SOURCE: Halsband, Robert. “Hogarth's Graphic Friendships: Illustrating Books by Friends.” In Johnson and His Age, edited by James Engell, pp. 333-66. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Halsband examines Hogarth's secondary career as a book illustrator for such notable eighteenth-century authors as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne.]

As a painter and draftsman-engraver William Hogarth ranks high in eighteenth-century British art. As a book illustrator, although here he expresses a lesser aspect of his genius, he is worthy of attention as well.¹ When he illustrated works by contemporary writers whom he knew personally, we can examine the illustrations in a biographical context to supplement other relevant contexts. His friendships with writers cover a wide range, from close intimacy (as with William Huggins) at one extreme, to that of mere acquaintanceship at the other. The types of literature he illustrated are likewise varied: a collection of essays; four stage works—an oratorio libretto, a ballad opera, a comic interlude, a burlesque tragedy; and, most successfully, one of the famous novels of the century.

The earliest example of Hogarth's work as a literary illustrator for someone he knew is his frontispiece in 1726 for Nicholas Amhurst's collection of periodical essays Terrae-Filius: Or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford. Amhurst's connection with the university had been stormy: in 1719, at the age of twenty-two he was expelled—for libertinism and misconduct, according to the authorities; for Whig principles and opposition to the university's Toryism and high church sentiments, according to his own self-defense. He then settled in London as a journalist and in 1721 began a campaign of revenge by issuing Terrae-Filius, published twice a week for about six months. In 1726 he collected and republished the essays in two volumes.

Amhurst's earliest connection with Hogarth had occurred in 1724, when, in his periodical Pasquin, he praised Hogarth's satiric print Masquerades and Operas, “representing the bad Taste of the Town,” as Hogarth himself described it, since masquerades, opera, and pantomime had driven English plays from the theaters.² Admiring Hogarth's work, Amhurst—rather than his printer Richard Francklin, who was politically oriented—probably engaged him to design and engrave the frontispiece for Terrae-Filius.

What does the print show? The first number of the periodical explains that at the Encaenia, Oxford's annual commemoration of founders and benefactors, an undergraduate in the role of university buffoon—called terrae-filius (or son of the soil)—delivered a mock, satirical oration made up of university gossip to divert the crowd of spectators, his “merry oration” being “interspers'd with secret history, raillery, and sarcasm, as the occasions of the times supply'd him with matter.” The setting is the Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren and opened in 1669, and today still used for the annual Encaenia (although an oration by a terrae-filius has long since been dispensed with).

In the gallery sit the undergraduates, one of whom is climbing over the balustrade; they frequently interrupted and heckled the speaker. Below them sit the masters and doctors. In the center the vice chancellor presides, with a proctor on his right. In the lower right corner stands the other proctor with a copy of Terrae-Filius that he has indignantly torn in half—probably because he believes himself slandered in it. But the focus of attention is the terrae-filius orator himself, the center figure in the cluster of people. His wig and gown have been torn off by an outraged woman. Others mentioned in his oration surround him menacingly; he is even being attacked by a dog. The print thus reflects the irreverent essays that it introduces.

Hogarth, of course, never studied at Oxford. Unless he attended an Encaenia for the purpose of designing the frontispiece, he could have based his design on a print of the Sheldonian and a description of the terrae-filius oration. As to his acquaintance with Amhurst, in 1729 the Craftsman, a political paper edited by Amhurst, printed a notice of Hogarth's secret marriage to the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, the painter.³ The information probably came to Amhurst through his friendship with Hogarth.

In contrast to Amhurst, who could not have known Hogarth intimately, William Huggins was a friend of long standing, and of such closeness that Hogarth addressed him in one letter as “My Dear best Friend.”⁴ To document their friendship we have engravings, letters, and a vivid little portrait in oils.

Huggins, born in 1696 and almost exactly Hogarth's age, was far from being a hack writer. An Oxford graduate, he was for brief periods a fellow of Magdalen and a functionary at Hampton Court. He also trained for the law, and assisted Hogarth in his campaign (in the 1730s) to persuade Parliament to draft legislation for the copyright of prints. But Huggins' main passion was Italian poetry. He was a pioneer enthusiast in the Romantic appreciation of Italian literature.⁵

His earliest known connection with Hogarth was as the painter's patron. About 1732 he bought from him two important paintings—a version of The Beggar's Opera and a picture of the Bambridge committee of the House of Commons during its investigation of the horrifying conditions in the Fleet prison. (Its warden, Thomas Bambridge, had bought the appointment from Huggins' father, who himself had been notorious for his profitable cruelty.) These two paintings had been intended for a collector, who when he became bankrupt fled England; Huggins generously bought them himself.⁶

