Cinematic Techniques in William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress.

Fall 99, Vol. 33 Issue 2, pp. 49-65

Journal of Popular Culture
by Philip Momberger

CINEMATIC TECHNIQUES IN WILLIAM HOGARTH'S A HARLOT'S

PROGRESS

Recent and illuminating analyses of William Hogarth's serial engravings--A Harlot's

Progress (1732), A Rake's Progress (1735), Marriage a la Mode (1745), and Industry
and Idleness (1747)--have explored his brilliant synthesizing of traditional pictorial
forms with elements drawn from the popular arts of his eighteenth century London
milieu, among them theater, pantomime, ballad opera, sensational journalism and
erotica, book illustration, pictorial and verse satire, the traditional emblem book, and
the newly emergent novel. Other commentaries have noted his anticipatings of such
later forms as the comic strip, the comic book, and the political cartoon.(n1) As yet
unremarked, but at least as striking, are the uncanny presagings of cinematic device
and structure that Hogarth devised in 1731-1732 for the first and most powerful of his
pictorial narratives, A Harlot's Progress. Examined as if they composed a motion
picture's preparatory "story board" or were still frames in a black-and-white silent
film, those six engravings prophesy major strategies in the filmic art that would lie
nearly two centuries in the future.

Before exploring those proto-cinematic devices, it will be necessary to summarize the

course of Hogarth's pictorial narrative through its succeeding frames. In his Harlot's
Progress Hogarth unfolds the brief, unhappy history--the ironic non-progress--of a
naive country lass, one "Mary Hackabout," who journeys from her home in rural
Yorkshire to London, there to seek her modest fortune as a seamstress or in some
other honest trade. Mary is soon drawn, however, into a life of vice that finally
destroys her.

In frame one, Mary has just alighted from the covered York-to-London Wagon at the
Sign of the Bell tavern and gambling den in seamy Cheapside. Attired in a simple
white country dress and straw hat, with a white rose of innocence pinned to her
bosom and her sewing kit dangling from her arm, Mary expects to be met and aided
by her city cousin, for whom she has brought the gift goose at the lower right corner
of the frame. Mary's clumsily lettered, semi-literate gift tag bespeaks her lack of
education: "For my Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London." Baneful chance and
urban corruption intervene, however. The supposedly "loving" cousin does not
appear, and Mary is welcomed instead by a notorious old procuress, clad in rich
satins but with a syphletically cankered face, who will flatter and seduce the naively
susceptible girl into the life of vice.

At first Mary prospers on that low road, where she soon acquires a taste for the
trappings of fashion and wealth. In frame two, a rich Jewish merchant with an
elongated caricatured nose has established her as his mistress in a luxurious
apartment with elegant wall covering, expensive furniture and oil paintings, a lady's
maid, an exotic black child servant, and even a fashionable pet monkey. Mary,
however, has evidently--and imprudently--been two-timing her much older patron.
She snaps her fingers and kicks over the tea table in order to distract his attention
from the handsome young gallant--Mary's overnight companion--who is shushing the
wide-eyed maid and exiting on shoeless tiptoe at the left rear.

In frame three, we infer that Mary's patron has discovered her duplicity, and cast her
out. No longer a kept and pampered mistress, Mary now plies the common whore's
trade in far humbler surroundings, and for a much less savory clientele. The "Drury
Lane" tavern markings on the pilfered tankard at the lower right indicate that Mary
has been reduced to streetwalking in seamy Covent Garden. It is again tea-time, but
telling contrasts between this frame and its predecessor dramatize the decline in
Mary's circumstances. The lady's maid and exotic child servant of frame two have
been replaced by an aging bunter with a disease-ravaged face; the elegant furnishings
and tea set by a clutter of worn and merely functional objects; the fashionable pet
monkey by a common alley cat, and the richly mounted oil paintings by the crude
penny prints tacked to Mary's wall. One depicts "Captain Mackheath," the
highwayman hero of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), and the labeled wig box
stored atop Mary's bed canopy awaits the return of its owner, James Dalton, a
notorious thief. Moreover, the witch's hat and bundle of birch sticks hanging by
Mary's bed suggest that she is catering not only to criminals, but to deviant tastes.
More ominously still, the marks of disease are spreading on Mary's face.

