Hogarth also depicts pantomimes and masquerades on the streets of London, as if in implicit homage to the theatrical reality by which they are surrounded. In an engraving completed in the early months of 1724, Masqueradesand Operas, the London crowd is seen to patronise a pantomime entitled The Necromancer; in the same street, Haymarket, is displayed the notice for a midnight masquerade. Hogarth also drew Punch, whom in The Analysisof Beauty he called “droll by being the reverse of all elegance, both as to movement and figure.” The same may be concluded of the Londoners in his engravings, who are often rendered as caricatures or as types.
Hogarth is of London, too, in his disregard for the conventional pieties of Christianity. Turner died murmuring that the sun was god, and this pagan spirit is very much part of the city’s instinctive and energetic life. In the fifth plate of Marriage-à-la-Mode, Hogarth parodies the Descent from the Cross in the dying posture of a nobleman; he also parodied the effects of sermonising in The Sleeping Congregation and burlesqued William Kent’s altar-piece at St. Clement Danes Church. One curious detail may be mentioned in this context. In The Sleeping Congregation Hogarth has included an hour-glass, but this is only one of the many time-pieces which he incorporates within the scenes of London. In the work entitled Morning the clock of St. Paul’s Church is clearly visible, with an image of Father Time above it and the legend “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” below. Smoke rises from a chimney pot towards these emblems of time, as if to represent the elements of transitoriness and forgetfulness in the passages of London life. In such paintings as The Graham Children and The Lady’s Last Stake, clocks appear as emblematic features of a rushing or decaying world. In his last completed work, Tailpiece, or The Bathos, he again depicts Father Time with his scythe at a ruinous tavern in Chelsea known as “The World’s End”; here on the edge of London is the broken portal of eternity. So Hogarth was vouchsafed an intuition of London existence in the context of time and evanescence. It has been remarked that, the more local and specific a sensibility, the more it may aspire to universality. It is appropriate, therefore, that, in the words of one historian of art, Hogarth “was the first British artist ever to achieve international fame.”2 We may go further, and suggest that he was one of those Cockney artists who saw real visions in the streets of London.
His influence was profound, but also particular. Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank were the three principal English caricaturists who considered themselves to be in the Hogarthian tradition of London portraiture, combining a fluency of line with a gift for grotesque or comic observation. The cartoons of Gillray and Rowlandson are vigorous and energetic, filled with the life and variety of the city, savagely denunciatory or gargantuan and tumultuous. They were true London artists because they were entranced by the scenic and the spectacular; in a city built upon greed and upon commerce, Gillray in particular was preoccupied with the shadows of money and power. His great works are striated with light and darkness, as if he were an heroic artist of the streets. He was neither sentimental nor introspective; his power came out of caricature and theatrical display, even though a note of rancid poetry emerges in some of his more demonstrative compositions. Each one strikes a different attitude, some grave, some gay, with a readiness of wit and rapidity of association which are also associated with urban life. As one historian of the national character has observed, the dweller in a great town “is always receiving fresh impressions; and he may readily fall into a longing for a constant renewal of his sensations.” 3
The book illustrations of Cruikshank were perfectly equivalent to the early urban vision of Charles Dickens, too, with their fierce air of constriction and incarceration. There is a famous illustration of Fagin in the condemned cell at Newgate, of which Chesterton wrote that “it does not merely look like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin.” There is something feverish about Cruikshank’s genius, peculiarly apt in a city itself often described as fevered. In later life Cruikshank often declared that he had been the principal begetter of Oliver Twist and his sad history, and it is possible that he did in fact conceive of an Hogarthian “progress” of the orphan from poverty and misery to wealth and happiness.
