When William Wordsworth composed that part of The Prelude entitled “Residence in London,” he chose to remark upon its “shifting pantomimic scenes” and “dramas of Living Men”; this “great Stage” encouraged “Extravagance in gesture, mien, and dress” so that even the roadside beggar wore “a written paper” announcing his story. This last detail may be the fruit of accurate observation; as early as the sixteenth century the beggars of London were renowned for their theatrical tendencies. A seventeenth-century beggar, Nan Mills, depicted by Marcellus Laroon in The Cryes of the City of London Drawne After Life, was known as an excellent actress and mimic who “could adapt her countenance to every circumstance of distress.”
In one of his essays in the Spectator, composed primarily for a London audience, Addison alludes to the notion of the world as a theatre in which “the great duty . . . upon a man is to act his part to perfection” and “to excel in the part which is given us.” According to one literary historian Addison was here alluding to the “arbitrariness” and “inscrutability” of the theatre itself.10 But these are of course precisely the characteristics of the city and, by an ineluctable process, of the theatrical art associated with it. In Henry Fielding’s “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” he declares that “the whole world becomes a vast Masquerade, where the greatest Part appear disguised under false Vizors and Habits.” It was this vision which prompted Daniel Defoe’s vast assemblage of journalistic and fictional reportage, generally concerning the sensation of the moment; he was one of the true originators of the English novel.
The monkey, the mask and the mirror in the second stage of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress are all tokens of theatricality and imitation; the pictorial series itself presents a number of highly dramatic scenarios in which Hogarth introduces his characters as if they were already on stage. One chapter of Tom Jones is entitled “A Comparison Between the World and the Stage,” in which Fielding suggests that “life more exactly represents the stage, since it is often the same person who represents the villain and the hero; and he who engages your admiration to-day, will probably attract your contempt to-morrow.” Hogarth confessed that “my Picture was my Stage and men and women my actors.” The conjunction of Hogarth’s name with those of Defoe and Fielding does indeed suggest a new and uniquely urban sensibility within the English imagination.
A Wealth of Characters
Henry Fielding. Engraving after William Hogarth, c. 1762
CHAPTER 39
An Essay on the Essay
The art of fictional dialogue imitates the practice of conversation. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when the novel emerged fully armed upon the stage of the world, there were in London “conversation assemblies” and conversaziones. In high art “conversation pieces” were considered to be distinctly modern, because conversation itself had become the single most important medium for understanding. The idea of conversation, as the proper form for public and socialised truth, was pre-eminent in a culture of coffee-houses, clubs and weekly periodicals.
London had of course always been the center of political and economic debate. But the notion of polite conversation, making judgements and recording opinions, spread as rapidly and as widely as the newly emerging “middling classes” of London merchants and professional men. The discussion of essays played a large role in these informal debates where, by general report, the latest Spectator or Idler would be commended or disparaged. The Spectator was primarily designed for readers “in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses,” with the assumption expressed by the Earl of Shaftesbury that “All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amical collision.” The civic virtues of the seventeenth century had been those of hardy frugality and moral independence, but these in turn gave way to condescension and civility. The unamiable rigours of Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, were replaced by a blander benevolence. The martial spirit was outmoded and unfashionable; the new key-word was sensibility not untouched by sentimentalism.
The success of the essay depended upon a shared set of values and assumptions, therefore, in turn allowing an intimacy or familiarity of tone; a certain rapprochement between author and reader was to be desired. Johnson, in one of his own essays in The Rambler, associated himself with Francis Bacon. “Bacon, among all his pretensions to the regard of posterity, seems to have pleased himself mainly with his essays, ‘which come home to mens business and bosoms’ and of which, therefore, he declares his expectation that they ‘will live as long as books last.’ ” It is this desire to reach “bosoms” as well as “business” which suggests a connection between the essay and the novel, but with its unique form and its formidable strength the essay itself takes its place as a true feature of the English imagination.
The first collections were published in the 1780s, the great contributors being Johnson and Goldsmith, who had succeeded Addison and Steele; after them came Hazlitt, Lamb, and the series of English Essayists published between 1802 and 1810. Samuel Johnson was a natural and prolific essayist, so there is more than a touch of humorous self-abasement in his remark that a writer “needs only entitle his performance an essay, to acquire the right of heaping together the collections of half his life, without order, coherence, or propriety.” Here again is the English aptitude for variety, even if it is ironically expressed. Essays were not only conversational and various, however; they were also practical and useful. They were modes of instruction and exhortation; where once the circulation of learning was maintained by the pilgrimage to European libraries or by the work of scholarly exegetes, the demands of knowledge were now amplified and communicated in the various journals and periodicals of London coffee-house society. Matters of theology and of physics, of medicine and of economics, were now the subject of the “easy” and “familiar” style of the English essayists. The contribution of the essay to moral and homiletic literature was therefore immense. As Addison remarked in the tenth number of the Spectator, “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.” The other merit of the essay lay in its brevity; as one writer of the early eighteenth century put it, it was more appropriate to “the Brisk and Impetuous Humour of the English, who have naturally no Taste for long-winded performances, for they have no sooner begun a Book but they desire to see the End of it.” That is perhaps why the essays of Montaigne, translated by Florio in the early seventeenth century, acquired such an enormous popularity at an earlier date. So the form, first popularised in English by Francis Bacon, sets its seal upon eighteenth-century civilisation. It has been concluded that the essay was “the only literary form used by every major author of the century”;1 its influence can be traced in the more fluent and informal tone of dialogues and sermons, treatises and poems. And, of course, shortness was all.