Now deprived of a patron's protection, Mary is left vulnerable to the first hazard of
the harlot's trade. Led by a puritanical magistrate, the district vice squad enters at the
right rear to arrest her, and send her in frame four to Bridewell Prison. There, with
fellow prostitutes, a professional gambler, and other miscreants, Mary is set to work
pounding hemp for rope-making. A glaring jailer directs her more conscientious
attention to that task, and we see no evidence of honor or fellowship in the criminal
class to which Mary has sunk. The one-eyed prisoner to the jailer's left is picking
Mary's pocket, while the tattered whore at the frame's far right grins at the pretentious
absurdity of Mary's elegant attire in so squalid a setting.

Released from prison, Mary is succumbing in frame five to the further--and final--
risks of prostitution: unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease. Mary's lice-
scratching little boy is dangerously close to the fire as he reaches for a chunk of
broiling meat, but no one bothers to notice the child's hunger or his peril. Swathed by
the fire in the "sweating blankets" prescribed for syphilis, the dying Mary is likewise
ignored by the two quack physicians who squabble over which useless medicine to
administer, and by the corpse-washer and layer-out who rifles Mary's trunk at the
lower left. Even her beaklike nose and humpbacked form suggest a scavenging
vulture.

Mary's wake in frame six is hardly a scene of gravity or grieving. As is indicated by

the mock-heraldic coat of arms with keg taps that hangs on the rear wall, her
"mourners" are assembled in a decrepit tavern's back room, where they use Mary's
coffin as a buffet table, and where the urban vice and predation that have destroyed
her continue unabated.(n2) In the left foreground, the presiding minister fondles the
seated young lady who conceals his lecherous fumbling with his broad black
mourning hat. By the window to the right, the undertaker seductively strokes one arm
of the young woman who picks his pocket with the other, and the remaining mourners
are similarly preoccupied with everything but the deceased. Is the wailing woman at
the lower right grieving for poor Mary or, as seems more likely, has the open "Nants"
brandy jug at her feet induced a bout of delirium tremens? The sniffling young lady to
the right rear seems to be weeping only over an injured finger. The mirror-gazing
woman behind her exhibits the same vanity that has helped bring poor Mary to her
doom, and Mary's little boy in formal mourning garb plays with his toy top, ignored
again by his elders and as oblivious as they to his mother's death. Only the white-
dressed young woman at the frame's center peers with dismay into Mary's coffin, and
to that figure's visual and thematic functions we shall shortly return.

Hogarth's primary clientele for his serial engravings was, of course, the rising London
bourgeoisie.(n3) How, then, might those purchasers of these best-selling prints have
construed the meaning and moral of his Harlot's doleful "progress" from innocence
through corruption to death? In those terms dearest, of course, to the pragmatic
bourgeois soul: As witness the monitory fate of Mary Hackabout, vice and crime are
to be scrupulously eschewed--not because they are unkind to our neighbors or
offensive to God, but because they do not pay. And, while applauding that affirmation
of the bourgeois straight-and-narrow, the London purchaser of Mary's pictorial
history would also have been powerfully confirmed in what he or she already knew:
That the big city is a dangerous environment where predators of every stripe will
exploit and consume the unwary, and at last cast them callously away. That
recognition would in turn have reminded Hogarth's purchaser of his Christian
enjoinment to compassion and forgiveness. Pretty young Mary is, after all, not so
much wicked as she is naive, vain, malleable, shallowly ambitious, and rather stupid--
a fatal compound that attracts London's corrupt and corrupting despoilers as surely as
the whiff of blood draws sharks. Thus, Mary as victim is more to be pitied than
censured; and in either event, whether condescending to condemn or to excuse, the
bourgeois purchaser would rest comfortably assured of his own moral superiority to
Hogarth's non-heroine.(n4)

