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This chapter discusses several biographies of William Hogarth, and explores the nature and function of literary anecdotes in the construction and promotion of the artist's individual and artistic personality. More precisely, this section discusses the spatial qualities of certain anecdotes contained in John Nichols's Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth. It argues that literary anecdotes are the most pictorial and visually effective passages of Nichols's biographical account, and thus function as verbal and textual counterparts to Hogarth's pictures. These brief stories represent biographical images in words and contribute to elaborating an image of Hogarth as an artist that is highly reminiscent of his own portraits of characters.

This chapter argues that David Wilkie sought to represent the everyday stories as the authentic basis of social life, and also shows that his initial image of the everyday was not sustainable once there was no longer any consensus over who was and who was not properly part of society. Pitlessie Fair and the Village Politicians were visceral scenes of rough country life. William Hogarth is conspicuous by his absence from his historical scheme of things; and, given the regularity with which Wilkie was blithely compared to Hogarth by his contemporaries, he can only have had mixed feelings about him. The Chelsea Pensioners was one of three outdoor urban scenes that Wilkie exhibited in succession in 1821–3. The Village Politicians had as its basic theme the disruptive effects of news upon everyday life: the two were represented as incompatible.

This essay lays bare the rampant but thinly veiled scatology in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s renowned commentaries of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. It shows that Lichtenberg finds all kinds of scatological objects – chamber pots, enemas, anal swabs – in Hogarth’s prints by applying what he calls the hermeneutics of hypochondria. Such a hermeneutics follows digressions, metaphorical associations, and metonymical connections to identify scatological objects in the images even where there are none. The resulting excremental vision of A Harlot’s Progress evidences, in Lichtenberg’s view, his own hypochondria and threatens the validity of his interpretations. But he also turns the scatological motif against the interpretive excess that produced it: excrement confronts the hypochondriacal interpreter with his own corporeal mortality and thus with the limits of his interpretive capacities as a human. Scatological satire therefore serves, in Lichtenberg’s conception, as something like a cynic self-therapy for interpretive hubris.

This chapter focuses on the work of London artist William Hogarth. His print series Industry and Idleness, a twelve-print moral satire about Spitalfields weavers, was the best-selling of all British prints in the North American colonies. The series offers additional insight into the life and times of weaver Simon Julins. Given that the colonial North Americans who purchased this series were also the leading import market for Spitalfields silks, Americans who bought or saw Hogarth's prints would have been well acquainted with both Spitalfields and the products of its looms. Hogarth's use of Spitalfields weavers for his Industry and Idleness series allowed him to capture a place and industry with cultural resonance on both sides of the Atlantic. Situating Julins within the context of Hogarth's series shows that weavers like Julins should be understood as part of a transatlantic tale—a story dictated as much by colonial consumers and the imperial marketplace as by the realities of the metropole.

This chapter examines how alcohol use is represented in visual art. Representations of alcohol use and abuse have long been the subject of works of art ranging from Diego Velázquez’s painting of Bacchus offering the gift of wine to mankind as a deliverance from sorrow through to Franz Hals’ depiction of the merry drinker and Peder Kroyer’s artists’ party toast. All of these paintings present the positive effects of alcohol use. Conversely, Vincent van Gogh depicts the solitary and lonely absinthe drinker and, more tragically, William Hogarth illustrates the ravages that alcohol abuse brought to London in Gin Lane. Other artists, such as Maurice Utrillo and Jackson Pollack, were alcoholics themselves; Utrillo traded his drawings and paintings for drink.

Foundling stories, which abound in legend, have generally looked at the fate of the found child, not at the parents on either side, abandoning or taking in. But two famous stories, of Oedipus and Moses, do include parental elements. A form of collaborative parenthood can be seen in the founding of foundling hospitals at times when the abandonment of babies was commonplace. The chapter outlines the early history of the eighteenth-century London Foundling Hospital, which came about largely through the initiative of Captain Thomas Coram, and discusses the meanings of two of its paintings: William Hogarth's ‘Moses Brought before Pharaoh's Daughter’ (1756), and Emma Brownlow King's ‘The Foundling Restored to its Mother’ (1858). Two novels contemporary with King's painting both have stories of adoptive foundling fathers: George Eliot's Silas Marner (further discussed in Chapter 7) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847).

