance of hierarchic social order that Goodchild becomes a prisoner of conventions. He is, finally, also a victim, caught in his seemingly powerful position: the last plate presents the prisoner in the Lord Mayor's coach while the ghost of his 'prentice friend hovers in the corner—represented by a broadsheet, i.e., writing/discourse.¹⁸

Members of the lower class in Hogarth's graphic art show extreme disrespect for any kind of written law. This rejection of repressive discourse is perhaps best depicted in Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. With the Licencing Act of 1737 Walpole had finally succeeded in silencing the theatre as a forum and medium of political criticism, in which Fielding had been poised to reach the summit of his career as a dramatist. Excepting Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, all theatres were closed down. (This action proved to be the spring for Fielding's new career as a novelist.¹⁹) Henceforth, theatre companies had to meet in private houses or they had to invent ‘social’ pretexts (‘tea and coffee’) to perform plays. In Strolling Actresses, a copy of the Licencing Act—the ‘Act against Strolling Players’—lies on a crown in the left foreground. The fact that it is shown with a crown may suggest regal approval of the Act.²⁰ The manner in which it is treated, however, establishes a semantic parallel with the ‘useful’ function of the Pastoral Letter in plate 3 of A Harlot's Progress. In this barn, the Act has been entirely deprived of its intended function as a repressive text. Like the Pastoral Letter, it serves a new, practical purpose. Those for whom the actual text of the ‘Act against Strolling Players’ was written thus resist in their own way, accepting the paper but not the text it bears: the mother feeding her child uses a sheet as a bib. Additional signifiers support this satirical message. The visual arrangement in the engraving of the Act and the crown, and of the crown beside a chamber-pot, invites a comparison between these details. For instance, we can see that structural similarity (two receptacles beside each other suggest likeness) identifies the fecal contents of the chamber-pot with the legal-‘royal’ contents of the crown. At the same time, this seemingly accidental and (in political terms) rather daring constellation expresses the opinion of the actors vis-à-vis the ‘official’ discourse of the state and Crown.

In Hogarth's An Election Entertainment, published in 1755, irony becomes more intricate in the playing with signifiers, indicating both the uselessness and ineffectiveness of another legal text. In the right foreground, one visually marked text lies on a platter with pipes and a tobacco bag marked ‘Kirton's Best’. Significantly, the title of the ‘Act against Bribery and Cor[ruption]’ is ‘corrupted’ in itself. The iconography of the picture indicates that at this election meeting the Act is supposed to be hidden or ignored. But like the Pastoral Letter and the Act against the players, it is put to a rather useful purpose that again comments on the refusal of potential readers to honour the textual injunctions on the paper. The paper of the Act, not its contents, is accepted, here serving as a pipe-lighter.

In each of the prints discussed above Hogarth presents his satirical view of merely one legal text, and especially of its effect upon the common people, who prefer the paper to the text. In the different states of Beer Street (1751, third state in 1759), Hogarth juxtaposes ‘official’ discourse in several forms and in various texts; they all vie for the attention of the reading public.²¹ At the right, we see some books. Destined ‘For Mr Pastem the Trunk maker in Pauls Ch[urch] Y[ar]d’, they remind us of the classics in the wheelbarrow of the pedlar in Masquerades and Operas. There is a difference, however, in that the iconography of Beer Street implies the opposite of the earlier print; Beer Street argues that the literary and critical works depicted in this scene are really of no value, pleading for their use as wastepaper. The books—in a pun on their use and destination, Lichtenberg calls them ‘corpses’, or remains of brilliant ideas²²—are labelled ‘Modern Tragedys Vo. 12’; ‘Hill on Royal Societies’; ‘Turnbul[l] on Ant[ient] Painting’; ‘Politicks Vol: 9999’; and ‘Lauder on Milton’. For Hogarth's contemporaries, these titles were self-explanatory. ‘Dr’, or Sir, John Hill (?1716-75) wrote pseudo-scientific treatises; his A Dissertation on Royal Societies (1750) was the result of the Royal Society's refusal to make the illustrious would-be doctor a member. George Turnbull's A Treatise upon Ancient Painting (1740) praised the Old Masters of painting, based almost entirely on surviving descriptions of lost works. And William Lauder (d. 1771) wrote An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his ‘Paradise Lost’ (1750) to prove that the great English author had plagiarized Paradise Lost from seventeenth-century Latin poets. Lauder's fraud was exposed by John Douglas, who was to become Bishop of Salisbury.

The decoding of the other texts in the picture poses greater difficulties that reflect the hermeneutic problems critics still have with the explication of the print.²³ Meaning depends on the structural relations the reader establishes between the texts (and the persons). One general ‘message’ or point may of course be found in the very juxtaposition of these publications. It is the simultaneous presentation of the King's Speech, visually ‘supported’ as it were by The Daily Advertiser beside the fat craftsmen, and the ballad that fascinates the fishmongers, which suggests comparison and, ultimately perhaps, similarity. The easily readable excerpt from the speech of the monarch urges his British subjects to boost trade and commerce: ‘Let me earnestly recom[m]end to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on My hearty Concurrence and Encouragement’. Those depicted at the left will certainly profit from this positive speech. Therefore, they do not have to read the text, nor will they (mis)use it.

