George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 88 George & The Influence of William Hogarth PART ONE: A History Lesson.

When George was a lad, he was addicted to the works of William Hogarth (1697-1764). His father owned a large format edition of plates made after the original paintings, and George tells us he spent many happy hours looking through the images. When his father died, George inherited the book.

The Painter And His Pug
by William Hogarth 1745

It seems an odd choice for a father to share such a book with a child. In his own time, Hogarth's work was considered unsuitable for children's eyes - even in the harsh eighteenth century, children were considered to be sponges to bad influences, and likely to be affected by the tales of the seamier side of life. Perhaps George used to sneak in and have a crafty vada while his father was tramping the lanes of Wakefield collecting fronds. Perhaps George developed some of his own peculiar peccadilloes from the frisson of danger present when forbidden fruit is greedily gobbled up - looking at all those sins on display would have been an education.

Hogarth's biography would have been of interest to George, and in it, we have examples of what Jung and Sting call 'synchronicity', but what Douglas Adams refers to as the 'interconnectedness of everything' that chime with our man - set yourself the task of spotting them.

William Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, London. For anyone interested, it was an area first developed by Sir Richard Riche (the man who failed to stand by his friend, Thomas Cromwell), after being given Bartholomew Priory at the time of the Reformation's campaign of urban planning known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In Hogarth's time, it was situated round the corner from Grub Street click.

His father was a Classics scholar and Latin teacher who had no real talents, so he took up writing for hack publications. When this failed to pay enough, he opened a coffee shop where only Latin was allowed to be spoken - a proper USP if ever there was one. But, vulgo acceptam non, and it soon closed, with the educated entrepreneur eventually being thrown into the Fleet Prison for his debts. Hogarth never forgot this humiliation and the misery it brought on his family. If his work was about anything in particular, then it sought to portray the arbitrary outcomes of human endeavours, particularly how hope can be destroyed, how all plans can go awry, and how adversity turns up at the party whenever it can get its foot in the door. It also gave him a strong drive to make money - which fuelled his equally strong drive to win fame at his chosen craft.

Hogarth worked as an apprentice printer and etcher until he was in a position to make a name for himself as an independent. He would walk the streets of London observing the masses and making notes and sketches for future works - much as George used to do. Books of printed plates, like the one George had, were based on paintings - and for Hogarth's first real success, A Harlot's Progress, he had first painted a scene of a prostitute about to be arrested for her crimes - which became scene 3 of the series. All of the plates are based on this series of paintings now in the Sir John Soane's Museum in London - having been bought by Sir John directly from the artist.

A Harlot's Progress of 1732 click concerns a country girl, who comes to London seeking work as a seamstress but becomes the mistress of an old, rich man. Thrown out by him because of her habit of taking young lovers, she becomes diseased and mad and eventually dies of syphilis. Some of George's biographers trot out a version of this tale whenever they think of George's first wife, Marianne, but that might be down to the fact they assume all working class girls are prostitutes at heart, and all working girls become infected with venereal disease. I'm sure Freud would be able to explain their motives to them. Marianne aka Nell is often described as a country girl who fell from grace in a big city - but George told HG Wells Edith was a country girl who fell from grace... so, perhaps George is the one we should blame for this episode of rampant wish-fulfilment.

What would the child George have seen in his book? Here are tinted versions of the six Harlot plates, with their captions - George would probably have viewed monochromes:

1. Moll arrives in London

2. Moll the Harlot

3. The Harlot Apprehended

4. The Harlot Does Bird

5. The Harlot's end (1)

6. The Harlot's Wake 

In later years, George would have been particularly interested in Plate 4 - The Harlot Does Bird - as he had done a bit of bird, himself, and would be able to compare notes.

Belle Vue Manchester - where George did his bird.

Hogarth was a man somewhat at odds with his time - he hated the influence the rise of Classicism was having on the traditional values of England (back in those days, 'England' stood as a term for all the UK). He despised the French and the Italians - and did all he could to promote English superiority. In Commonplace 23, we saw how his painting 'The Roast Beef of Old England' click was based on the Grub Street Opera by Henry Fielding. (here is a hint at why click and click)

In 1732, Hogarth went on an extended holiday - his staycation version of the Grand Tour - with some chums and then returned to compile Five Days Peregrinations Around The Isle of Sheppey. If you can access google play you can download it for free here click. It does contain images - Hogarth's sense of humour comes into play, sometimes rather in a sort of Georgian Carry On fashion. Dickens' Pickwick Papers covers similar turf, albeit in a more complicated, less scatological, way, but it is similar.

Hogarth's works were popular with all the social classes - he didn't differentiate between them and preach that the rich were morally superior to the poor. It was clear to Hogarth we are all in the gutter together, making a mess of things, or being the victims of circumstance. Without being politically aligned in any direction (he lampooned both Whigs and Tories), he believed in private philanthropy and getting stuck in to help the disadvantaged. 'Charity' that came from institutional places was the norm, but the idea of the private benefactor who gave for the common good was a brand new concept. At St Bartholomew's Hospital, Hogarth painted huge murals for free - to save them being done by an Italian! - click to see - and then turned his hand to supporting needy children.

Captain Thomas Coram by William Hogarth 1740

One of Hogarth's most lasting philanthropic concerns was the Foundling Hospital, the building now being run as The Foundling Museum click. Captain Thomas Coram set up the first ever charity dependent on public donations, to help children; it's still going strong. Hogarth donated paintings for the charity to sell, Thomas Gainsborough helped him decorate the interior walls of the building, and George Frideric Handel composed music for it - click to find out about Coram and the Handel concert.

The Foundling Hospital offered a place for unwanted or abandoned babies or those who, for various reasons, could not stay with their mothers - such as when there were no workhouse places for babies, or a widow remarried and her second husband did not want his predecessors' child. A mother would leave a small, unique token to be taken as ID in the case she might one day be able to return and reclaim her child. This new move to identify children as being vulnerable and worth helping quickly caught on and raising money for them became fashionable. The children would be educated and then work was found for them - a chance for a decent life as a servant or an apprentice.

Foundling tokens 

In 1735, a woman called Judith Dufour dropped her two-year old child off at a workhouse because - she claimed - she could not look after him. She eventually returned and reclaimed him - he was now well-dressed in new clothes. Judith took him home, killed him, disposed of his body and then sold the clothes he wore and used it to buy gin. Or, so the story goes.

Hogarth may have had this in mind when he made perhaps his most famous picture - Gin Lane. It is a satire on the addiction to the dreaded foreign substance he despised, and the way this foreign muck was ruining the salt of the earth Londoners.

Gin Lane

Beer Street

Here, we have Gin Lane, next to Beer Street, its companion piece, celebrating the delights of British Beer. These two separate plates were meant to be viewed side-by-side, so a comparison could be drawn between the decent consumption of British beer, which makes us happy and content, and the foul, destructive consumption of foreign gin.

George was occasionally a bottled Bass beer man - oddly he says he took it for medicinal reasons (yep, that old excuse haha). He reports it went through him like a train, but as this seems to be a common effect of the ale (according to my reliable sources!), and George was a martyr to his innards, we must not say he - and his bowels - could not 'take' their beer.

A Bar At The Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet 1882
(Bass beer bottles with red triangle logo)

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE HOGARTH'S THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY AND HIS SERPENTINE LINE
AND GO TO click TO SEE HOW BEER AND TEA HAVE SHAPED OUR WORLD AND PROBABLY SAVED MILLIONS OF LIVES.