When Hogarth's client had wearied of such weighty moral reflections, he could have
indulged in some lighter pleasures as well. He might have smiled, for example, at the
artist's caricaturing of familiar public figures. The falsely friendly madame and the
leering aristocrat fondling his genitals in the tavern doorway in frame one, the tight-
lipped magistrate in frame three, and the disputatious quack doctors in frame five all
have been identified as prominent Londoners whom Hogarth's contemporaries would
instantly have recognized, with what Aristotle terms "the pleasure of the familiar."
(n5) Or, having purchased these Harlot's Progress engravings, the proud owner might
have had them framed and mounted on his domestic walls, and would thus have felt
himself elevated from bourgeois merchant or clerk to aristocratic patron of the arts.
(n6) Or, on a less exalted plane, the purchaser might have relished the erotic titillation
that the artist-salesman has shrewdly packaged in an homiletic wrapper. Hogarth's
subject is, after all, harlotry; and his Mary in frames two and three has shed the
modest country garb and downcast gaze of frame one for the provocative attire and
come-hither expression appropriate to the very softest pornography. We may be sure
that Hogarth's original consumers were not altogether averse to that allure. Scratch a
strait-laced bourgeois puritan--in any century--and one is likely to find a panting
libido as often as not. Hogarth himself implies as much in frame three of his Harlot's
Progress. There, as Bindman observes, the rabidly puritanical magistrate Sir John
Gonson "as he enters appears to hesitate as if caught by lust at the sight of the
Harlot's seductive presence, for it was an old saw that such moralizing zeal was
essentially prurient" (58). Hogarth confirms that suggestion by drawing emphatic
visual correspondences between the puritanical magistrate and the lecherous
aristocrat of frame one. In each frame the bewigged and socially powerful male figure
stands with his male assistant or assistants at the right rear near an open doorway,
gazes diagonally across and "down" the frame, looks over and past an intervening
older and poxy female figure, fixes his stare on the alluring young Mary at the left,
and simultaneously reaches for his groin.

Hogarth's occasional caricaturing of public figures like the magistrate and the
aristocrat, with its implicit criticism of the powerful, would in the next century evolve
into the more topically focused art of the political cartoon. His invitation to the
middle class to mimic-on-the-cheap the art-collecting proclivities of its social
superiors would in our century flower into the merchandising genius of the Franklin
Mint and other such purveyors of ersatz Ming miniature vases, plastic Faberge eggs,
and replicated first-edition books bound in finest Naugahyde. And Hogarth's sly
wrapping of erotic skin within didactic sermon prophesies nothing so much as the
fleshy Biblical epics of the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.

Since William Hogarth arguably is the first modern, mass-producing visual artist
successfully to court middle-class tastes and commercial patronage, further such
comparisons of his work to the popular arts of our own time will of course suggest
themselves to every student of those arts. My present interest, however, is in
Hogarth's uncanny presagings of the narrative cinema that would lie nearly two
hundred years in the future. I hasten to add that I am as inclined as anyone to doubt
the paternity of children born centuries after their alleged fathers, that I know of no
film-maker who has claimed or lauded Hogarth as an ancestor, and that I am not
arguing for a linear historical influence or descent. Nevertheless, I am speculatively
persuaded that were Hogarth the serial engraver our contemporary, he would be a film
director, and a most resourceful one. Conversely, his eighteenth century pictorial
narrative may have much to teach the twentieth century cinema and its students.

Consider first Hogarth's skillful composing of pictorial elements--of sets, props,

actors, costumes, lighting, space--in a rectangular frame, his calculated assemblage of
mise-en-scene so that visual image will generate both drama and meaning.

Frame one--in cinematic terms, Hogarth's "establishing shot"--will serve to illustrate.

Here Mary Hackabout arrives in London's Cheapside slum, at a topographically
actual crossroads that becomes, metaphorically, a moral one. To the right in the frame
are the sinister figures who tempt and menace her: the richly clad but syphletically
cankered madame and the lecherous aristocrat in the tavern door. Fatefully absent is
the city cousin who could have guided and protected her, but just behind Mary in the
left middle distance is another potential savior: a black-robed clergyman on
horseback. Unfortunately, the good minister will not be spurring his white horse to
the imperiled maiden's rescue, for he is preoccupied with scrutinizing a letter of
introduction that he hopes may advance his ecclesiastical career. As myopic as his
blinkered steed, the minister fails to notice Mary's danger, or even that his grazing
horse has toppled the stack of buckets at the frame's far left. Thus, neither family nor
church will come to Mary's aid; indeed, the clergyman has unwittingly turned his
back on her.(n7) She is endangered by figures both criminally low-life and
aristocratic, and her wholesome rural past is vanishing to the left with the covered
York-to-London cart that has delivered Mary, and other white-clad country girls too
poor to pay coach fare, to the corrupt and predatory city.