In contrast to this treatment of a (semi-) legal text, the ballad finds eager readers. It is from the pen of one of Hogarth's friends, John Lockman. In his famous and popular ‘Herring’ poems Lockman (as secretary of the Free British Fishery) compared the honest profits of the fishing industry with the illusory and empty promises of investors and swindlers advertising for South American gold-mines (see, for instance, Lockman's The Shetland Herring and Peruvian Gold Mine of 1751). In this respect there is a difference between the Kings's Speech and the ballad, although both can be considered as forms of advertising, that is, economic discourse.²⁴ Nevertheless, they do constitute a form of discourse that addresses the common people and intends to allot them a role in the commercial sphere.

If one reads the texts from this point of view, one immediately discovers a series of details that form a sort of counter-argument in the picture, disturbing the superficial expression of satisfaction and pride. What disturbs the impression, visually and ideologically, is, for instance, the pawnbroker's house at the right. A decoding of this dilapidated building in dualistic terms of the good (beer drinking) and bad (gin consumption) dichotomy, or in terms of cause and effect, would of course contrast the house of ‘N. Pinch, Pawn Broker’ (in Beer Street) with that of ‘S. Gripe, Pawn Broker’ in Gin Lane. But it is precisely such thinking in dualistic terms which the print of Beer Street foregrounds and finally explodes. In fact, one could argue that, especially in conjunction with Gin Lane, it ‘turns on the tension created by the presence or the operation of opposites’.²⁵

Take the pawnbroker's house in Gin Lane. How are we to associate it with the other signifiers in the print, and with those in Beer Street? Is it merely accidental that the perspective of the image, in a kind of trompe-l'œil effect, appears to force us to associate the pawnbroker's sign with the statue of George I whose head it seems to ‘crown’? And what is the relation? The ways critics have answered these questions demonstrate both the semantic richness of Hogarth's work and the fallacies of readings based on author intention. Barry Wind, at one extreme, believes in the ‘establishment tenor’ of the print and maintains that the statue of George I ‘emphasizes Hogarth's sympathies with Hanoverian ideas and brewer interests’, but then concedes that the ‘motif may be only an allusion to well-known Hanoverian greed and tightfistedness’. He reads the distance of Church and state in this image as a positive contrast to the dissipation of the gin drinkers. At the other extreme, Paulson believes that the pawnbroker's sign above the monarch's head is an ironic halo commenting on the collusion of Church and state. Paulson tells us that the prohibitive Tippling Act that increased the price of gin was modified in 1747, when the distillers petitioned for the right to retail. As a consequence, gin consumption rose substantially, and in 1750, in some parts of London, one in every five houses was a gin shop. But Paulson does not want to support his reading with social evidence; rather, he trusts in authorial intention, arguing that ‘whether or not Hogarth had this information, he assumes some such situation when he includes the spire of St George's in Gin Lane and juxtaposes with this print of the emaciated gin drinkers the prosperity of the fat merchants and the royal urge to greater commerce in Beer Street’.²⁶

But why obstruct one's reading of the print with Hogarth's intention, even though Hogarth's own commentary on the series, in Autobiographical Notes, seems to confirm a dualistic reading?²⁷ Listening to the voices in the picture, qua signifiers, we must admit that the visual arrangement of the pawnbroker's sign above the monarch's head is not accidental. It is a consequence of perspective. Perspective in art is what rhetoric is in writing (as recent art historians, in particular Mieke Bal and Hubert Damisch,²⁸ have shown). Perspective urges, even forces us, to take a particular viewpoint. The problem with perspective is that in images with realistic details, such as Hogarth's prints, one tends to take it for granted, when as a matter of fact it is the most powerful sign for the real in modern art, a sign we frequently overlook precisely because it is so obvious. Hence, on the basis of the perspective in Gin Lane one can argue that we may indeed connect the (sign of the) pawnbroker's shop with (the architectural sign representing) George I, and, by implication, the left side and its semiotic ‘connection’ with the left side in Beer Street and its verbal connection with the monarch. Such a decoding will indeed come close to Paulson's reading—but sans authorial intention.

Similarly, the ostensibly happy man painting the signboard represents not one but several messages, depending on how we relate him to the signs (including the human beings) of which he is a part. He has been employed by the fat merchants and artists as a gesture of generosity on their part; but the emaciated painter, apparently even content with his new role, is not an artist anymore, he has become a simple painter of signs. This society has no need for real art.