About the same time on his own behalf he commissioned Hogarth to design a frontispiece for a literary work he had written. Its title, as published in 1733, was Judith: An Oratorio; or Sacred Drama, with music by Willem De Fesch, a Dutch composer recently emigrated to London. On the title page of the pamphlet Huggins modestly listed the author as W——H——. Through choruses, recitatives, and airs, Huggins dramatized the central episode of a story taken from the Old Testament Apocrypha. It tells how the beautiful and virtuous Judith, a Hebrew widow, determines to rescue her people from the besieging army of Assyrians. Accompanied by her maid, she goes to the camp of Holofernes, general of the Assyrian army. He is so struck by her beauty, which he hopes to enjoy that night, that he drinks himself into a stupor and falls asleep. Judith then seizes his sword and cuts off his head, which she carries back to the Hebrews. Their army then attacks, displaying the head on a spear, and the Assyrians, demoralized by the loss of their commander, are defeated and flee.

The story had frequently been used by Renaissance and baroque painters, most of whom depict Judith displaying the severed head. But Hogarth chose the less shocking but more suspenseful moment when Judith prepares to carry out her bold and bloody deed. Pointing to the victim with one hand, she holds his sword in the other. (His helmet and shield, no longer protecting him, lie nearby, symbolizing his helplessness.) Judith's grandly rhetorical gesture seems borrowed from history painting, as though Hogarth has miniaturized the biblical legend.⁷ The precise libretto passage that he illustrated in the frontispiece is Judith's air:

O God, a manly Strength impart
To my Hand as to my Heart,
For thy chosen People's Sake.
Rush forth thou massy glitt'ring Sword,
That on thy detested Lord
My just Vengeance I may take.

The quotation from Virgil printed at the bottom of the plate constitutes an ironic counterpoint to the picture. Translated it reads: “saved by these wounds of thine, and living by thy death.” In the Aeneid the lines are mournfully uttered by the Etruscan king when he sees the corpse of his son who was killed in the battle that has enabled him to survive.

As a specimen of Hogarth's draftsmanship, the design seems inferior. The heroine's arms are clumsily drawn, for example. But the weakness may also be blamed on the engraver, Gerard Vandergucht, who frequently engraved Hogarth's drawings. What can be said in favor of the composition is that it does reflect the pious fervor of Judith's heroism.

The oratorio was scheduled to be performed in the theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields on February 8, 1733, aided by new painted scenery and magnificent decoration.⁸ Cecilia Young, who was to sing the main part, was one of the best singers of her time, with a high and unusually flexible soprano. But the announced opening performance of Judith did not take place, for Miss Young withdrew because of illness, or so she claimed. Huggins angrily disclaimed responsibility for the cancellation, blaming it on “the Misconduct and pretended Sickness” of Miss Young.⁹ (Her frequent illness, Grove's New Dictionary of Music states, was attributed by some to intemperance.) A week later the performance took place, with an inferior singer in the leading part. The libretto, whose printing had evidently been arranged by Huggins, was sold only at the playhouse and could not have had a large sale. The performance, conducted by De Fesch, did not catch the town's fancy, and Judith was performed only once again, seven years later at a benefit for him.

Yet apart from the frontispiece, Hogarth made use of the oratorio in a curious way. Two months before its first performance, he issued subscription tickets for his own forthcoming large single engraving entitled A Midnight Modern Conversation. Most of the small subscription form is filled with a design usually referred to as “A Chorus of Singers.” The conductor, at the top of the heap of people, conducts from a score on which is printed “Judith: an Oratorio; or Sacred Drama by”; in the chorus, consisting of fourteen men and boys, five display their scores on which can be read “the world shall Bow to the Assyrian Throne”—the text of a choral number in Act I, Scene 1, of the oratorio. From the conductor at the top, evidently a caricature of the composer De Fesch, to the choirboys at the foot, the entire engraving has a crude, gutsy vigor about it, especially since all the individuals are characterized with sharp particularity.¹⁰ Hogarth's use of this oratorio chorus as the ornamental design on his subscription ticket can only be interpreted as an advertisement for his good friend's work, then in rehearsal. The oratorio's sacred theme served also as a moral contrast to the vice and debauchery that make up the subject of the engraving.

