I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  Here, ladies well past their best in tally’d clothes, with over-painted faces, did posture dances high on tables while the gentleman watchers looked up from low stools. That night a posture moll with a glass eye balanced on one foot on a tray and pleasured herself.

  Setting off for home, at my insistence, it came on to rain just as we set off across the piazza. John Thornhill, being the most inconstant as well as the laziest fellow I had ever met, suggested we head for St Clement Danes for a lady down on her luck, instead of going home.

  ‘The hackneys are only over there,’ said John, waving at them. ‘Or maybe Hummums to partake of the pleasures of the good Mrs Gould? That’s within walking distance. Eh?’

  ‘Not in the mood anymore,’ I slurred. My head was spinning with the drink which, if truth be told, I could take less well than John.

  At that moment a couple of tuppeny bunters strolled by, eyeing us.

  ‘They’ll do,’ said John, piling inconstancy on inconstancy.

  ‘I thought you wanted to …’

  I was to wish, many times, that we had followed one of John’s many alternative plans.

  The bunter suddenly ‘mine’, for the other had already taken John’s arm, was tall, dressed in a silver gown open at her bony chest, with two girlish ribbons in her thinning hair, which was swept back and streaked with grey.

  As I looked, a gust of wind in the rain bore the sodden ribbons briefly aloft, before they fell back again, damp and defeated. The high forehead this revealed was a parody of intelligence, just as her stately demeanour, borne of a certain stage of hunger, was a parody of aristocratic grace of bearing and movement. She held a closed fan to her wrinkled, much-pursed lips.

  The clock on St Paul’s rang out eight o’clock, cutting tinnily into the din on the Piazza, causing a pause in the brawl erupting in the doorway of Tom King’s. With the trace of a smile, I looked up at the figure of Time with his scythe and hourglass above the clock, always a favourite symbol of mine as I was always in such a hurry. And below the clock the warning words Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

  Behind them a fellow was bawling his wares, Dr Rock’s nostrum, reminding me fleetingly of my boyhood selling the nostrum prepared by my mama. Oh, that thought of a nostrum had rung a warning bell in my mind, to ring over the tinny chimes of St Paul’s. Was there a second there, as the quartet of buyers and sellers prepared to move off to the tight alleyway behind Tom King’s, when I could have pulled away? When I could have said no to the transaction and its anticipated pleasures? Whenever I have thought back to that moment, so many, many times, I simply did not know.

  Ahead of us, as we moved off, two women, one young one very old, warmed their hands at a makeshift fire. Behind them a young gallant, no doubt fresh out of Tom King’s, gave tongue into the mouth of a bawd somewhat more tooth-some than the bunters awaiting John and me.

  Another gentleman, with ‘gull’ written so clearly on his ageing features it may as well have been a placard held aloft, was attempting to woo another bawd whose comely hesitation was designed to raise her price.

  Past them all we go. And behind Tom King’s the tuppeny bunters slip the coins into leather purses they tie into their fobs, then hoist their skirts for the trade. No need for Dr Condom’s so useful invention, not with hags of that vintage, at least that is what I thought at the time. Wrongly, as it so transpired.

  2

  ENSCONCED in our rooms in Sir James’s house, I waved a copy of the Weekly Register triumphantly on high at Jane, before lowering it to read to her, although I had already memorised what it said.

  ‘The story you see, Jenny dear, the story of the harlot from my poor aching head.’ I stroked the bashed groove on my forehead to illustrate my point. Jane started to speak, but I waved her to silence the better to continue to announce my triumph.

  ‘Here’s the core of it. Blah, blah … “would redound as much to his reputation as the late Progress of a Harlot by the ingenious Mr Hogarth.” You hear that, Jenny darling? The ingenious Mr Hogarth. Ingenious, indeed!’

  I puffed myself up, only half self-mocking, and went strutting round the room like a bantam cock, chest thrust out.

  ‘Do you know who wrote the article?’

  ‘Mmm? What? Yes. James Ralph. Know him from Old Slaughter’s. He’s a good fellow.’