‘Official discourse’, which appears here in conjunction and collaboration with the self-satisfied burghers, is further subverted when one considers that Beer Street is not a single picture. Together with Gin Lane it forms a set. More often than not, meaning in Hogarth's graphic art is created by the serial aspect, by what Frédéric Ogée has aptly termed ‘les parcours sériels’ that invite the eye to wander, to compare and to err (Ogée plays on the meanings of the French term erre, which like the English equivalent implies going astray, to be wrong, and, in its obsolete sense, to ambulate).²⁹ The serial aspect brings to the fore parallels (e.g., the church that stands far away in both of the prints) that undermine the meaning suggested by the titles and the verses accompanying the pictures. These parallels point out to us that the engravings do not merely comment on the consumption of good and bad kinds of alcohol; they also treat of the presence and absence of the state apparatuses (the Church, the Crown, the Government) represented by texts and architectural signs (the church spire, the statue of the monarch). In this respect one can agree with Paulson's reading of the series, when he argues that ‘the basic cause and effect relationship would be understood by the poor: not that beer drinking leads to prosperity and gin drinking to want, but the reverse. Rather, beer drinking is a product of prosperity and gin drinking of want’.³⁰ Therefore, what at first glance looks like a praise of commerce and the acceptance of the discourse supporting it proves to be highly ambiguous in the serial context.

As a set, Beer Street and Gin Lane comprise an iconotext that can be read as an ironical comment on the paratext. This paratext is made up of the caption and the titles. In fact, the moral verses on the plates were written by Hogarth's good friend the Revd James Townley. Together with the seemingly obvious titles they do not complement the prints, as even recent critics still maintain;³¹ rather, they should be seen as a first attempt to provide a comprehensive verbal explanation, an explanation that works with its own stereotypes derived from popular writings and mythology. The texts also appeal to dominating mentalités—the prejudiced view of France and French customs, the association of England with beer and liberty, and the glorification of things English:

Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
          Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
          Can chear each manly Heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
          Successfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
          And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
          Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
          With Liberty and Love.

The caption to Gin Lane runs:

Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
          Makes human Race a Prey;
It enters by a deadly Draught,
          And steals our Life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair,
          It's Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes, with hellish Care,
          Theft, Murder, Perjury.
Damn'd Cup! that on the Vitals preys,
          That liquid Fire contains
Which Madness to the Heart conveys,
          And rolls it thro' the Veins.

The imagery here is also interesting in that it establishes relations less with misery and death (as in the print) but rather with Christian ideas of Satan, sin, and Hell.

These ekphrases of the two prints ignore indeterminacy while promising us clear meanings and messages. The polysemous signs as well as their syntax in the pictures militate against the simple meaning of the verbal text beneath the prints, a text that tries to impose dichotomy, based on dualism and hierachies of meaning, upon constructs that are far more complex than the Revd Townley and contemporary explicators such as Barry Wind would have it.

Indeed, if the Hogarthian visual forms harbour ‘a greater potential for doubleness—or openness—of interpretation’³² than, say, eighteenth-century fictional texts, we should preserve that openness in our reading by focusing on the semiotics of the prints and their reception.³³ Such an approach would allow at least two possibilities even for the eighteenth-century audience. As Paulson writes: ‘the poor as well as their betters … can go to the visual image and take away the aspects they see through their particular preconceptions. But what the rich will see as peripheral irony, the poor will see as central’.³⁴ It is the complex referentiality of the iconography of the Hogarthian image that works directly against the conditioned expectation of simple dualistic interpretations. This ‘shading’ of meaning by introducing signs and constellations of uncertainty makes the viewer's task a difficult one.³⁵

For those who still care about this issue, the differences between the first and subsequent states of Beer Street may tell us something about Hogarth's changing satirical intentions. More important, however, they also throw some light on the interchangeability of specific signifiers. Take the stout blacksmith at the left, for instance. In the first and second states he is lifting a Frenchman into the air while brandishing a jug of ale. In the third state of the print, the Frenchman has been replaced with a huge loin of meat (and a pavior making advances to a girl next to a basket of vegetables). One can assume, therefore, that in terms of signifying, the stereotypal, spindly Frenchman serves a satirical function that is similar to that of the meat: the aim is to invite the observer to identify with English patriotism (as a potential spy is being caught) or with Englishness (eating beef or mutton) as such.

But what kind of meat does the blacksmith hold up? In tune with earlier commentators such as Lichtenberg, Paulson believes that it is ‘a shoulder of mutton’—and the lower part of the rather small leg would seem to confirm such a reading. Barry Wind, however, has recently argued that the metamorphosis is from a Frenchman into a loin of roast beef, since popular attitudes linked roast beef—and especially roast beef and beer—to ‘Englishness’. I think that in this case Wind has a point, for if Englishness is to be expressed here, what better image than a huge chunk of beef.³⁶ After all, it is roast beef which serves as an ersatz for England in Hogarth's The Gate of Calais. In any case, both mutton and beef indicate the richness of the country (as opposed to France's soupe meagre). In the semantic and structural context in the left-hand corner of Beer Street, it seems that roast beef is the more persuasive ‘reading’. For the loin of roast beef (assuming that it is beef and not mutton) and the jug of ale are sign types which, in terms of Peircean semiotics, are multifunctional, serving as they do as icons, indices and symbols.³⁷ I would argue that it is impossible to maintain that one of these categories dominates in the print, and it is precisely this fickle nature of the sign (type) in Hogarth's art that makes it simultaneously realistic, parodic, rich in meaning and deeply fascinating.

