If you want a real London artist, William Hogarth is the one whose pictures are most solidly grounded in this city. Anyone who has a feel for the capital should make their way to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where there’s a fabulous exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum entitled Hogarth: Place and Progress. Here you can see the complete collection of his series of Modern Moral Subjects.
So, you get A Rake’s Progress, A Harlot’s Progress (you know they’re not going to turn out well), Marriage A-la-Mode (that doesn’t end well either), The Happy Marriage (far more dull), and The Humours of an Election (if you think our politics are bad, take a look).
All are riveting: you can cheerfully stand in front of any of them for minutes on end (slow art, anyone?) just to drink in the comic detail — the boy pissing on the crowd from a balcony in the triumphal election scene, two dogs getting libidinous in front of an ill-judged human marriage ceremony. All human life is there. Any could illustrate the old Samuel Johnson dictum that when a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life.
But the thing is, London is where the moral dramas of life are played out. It’s not just that London is a backdrop to all the series, apart from the election one, which is in Oxfordshire. There’s a map showing all the places in the city where the action takes place. Hogarth himself grew up near the Fleet Prison, where his father did time for debt.
London shows how characters make bad and make good. As the programme notes: “The idea of spiritual progress [negative or positive] is made visible through representations of London life; for example, the contrast between the City of London, with its winding alleys and crumbling houses, associated with merchants, and the West End, where the landed aristocracy live in spacious and orderly squares, physically nearer to the royal Palace of St James.”
So, in Marriage A-la-Mode, or a marriage of convenience, the rise and fall of the wife can be seen in the change in place. Her father, a merchant, marries her off to a nobleman, so she moves from the City to a grand house near St James’s. When she dies an ignominious death, it’s back to the City... the shame.
And then there are the haunts of the poor, around St Giles, or the in-between dodgy areas, such as the notorious Rose Tavern in Drury Lane, where the rake ends up.
We know just what to make of what happens to the characters, because the London scene tells us. It’s all wryly amusing for us, as all the places that were then seen as dodgy or depraved are now unimaginably chic and unaffordable.
Hogarth would have had lots to say about bad aspects of modern London. Where he warned young country girls against city vices he might now depict the awful fate of Moldovans being trafficked into prostitution. Syphilis haunts his pictures; it could be HIV/AIDS now.
But there’s colossal humanity in his world view. And now, as then, London is where we see the best and worst of it.