CHAPTER 40
The Hogarthian Moment
Samuel Johnson wrote poetry and essays while also attempting drama and fiction; Fielding and Smollett began as dramatists before they ever considered writing novels; Defoe mastered every single form of the eighteenth century, and invented several new ones. This variousness can of course be studied as part of the English appetite for heterogeneity in all its forms, but variety is also an old London dish. Dryden’s dramatised version of Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence, has been described as that of “a London citizen and his wife mixing on familiar terms with angels and archangels,” 1 a dialogue which has less to do with seventeenth-century London than with the inheritance of the medieval mystery plays on the streets of Clerkenwell and Cheapside. It is the same appetite which Dryden himself apostrophised in his dedication of Love Triumphant; he declared that the mixture of tragedy and comedy was “agreeable to the English Genius. We love variety more than any other Nation; and so long as the Audience will not be pleas’d without it, the Poe
t is oblig’d to humour them.” The condition of London itself encourages a life, or sense of life, in which contraries meet. Without contraries, one Cockney visionary once wrote, there is no progression.
Yet when everything is contiguous, there is danger of so close a contact that distinction ends. This was conveyed by metaphors of the plague, when in one essay Fielding suggested that public assemblies in the city were “as infectious by Example, as the Plague itself by Contact.” The same vision was promulgated by Charles Dickens when he surmised that it is certain “that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, and that if you once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in Saint Giles, no mortal list of Lady Patronesses can keep it out of Almacks.” It was often observed that in London the living must keep close company with the dead. Hogarth depicted this in Gin Lane . The same sense of mortal contagion infects the dramatic and novelistic representations of urban life, where “fever” and “fevered dreams” are constantly invoked.
In a world where all marks of rank and distinction can also be blurred, as if in masquerade, there is the danger of social slippage. That is precisely why the novels and plays and paintings of the period are concerned with the ambiguities of gentility and criminality, as well as by the urgent aspirations of one or another character to move forward in the social hierarchy.
The role of chance meetings and unexpected events, generally against the background of the “mob” or crowd, is as integral to the fiction of Fielding or Smollett as to that of Dickens. Thus in Fielding’s Amelia (1752) a “trifling adventure,” a perambulation in “the green fields in London” by the heroine and her husband, is capable “of producing the most unexpected and dreadful events.” Such is the quality of chance or fortune in London, where a population of socially fluid characters are engaged in incidents over which they have no control; the “events” are “unexpected” because they conform to no observable plan or pattern. This mutability is mimicked by the novels themselves, which shift unexpectedly from allegory to history, from heroism and high sentiment to pantomime and melodrama. Pierce Egan’s Life in Londonis a narrative adventure diverted and diffused by verse, philosophical speculation, topographical enquiry, romance and passages of song. Egan even manages to include an operatic score. This vision of the world is comprehensive and capacious without necessarily being complex or profound. It accommodates arbitrariness, inscrutability and endless change.
Yet Charles Dickens, of all novelists, knew that the city was not necessarily random or inscrutable; rather, that the mystery of London lay in its interconnectedness. His own novels represent by means of image and symbol such an interpenetration of lives and destinies that London itself is packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered or shared experience. “Draw but a little circle,” he wrote in Master Humphrey’s Clock, “above the clustering housetops, and you shall have within its space everything, with its opposite extreme and contradiction close by.” Here “life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid themselves down together” and here also were “wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence . . . all treading on each other and crowding together.” He described “the restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep,” as if it had somehow to encompass its multitude before it rests; if it ever can rest, that is, with the “streams of people apparently without end . . . jostling each other in the crowd and hurrying forward.” Spectacle and melodrama are intrinsic aspects of the London vision and thus, by extension, of the English imagination itself. Yet it is not a false or ignoble sensibility. It allows pathos and sublimity no less in the canvases of Turner than in the pages of Dickens where “every voice is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.”