The same principle governs the altering of the reading-matter on the table that seems to be wedged between the butcher and the blacksmith. As far as the various genres of ‘official’ discourse are concerned, it is important that the first state presents two newspapers, The Gazette and The Daily Advertiser, whereas in the second and later states the King's Speech has been substituted for The Gazette. This is, I think, telling: it suggests a connection between these two types of reading-matter. Since they are interchangeable, the satirical and rhetorical function of the newspaper seems to be rather close to, if not identical with, the royal Speech. Although the Speech of the monarch introduces a new, more obviously political, aspect, the fact that his words can and do replace a newspaper should alert us to the common denominator of these forms of discourse. This common ground is their status as rhetoric aiming at the dispersion and sedimentation of an ideology that serves the Government as well as the obese burghers represented in the picture. On the textual level, then, these ‘papers’ (the Speech and the newspapers) are nothing else but organs of those state apparatuses (as Althusser terms the influential, discourse-producing social institutions) that seem to appeal to, and thus create (the illusion of), the relevant subject. Ultimately, however, their aim is the subjection of the subject through an ‘appealing’ discourse that is coercive rather than liberating or enlightening.³⁸

Time and again, Hogarth's graphic works dramatize the ambivalent role of journalistic writing. In fact, for A Harlot's Progress and other series, the artist himself was inspired by scandals and sensations reported in the newspapers, and many of his prints cannot be adequately understood without a thorough knowledge of the personal and political feuds fought in the contemporary press.³⁹ A particularly influential medium of writing, the papers were thus a tool for the ‘official’ discourse to shape attitudes and mentalités in the world of eighteenth-century social consumption. It speaks for the artistic value of Hogarth's œuvre that this journalistic discourse is presented for us to ponder, in view of its social and ideological impact. Whenever we see people carrying or reading a newspaper in Hogarth's prints, the papers are more than decorative details or signs creating (the illusion of) quotidian reality: they are essentially signifiers of powerful forces. As with the other forms of potentially coercive discourse discussed above, it is the consequences of its consumption that matter. More often than not Hogarthian prints demonstrate the noxious consequences of this form of consumption. I shall restrict my discussion of the phenomenon to three examples.

In A Midnight Modern Conversation, which parodies the two denotative meanings of ‘conversation’ (a ‘conversation piece’, a genre of group portraiture, as well as an exchange of words or ideas) in a satire on the different stages of inebration, the man at the far right is characterized by his reading-matter.⁴⁰ One conclusion that can be drawn from the minor catastrophe about to occur in this corner is of course that it is precisely the preoccupation with political papers that literally sets the reader on fire. Perhaps he is a politician: the London Journall and The Craftsman sticking out from his coat-pocket support this interpretation, for they were propaganda organs of, respectively, Walpole and the Opposition. Politicians, the visual rhetoric argues, are not only impractical and unreliable, they are downright dangerous because their ‘deep’ thinking leads to fatal consequences. These are indicated by the candle put to unintended use by the absent-minded ‘politician’, and by the sword that menacingly protrudes directly from the papers. Always attentive to such seemingly marginal details, Lichtenberg pointed out that the papers ‘rest meaningfully’ on the sword while the open mouth of the man beside the ‘politician’ resembles a crater that is about to erupt in a ‘revolution’.⁴¹

The visual rhetoric of the picture likens the effect of reading political papers to the intoxication produced by the consumption of tobacco, wine and spirits. The ‘politician’ setting fire to his shirt-cuff instead of the tobacco in his pipe is a signifier referring to pictures and texts that readers of the time would have recognized. Hogarth's earlier painting, The Politician (c. 1730), for instance, employs the same device in that an absorbed reader's hat is catching fire. Later on, in plate 2 of The Times, Wilkes's anti-Government North Briton is nearly ignited by the candle of ‘Ms Fanny’, the Cock Lane Ghost, suggesting the danger of journalistic defamation and political journals. The inattentive ‘politician’ in A Midnight Modern Conversation whose sense and senses have been numbed by the papers also constitutes an allusion to Fielding's ‘Mr Politic’ in The Coffee-House Politician of 1730, for this gentleman's dedication to the political press leads to the loss of his daughter. Becoming absorbed in partisan newspapers, Hogarth's print argues, is tantamount to drunkenness. Newspapers of this kind are like alcohol or poison.

The individual as a potential victim of journalism emerges most forcefully in Hogarth's The March to Finchley of 1750, retouched in 1761. One could argue that the young soldier—here an emblem of England in trouble—in the centre is importuned both by two women (a pregnant girl and an old hag) and the texts each carries. In tune with the pictorial ‘architext’ of this detail of the picture (Rubens's painting of Hercules between Vice and Virtue), Virtue, here a sutler (a servant or victualler) and ballad singer, carries a portrait of the Duke of Cumberland and the ballad ‘God Save our Noble King’. In an equally telling manner, Vice is associated with newspapers. The old woman is a newspaper vendor and a papist (indicated by the cross on her shawl). She is selling three opposition papers: The Jacobite Journal, the London Evening Post and The Remembrancer. The first was actually a satire on Jacobite propaganda (Hogarth's engraving implies that it was read by Jacobites, but it did not appear until 1747) and The Remembrancer is both a paper and pun.⁴² It is obvious that Hogarth's satire is based on the juxtaposition and association of newspapers and political journalism with vice, danger (Catholicism) and corruption.