The warm friendship of Hogarth and Huggins continued to flourish. In January 1735 both men were among the group that founded the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, a social club devoted to convivial pranks. During the next two decades Huggins passed most of his time at his country house busy with literary pursuits. In 1757 he published his anonymous translation of Orlando Furioso in two volumes. Soon after that he asked Hogarth to paint his portrait as a companion piece to one of his late father, done by Hogarth in the early 1740s.¹¹ Hogarth graciously agreed. The result is an oval portrait showing Huggins, informally dressed in a morning cap looking to the side with an amiable expression as though pleased by what the artist has put in the background. The bust on the left is inscribed on its plinth “Il Divino Ariosto,” and on the right a wall plaque lists the three books of The Divine Comedy, a translation of which Huggins was working on. Foreseeing its publication, Huggins asked Hogarth to consider illustrating Dante's masterpiece. “What you propose,” Hogarth replied, “would be a Noble undertaking which I believe ten or a dozen years agoe I should have Embraced with joy, and would have pleased the Public, if I could have done the Author any degree of Justice, but consider now my dear Friend Sixty is too late in the day to begin so arduous a Task a work that could not be compleated in less than four or five years.” In his indolence, he continued, he could only be content with trifles.¹²

Almost two years later in 1760, when Huggins prepared to publish his translation, he asked Hogarth to make an engraving of his portrait to serve as frontispiece. Again Hogarth begged to be excused. He knew from experience, he explained, that he had the devil of a time copying his own work, and he was sure the poorest engraver could perform the task better than he. But, in fact, Huggins employed for the task Thomas Major, who would later be the first engraver elected to the newly established Royal Academy. As for Huggins' translation, except for a very brief excerpt published in a magazine,¹³ his ambitious work remained in manuscript (and is now lost), and his engraved portrait intended as a frontispiece was merely struck off in a few copies.¹⁴

Hogarth's frontispiece to Judith was not only a tribute to friendship but also a sign of his interest in the stage. He wished to compose his pictures, he once remarked, as though they were representations on the stage.¹⁵ Of the book illustrations he designed for friends, three others (besides Judith), were frontispieces for stage works.

Joseph Mitchell, a Grub Street poet and a member of the Scotch contingent in London, sought the patronage of the Prime Minister so strenuously that he was sometimes called Sir Robert Walpole's poet, although he failed to win Walpole's favor. He courted less exalted patrons as well. In February 1731 he published Three Poetical Epistles. To Mr. Hogarth, Mr. Dandridge, and Mr. Lambert, Masters of the Art of Painting. The first epistle, addressed to Hogarth as an “Eminent History and Conversation Painter,” praises him extravagantly: “Shakespeare in Painting, still improve / And more the World's Attention move.”

Perhaps in gratitude to Mitchell for his flattering notice,¹⁶ Hogarth designed the frontispiece for a ballad opera that Mitchell had recently completed. Entitled The Highland Fair: or, Union of the Clans, it was staged at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on March 20, 1731. In its brief prologue the supercilious Critick laughs at the notion of a Scotch opera, to which the poet replies: “Why not, Sir, as well as an English, French, or Italian one?” (The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, a spectacular success, had started the vogue in 1728.) Mitchell's subtitle—the “Union of the Clans”—sums up the theme of its Romeo and Juliet plot. Three performances the first week and a fourth the next month make up its entire stage history. It was published during the first week, having already been advertised in The London Evening Post: “With a curious Frontispiece, design'd by Mr. Hogarth.”

What Hogarth depicted in the frontispiece is the concluding scene of the opera. One clan chief, Colin (on the left) is accompanied by his piper, behind whom can be seen his vassals and servants. Confronting him stands Euen, chief of the enemy clan. Their exact actions are given in the stage directions: “The Chiefs bow thrice as they meet, Colin making the first Steps and Reverences, according to the Ceremonial agreed upon.” Both chiefs are armed with nondescript swords and shields, but with Scotch bonnets on their heads and a set of bagpipes to supply local color. The engraver of Hogarth's design was again Gerard Vandergucht, this time less graceless than in the Judith frontispiece. The caption under the print, far from reflecting its Scottish setting and story, comes from the Aeneid: “Perchance even this [distress] will some day be a joy to recall.” In the Roman epic this is how Aeneas consoles his men after they have been storm-tossed onto the shore of Carthage. Similarly, the Scottish clan chiefs, living in peace, will some day recall their former distressful strife. Presumably the Latin tag, like the one printed under the frontispiece to Judith, was provided by Hogarth. Yet neither literary work bears any relation to Roman epic or legend. Perhaps Hogarth was recalling his boyhood training, when his father was a schoolmaster and Latin scholar.