A virtuous alternative, however, yet remains. On the tenement balcony to the rear, just
above Mary's head, is a poor but respectable housewife engaged in mending and
hanging out her laundry. A straight and narrow slot of light joins the elevated
housewife at once to heaven above and to the white-dressed Mary below. This first
frame will be the only one set out-of-doors, and here the converging connotations of
space and freedom and light and cleansing and what analysts of pictorial design term
"vertical escape" define the positive possibilities of humble domestic virtue that the
innocent Mary at her crossroads still might choose. But, unhappily, in corrupting
London the city's crumbling buildings threaten to squeeze out heaven's light. The
respectable housewife recedes and dwindles in comparison to the foreground figures
of temptation and vice; and, as preoccupied as the minister with her own affairs, she
takes no more notice than he of Mary's peril. The dark-clad old bawd is by far the
largest figure in the frame, and she dominates the white-dressed Mary just as the
black-robed minister rules his white horse. Indeed, the recruiting madame seems in
horse-dealer fashion about to inspect Mary's teeth, and visual emblems that Mary
faces to the right of the frame ominously prophesy her fate. Her black, initialed trunk
resembles a coffin and appropriately will reappear in Mary's death scene in frame
five; and her dead goose calls to mind the proverbial "silly goose," "gone goose," or
"goose cooked" that Mary soon and finally will be. Moreover, as Paulson reports,
"`green goose' or `Winchester goose'" were "contemporary slang for whore" (The
Modern Moral Subject 262).

No later master of cinematic mise en scene, not even Eisenstein or Hitchcock, has
more effectively enframed pictorial elements for the dramatization of theme. Those
directors, however, could elaborate such meanings as their moving "movie" pictures
moved. Hogarth the engraver of course cannot, and one senses his impatience with
his static pictorial medium throughout his Harlot's Progress sequence. Here the artist
strives repeatedly for "snapshot" effects that will suggest motion only fleetingly,
momentarily arrested and ongoing. Hogarth's human figures, for example, seem never
posed or at rest but always caught in an instant of suspended motion, and the props
that surround them are similarly dynamic. The stacked buckets are tumbling in frame
one, the kicked tea table and crockery falling in frame two, the hot water pouring in
frame three, the mallets rising or descending in frame four, the doctor's chair toppling
backward and the stewpot forward in frame five, and the lecherous minister's wine
glass spilling in frame six, with a none too subtle hinting at ejaculation. Moreover,
recurrent visual references to time--to bell and watches and dated documents--serve
as constant reminders of the temporal dimension in which motion and change inhere.

Such momentary freezings of motion remain, however, just that: frozen, in pictorial
engraving's inescapably static mode. To induce the effect of motion, Hogarth must
shift his reliance from his static prints to the unfettered mobility of the viewer's eye:
to the optical mobility of the eye that roams searchingly up and down and across and
into and out of each richly detailed frame; and, more importantly, to the figurative
"eye" of visual memory that, as in film experience, shuttles between and among
discrete visual data, joining image to image, event to event, frame to frame--and in
that dynamic process actively extracting meaning.

At the simplest level of constructing meaning through visual memory and association,
the active viewer of A Harlot's Progress infers relations of cause to effect, precisely
as he would in watching a narrative silent film. The bad choice impending in frame
one, for example, has its visible effect in Mary's reduction to kept woman in frame
two. In turn, the betrayal depicted there causes the effect of Mary's demotion from
pampered mistress to lowlife whore in frame three. Mary's approaching arrest in that
frame causes her imprisonment in the next. And, ultimately, Mary's wrong turn at the
moral crossroads in frame one initiates the inexorably unfolding causal chain that will
propel her at last into her coffin.