One critic wrote, in 1844, that anyone who wished to “estimate the genius of Mr. Dickens” should “read the essays by Charles Lamb and by Hazlitt, on the genius of Hogarth.” There is indeed a true and powerful affinity. Dickens was often described as “Hogarthian”; the novelist and the artist were believed to possess the same strident urban sensibility. The resemblance is not fortuitous. Dickens was a keen admirer of Hogarth’s work, and his imagination was partly trained by his absorption of Hogarth’s engravings. Hogarth’s depiction of Gin Lane helped to create Rowlandson’s The Dram Shop and Cruikshank’s Gin Shop, for example, but it was also the inspiration for an early essay by Dickens entitled “Gin-Shops”; the young novelist describes in vivid terms precisely the same spot which Hogarth had depicted eighty-seven years before. Just as Hogarth dwelled in loving detail upon the critical mass of crowds in March to Finchley and Southwark Fair, so Dickens exclaimed that “we revel in a crowd of any kind—a street ‘row’ is our delight.” Hogarth and Dickens were both preoccupied with gaols and asylums, as if they represented a true image of London; the third plate of A Rake’s Progress is best and most fully interpreted in the account of Mr. Pickwick’s incarceration in the Fleet Prison. But they were both entranced by fairs and street carnivals so that Hogarth’s Southwark Fair is amplified by Dickens’s essay on “Greenwich Fair.” In their works the city becomes both prison and theatre, fairground and madhouse. Oliver Twist has as its subtitle “A Parish Boy’s Progress” in direct homage to Hogarth, while the more pathetic scenes of Nicholas Nick leby were described by Forster as “like a piece by Hogarth, both ludicrous and terrible.” They both dwelled upon minute particulars. In Hogarth’s third plate of Marriage-à-la-mode, for example, a quack’s surgery is seen to contain a fish’s skeleton, a tripod, an odd shoe, a sword, a model of a human head, a top hat, pill boxes, and so on. Dickens describes the interior of the old curiosity shop as containing “suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour . . . fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry and strange furniture.” Both artists packed their work with strong detail, as if attempting to convey all the fragmentation and adventitious chaos of the urban world. It could even be argued that some of Dickens’s success and popularity sprang directly from the fact that he rendered Hogarth’s engravings legible and readable; he gave the artist’s vision a literary life.
The example of Charles Dickens will in any case confirm that the influence of Hogarth’s vision was not confined to artists. Just as Hogarth borrowed some of his satire from Pope—particularly from that visionary poem of London The Dunciad—so in turn Hogarth influenced Samuel Johnson. One of Johnson’s essays for The Idler is a direct commentary upon Hogarth’s print of Evening in the city. Yet the artist’s most formidable bequest was to those eighteenth-century novelists who shared his sense of the urban world. Hogarth and Samuel Richardson were on terms of familiar acquaintance, for example, and Richardson’s Pamela borrows directly from A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress. Richardson’s Apprentice’s Vade Mecum wishes that “the ingenious Mr. Hogarth would finish the portrait.” Henry Fielding called Hogarth one of the most “useful Satyrists that any Age hath produced” and, in his preface to Joseph Andrews, praised “the ingenious Hogarth” for his ability “to express the affections of men on canvas . . . it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think.” In Tom Jones, also, Fielding interrupts his narration to exclaim, “O Hogarth! had I thy pencil!” Hogarth himself was not averse to borrowing from Fielding; his Industry and Idleness, which recorded the careers of industrious and idle apprentices, was clearly indebted to the novelist’s account of criminality in Jonathan Wild published four years earlier. There is here a consonance of attitude and taste which surel
y belongs to the broader history of the English imagination.
It has been observed that Laurence Sterne is heavily indebted to Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty—Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick copies the artist’s “serpentine line of beauty”—and Sterne’s sermon upon “Felix’s Behaviour Towards Paul” serves as a commentary upon Hogarth’s Paul Before Felix. Tobias Smollett invokes Hogarth in his principal novels. “It would take the pencil of Hogarth,” he wrote in Roderick Random, “to express the astonishment and concern of Strap”; an expression in Humphry Clinker “would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy.” In the context of this admiration, then, it may be appropriate to consider the novel as a specifically London form.
CHAPTER 41
Some Eminent Novelists
Prose fiction, which is believed to be of Graeco-Roman origin in the centuries before Christ, is ancient and ubiquitous. The Anglo-Saxons translated Apollonius of Tyre into Old English prose, which can properly claim to be the first novel in the vernacular. But if it can be argued that a broad tradition of popular fiction began with the work of Defoe and Richardson, Smollett and Fielding, then the springs or sources of its inspiration are most likely to be found in the circumstances of eighteenth-century London. The city was the centre of novelty and of change, of social mobility and of sociable excitement; most eighteenth-century novels are set in London or send their characters spinning in that direction, as if they were being drawn ineluctably by a “vortex” or a “lodestone.” The conditions of the novels of Smollett or of Fielding are populous and multifarious, with characters led by chance or exigency into one another’s company. The symbolic power of the capital was, therefore, immense. It was itself one giant novel.