A Midnight Modern Conversation and The March to Finchley thematize the dispersion of political rhetoric. They depict the individual, the reader, as a highly contested target of noxious journalism that, in turn, is the product and vehicle of social groups and institutions: the Government, the Church, political parties. Both prints incorporate this contest (by way of discourse) for the reader and the attempt to subject him/her to socio-political norms, albeit in terms of satire. Yet journalistic discourse has another function that is perhaps even more important than its role in the contemporary arena of politics. Hogarth highlights this function in his typical ‘marginal’ manner, almost en passant as it were, in the second state of plate 4 of A Rake's Progress. As with the different states of Beer Street, it is again interesting to note that which has been changed, or rather exchanged: in the second state the group of seven boys on the pavement, in the lower-right corner, occupy the place of the single boy in the first who had his hand on the Rake's cane. There is, then, a semantic relation between the Rake and the boys. One could read this (in the first state) as the taking away of support or, in the revision of the picture, as a comparison of the ways in which the Rake and the boys support themselves. Like the man getting out of his sedan chair, the boys are gamblers, cheats and drinkers.

In a series of astute comparisons between the ‘black’ boys and the ‘white’ gentleman (a contrast also suggested by White's gaming-house, at the left, and the sign ‘black’ at the right), Lichtenberg throws light on the satirical relations in this scene. The chimney-sweep at far right, he points out, does not seem to refer to the Rake, but the latter—like many another gentleman with a white wig—also works his way up by ‘creeping through dirty channels’.⁴³

Within the small scene in the corner at right, a newspaper adds additional, ambiguous, meaning to the engraving: the left-most boy, probably a bootblack, like his comrade beside him, is smoking a pipe and reading The Farthing Post, a cheap, piratical paper. Vending gossip, news and politics, this was the eighteenth-century equivalent of today's The Sun newspaper. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from its depiction here (including the allusions to the issue of piracy and to contemporary politics and the Excise Bill of 1733),⁴⁴ one cannot ignore the embedding of the sensational paper in the larger matrix of corruption, intoxication and immorality, which is foregrounded in this section of the print. The little reader is also a little politician;⁴⁵ like his colleague in A Midnight Modern Conversation he is characterized by the fact that he does not notice what is going on. Instead of alerting him to the problems, politics (in writing) absorbs his attention. Although only a minor visual detail, the newspaper nevertheless establishes semantic relations between the boys, the Rake and newspaper consumption.

In terms of journalistic discourse vis-à-vis society, however, there is more at stake here. The poor bootblack, we must remember, has nothing else but his paper to read. Indeed, The Farthing Post is to him what the cheap, didactic London Almanack is to the frugal merchant, Mr West, in plate 4 of Industry and Idleness: in each case, the particular reading-matter replaces literature and art. From the bourgeois, educated, point of view, it is ersatz reading (both in the German and more derogatory English meanings of the word)—the ‘literature’ of the common people. If one message that emerges from Industry and Idleness is that the diligent reader, Francis Goodchild, is always easy prey for coercive ‘official’ discourse, one may argue that in plate 4 of A Rake's Progress, the bootblack, visually and literally at the bottom of society, will stay there as a result of the thoughtless consumption of tobacco, spirits and an equally noxious journalistic discourse promising information while providing useless entertainment and sensational slander. The poor boy will remain at his lowly social position (a level the Rake has yet to reach) because his reading-matter contributes to the sedimentation of a state of mind, a mentalité even, that makes him yearn for gossip while preventing enlightenment.

It would of course be convenient at this point to summarize the functions of ‘official’ discourse that I have merely touched on here. This is impossible, for the simple reason that such an attempt would crudely simplify the concepts that create sense in Hogarth's graphic art (intertextuality and intermediality) in order to make them applicable to my critical concern. Intermedial readings as I have practiced them imply an undeniable paradox: they arise out of the fact that intertextuality provides meaningful insights into the variety and contradictory nature of discursive systems but also leaves open spaces and unexplored terrain. Jonathan Culler has suggested that ‘theories of intertexuality set before us perspectives of unmasterable series, lost origins, endless horizons … and … in order to work with the concept we focus it—but that focusing may always, to some degree, undermine the general concept of intertextuality in whose name we are working’.⁴⁶ Even if, in the case of Hogarth's graphic art, one concentrates exclusively on the iconographic exploration of any single print, one will soon have to recognize that which could be termed a semantic Heissenberg-effect, i.e., the ultimate indeterminacy of such an enterprise,⁴⁷ for Hogarth's engravings are complicated constructs in which visual and verbal signifiers (with several levels of meaning), entire sign systems as well as discursive forms, produce iconotexts whose meaning unfolds within the structural and semantic relations of the elements. In this respect, it is important to recall what Derrida has said about indeterminacy. ‘Every sign’, Derrida argues:

linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written, in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any centre of absolute anchoring.⁴⁸

Indeterminacy in Hogarth's engravings arises because his works engage in playing at the level of signs as well as at that of semiotic systems (e.g., the discursive forms discussed in this chapter) by quoting and questioning texts and contexts while creating new possibilities of understanding.