  Jane nodded, smiling at me indulgently. ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, her grey eyes open wide. ‘You have a name now. And even more importantly, people know what to expect.’

  I stopped strutting. ‘Clever Jane,’ I murmured.

  At this point in my life, aged thirty-five and so far from a young man, I was much exercised by what had changed and what had not. The changes were there for all to behold – the strutting Hogarth, wallowing in the soft down of luxury, surpassing Sir James, a man once held as hero. But what had not changed kept me a small man, in my own eyes, constantly tugged back to being a small boy.

  For the whole tribe of printers and booksellers, the whole cannibal tribe who fed off the flesh and talent of painters, were doing to me what they had done to my father. I always believed that my darling pater would have lived years longer without their stripping of his flesh. The likes of Edmund Curll, Overton the print seller, Wyat at The Golden Lion, and Bowles. Only Charles Ackers, to my certain knowledge, had had the grace to die, between my father’s time and mine.

  I could never remember Bowles’ first name – I was ever poor at names, but Bowles was the worst of them. When my Taste of the Town, a daring exposure of modern morals, first appeared, it was Bowles who obliged me to sell my original engraving plate to the pirates for a pittance, as there was no place of sale for my works but their shops and they would not deal with me if I didn’t.

  Long and loud I bemoaned my helplessness to control the sale of prints and engravings of my own works – the fruits of my own talent – until Jane, with her simplicity which was rendered down wisdom, said ‘Why not simply assume control, then?’

  ‘But nobody has ever …’ I was pacing at the time. I stopped.

  Jane laughed. ‘When has that ever stopped you?’

  This particular seed of Jane’s was no sooner in than it sprouted. And the result was that the tale of the harlot and her progress, in six pictures, was to be sold by subscription by William Hogarth alone. No printers, no booksellers. I intended to do it all myself, bruit the thing abroad and collect the money. Tout seul!

  Purchasers had simply to present themselves at Sir James’s well-appointed premises in Covent Garden. On production of half a guinea they received a subscription ticket to the six paintings of the Harlot’s Progress.

  When the engravings of Harlot were ready, and copies could be taken from them, purchasers of the subscription ticket would receive their six prints on payment of another half guinea.

  But could such an audacious scheme work in practice? Would the cannibal tribe still find a way of pirating the material?

  The answer to the second question was that they did. Figures were seen lurking outside Sir James’s house, sketch pad at the ready, peeking through the downstairs windows. The Harlot was quickly ushered upstairs, while the pirating sketchers were driven off by Sir James’s footmen. Then, there was even an attempt to inveigle a copier into Sir James’s household, in the guise of a new under-footman.

  But would buyers accept this mode of purchase? The worry of it, in addition to whether buyers would come, was the need to find skilled engravers to engrave the paintings, for I knew I could not undertake it myself. I had never really risen from my level as Gamble’s ham-fisted apprentice engraver.

  Only the French were delicate enough to engrave really well. But for all the French in London, seeking the good life, I had so far failed to find one up to the task. Oh, for Frenchy Pellett or his like, but Frenchy had disappeared, some said back to France.

  So I tried Sympson (who was English), and found wanting, then Vandergucht, also found wanting. And others. And others. In the end I had no choice but to put my own stubby hands
to work and slowly, laboriously; I did the engraving myself, saving anything up to £100, as I proudly told Sir James.

  But the uncertainty over the whole daring and new(ish) project was shown clearly enough by the first mention in the press of prints of the Harlot– the announcement of its delay, as my stubby fingers struggled along.

  In the Daily Post, the Daily Journal and the Craftsman there was this: ‘… being disappointed in the assistance he proposed, the artist is obliged to engrave them all himself.’ It was a full three months later before another announcement in the Daily Post declared the six prints ‘ready to be delivered’.

  By then, Jane and I had more than an inkling of the likely response. More than a thousand potential buyers had made their way up the stairs to Sir James’s elegant vestibule and on into the painter’s studio, to part with a guinea in two stages and leave clutching their subscription ticket.