Eighteenth-century fiction is hybrid and various, part realistic and part allegorical, combining heroism and farce in equal measure; it conflates epic with romance, and even includes critical theory. The tone is never constant, and the instability of the narrative mimics the fluidity of the action. At the time of the city’s greatest expansion, the novel is endlessly prolific. It has no boundaries of form or genre, mingling fact and fiction indiscriminately; in that sense, too, it reflects the nature of the city. Masquerades are to be found in Richardson’s Pamela, in Fielding’s Amelia and Tom Jones, in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, in Defoe’s Roxana, and in a score of other fictions. 1 Upon these occasions a “strange medley” of persons in disguise disport themselves; this is the condition of the city, and also the nature of the novel. Masquerades represent the shifting crowd, an unnatural assembly in every sense which in Cecilia includes men dressed as “Spaniards, chimney sweepers, Turks, watchmen, conjurors and old women”; these are of course the inhabitants of the city itself who are here portrayed in caricature as if in homage to the genius loci. The fear of enforced touch, and of contagion, is also evident in the descriptions of untidy or unnatural couplings: “a Devil and a Quaker, a Turk and female Rope-dancer, Judge and Indian Queen, and Friars of several Orders with Fanatick Preachers, all pair’d.” There is a suggestion here of sexual licence underlying the incoherence and arbitrariness of the proceedings; the city itself is portrayed in eighteenth-century fiction as the haven for lusts natural or unnatural. As Addison remarked, “the secret history of a carnival would make a collection of very diverting novels.”
Many fictions present a journey towards the city as a colourful pilgrimage—the most celebrated example being that of Tom Jones—and in a similar spirit novelists such as Fielding and Defoe relish disorder and mutability. Just as the “low” can be disguised as their betters at a masquerade, so in eighteenth-century fiction servants and masters often find their roles reversed; Pamela is transformed from a chambermaid into a lady, even if her gentility is somewhat theatrical. But then this is also the condition of the city, where servants were chastised in pamphlets and tracts for dressing up as their employers and imitating their manners. The novel was often criticised, in oblique terms, for the size and nature of its audience. There is no doubt that the vogue for fiction helped to create a “reading public” but the moralists observed that fiction had become the especial delight of women, tradespeople and servants. The appeal to women is perhaps exemplified by the plethora of titles devoted to heroines—Pamela, Amelia, Cecilia—where the Anglo-Saxon and medieval tradition of female saints’ lives is continued in another guise.
Despite the complaints of moralists, however, fiction was far from being simply an entertainment or diversion for servants and tradespeople; it acted, on the contrary, as an instruction manual or “pattern book.” The fictions of the eighteenth century were on one level designed to “describe manners, paint characters, and try to correct the public.” It was advertised that Pamela was “published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes; a narrative which has its foundation in truth.” Novels, however, were concerned with practice as well as principle. They were manuals of etiquette and guides to polite society. It is no simple coincidence, therefore, that “they depict more often than not attempts to acquire status (or wealth and power) through isolated and individual virtue and action rather than by inheritance or through corporate involvement.”2 So the elements of pantomime and masquerade also hold the slivers and glimmerings of individualism; just as the city is the true arena for the human striving after profit or power, so the novel celebrates individual and practical exertion.
It is striking and significant that Daniel Defoe, for example, should select as the subject of his fictions solitary and generally fearful individuals. Robinson Crusoe, who has variously been described as the representative of “economic man” and the Protestant conscience, has become a key figure of the English imagination; in that context, his earnest practicality and hesitant spirituality, as well as his position in “the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life,” are at least as important as the variety of his “strange surprizing adventures.” He was as isolated upon his desert island as in any London garret.
