by Michael Dean
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2012 by
Duckworth Overlook
LONDON
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
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[email protected]
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NEW YORK
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www.overlookpress.com
© 2012 by Michael Dean
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Michael Dean to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 978-1-46830-717-7
Contents
Copyright
Cast of Characters
Part I
The Finger of God 1697–1714
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
From Gamble to Rich 1714–1732
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part III
From the Harlot to the Devil 1732–1758
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part IV
Finis 1757–1764
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Author’s note
For my late parents, Anne and Joe Dean
Cast of Characters
Listed here under the part in which they first appear
PART I
William Hogarth – painter and engraver
Richard Hogarth – William’s father
Anne Hogarth (née Gibbons) – William’s mother
Anne and Mary Hogarth – William’s sisters
John Dalton – painter
Lavinia Fenton – actress, later Duchess of Bolton
Edmund Curll – bookseller-publisher
John Huggins – prison-keeper (governor) of the Fleet Prison
Anthony (Moses) da Costa – banker and financier
Kate – a bawd at da Costa’s house
PART II
Ellis Gamble – silver engraver
Felix Pellett (Frenchy) – apprentice to Ellis Gamble
Stephen Fowler (Birdcatcher) – apprentice to Ellis Gamble
Sir James Thornhill – Hogarth’s patron, later his father-in-law
John Thornhill – friend of Hogarth, Sir James’s son
Jane Thornhill – Hogarth’s wife, Sir James’s daughter
Lady Judith Thornhill – Sir James Thornhill’s wife
Fanny – Jane Thornhill’s maid
Sarah Young – assistant to Hogarth’s sisters, later the Hogarths’ housemaid
Mother Douglas – keeper of a bawdy house
Francis Hayman – painter, later Old Slaughter Group
PART III
Trump – a pug dog
Theosophus Taylor – apothecary
George Lambert – painter, Old Slaughter group
Jack Laguerre – painter, Old Slaughter group
Thomas Hudson – painter, Old Slaughter group
Hubert Gravelot – engraver, Old Slaughter group
Louis-François Roubiliac – sculptor, Old Slaughter group
Henry Tompion – butler at the Hogarths’ Leicester Fields house
George Wells – footman at the Hogarths’ Leicester Fields house
Charles Mahon – second footman at the Hogarths’ Leicester Fields house
Mrs Parsons – cook at the Hogarths’ Leicester Fields house
William Huggins – lawyer, son of John Huggins
Sir Archibald Grant – parliamentarian
James Edward Oglethorpe – parliamentarian
Thomas Coram – sea captain and trader, started the Foundling Hospital
Jonathan Tyers – developer of Vauxhall Gardens
Henry Fielding – novelist
Daniel Graham – apothecary
Daniel Lock – governor of the Foundling Hospital,
founder of the Lock Hospital
John Wilkes – governor of the Foundling Hospital,
later editor of the North Briton
PART IV
Sir Richard Grosvenor – wealthy aristocrat
Sir Joshua Reynolds – painter
Charles Churchill – poet, later deputy editor of the North Briton
Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi
Horace, Ars Poetica
If you want to move me to tears, you must
first feel grief yourself
Part I
The Finger of God
1697–1714
1
I WAS BORN beside a printer’s owned by a certain Mr Downinge of Bartholomew Close, East Spitalfields. As I was born, the stink of ink filled my nostrils. The clank of prints as they were made assailed my ears the very instant I barged my way out of my mother.
My fate was sealed, then, even as the midwife grasped me by the ankle with a cry of ‘Gotcha! You slippery boy!’ I was born to make images, prints and paintings. William Hogarth, Serjeant Painter at the court of George II, phizmonger to the high and mighty. At your service, out I came.
I was born, then, but I was not yet finished, not yet complete. What my father called ‘The Finger of God’ had not yet been laid upon my head. That happened some seven years later.
It was November. I am sure of that because my two sisters were born in that month: Anne was born on the same day of the month as me, and then came Mary. So our rooms were November-dark by the time of our meal at three o’clock.
Two bars at the window made the sign of the cross over us Hogarths as we ate. That cross of bars was the first image I trained my memory to keep. It was soon to form the backdrop to my father’s prison cell. Many years later I even placed it in a gleam of light on a globe of the world in my portrait of my friend Thomas Coram: the portrait that was to be my masterpiece.
After gnawing my shank of Essex mutton clear of meat, placing the bone carefully on the trencher, I took my leave: ‘Excuse me, pater. Thank you for the meal, mama.’ And away I sped.