Still, what can be said about the discursive forms within Hogarth's iconotexts without reducing the complexity of the issue is that the prints dramatize the socio-political use and, even more, the misuse of language and writing. Behind this dramatization lurks a satirical-iconoclastic method Hogarth shared with Swift, who also mocked and attacked the exclusive, noxious jargon developed by social groups to the detriment of other groups.⁴⁹ What Hogarth's engravings foreground in their use of such discourse is the attempt of groups and institutions to use writing as a means of gaining influence and dominance.

In this respect Althusser has suggested the analysis of such discursive forms as an expression of the ideology produced by the state apparatuses. Althusser maintains that the traditional Marxist notion of ideology is erroneous in its distinction between ‘superstructure’ and ‘base’. He has argued that ideology is not ‘false consciousness’ as a result of a system of representation disseminated by the dominant classes in order to mask the capitalist control of the means of production. Rather, he has equated ideology with all systems of representation (political, religious, artistic, juridical etc.), regardless of the social class or interest group that manufactures them. Suggesting an analysis not of the manufacturers but of the systems themselves, which create the illusion of the relevant subject while trying to dominate that subject in his/her very ‘interpellation’, his position is thus a semiotic one. According to Althusser, who yokes ideology to representation, all sign systems are ideologically freighted. One can thus search for the structures of power within those systems rather than in the relations between ‘superstructure’ and ‘base’.⁵⁰

It seems that Hogarth's prints, even more than literary texts, draw our attention to the reception and the potentially repressive function of discourse. Both Althusser and Foucault perceive the origin of discourse in social institutions (the state, the Church, the school) that constitute and control the nature and knowledge of individuals.⁵¹ Hogarth's graphic art both shows and participates in the dissemination and sedimentation of these processes in eighteenth-century society—including the reactions of the addressees and potential targets of discourse. However, ‘official’ discourse as it found expression in the Pastoral Letter, in Acts of Parliament and Royal Speeches and in newspapers, is merely one thread in the intertextual fabric of the engravings. Fabric, a textile term Barthes and Kristeva have applied with much profit to literary texts,⁵² is an expression that is more than apposite for Hogarth's weaving of visual and verbal texts in graphic works whose intermedial relations can still fascinate us today.

The Hogarthian image, then, can be studied as a site (with all the architectural and archaeological connotations of that word) where the partisan discourse of the eighteenth century has been encoded in the form of equally partisan artistic comments on cultural and ideological phenomena. I have argued that Hogarth's engravings hold a lot of information in store for us if we abandon the chimerical and speculative aim to reconstruct the artist's intention and focus on a goal that, to my mind, is both more rewarding and more persuasive. That goal is—to return to my archaeological metaphor—the uncovering of discursive strata or, in terms of the Barthian/Kristevan ‘network’, the unravelling of the woven tissue. One advantage of this approach is that it also promises insights into the schemes (pun intended) of the artist, unveiling not his intention but rather the extent to which his rhetoric depended on pre-established discursive traditions and the concomitant mentalités. This means, for example, that Hogarth may have been working within mentalités that were too powerful to be resisted. In terms of Lacan's model, one might say that he was working sous le regard (under the gaze), that is, in a discursive space he could neither formulate nor change. Scholars interested in the reconstruction of artistic intention will of course find such a view of Hogarth and his work wholly untenable, precisely because it challenges the idea of the genial author in command of his artistic machinery.⁵³

Notes

1. See Hogarth's Autobiographical Notes, in his The Analysis of Beauty, p. 205. For detailed discussions of the engravings see Paulson's catalogue, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 47-9, 55-7; and the more biographically orientated Hogarth, vol. I: The ‘Modern Moral Subject’, 1697-1732, pp. 76-90, 119-22.

2. On the importance of these popular forms of entertainment and their treatment by Hogarth see my ‘Hogarth's Graphic Palimpsests’.

3. See U. Böker, ‘John Gay's The Beggar's Opera und die Kommerzialisierung der Kunst’, p. 136.

4. See R. Barthes, ‘L'Effet de réel’, and G. Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’ in Figures II, pp. 71-100.

5. On this process in which periodicals played an important role by establishing aesthetic (exclusive) norms, see U. Böker, ‘Die Institutionalisierung literarischer Produktions- und Rezeptionsnormen’.

6. See P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Although Bourdieu is mainly concerned with the attempts of the Parisian upper middle class to cordon themselves off with the help of aesthetic canons that serve to achieve difference from neighbouring social groups, his study can be usefully applied (cum grano salis) to other countries and periods.

   Persuasive studies of the process of suppression of popular entertainments during the establishment of new aesthetic norms can be found in P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 80-175; I. Pears, The Discovery of Painting, and in the two essays by U. Böker cited above.

7. For an evaluation of the print see Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 110-11; and his Hogarth, vol. II, pp. 113-6.

8. On the phenomenon of commercialization within eighteen-century cultural consumption, see J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-century England, N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982), U. Böker, ‘John Gay's The Beggar's Opera’, pp. 140-5, and J. Brewer and R. Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods.