  A triumph, then, for the ingenious Mr Hogarth as author of Harlot, as engraver, as man of affairs and as avenger of his father against the tribe who had done him down. I wept on Jane’s shoulder at my first inkling of what a success Harlot was going to be. But I didn’t kiss Jane on the mouth, let alone make love to her. The hurt in her face haunted me, at the moment of what should have been my greatest success.

  The pain in the balls had come first. This was close enough after my encounter with the tuppeny bunter round the side of Tom King’s for me to know she had caused it. Then a couple of red raised spots on my cock – big enough, obvious enough. Then came the dripping of smelly yellow stuff into the expensive Spitalfields silk drawers I now wore. And through them into the front of my breeches. I had to keep my waistcoat or even my dress coat on the whole time, in case the growing discharge between my legs became evident.

  Angrily, miserably, I considered wrapping my poor suffering member in linen or even wool. What could be done about the French Pox? Five guineas a time to see a surgeon? They knew no more than apothecaries. And if I went to a quack of their circle, like our neighbour John Misaubin, who I had just portrayed in the Progress, treating my harlot for the clap, it would be all over London.

  It would get back to Jane. So would a visit to the dispensary in St Martin’s Lane, where I would stand a good chance of bumping into an artist friend, or worse, an artist enemy, sauntering into Slaughter’s coffee house nearby. I was annoyed about that, because the dispensary would have been cheap. In a fury, I eventually determined to visit an apothecary, somewhere out of the way.

  I consulted Mother Douglas, an expert in such matters. I feared her ribald laughter, even as I spoke, or rather whispered out my anguish. But Mother Douglas had heard of my recent marriage and she was sympathetic. I knew she liked me both for myself and for my consideration to the girls, which was, as she once told me, ‘at Jew level for its kindness and heart’. And anyway, she regarded such motherly advice as an extension to the service she provided.

  ‘If you want discretion, Billy, an open hand and a closed mouth, Theosophus Taylor of Clerkenwell is your man.’

  ‘A quack?’

  Mother Douglas shook her head, laying her hand fondly down on my shoulder.

  ‘He’s an apothecary.’

  ‘A good one?’

  ‘Not particularly, but he’ll give you the same mercury as those who’ve got letters, plus he’ll keep his mouth closed and that’s the main thing for you, my boy. There’s only two sorts what are discrete, Billy Boy: them as is dead and them as don’t know nobody. Taylor don’t know nobody and he ain’t far from being dead, neither.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a fine recommendation! What’s wrong with him? Did he take his own medicine?’

  Mother Douglas let go of my shoulder and shrugged. ‘He’s likely got the French Pox, like you. Most everybody has these days.’ She sighed windily at the ways of the world. ‘But I’m not sure if that’s what’s killing him. Anyway, he’s not long for this world. I’d get a fast hansom if I was you.’

  I laughed. I truly felt better. Mother Douglas was as unruffled as a mill pond on a sunny summer noon. Such folk calm the fears of others and point up the bright side.

  The good Mother turned away. Kindness had its place, but it could only take so long. She had an establishment to run and good money to take from bad boys. I did indeed set off immediately. This Taylor had his establishment in Woods Close in Clerkenwell, not far, Mother Douglas had informed me, from the Skin Market. Aye, and not that far from the mad house either, I had thought, but I kept the thought to myself.

  It was well out of chairing distance, so, swearing at the pain of it, I forked out 1s 6d for a hansom. I cheered up when I made a joke to the driver about arriving before Taylor died.

  There was, in any case, no question of sending a note on ahead, thus inviting blackmail. And certainly no question of sending one of Sir James’s footmen, as advance party, or even Sarah Young, who would do my bidding, I was sure, until death. So I arrived unannounced and alone at Taylor’s insalubrious premises and crisply demanded of the girl-child who presented herself to see Theosophus Taylor, forthwith.

  ‘You a pal of his, good sir?’

  I puffed myself up to my full bantam-cock dimensions. ‘It is a medical matter.’

  The girl trotted off, muttering ‘Got the pox, then, have we?’ knowing her lithe speed would see her clear of my anger.