Hogarth’s Night, executed in 1738, is very much a stage-set or a nocturnal tableau in which the tall buildings of brick are its “wings”; crowded upon the stage of stone and cobbles are vagrant children, drunks and an overturned coach. Gin is being poured into a keg, while urine is discharged from a chamber-pot out of a first-floor window. Fire is spreading in the foreground, and in the background are signs of a larger conflagration. “We will therefore compare subjects for painting,” Hogarth wrote, “with those of the stage.” In his graphic works action and contrast thrive in dramatic chiaroscuro; exits and entrances are manifold. Healthy “Beer Street” and noxious “Gin Lane” exist side by side; the purse-proud milliner passes a wretched whore, and the plump child of esteemed parents struts beside a vagrant girl eating broken crusts out of a gutter. Here dwell incongruity and difference but, curiously, in the light and atmosphere of London they are for a moment united. It may be wrong, then, to conclude that London artists are not capable of profundity.
In every respect Hogarth conceived of himself as a distinctly and defiantly English artist. He was born at Smithfield in 1698, and his art became identified with the raucous streets of the city. He began in a hard trade, that of a goldsmith’s engraver, but quickly realised the commercial possibilities of political satire. He was a wonderful artist, who excelled in the realm of portraiture, but he managed to combine genius with business in an exemplary manner. He secured the passage of legislation, known as “Hogarth’s Act,” to protect the copyright of engravers. Like Blake and Turner, he was short, stocky and pugnacious. In a letter to the St. James’s Post in June 1737, he con-demned those dealers in art who “depreciate every English work, as hurtful to their trade, of continually importing shiploads of dead Christs, holy families, Madonnas . . . and fix on us poor Englishmen the character of universal dupes.” He declared that he would rather depict an “English cook-maid” than a Venus, and in one print displayed crowds attending an Italian opera while the works of Dryden, Congreve and Shakespeare are cried out as “waste paper for shops.” So Hogarth aligned himself with an English dramatic tradition at the same time as he promulgated a wholly native art. That is perhaps the reason for the marked resemblance between some of his caricatures or grotesques and the “babooneries” in the margins of medieval psalters; the same spirit of gross and popular art is abroad. It is of course in the nature of English genius that it steals from foreign compositions even as it disparages them, and Hogarth borrows from European artists as disparate as Raphael and Watteau; there is always this sense, in even the most defiantly “nationalist” art, that the English imagination has been quickened and revivified by contact with European sources. Yet ultimately the scene is that of contemporary London, and the tradition Hogarth invokes is that of Shakespeare and Pope, Swift and Defoe.
Kemble as Hamlet, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The image of the introverted romantic hero, “dark cloaked against murky skies.”
“No reasonable offer refused.” Widow Twankey, like Juliet’s Nurse and Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters, was a descendent of the nagging Mrs. Noah, played for broad comedy by a man in skirts. Equally, Dan Leno’s comic asides to the audience found their roots in the medieval mystery plays.
Hesitancy and awkward formality: “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews” by Thomas Gainsborough. Are they embarrassed to be the owners of such a landscape?
Theatre in painting: “Mr. B. finds Pamela writing.” From Joseph Highmore’s illustrations for Richardson’s novel Pamela.
Pegwell Bay, Kent, “A Recollection of October 5th 1858” by William Dyce: the landscape of the English shore-line “touched by mystery and enchantment.”
“Margate from the Sea” by J. M. W. Turner, “the Cockney boy who felt the romance of the ocean, becoming once more the seafarer of the Anglo-Saxon lament.”
The romantic imagination: “The artist is then one surrounded by invisible powers.” “The Great Day of His Wrath,” from John Martin’s Judgement series.
The celebrated painting by Henry Wallis of the doomed young poet, Chatterton, the most successful faker of the eighteenth century.
“Stroud: An Upland La
ndscape” by Philip Wilson Steer. It was in the Malvern Hills that Langland dreamed his marvellous dream and Elgar was inspired to express yearning and nostalgia in The Dream of Gerontius .
“Reliance upon practical detail and purposeful experiment seems to breathe an English spirit.” “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
The open elaboration of the Lloyds Building reflects an English love of surface decoration.
His first paintings were of scenes from Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera , in which “high” and “low” are confounded, but his gift for moral portraiture can be seen most clearly in relation to Langland or Chaucer. Only in the city can true drama and allegory be discovered. “In these compositions,” he wrote, “those subjects which will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class.” That emphasis upon “utility” might of itself be enough to characterise his English genius, but his demotic and egalitarian temper is also pertinent. He dwelled keenly upon the details of “low life,” and crowded his engravings with the weak and helpless. In part it represents a Hogarthian defiance of “high” art, and a kind of embarrassment at the striking of heroic or historical attitudes; in practice, too, it relies upon the representation of homely or familiar details rather than the grandly or generally expressive painterly gesture. The deflation of magnificence has always been part of the English imagination.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 37