Such an ardent theater-goer as Hogarth inevitably encountered David Garrick, the greatest actor and after 1747 the most successful theatre manager of the time. In 1741 at the very beginning of his London career the young actor achieved instant fame as Shakespeare's Richard III. Hogarth must have met him soon afterwards. Unlike previous actors, who postured the role in the traditional declamatory style, Garrick transformed himself into the crafty, mercurial monarch, playing him with naturalistic expression and intensity. The high point of his performance was the tent scene in the final act, when Richard awakens from his guilty dream to be confronted by the ghosts of his victims. When Hogarth painted his portrait of Garrick in 1745 he chose this dramatic scene. Huge, life-size dimensions endow the picture with the sweep and grandeur of history painting. As Ronald Paulson writes, it is a remarkable fusion of history painting and intimate portraiture.¹⁷ Evidently not commissioned by Garrick, it was sold to a private collector, after being engraved as a print.

Not only actor and manager, Garrick was also playwright and poet, and he involved Hogarth in both these activities near the end of Hogarth's life. In March 1762 Garrick wrote a brief comic interlude in verse for the theatre in Drury Lane, calling it The Farmer's Return from London. In the preface he modestly claims that he wrote it only as a benefit for Mrs. Pritchard, one of his favorite leading ladies, and would not have printed it “had not his Friend, Mr. Hogarth, flattered him most agreeably, by thinking [it] not unworthy of a Sketch of his Pencil.” He was therefore dedicating “this Trifle” to Hogarth, he writes, to honor him “both as a Man and an Artist.”

In his frontispiece Hogarth has delineated the homely kitchen-living room in which the farmer—played by Garrick—tells his family about his visit to London, where he has seen the coronation (of George the Third and his bride), attended the theater, and visited Cock Lane, scene of a recent ghost-hoax. Although Garrick provided the farmer and his wife with three children, Hogarth put only two into his design. The cracked wall and coarse furnishings reflect the rugged simplicity of the farmer, whose Falstaffian figure and rough costume are in tune with his rustic dialect and crude sense of humor. The scene glows with earthy realism of Dutch and Flemish genre paintings.¹⁸ When his children are out of the room the farmer assures his wife that he has not succumbed to any prostitutes in London: “I know, as we sow we must reeap, / And a cunning old ram will avoid rotten sheep.” The part of his wife was played not by Mrs. Pritchard, as intended, but by Mary Bradshaw, who won the greatest success of her career in that part.

On the stage the interlude was popular, no doubt for its topicality and robust humor. It played for twelve nights the first season, and three the following. In print, as a thin pamphlet, it went into a second edition the same year. Perhaps Hogarth's frontispiece helped sell it, particularly since the engraver had done the design justice. He was James Basire, who had recently been appointed engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, and who is best known today as William Blake's teacher and master.

The friendship between Garrick and Hogarth was acknowledged after Hogarth's death, when Mrs. Hogarth asked the actor to write an epitaph for her late husband's tombstone. It begins: “Farewell! great painter of Mankind! / Who reach'd the noblest point of Art …”¹⁹

Hogarth's friendship with Garrick runs a curiously parallel course to his relationship with Henry Fielding. Warmly admired by Fielding, Hogarth designed the frontispiece for one of his friend's minor plays and after Fielding's death honored him with the portrait that introduces his collected works.

In his brief career as playwright, from 1728 until the Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding wrote a variety of comedies, farces, and burlesques. When his burlesque Tom Thumb, A Tragedy (in two acts) was staged and published in March 1730 he was at least acquainted with Hogarth. A year later, after he had revised and enlarged the play as The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (in three acts), it bore the frontispiece designed by Hogarth. Here the artist could display his brilliance as caricaturist; and in this plate his customary engraver did justice to his design.