Bartholomew Close is the shape of a bulging bib on a baby, with narrow alleys north and south for drawstrings. I ran out of the Close through a paved alley to the south, my little shoes slapping on the loose cobbles of Duck Lane. Even as I turned from there into the first waving curve of Little Britain, past the first dingy clutch of printers and bookshops, the smog was descending, swirling under the eaves which leaned towards each other above me, nearly touching overhead. The air smelled acrid with burning coal.
I was heading for St Botolph Churchyard, to pla
y tip-cat with my friends over the remains of my grandfather – my mother’s father, John Gibbons. As I ran, a wind blew up. At first I took no notice. Wind and rain were nothing new that year; we had experienced little else for nearly two weeks.
But the wind grew fiercer, now thick with black dust. It carried the lowing and bleating of the Smithfield Market cattle and sheep. I imagined them protesting as the soot flecks hit them, black on white and black on brown.
I feared for my calamanco shirt, so skilfully stitched by mama from a piece of her oldest nightgown. My second shirt was still drying. I would be confined to our rooms if anything happened to this one. Mama was slow to anger, but when it came it was terrible. It was she, and never father, who slapped my sisters and me when there was cause.
I placed my arm across my chest as I ran to ward off the dust; not a sensible act, really, because the wind was coming from behind me. The gale, for a gale it now was, was growing fiercer.
Little Britain is a wide street with two bold curves in an S-shape. I was walking along the second of the curves, opposite one of the fine houses which mixed in with more humble homes and shops.
The raging wind was frightening me. As I hesitated, a roaring gust lifted me half off my feet, then tumbled me along at a forward-leaning trot. I saved myself from falling only by clutching at the grand railings of the house I was passing. Surely my friends would never keep to our planned meeting at St Botolph through this?
I turned to face the storm. Cruel little pricks of stone scattered into my face, making me cry aloud. Suddenly my face was wet, then my hair, then my chest, my poor shirt soaked tight to me; within seconds my breeches drenched through to my drawers. I threw myself forwards, battling the gale; our room, shortly before so gladly abandoned, was now a vividly pictured sanctuary.
I saw the crowd in Little Britain not, as I would normally have done, as subjects of great fascination, but as buffers against the wind and rain, which may with luck save me. Now all those in the crowd were moving fast with jerking limbs for fear of being lifted and tossed through the air.
There was a woman, a hawker of apples I believe, just about to abandon her produce as wind and rain whipped her mantua around her, showing her comely, firm curves. Her eyes widened at me, for a second seeking help, then, as she registered my tender years, unmistakeably offering help herself, with a waving arm which was itself lifted by the wind.
It was a gesture of goodness I have never forgotten, and far from being the last I have received from women. But she was facing me and in a blinking she was driven past at a run. I heard her scream, but I have no idea where she finished when the wind and rain had had its way with her.
Varlets were running in the street, grasping at anything, including each other, which might slow their hurtling along. Many were screaming and shouting, a cacophony of terror.
‘It is the end of the world,’ bellowed one fellow known to me by sight, a baker.
‘God’s wrath! God’s wrath is come upon us,’ moaned another, a chimneysweep, his black clothes stained with blood down one sleeve.
An old fellow lay himself down, clutching at the cobbles with his hands, to let the storm pass over him. Others made their way backwards or sideways like crabs, the better to progress.
‘We have sinned! We have sinned!’
London is Sodom under good Queen Anne; overweening, overmighty, bloated with riches. We have forgotten God and this is His retribution. It was borne on the wind, lashed into us all by the rain.
Half a tree blew past me, lifted in the air by the wind so it seemed to run like a man. The lowing of cattle from the market grew louder, as if they, too, were trumpeting the end of the world. The street was becoming slippery with mud.
As I battled my way back into the curve of Little Britain and had the straight in sight, I gave a growl of triumph through clenched teeth, pushing into the wind with my left shoulder as prow, right hand on my privy parts, thanking the Lord for my small stature and chunky physique.
My bleary gaze perceived a sedan chair just going over, tilting Milord onto the muddy street way, Mechlin-laced cuffs and all, with his periwig in the grub with the piss and the dead dogs, while the no-doubt thankful chairmen, front and back, dropped the gilded poles and legged it as best they could into the storm.
Some sheep running loose overtook me.
To the right, I saw a dead cow belly-up outside a chandler’s shop, which had its iron bar up across its front. The poor beast may well have met its end before these gusts from hell blew up, for all I knew, but I had no recollection of it from the walk the other way.
Lamps from the grander houses were crashing to the ground, so a novel hazard was broken glass, piling up with the tile shards and rubbish from the roofs of houses. Some tiles stuck upright in the mud like miniature gravestones.
The crowd around me appealed for mercy with their eyes, as far as they could open them. Some opened their mouths, but we were mute to each other in the howl of the wind. Still, I knew, as they knew, that it was the crowd which was saving its constituent members, by breaking the gale.