This chapter addresses two related subjects, the reception of De Hooghe’s satires and the role of the satirist. The focus of this discussion is the so-called Pamphlet War of 1690, the primary vehicle for much of the criticism of De Hooghe’s satires. In twelve scathing pamphlets published against Romeyn de Hooghe in the first several months of 1690, witnesses alleged his blasphemy, atheism, and sexual perversion, and embroiled him in a fevered exchange of pamphlets with representatives of Amsterdam. While such rhetoric employed against the printmaker in pamphlet literature vividly described his manifold immorality, Hollands hollende koe (Holland’s running cow), an anti-Williamite satire produced by the printmaker’s enemies in his distinctive etching style, provided material ‘evidence’ of his lack of integrity. With this print, De Hooghe was accused of working for both sides of the political divide—producing Orangist satires for William III and anti-Williamite satires for the Amsterdam regents. The potency of Hollands hollende koe depends fundamentally upon the assumption of integrity between satirist and satire, the notion that he or she believes in the positions and ideologies espoused in his or her satires. It will be argued that the conflation of satirist and satire and the attendant expectation of moral conviction on the part of the satirist are not only associated with the genre of political satire, they are engendered by it and feature prominently throughout its history.

This concluding chapter focuses on the question of circulation and impact: to what extent did De Hooghe’s satires travel beyond The Netherlands in the seventeenth century and what influence did they have on English political satire of the eighteenth century? The appearance of motifs from De Hooghe’s satires in mezzotints of c.1690 and prints on the subject of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 will be discussed as will instances in which De Hooghe’s satires were reissued in the eighteenth century. However, a comparison of this handful of examples with the liberal use of De Hooghe’s triumphal allegories and battle scenes in such distant locations as Latin America and Russia reveals one of the qualities that epitomizes political satire—its dramatic circumscription by temporal and geographical boundaries. Satire’s embeddedness in a specific political, historical, and cultural moment and its dependence upon text that often channels the idiosyncrasies of spoken language, render it difficult—often impossible without intensive investigation—to understand beyond its immediate context. This is as true for twenty-first-century satires as it was for those produced in the late seventeenth century.

The oratorio Susanna is based on the story of Susanna from the Apocrypha. In the biblical narrative Susanna is reduced to the status of an object, seen and not heard, and she functions simply to highlight the good or bad character of the menfolk around her. By contrast, the oratorio's libretto has a much more rounded portrayal of her, especially in her relationship with her husband Joacim, which is mutually passionate and chaste. This focus on the marriage relationship is unique among English treatments of the Susanna story between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which usually understand it as a cautionary morality tale. But when the libretto was written, the concept of sentimental marriage was gaining headway, and mercenary marriage had been criticized by the artist William Hogarth and the novelist Samuel Richardson. Susanna can thus be understood as an expression of support for these changing values around marriage.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s comics version of art history and how it reveals his fundamental ambivalence toward high art and the institution of the museum, even when he has been celebrated by many in these arenas. By analyzing “Our History of Art,” a series of episodes that appears among the opening pages of The ACME Report, it highlights the tension between Ware’s suspicion of the art world and his familiarity and ease with its conventions. The chapter also considers Ware’s advocacy for a greater awareness of comics in relation to his critique of traditional art histories. Furthermore, it discusses the influence of artists such as William Hogarth, René Magritte, and Philip Guston on Ware’s artistic production, along with his skepticism toward both art criticism and art museums.

Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the poet summons the miraculous and sacred power of music and song, but any allusion to Orpheus is shadowed by his tragic fate. Wordsworth’s poem recalls, by inversion, William Hogarth’s famous print, ‘The Enrag’d Musician’ (1741), in which a mob of urban noise-makers (including rival and degraded forms of street music and song) advance on the ‘classical’ violinist, himself a bathetic version of divine harmony. Hogarth’s urban ‘soundscape’ reappears in James Clarence Mangan’s poem ‘Khidder’ (1845), which likewise brings the fate of Orpheus, rather than his power, into focus. The violence with which street singers are faced is evident in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), whose title indicates that Orpheus will descend in vain into the hell of the city.

The eighteenth century saw the curious tradition of translating Milton’s Paradise Lost into normative English prose and verse. The status of these translations as literary curiosities belies their serious ambition: to secure a universal readership of this English classic, an ambition also articulated in contemporary works of criticism and commentaries. Rather than treating this cluster of works as adaptations, this chapter conceives of them as intralingual translations, thus positioning them in the terms with which their authors describe them and within the earlier tradition of translation-as-commentary. Milton’s English translators aim at making his epic accessible to women, ‘foreigners’, ‘young people’, and ‘those of a capacity and knowledge below the first class of learning’, even if that accessibility requires some rewriting. Borrowing methods from the teaching of Latin, these authors established a practice that persists to this day in student-friendly translations of English poetry.