Frame one also introduces a rich complex of pictorial parallels and symbols that the
viewer's visual memory will associate into continuously evolving and thus "mobile"
patterns of meaning. The telling visual correspondences between the criminal and
judicial lechers in frames one and three have been noted above, and "animal" images
compose another such dynamic that unfolds from frame to frame. The feeding horse
in frame one is driven by the animal needs that in turn precipitate the stacked buckets'
fall, just as humanity's own animal drives will propel the innocent Mary to her own
"fall," and ultimately to the doom that her dead goose prophesies. The sexual
"monkey business" imagistically pointed up in frame two "makes a monkey out of"
Mary's lustful patron, whose facial profile exactly mirrors her simian pet's. The
monkey is associated as well with Mary, with a scrap of whose frilly clothing the
animal has draped itself. Just as the monkey is Mary's pet, so is she her keeper's. And
just as monkeys are said to "ape" human gestures and expressions, so the socially
ambitious Mary is for her part mimicking the fashions of London's great ladies--in
luxurious idleness, in elegant costume and furnishings, and even in the "unfaithful"
taking of a handsome young lover.(n8)

Humanity's imaged descent to brutishness continues in frame three, where the female
cat-in-heat that sniffs under Mary's dress is a sardonic comment on her behavior, and
on that of Mary's clients as well. As the dog image at the lower center of frame four
confirms, Mary has there gone-to-the-dogs, leads a dog's life in prison, and like a
canine pack animal has allowed brute instincts to submerge her prior, visually
autonomous individuality into the criminal crowd. No animal images appear as such
in frames five and six, nor need they there appear. The dominance of bestial impulse
in Mary's life and world has by then been visually established, and we need only be
reminded in those concluding frames of our animal needs (to feed and to breed) and
of the ultimate and humbling animal destiny that we share with Mary Hackabout: to
fall ill and die and decompose. The final stage in that process is grimly predicted in
frame five, in the vulturous form of the kneeling corpse-washer and in the mended
screen door and hanging fly trap to the scavenger's rear. In frame six, Mary's corpse
has in fact not yet sunk to its final dissolution, but she is there invisible to the viewer
and thus has been prophetically reduced to corporeal nullity.

The viewer's visual memory brings still other images into associative conjunction as
that faculty "moves" forward and back and forward again from frame to frame. The
natural light and outdoor space that Mary had enjoyed in frame one, for example, will
steadily diminish in the succeeding "indoor" frames. Light dims, windows darken,
open doors close, ceilings and walls seem increasingly "barred," and space contracts
as Mary's entrapping circumstances usurp her freedom and squeeze her at last into her
narrow coffin. Similarly, the changing image of the canopied bed epitomizes the
biologically determined course of Mary's--or anyone's--life, for it is in bed that one is
born, enjoys sex, usually breeds, and finally dies. The bed image expands radically
and brazenly from frames two to three; vanishes in frame four, for Mary will enjoy
neither sex nor comfortable rest in Bridewell Prison; reappears only to recede and
contract as Mary is dying in frame five, and shrinks at last to Mary's covered casket.

Absent a sound track with dialogue or voice-over, and absent even the dramatic
cartoonist's "speech balloons," we of course cannot know precisely what the wordless
Mary thinks or feels about what is happening to her, and in particular how she may
regard the hypocrisy of the dominant male sex whose members first solicit her favors,
and then condemn and persecute her for complying. On the one hand, it is appropriate
that Mary be presented to us less as a conscious and feeling "subject" than as an
exploitable "object," for that is how her urban environment regards and treats her. On
the other hand, however, Hogarth does through the series modulate his rendering of
Mary's eyes, the conventional "windows of the soul," to provide a degree of access to
her changing interior state.