I had battled my way back to Duck Lane. I let loose a growl of triumph. Here, there was a glut of small businesses from pawnbrokers to barbers to printers and back again, with their street signs swinging wildly, bashing into each other and one and then another coming smashing down into the narrow street.
Between here and the warren of foetid alleys, the dingy courts and the lanes too narrow for two men to walk abreast which surrounded Bartholomew Close were some of the oldest streets in London: Cloth Fair, Barley Mow Passage, Rising Sun Court, Half Moon Court, Kinghorn Street.
Scorched but spared by the Great Fire, the whole stinking lot had also been preserved from Sir Christopher Wren, who had a grand design to rebuild them but had not been permitted to for lack of public money. The wind and rain, however, seemed bent on offering the good architect a second chance, as the old wood and wattle of these decaying buildings shook like the teeth in a nodding dowager.
I heard the crack first, just as Bartholomew Passage – the alley that led into Bartholomew Close – assumed an impossible angle, a thing of wild diagonals and steep bending rhomboids. Then it grew dark above me as a clockmaker’s came down on me, sign first then the establishment itself. There was a sharp pain in the front of my head. I was aware of sticky blood in my nose. I felt hard cobbles against my back and the stench of freshly churned mud in my nostrils, and then nothing.
Nothing, that is, until strong hands reached under my armpits some time later. Hands that I knew even then, semi-conscious and seven years old, represented my salvation and my destiny. They were the hands of our neighbour John Dalton. And John Dalton was a painter.
My destiny was lifting my mud-bespattered, bloodied body out of the gutter.
2
I DO NOT KNOW for how long I was unconscious, nor when John Dalton finally got me home. It was like death, as I have always imagined it. It gave me an awareness of the finality of things unusual, I believe, in one so young. It made me tenacious in my haste to accomplish whatever task I set myself, all too aware, even then, of fighting against time.
I awoke to a state of groaning half-being in my own bed, dressed in a nightgown, ragingly thirsty, with the devil’s own pain in my head and a smile on my face.
‘Hello, little man! I thought we’d lost you!’
My smile widened. This hurt me quite a lot, but I had no control over it. I smiled whenever my father spoke, or even as he cleared his throat in languid preparation to speak, as he tended to do. I smiled at the sight of him, at the thought of him. I believe my smile would even come at the smell of him, or at the trace of any evidence of him, like the touch of one of the books he wrote.
A diffident, though lengthy, clearing of the throat, accompanied no doubt by a stroking of the paternal chin. I can’t be sure of that; I had my eyes shut.
‘Um … Little man? Can you … er … hear me?’
I tried to stop smiling, as it hurt so much
, but the effort of stopping smiling amused me and made me smile more.
‘Hello, pater,’ I said. ‘Yes, I can hear you. I am sorry I have worried you and mama.’
Speaking drove agonising pains through my head, so I stopped, noticing as I did so that my forehead was covered by a linen cloth soaked in water of cloves. The bed was pitching and yawing as if I were at sea. I drifted into a half-sleep, aware that the storm was still raging outside, wind lashing rain against our poor tiny window. It was to rage all night.
‘Aeris impulsum,’ pater was saying, to the room in general. ‘That’s what Aristotle called the wind.’
‘Never mind Aristotle,’ snapped mama. ‘Tear me some fresh strips of cloth. And tear them straight, for heaven’s sake.’
I awoke next time to the sound of baby Anne bawling. Pater took her from her crib and rocked her in his arms, which soon soothed her. My bed was still afloat on its own wild sea. Little Mary held a bowl of scented water in which mama dabbed a cloth, then mopped my wounded brow. It hurt like the torments of hell and I shrieked at her to stop it.
‘William!’ she cried angrily. ‘I am trying to help you!’
Then she told me to say the Lord’s Prayer. Thinking I was about to meet my maker, I burst into tears, which caused the wound on my forehead to bleed afresh.
‘Shan’t!’ I shouted at mama, regardless of the pain it caused me.
‘Stubborn boy!’ she shouted back, angrily flapping the succouring cloth at me, splashing the baby with clove-water.
‘Will I live?’ I asked pater.
‘Of course you will,’ snapped mama, in reply.
‘It is thought,’ said pater, with his customary care, as if cherishing each word, ‘that the cause of storms is the influence of the sun upon vaporous matter, which …’
‘Make fast the door downstairs, Richard. This storm may be a curse on Christian folk but it is a blessing to thieves.’
‘… which being dilated are obliged to possess themselves of more space than …’
I fear I fell asleep again at that point.
We continued in this manner until morning, none of the Hogarth family sleeping; the storm, if anything, increasing in its ferocity. I awoke, for the first of many times, from feeble sleep to hear pater’s soft voice.