Tom Thumb, the hero, is hardly visible as he struts (in the lower left), dressed in armor with an over-sized plume decorating his helmet. This “little Hero, Giant-killing Boy,” as he is called in the play (p. 7) is further described: “Tho' small his Body be, so very small, / A Chairman's Leg is more than twice as large” (1731, p. 4). In the particular scene illustrated in the frontispiece two ladies in rivalry for Tom Thumb's love face each other. The taller one is Glumdalca, the captive Queen of the Giants, who is beloved by King Arthur, and she has just boasted of her amorous conquests to her rival, Princess Huncamunca, the king's daughter. The princess says, as she approaches the rival queen: “Let me see nearer what this Beauty is, / That captivates the Heart of Men by Scores.” And as she holds a candle up to the Queen's face she exclaims: “Oh! Heaven, thou art as ugly as the Devil (1731, p. 31). (These lines parody the passage in Dryden's All for Love, where Octavia scrutinizes Cleopatra to discover the charms that have bewitched Mark Antony.²⁰)

In designing the frontispiece Hogarth was apparently guided by the stage representations at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, where he could have seen the play in rehearsal. (The text, with frontispiece, was published just before the first performance and during the play's run was sold at the theatre.) The background has the look of a stage set: an interior in the Palladian style. Tom Thumb's size in the frontispiece is necessarily subhuman—or, seen in a different perspective, he is human while the two women are superhuman giantesses. In the earlier version of the play Tom Thumb had been played by a girl (Miss Jones). In The Tragedy of Tragedies the part was played by a boy, “Young [John] Verhuyck,” whose only other recorded stage appearance, two years earlier, had been in The Beggar's Opera “perform'd by Lilliputians.” The high-pitched voice of this diminutive youth would have added a measure of humor to the swashbuckling boasts of Tom Thumb the Great.

That Hogarth was commissioned to supply this amusing frontispiece to the dramatic burlesque implies that Fielding held the artist in high regard; and he was not reluctant to express his admiration explicitly in print. In his periodical The Champion he called Hogarth “one of the most useful Satyrists any Age hath produced” (June 10, 1740). In the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) and in the text of Tom Jones (1749) as well, he pointedly paid tribute to Hogarth's genius.²¹ He continued the compliments by referring readers to Hogarth's prints for characters and scenes in his novels;²² he modestly assumed that he could only approximate with words what Hogarth so eloquently expressed with brush, pencil, and burin.

An opportunity for Hogarth to exhibit his friendship for Fielding came in 1762, some eight years after Fielding's premature death, when Fielding's publisher issued the first collected edition of his works and needed a frontispiece for the first volume. Fielding had apparently never sat for his portrait. Hogarth designed a suitable sketch, and this was engraved by Isaac Taylor, one of the better engravers of the time. Whether Hogarth drew the portrait from memory or used a silhouette profile given to him—the facts are disputed—the framed bust is certainly his own creation. Himself nearing the end of his life, he was able to infuse the slight outline with a striking intensity of expression. The prominent nose and chin, the brilliant deep-set eyes, and the receding upper lip, indicating the loss of his teeth (which Fielding joked about)²³—all contribute to the human likeness.

Set in its ornamental frame—designed probably by the engraver—the portrait hangs above various objects and emblems relating to Fielding as writer and lawyer. For the man himself, the sword symbolizes his aristocratic family background; he was a collateral descendant of the Earls of Desmond and Denbigh. The pen and inkwell stand for his literary profession, and as evidence the book titles can be read: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and his last novel Amelia, opened to its concluding pages. Of the two masks decorated with laurel leaves, only the mask of comedy is placed upright, while the mask of tragedy—a genre Fielding never practised—lies supine and unused. The scales of justice refer to his appointment as justice of the peace; and the Statutes at Large Vol XIII is the annual volume of Sessions Acts for 1740 (the thirteenth year of George II's reign), when Fielding was called to the bar and began his legal career. Against the tome leans a bundle of legal briefs, and under it lies a legal document, perhaps a cognizance, unfolded toward the viewer to display a version of Fielding's own signature. His career as lawyer and judge bridged his activities as playwright and novelist: all these phases, placed under his portrait, have the effect of an epitaph. Thus Hogarth memorialized his friend.

Publishers at that time rarely added illustrative plates to contemporary novels, a new genre regarded as relatively ephemeral. Hogarth had once begun to illustrate the classic Don Quixote, a model of sorts for Joseph Andrews, in which Fielding invoked “the inimitable Pencil of my Friend Hogarth” (1742).²⁴ But when Fielding's publisher decided to illustrate the third edition with a dozen engraved plates the following year, he did not turn to Hogarth, who would presumably have found the task congenial. Instead James Hulett designed and engraved the plates, and they seem feeble compared to Fielding's lusty text. His later novels Tom Jones and Amelia were not illustrated in any contemporary edition.