In frame one, the innocent Mary's eyes are modestly downcast and in a provincial
newcomer's passive shyness nearly closed. In frame two, however, Mary has learned
both deceptive cynicism and aggressiveness: as she distractingly snaps her fingers
and kicks over the tea table, she fixes her startled patron with a challenging gaze.
Mary has grown more brazen still in frame three as she makes direct eye contact with
the viewer, to whom she displays a probably stolen watch. Mary's stare is ambiguous:
Is she inviting the viewer to make a timed appointment, or pointing out that he is late
for one? Is she proudly displaying a criminal trophy? Or is she making the viewer a
silent witness and thus an accessory to theft? In any case, Mary's calculating boldness
and her quest for initiative advantage have continued to grow, but to a degree
unwarranted by the realities of social power and the vulnerability of her situation.
Unbeknownst to the watch-flaunting Mary, her time is about to "run out." When the
approaching magistrate has arrested her, Mary will lose any hope of choosing and
initiating action as a "subject" and will thereafter be only acted upon as a passive
"object." That realization has come home to the imprisoned Mary in frame four, as
her now humbled gaze reveals. Here she dare not meet the jailer's threatening glare.
She is too humiliated and fearful to make eye contact with her fellow convicts or with
the viewer, and her now anxious eyes look down and out of the frame, perhaps in
avoidance of her immediate circumstances, or perhaps in despairing search of a
succor that of course will not come. Her victimization completed, Mary's eyes are
closing in death in frame five, in a mordant echo of her demurely downcast gaze in
frame one. In frame six, the dead Mary's soul has departed this world, and its ocular
"windows" are accordingly unseen.(n9)

There may well be dozens more of such incrementally evolving images, but let us
conclude by examining a final cinematic device in A Harlot's Progress. Many great
films have appealed to the viewer's visual memory by ending, visually, as they had
begun. One thinks, for example, of the pictorially circular structures of Welles'
Citizen Kane, Wilder's Double Indemnity, Clayton's The Innocents, and Herzog's
Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Such visual symmetry can yield a sense of dramatic
closure and, more importantly, of thematic development epitomized and fulfilled. The
initial and final frames of A Harlot's Progress achieve in conjunction precisely those
effects.

In frame one, Mary had arrived in youthful life and hope near a London tavern's front
door. In frame six, she will be borne from a tavern's back room, defeated and dead. In
frame one, Mary had been surrounded by open space and outdoor light. In frame six,
she is encoffined in indoor gloom. The preoccupied clergyman in frame one had been
oblivious to Mary's need. His counterpart in frame six is deliberately and even
obscenely indifferent. In frame one, the old procuress had pretended a friendly
interest in Mary. If, as Bindman suggests, the aging bawd reappears in frame six as
the wailing woman "lamenting the loss of revenue" (61) that Mary's death has caused
her, then hypocrisy has been unmasked and the underlying reality of exploitation
most hideously revealed.(n10) Frame one had hinted at drinking and sexual predation
and corruption. Frame six seems a prelude to orgy. Evil, it appears, has not only come
full circle; it has intensified. The inscribed plate on Mary's coffin records her date of
death as 2 September 1731--the sixty-fifth anniversary, as Bindman points out, of the
Great Fire of London, a catastrophe popularly regarded as "a manifestation of the
wrath of God at the sins of Londoners" (93). On the visual evidence of frame six, the
time for another such judgment would seem at hand.

We may now attend to the mysterious young woman in white who gazes with unique
dismay into Mary's coffin at the center of that final frame. Published commentaries
have assumed that she is simply one of the many prostitutes who have assembled to
bid a colleague farewell, and that she peers at the dead Mary's face as a memento
mori. The symmetrical construction of the series as a whole and the focal emphasis
accorded the figure, however, suggest more extended and richer possibilities. Might
the young woman be the London cousin expected but disastrously absent in frame
one, and now at last but far too late arrived? Perhaps so. A country girl's beribboned
white hat hangs just above her head on the rear wall, however, just as the imprisoned
gambler's tricorn had hung above his head in frame four. If the hat is hers, then her
rural headgear suggests that the young woman is the next Mary Hackabout, arriving
in London at an overhead tavern sign just as Mary had: white-dressed and white-
hatted, clear-skinned, focally central, flanked on the left by a preoccupied clergyman
and on the right by an old procuress, facing to our right, gazing down, luminous in a
surrounding gloom, perhaps just descended from a covered rural meat wagon into an
urban sea of sharks.(n11) The dead Mary is now invisible to the viewer, for the
newcomer has replaced her at the pictorial and dramatic center; and the young
woman seems all but certain to re-enact the "progress" of the predecessor whose
dead, coffin-framed face she contemplates, much as the nearby woman stares at her
own rectangularly framed and mirrored image.