Daniel Defoe was born in Cripplegate, in 1660, the son of a tallow chandler; he shared that shopkeeper parentage with William Blake, whose father was a hosier, and Defoe can best be seen in the light of a broad tradition of London dissent. It is an honourable and old tradition, which has continued into the present century. He attended a Dissenting academy in Newington Green before taking up the trade of hosiery. He was never a successful businessman, however, and soon adopted the role of journalist and pamphleteer in the cause of William of Orange and the Whigs; the new king had invaded England in 1688, turning out the Catholic James II in the process, and reinstated a Protestant dispensation. Yet Defoe was not successful as a creature of party politics; he was constantly imperiled by bankruptcy and the threat of prison. As one of his most recent biographers has suggested, he had turned “from a conventional city merchant into a lonely, hunted and secretive outsider.” 3 He had experienced all the splendours and disasters of the city, in other words, and out of that confusion created the rapid and avaricious careers of Roxana and Moll Flanders. Yet he did not turn to fiction until he had exhausted his influence as a journalist; he did not believe his novels to be a substitute for, but rather an extension of, his reportorial and polemical work. He wrote discourses on family life and on trade; he wrote stories about pirates and thieves and murderers; he composed political as well as economic treatises; he wrote biographies of Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden; he finished a history of the Church of Scotland and a history of the devil; he issued a great many pamphlets and wrote down many accounts of London “marvels” such as hauntings and healings. Like many London writers, he tried his hand at anything.
It is important, also, to note that the novels sprang out of this prodigal inheritance and that they were conceived from Defoe’s confusion of fact and fiction. Robinson Crusoe was advertised as a true history “Written by
Himself,” with Defoe’s name absent from the frontispiece. A Journal of the Plague Year is nothing of the kind, but a rich concoction of true report and fictive imagining, while A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain was written from Newington Green. If fact proves to be fiction, then Defoe’s fiction has often been granted a factual status. The adventures of Robinson Crusoe were taken to be literal truth, while in more recent years Moll Flanders has been identified as Moll King or Mary Godstone. Yet all of these characterisations and attributions are beside the point. In the eighteenth-century city Daniel Defoe discovered the poetry of fact, and in that combination of the marvellous and the real he found his true subject. It is a token once more of that hybrid art which London seems to nurture; in an unstable and fluid society, where all may walk in disguise, there is no value to be found in generic identity and stability. It could be said that Defoe’s fiction is a simulacrum of his journalism, but in truth there need be no distinction. This may be profoundly unsettling for the more solemn critics, who wish to find in “the English novel” some intrinsic virtue or some reliable touchstone of excellence, but it is true to the mixed and various nature of the English imagination.
Defoe loved sensation and adventure, excessive delight and character in violent action. The energy and motion of London fill his sentences with their rapid and impersonal beat, their digressions and divagations; all the fever and fearfulness of Roxana’s life, for example, can be sensed in the restless and repetitious cadences of her autobiographical narrative. The speed and acceleration of the London streets are visible in Moll Flanders’s quick way of explaining herself—“for the next time I try’d it at White-Chappel just by the corner of Petty-Coat-Lane, where the Coaches stand that go out to Stratford and Bow and that Side of the Country; and another time at the Flying Horse, without Bishops-gate, where the Chester coaches then lay.” The language of the streets emerges, too, in Moll’s strong phrases. “So there was her mouth stopped. . . . That’s by the way.” There is a wonderful scene in Newgate between Moll and a condemned woman. “Well says I , and are you thus easy? ay, says she, I can’t help myself, what signifies being sad? If I am hang’d there’s an End of me, and away she turn’d Dancing . . .” Here is farther confirmation of the foreign belief that the English disdained death as a cheat or a thing of no moment, but it is also a tribute to Defoe’s remarkable fluency. In recent years his tone has become a matter of debate. Is he being ironic at his characters’ expense, or does he expect the reader fully to sympathise with their respective fates? A similar question has been raised about his style, which has been praised as a triumph of literary artifice and condemned as artless and prolix. Yet these considerations need not apply, especially within the new form of prose fiction which confounds distinctions of every kind. Defoe was an instinctive and prolific writer who effortlessly combined all the materials that were closest to hand without any attempt to discriminate between them. In this context it is perhaps worth noting that “Defoe’s prose contains a higher percentage of words of Anglo-Saxon origin than that of any other well-known English writer except Bunyan.”4 The old language emerged naturally, almost instinctively.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 38