Two other novelists, however, both friends of Hogarth, commissioned him to illustrate their work. When Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded became a sensational success on its publication in November 1740, Samuel Richardson, its anonymous author and one of its three publishers, determined to have the second edition embellished with a frontispiece for each of the two volumes. He was not unfamiliar with illustrated books, the previous year having himself edited a collection of Aesop's fables that contained many illustrative plates. His purpose in adding plates to Pamela was probably to encourage the sale of a new edition, though in this instance it is difficult to understand why any encouragement was needed. Instead of hiring one of the hacks employed in the printing trade, he turned to Hogarth.

By the end of December (1740) Richardson's friend Aaron Hill, playwright and journalist, had heard that he proposed to use illustrations in the new edition. “The designs you have taken for frontispieces,” Hill wrote to him, “seem to have been very judiciously chosen; upon presupposition that Mr. Hogarth is able (and if any-body is, it is he), to teach pictures to speak and to think.”²⁵ But when the second edition of the novel was published in February 1741 it contained no plates. In his lengthy introduction to the first volume Richardson explained that “it was intended to prefix two neat Frontispieces”; and that although one was actually finished, there was no time to execute the other because of the pressing demand for the new edition. Besides, he added, the engraving of the finished design, “having fallen very short of the Spirit of the Passages they were intended to represent, the Proprietors were advised to lay them aside.” No engraving or even sketch of either frontispiece survives as evidence of Hogarth's design and Richardson's disappointment. The publisher did not necessarily disapprove of Hogarth's design, since it was the engraving that he found wanting; and the two men remained friends. But Richardson persisted in his desire to illustrate the novel; and in the following year the sixth edition of Pamela Part I was embellished not with two but with fourteen plates by the leading book illustrator of the decade, Hubert Gravelot, and the up-and-coming Francis Hayman. These illustrations need not be discussed here since they do not concern Hogarth, but they demonstrate Richardson's serious intention to have his novel illustrated.

The other novelist with whose work Hogarth was connected, more fruitfully this time, was Laurence Sterne. Of all Hogarth's literary friends and (in a sense) patrons, Sterne stands out as the only one who both studied and practised painting.²⁶ In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman he discussed its craft as well as its aesthetics. When he alluded to Hogarth in the novel he could not have been certain that Hogarth would in fact be its illustrator.

Since Dodsley, the London publisher, had declined to publish Tristram Shandy on his terms (in 1760) Sterne arranged for the two volumes to be printed in York, and he shipped some copies to Dodsley to sell in London. The book's instant and striking popularity quickly persuaded Dodsley to publish a second edition.

He signed a contract with Sterne (on March 8, 1760) setting the terms for reprinting the first two volumes and for issuing (at the same time) the third and fourth. The contract was witnessed by Sterne's friend Richard Berenger, a bon vivant and man-about-town. To Dr. Johnson he seemed “the standard of true elegance,” and to Hannah More, “everybody's favourite.”

He could easily have been a favorite of Sterne's, for before the two parted that day he told Sterne that he would gladly be of service to him. “You bid me tell You all my Wants,” Sterne wrote to him later in the day; and then he specified: “no more than ten Strokes of Howgarth's witty Chissel, to clap at the Front of my next Edition of Shandy.” He then described the scene he wished illustrated: “The loosest Sketch in Nature, of Trim's reading the Sermon to my Father &c; w[oul]d do the Business—& it w[oul]d mutually illustrate his System & mine.” Since such a sketch by Hogarth was “not to be bought with money,” he tells Berenger, he would ask it as a favor from the artist he so much admired.²⁷ Berenger's request on Sterne's behalf was successful. On March 25 a newspaper advertisement promised that the new edition of Tristram Shandy would appear the following week “with a Frontispiece by Mr. HOGARTH,” and on April 3—exactly four weeks after Sterne's request—the illustrated edition was on sale.²⁸

Why had Sterne asked for this particular episode to be the subject of the frontispiece? First let us see what he had written about painting and painters (including Hogarth) in these first two volumes—which, one may assume, Hogarth had already read before being solicited through Berenger to provide a frontispiece. In the first volume Sterne had inserted, in chapter 8, a mock-dedicatory letter, which he then defends (in the next chapter) as being a good one, by analogy with the attributes of painting: design, coloring, drawing, and so on. He more pointedly alludes to painting in the second volume (chapter 6), where he draws an analogy between rhetoric, art, and music: “Just heaven! how does the Poco piu and the Poco meno of the Italian artists;—the insensible MORE OR LESS, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statue! How do the slight touches of the chisel, the pencil, the pen, the fiddlestick, et caetera,—give the true swell, which give the true pleasure!” When Sterne wishes to portray Dr. Slop, the man-midwife who so clumsily brings Tristram into the world, he invokes Hogarth by name. “Imagine to yourself,” he writes, “a little, squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horseguards” (vol. 2, ch. 9). “Such were the outlines of Dr. Slop's figure,” he continues, “which,—if you have read Hogarth's analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would;—you must know, may as certainly be caracatur'd, and convey'd to the mind by three strokes as three hundred.”