  A moment passed, then a woman appeared wearing clothes cut from the same cloth as the child’s – at least the sleeves of her dress were of the same gold material as the girl-child’s skirt, with a red rose pattern. But that was not what first caught my attention.

  Past the first days of flowery youth certainly, the woman was still comely. Her hair was jet black, her bosom in the low-necked dress creamy and to my eye all the more attractive for being full like a woman’s not high like a girl’s. Her right breast had an ‘FC’ stamp full on its swell: female convict. She had not tried to hide it. My battered member stirred again and stirred hard. I stared at her.

  ‘Come this way please, sir.’ The woman affected not to notice my stare. She spoke in a common whine, which only increased my low desire for her. ‘We have sent out for Mr Taylor.’

  I followed her through the small apothecary’s shop to a door behind the counter.

  ‘Is Mr Taylor away, then?’ I intended petulance, borne of my new found status as the ingenious rising star of artistic London, but such was my desire for her my voice went from deep to hoarse to croaking.

  ‘Mr Taylor is in conference, sir.’ She spoke without looking at me.

  I snorted. Conference, indeed! In the dram shop on the corner more like.

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Mrs Malloy, sir.’

  ‘Are you now?’

  Anger borne of lust tensed my torso, heading down. But I followed her into the back room like a good ‘un. Whereupon, to my disappointment, she left me without a glance. I came close to calling her back, as her skirts swished on the floorboards, but a shaft of sanity prevailed. I thought of Jane and was flooded with shame. Oh, desire! Sweet poisoned torment.

  But the contents of the apothecary’s consulting room quickly distracted me, so curious were they. There was a cabinet of curiosities, wherein a skeleton made advances to a flayed figure, which I had learned from the much missed Frenchy Pellett was called an écorché. Around the room there were signs that this apothecary had once been a barber – a horn and a shaving dish.

  Other weird delights included various human bones – I recognised a femur and a skull with holes in it on the table. There was also a tripod shaped like a gallows, a narwhal’s horn, mechanical pulleys, a crocodile with an ostrich’s egg attached to its belly, a double-headed hermaphrodite, and the sort of plaster model which sometimes hangs outside an apothecary’s shop – a life-size tronie figure with a pill in its moveable jaw.

  I stared at the ghastly object. At that moment Theosophus Taylor appeared, reeking of gin. He wiped his worn and greasy sleeve across his mouth before shaking hands.

  ‘A me
dical matter is it, good sir? A medical matter. Well, sir, that’s my purpose. That’s my area. Theosophus Taylor, at your service.’

  Taylor slumped heavily into the chair near the table with the holed skull on it, leaving me standing.

  ‘You were recommended to me by Mother Douglas.’ I hesitated. I considered asking for a discount, based on their joint dealings with the bawdy house owner, but thought better of it.

  Taylor registered my hesitation, but misunderstood the reason for it. ‘Come, come now, sir. We are all men of the world here …’ He belched.

  I thought, ‘Not of the same world, I hope,’ snobbery arising in me no doubt from my new-found worldly success. Aloud I said, ‘A touch of the French Pox, sir. What would you recommend?’

  For the first time I noticed Taylor’s nose, half eaten away by the affliction we shared, as if in dreadful warning to his patients. The nose was briefly turned sideways as Taylor scratched around on the table, searching, but rather in the manner of a blind man. I noticed the motion and the angles it made. Very interesting!

  Finally, hands leading the eyes, he took hold of a small silver box, opened its lid and polished the inside of it with a handkerchief black with grime which he pulled from his fob, holding onto the contents the while, so they did not spill on the floor. This operation complete, he reverently parted with three small round black pills.

  ‘Mercury?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed, good sir. Mercury.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘For the pills, two shillings. But you should use salve additionally, on the sores.’ He flapped around on the table for a jar of salve and handed it over. ‘That’s another sixpence.’

  I saw myself in my mind’s eye, a small boy selling jars of my mother’s gripe cure, matching the price to the purchaser. I was fond of the small boy I had once been, that plucky boy. How had he come to this?

  Once again, the pox doctor misread me, clearly seeing my expression as one of doubt. ‘It is efficacious, sir. Of that I do assure you.’