9. See especially Foucault's The Order of Things, and The History of Sexuality, 3 vols.

10. This is the view of mentality that governs the insightful study of N. Simms, The Humming Tree: A Study in the History of Mentalities. Simms argues that mentalities ‘are only partly textualizable’ and that their textual form ‘includes both the things that are unspeakable, unimaginable, and inconceivable and the tension that exists between them’ and what can be expressed (p. 14).

11. See my articles listed in the Bibliography.

12. On the publicity of Pastoral Letters see Paulson, Hogarth, vol. I, p. 283 n. 49; and p. 376 n. 48; and N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669-1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1926).

13. My account here is indebted to Paulson, Hogarth, vol. I, pp. 288-92; and II, pp. 88-9.

14. This is David Dabydeen's persuasive argument in Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain, pp. 104-5. Lichtenberg also stresses the general unpopularity of the Letter, arguing that it began to sell well when the merchants supported the ‘sender’ by distributing it at their expense. But given his dislike of clergymen (which he shared with Hogarth), he may be confirming a stereotype, for the high sales of the Letter tell a different story—but then again very little about the actual reception. See G. C. Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche, p. 117.

15. See Paulson, Hogarth, vol. I, pp. 1-2, 290.

16. My reading is indebted to the information provided by Paulson, Hogarth, vol. I, pp. 288-90; II, pp. 88-9, and Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 79-80. Paulson, again following his interest in author-intention, also develops a reading that relates this scene to the fact that Hogarth was a Deist and probably also a freemason.

17. On the role of paintings as part of the furniture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see the articles by C. Grimm and P. J. J. van Thiel cited above.

18. I discuss the series in the context of Hogarth's treatment of conduct books, and prescribed behaviour, in an article in a forthcoming collection of essays edited by Jacques Carré (Université de Clermont-Ferrand).

    For detailed discussions of Industry and Idleness see Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 129-39, and Hogarth, vol. II, pp. 289-322.

19. See R. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728-1737, and L. W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama, 1737-1824.

20. For details of the print see Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 108-9.

21. My discussion is indebted to the information provided by Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 146-7, and B. Hinz, William Hogarth: Beer Street and Gin Lane. Also see the recent evaluation of Beer Street and Gin Lane in the art-historical context of the ‘Last Judgment’, by Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild, pp. 264-94, where Busch provides useful information about the sociological and iconographic background for his new, interesting, reading of the series.

22. See G. C. Lichtenberg's [sic] Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, 10. Lieferung (Göttingen, 1808), p. 51.

23. Cf., for instance, the views advanced by Barry Wind and Ronald Paulson. Wind, in an author-oriented reading, sees Hogarth and his print as part of the establishment, sympathizing with Hanoverian ideas and brewer interests. Paulson believes that the print (in conjunction with Gin Lane) offers two possibilities of reading: one for the prosperous middle class (good versus evil) and one for the poor (prosperity causes evil). See Wind's essay, ‘Gin Lane and Beer Street: A Fresh Draught’, and Paulson's latest discussion of Beer Street in Hogarth, vol. III, pp. 23-6. Unfortunately, Wind's ‘fresh draught’ produces some rather stale ale, for it is basically a study of visual and verbal sources that served Hogarth as pretexts; Wind never questions the dualistic frame(work), including the relation between the accompanying verses and the image, and rejects the possibility that there might be irony (either intended by the author or produced by the reader) at work in Hogarth's iconotext.

24. Perhaps Paulson has this common feature in mind when he argues in Hogarth, vol. III, p. 23, that the fishwives are ‘reading the king's speech’. They have come all the way from Billingsgate to Westminster in order to sell their fish—but they are clearly reading the ballad, not the speech.

25. This is the persuasive argument of Stephen Behrendt's essay, in which he maintains that in Beer Street and Gin Lane ‘an implied dualism is in fact not supported but instead exploded’. See Behrendt, ‘Hogarth, Dualistic Thinking and the Open Culture’.

26. See Wind, ‘Gin Lane and Beer Street: A Fresh Draught’, and Paulson, Hogarth, vol. III, pp. 23-4. Also see Paulson's Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 145-8.

27. See Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, p. 226.

28. See Bal's Reading ‘Rembrandt’, pp. 235-6 and passim; and Damisch, Théorie du nuage, pp. 106-59, idem, L'Origine de la perspective.

29. See F. Ogée, ‘Lœil erre: les parcours sériels de Hogarth’. On the meaning of Beer Street that emerges from its serial aspect (Gin Lane being both its counterpart and its complement), see also D. Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 298-340, and H. J. Schnackertz, Form und Funktion medialen Erzählens. Narrativität in Bildsequenz und Comicstrip (Munich, 1980), pp. 35-86. See also Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 148.

30. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, p. 148.

31. See, for instance, Barry Wind, ‘Gin Lane and Beer Street’, who believes that the verses ‘make the message patent’ and that Hogarth's personal commentary ‘reenforced the admonitory message’.

32. Paulson, Hogarth, vol. III, pp. 25-6.

33. Paulson's argument echoes the theories of Wittgenstein and Nelson Goodman, who both assert that the codes in images are essentially richer and denser than those of verbal texts. See Wittgenstein's suggestion that density is by definition visual in Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus (1921; New York, 1961). However, in his later writings he changed his mind, maintaining that language is no less dense than are pictures: see Philosophical Investigations (1953; New York, 1958). Also see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. But the issue is far from resolved—witness Mieke Bal's statement, in Reading ‘Rembrandt’ (p. 401) that the density of codes is not a hallmark of the visual, which contradicts Paulson's underlying belief.