How appropriate, then, that the scene Sterne asked Hogarth to illustrate should include Dr. Slop! The entire scene—of Corporal Trim reading the sermon to Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, and Dr. Slop—is sketched verbally by Sterne as though he were giving directions to the illustrator. As Trim prepares to read, Sterne interrupts: “But before the Corporal begins, I must first give you a description of his attitude.” Not that of a soldier standing in his platoon ready for action, but as unlike that as could be. “He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon … He stood … his right-leg firm under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight,—the foot of his left-leg … advanced a little,—not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them;—his knee bent, but that not violently,—but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty;—and I add, of the line of science too”; after which Sterne explains why a scientific as well as an aesthetic reason authenticates Trim's posture.

Hogarth has stated in the preface to his treatise The Analysis of Beauty (1753) that the serpentine is the “line of beauty.” And to be sure, Trim's figure seen from behind (as here) is serpentine, in contrast to the gross, swollen caricature of Dr. Slop seen in profile. He has not yet finished outlining Trim's posture and proportions: “He held the sermon loosely,—not carelessly, in his left-hand, raised something above his stomach, and detach'd a little from his breast” (vol. 2, chs. 15-17). What Hogarth had to do, then, was to carry out the directions set down by Sterne; and is it not plausible that Sterne specified this very scene to be illustrated because he himself had conceived it in graphic (as well as rhetorical) terms?

This frontispiece to the second edition of the novel was repeated in the third, but in the fourth edition—published later in the same year—Hogarth altered it. Using his original drawing, he made two conspicuous additions which were duly copied by the engraver. Centered in the foreground a tricorn hat lies on the floor. The justification for this is clear in Sterne's text: as Corporal Trim prepares to read the sermon he “laid his hand upon his heart, and made an humble bow to his master;—then laying down his hat upon the floor, and taking up the sermon in his left-hand …” and so on. In his former version Hogarth had overlooked the hat; he now gives it a place in the design. But why the grandfather clock in the corner of the room? It is unmentioned in this scene. Since the passage of time is so essential an element of the story, intricately woven into its texture, a clock serves as its visible presence.²⁹ In the other plate—the frontispiece to volume 3—as we shall see, a clock again stands in the corner of a different room. Neither of these clocks, we should note, is the one that Tristram's father had forgotten to wind in the memorable first scene of the novel; that one stood at the head of the backstairs (ch. 4).

At the end of January 1761 Dodsley issued the third and fourth volumes of Tristram Shandy. In these Sterne again discussed painting and the sister-art of literature. In one passage where he wishes to describe the posture of Tristram's father, he writes: “his whole attitude had been easy—natural—unforced: Reynolds himself, as great and gracefully as he paints, might have painted him as he sat” (ch. 2). In contrast to this sober comparison, Sterne could also be ironic about the art criticism lavished by connoisseurs on grand pictures: “not one principle of the pyramid in any one group” (referring to the Italian treatise on painting by Lomazzo, mentioned by Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty).³⁰ And he then rattles off the flattering clichés applied to such masters as Titian (coloring), Rubens (expression), Raphael (grace); concluding with: “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world … the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!” (ch. 12).

As a frontispiece in the third volume, Dodsley inserted the illustration of a scene from, oddly enough, the fourth volume; and again it was Hogarth who designed it. Unlike the illustration for the first volume, commissioned (so to speak) by Sterne, this one has no supporting documentation to explain its genesis. By then, since Sterne and Hogarth were on friendly terms, their agreement could have been personal and verbal. The scene chosen is the crucial one of Tristram's baptism. Susannah has been charged by Mr. Shandy to tell the curate to christen the boy Trismegistus, but she garbles the message, and the curate—whose own name is Tristram—bestows it on the infant. Then Sterne continues: “My father followed Susannah with his night-gown across his arm, with nothing more than his breeches on, fastened through haste with but a single button, and that button through haste thrust only half into the button-hole.—She has not forgot the name, cried my father, half opening the door—No, no, said the curate, with a tone of intelligence … Pish! said my father, the button of his breeches slipping out of the button-hole” (ch. 14). In this drawing the figure of Mr. Shandy—“almost incredibly clumsy for Hogarth,” writes the editor of his drawings³¹—stands with clenched fist, as though aflame with anger that his son has been misnamed. The baptismal basin, placed on a chair, has been overturned, thus adding an element of disorder and confusion to the scene.