Mary Hackabout's surname had predicted and epitomized her destiny. A "hack," like a
prostitute, is a vehicle for hire and it daily runs a circular course, starting from its cab
garage, then like a streetwalker moving randomly "about" in search of clients, and
finally returning to the resting point from which its motion had begun. The visually
circular patterning of Mary's sad "progress" complements that sense of futile
movement, and the components of the final frame recapitulate the forces that have
converged to destroy her: negligent clergyman, exploitative old bawd, unwanted
child, selfish indifference, the disease that marks several prostitutes' faces, alcohol,
theft, mirror of vanity, closed and "barred" space, and sexual predation. Accentuated
and extended by the large semicircular shadow in the right foreground and the
circular yew-tray on the floor, those elements now form a larger circle that is closing
around the white-dressed newcomer at the frame's and the gathering's center. An
inexorably entrapping cycle of destruction, it seems, is about to begin once more.

Conventional wisdom holds that one picture is worth a thousand words; but that
equation would depend, one supposes, upon the worth of the picture, and of the
words. In the case of William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress, six serial pictures
incorporate perhaps a thousand pictorial details that, in their dynamic continuity and
interplay, earn their prophetic art a single word of description, and of praise:
"Cinematic."

And brilliantly so.

Notes
(n1)Every student of Hogarth is indebted to the monumental scholarship of Ronald Paulson,
including his Hogarth's Graphic Works: First Complete Edition, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP,
1965; rev. eds. 1970, 1989); Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP,
1971); Hogarth: The "Modern Moral Subject," 1697-1732 (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991),
and Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (South Bend: U of Notre Dame
P, 1979). Other useful studies include those by Antal, Bindman, and Cowley listed below;
David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973); Jack Lindsay,
Hogarth: His Art and His World (New York: Taplinger, 1979); Neil McWilliam, Hogarth
(London: Studio Editions, 1993); Robert Etheridge Moore, Hogarth's Literary Relationships
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1948), and Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (New
York: Farrar, Straus, 1997).

(n2)Paulson takes the vulgar coat of arms to be Mary's: ". . . a mocking set of armorial
bearings for the deceased hangs on the wall. Needless to say, such did not accompany the
funerals of whores" (Hogarth's Graphic Works, I, 148-49). Paulson thus interprets the
escutcheon to be a final sardonic comment on Mary's affectations of gentility. Given that the
"arms" consist of three keg taps, that whores could claim no such armorial distinction, and
that the wine is flowing at the wake, I take the plaque to be a tavern sign and thus to be a
visual reminder of Mary's arrival at a tavern in London in frame one. Hogarth has been
consistently at pains to specify the kind of setting in which his Harlot finds herself and to
make frames one and six symmetrical, and such a sign would be the only pertinent visual
clue in frame six. No church would be hosting a whore's bibulous wake, and Mary plainly is
not being "buried from home," for the cramped garret depicted in the preceding frame
would not have accommodated the crowd assembled and drinking at her funeral. A tavern's
back room accordingly seems the likeliest setting.

(n3)Antal offers a thorough, if relentlessly Marxist, account of the "bourgeois" character and
patronage of Hogarth's art.

(n4)A contemporary dramatization of that moral ambivalence has come down to us. Four
years after Hogarth's death, his widow Jane Thornhill agreed to a re-engraved reissue of
seventy-eight of his prints, including A Harlot's Progress, with each plate to be accompanied
by a didactic commentary written by the Rev. John Trusler. The edition was aptly titled
Hogarth Moralized (London, 1768). In Trusler's extended gloss on A Harlot's Progress, he
cannot decide whether he wants to castigate Mary as a slut or to denounce sinful London's
betrayal of her sweet innocence. He therefore does both, with no apparent awareness of
inconsistency, and no doubt with a doubled assurance of his own superior righteousness.