34. Paulson, Hogarth, vol. III, p. 26.

35. This point, which I entirely endorse, is made by Behrendt in ‘Hogarth, Dualistic Thinking, and the Open Culture’.

36. See Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 146-7; and Wind, ‘Gin Lane and Beer Street’. Berthold Hinz, in his detailed study of the series, follows Paulson and takes the meat to be a loin of mutton: William Hogarth: Beer Street and Gin Lane, p. 18. Werner Busch thinks the blacksmith is holding up pork: see Das sentimentalische Bild, p. 280.

37. See the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne et al., vol. II.

38. In his commentary to this scene, Lichtenberg, always perspicacious, finds a telling term—politics—for the speech and the papers, while stressing the relations between the beer, the mutton, and the interests of the King and the burghers. (G. C. Lichtenberg's Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, p. 50).

39. On the newspaper background of the Harlot series, see Paulson, Hogarth, vol. I, pp. 241-56; see also Paulson's Emblem and Expression, p. 37; and the commentary to The Stage-Coach, or the Country Inn Yard (1747), in Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 126-7.

40. For a recent perceptive discussion of the print see F. Ogée, ‘L'Onction extrême: une lecture de A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) de William Hogarth’.

41. Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung, pp. 47-8.

42. Lichtenberg bases his own punning ekphrasis of the central scene (he uses the German term Denkzettel, signifying memorandum, reminder and a lesson taught by physical means such as beating or thrashing) on the full title of the journal: The Remembrancer or Weekly Slab [Lichtenberg writes, ‘Stab’] on the Face for the Ministry, which obviously inspired Hogarth for his pictoral playing. See G. C. Lichtenberg's Erklärung, pp. 19-20. On the contemporary background see Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 142-5.

43. Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung, pp. 236-8.

44. For a discussion of the possible allusions see Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, pp. 94-5, and the critical works by Dabydeen and others cited there.

45. The term is Lichtenberg's, in Ausführliche Erklärung, p. 239.

46. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, p. 111.

47. Bernd Krysmanski, in his attempt (dissertation, 1994) to provide a comprehensive reading of Hogarth's Enthusiasm Delineated, has written more than 1000 pages—and there are still many open questions.

48. ‘Signature, Event, Context’, pp. 185-6, reprd in A Derrida Reader, p. 97.

49. See D. Eilon, Factions' Fiction: Ideological Closure in Swift's Satire, pp. 65-94, and my ‘Swift and the Female Idol’.

50. See Althusser's essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, and the critical discussion of Althusser's thesis in Visual Theory, ed. N. Bryson, pp. 3-4. Among the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ identified by Althusser (and to be distinguished from the repressive apparatuses, such as the Government, the Administration, the Police, the Army, the Courts, and the Prisons) and applicable to Hogarth's day and age one could name: the religious ISA; the educational ISA; the family ISA; the legal ISA; the political ISA; the communications ISA; and the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts). See the reprint of the major sections of Althusser's seminal essay in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood, pp. 928-36. For a critique of Althusser's view of the individual, which is partly based on Lacan's ‘imaginary consciousness’ and would seem to leave little room for personal ideological rebellion, see T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 171-3.

51. See especially Foucault's Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, and the three volumes of his Histoire de la sexualité. For a discussion of the role of discourse as seen by Althusser and Foucault, and of their influence on ‘New Historicism’, see M. Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (London, 1988), pp. 63-95; and R. Selden and P. Widdowson, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London, 1993), ch. 4 and 6.

52. See R. Barthes, ‘De l'oeuvre au texte’, p. 229, Le Plaisir du texte, pp. 100-01, and J. Kristeva, Sémeiotiké, pp. 145-6.

53. For a discussion, and application to art-historical studies, of Lacan's theory of the gaze, see Bryson's Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, the essays collected in his Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, and David Clarke's ‘The Gaze and the Glance: Competing Understandings of Visuality in the Theory and Practice of Late Modernist Art’, Art History, XV/II (1992), pp. 80-99. Also my ‘Learning to Read the Female Body’.

    Reacting to my article on eroticism in Hogarth's prints, in which I outline the discursive effects of Puritan moralism, Paulson finds such a view ‘wholly untenable’; see his comments to my discussion of Before and After in Hogarth, vol. III, p. 461 n. 66. Also see his negative response to my reading of The Sleeping Congregation, in Hogarth, vol. II, p. 407 n. 28.

    As my chapter above shows, it may be vastly more interesting to consider Hogarth not as a genial artist, but as a Derridean blind artist who masters neither space nor discourse. Hogarth, I have tried to show, was also written by the discursive fields and the mentalités of his age: some of them he manipulated, others, however, overpowered him. Paulson does not like the idea of a powerless Hogarth; I am not afraid of such a common sight (in art and literature), since we are all to some extent victims of the power lines of writing that have been the subject of Foucault's analyses.

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