Transferred to the copper plate by the engraver, the design was clearly altered, presumably by Hogarth's direction. Mr. Shandy holds out his hand as though uttering the pish directed at either Susannah or the buttonhole. This time the baptismal basin rests on a table, unspilled, next to a prayer-book; and instead a pillow, on which the infant had been laid, has fallen to the floor. Both frontispieces in Tristram Shandy were engraved by Simon François Ravenet, a French craftsman resident in London. Since he had been employed by Hogarth to engrave two of the plates in Marriage a la Mode (1745) he was presumably employed by Dodsley at Hogarth's suggestion.

If Sterne planned that Hogarth should design any additional frontispieces, he could easily have been discouraged by this crude one. In any case, no illustration accompanied any of the succeeding five volumes. Hogarth's involvement in political controversy with Churchill and Wilkes, as well as his poor health, would have discouraged him from any further work for Sterne, and his death in 1764 put an end to his career.

What have we seen in this rapid survey of Hogarth's book illustrations for his friends over a span of thirty-six years? Clearly he was stimulated by the most worthy works: Fielding's burlesque tragedy, Garrick's comic interlude, and Sterne's eccentric novel. His friendship with all these writers added, no doubt, some interest, even enthusiasm, to these illustrations. They are tributes to friendship as well as graphic embellishments. They also demonstrate Hogarth's versatility as an illustrator, a versatility matched in his paintings and various original series of engravings.

Notes

1. I am greatly indebted to two important books by Ronald Paulson: Hogarth's Graphic Works, rev. ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970) and Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), hereafter cited as HLAT. My essay can be regarded as a series of footnotes to Paulson in the sense that it amplifies minor topics of his large-scale works.

2. Paulson, HLAT, I, 103, 121.

3. Ibid., I, 204.

4. Ibid., I, 263.

5. Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature 1755-1815 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 33.

6. Paulson, HLAT, I, 230.

7. Hogarth's design has striking similarities to a print of Judith by Bernard Picart, engraved by Pigne, probably dating from 1710 (Kitto extra-illustrated Bible, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, vol. 30, f. 5720). Paulson mentions Picart's influence on an earlier work by Hogarth (Hogarth's Graphic Works, I, 31).

8. John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated (London, 1791-1798), II, 526.

9. Unless otherwise noted, all references to stage performances are drawn from The London Stage 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960-1968), Part 3: 1729-1747, ed. Arthur H. Scouten; Part 4: 1747-1776, ed. G. W. Stone, Jr.

10. For a detailed analysis of the plate, see Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 62.

11. Paulson, HLAT, II, 263.

12. Ibid., II, 264-265.

13. British Magazine, April 1760, p. 266.

14. One copy is in the Huntington Library.

15. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 209.

16. Paulson, HLAT, I, 235-237, 531.

17. HLAT, II, 29.

18. For a detailed analysis of the plate, see Antal, Hogarth, p. 71.

19. George Winchester Stone, Jr. and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. 105.

20. John Dryden, Four Tragedies, ed. L. A. Beaurline and F. Bowers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 246.

21. Joseph Andrews, ed. M. C. Battestin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 6, n. 1.

22. Robert E. Moore, Hogarth's Literary Relationships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), pp. 127-132.

23. Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), III, 71-73. For a thorough analysis of Fielding portraiture, see Martin C. Battestin, “Pictures in Fielding,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17 (1983), 1-13.

24. Ed. Battestin (1967), p. 41.

25. Richardson, Correspondence, ed. A. L. Barbauld (London, 1804), I, 56.

26. Sterne scholarship has not overlooked this rich topic; see especially William V. Holtz, Image and Immortality A Study of “Tristram Shandy” (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970).

27. Sterne, Letters, ed. Lewis P. Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), pp. 99-100.

28. Kenneth Monkman, “The Bibliography of the Early Editions of Tristram Shandy,” The Library, 5 ser., vol. 25 (1970), p. 22.

29. Cf. Samuel L. Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), p. 59.

30. P. 91.

31. A. P. Oppe, The Drawings of William Hogarth (London: Phaidon Press, 1948), p. 55.