(n5)Hogarth's contemporary and fellow engraver George Vertue in his notebooks identified
several of the actual persons depicted in A Harlot's Progress, and modern scholarship has
confirmed and extended Vertue's identifications. The aging procuress in frame one is
"Mother" Elizabeth Needham, who in 1731 was sentenced (fatally) to the pillory for keeping
a disorderly house and was notorious enough to be satirized in Fielding's Covent Garden
Tragedy and Pope's Dunciad. The lecherous aristocrat in the same frame is the still more
infamous gambler and rapist Colonel Francis Charteris, whose powerful friends regularly
connived to protect him from the law. At Charteris' side is his pimp, "Trusty Jack" Gourly.
The arresting magistrate in frame three is Sir John Gonson, a bordello-raider famed and
often mocked in Hogarth's London as the rabidly puritanical "Scourge of Whores." The quack
physicians in frame five have been identified as Drs. Richard Rock and Jean Misaubin, who
regularly advertised spurious cures for venereal disease. Paulson offers a detailed account of
those and other sources for Hogarth's characterizations in contemporary press accounts of
crime and political scandal (Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, I, 240-55).

(n6)Hogarth expected his purchaser to have the Harlot's Progress engravings framed and
hung as what Hogarth called "furniture," and accordingly sized his plates at approximately
12" x 14". Paulson reports that the prints usually were framed and domestically mounted in
two horizontal rows of three (Modern Moral Subject 282). Antal notes that the Harlot
pictures were often reproduced on the inexpensive chinaware, decorative box lids, and fan
mounts that bourgeois consumers liked to acquire in low-cost emulation of aristocratic
tastes (52).

(n7)Hogarth apparently told his friend and Continental publicist Jean Andre Rouquet that
the mounted clergyman is Mary's father, who has accompanied her from Yorkshire to London
in pursuit of his own advancement (Paulson, Modern Moral Subject 328). Trusler repeats that
identification, presumably on the authority of Hogarth's widow, in Hogarth Moralized. If the
identification is accepted (albeit with no supporting visual evidence), then Mary's
abandonment by her family is the more striking and shameful still.

(n8)I am indebted to Paulson's Modern Moral Subject at many points, but here especially
(263).

(n9)Hogarth occasionally incorporates verbal pointers into A Harlot's Progress, e.g., the gift
tag and the letter of introduction in frame one and the labeled wig box and "Mackheath"
print in frame three; but he relies almost entirely upon visual data to advance narrative and
articulate theme. The artist's confidence in the communicative power of purely pictorial
images seems subsequently to have waned, however. For his next graphic narrative, A Rake's
Progress (1735), Hogarth commissioned a poet friend to write explanatory and moralizing
verse commentaries that were printed at the bottom of each frame. That hybridizing of the
visual and the verbal persists in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747) and in the verbally
annotated reissue of A Harlot's Progress that he authorized in 1744.

(n10)Antal follows some contemporary accounts in identifying the wailing woman as "the
deceased's employer, a well-known London character, an old procuress named Mother
Bentley . . ." (101). Paulson endorses no specific identification for the figure, but concurs
that she "must be [Mary's] bawd. This explains her passionate lamentation" over income lost
(Hogarth's Graphic Works, I, 149).

(n11)Regarding the wall-hung hat, Cowley in pursuit of religious iconology notes that
"Hogarth . . . used innocent objects as haloes frequently" in his early "progress" series "to
mock-sanctify his characters. A hat on the wall behind one of the harlots who mourns . . . in
A Harlot's Progress VI makes hers the role of a sorrowing magdalen" (136). Perhaps so. In any
case, the shiny white "halo" hat suspended over the young woman's head distinctly recalls
the heavenly light that had bathed the innocent and luminous Mary in frame one and thus
further reinforces the figural correspondence argued here.

Works Cited

Antal, Frederick. Hogarth and His Place in European Art. New York: Basic Books,
1962.

Bindman, David. Hogarth. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.

Cowley, Robert L. S. Marriage-a-la-Mode. A Re-view of Hogarth's Narrative Art.

Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983.

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP,
1971.

-----. Hogarth: The "Modern Moral Subject." 1697-1732. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 1991.

-----. Hogarth's Graphic Works. First Complete Ed. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP,
1965. Rev. eds. 1970, 1989.

Philip Momberger is Associate Professor of English at the University of West Florida.

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