In 1736, an impressario called Jonathan Tyers commissioned William Hogarth to paint four scenes to decorate his pleasure park Vauxhall Gardens, where Londoners, some of them posh and some just wearing posh clothes, listened to music, intrigued and seduced each other in the “dark walks” under the trees. Hogarth had the idea to capture the comedy and sadness, crowds and chaos of life in 18th-century London in four paintings that translate an old artistic theme, Four Times of the Day, from pastoral settings to a city that was fast becoming the first modern metropolis. In 1738, he published a set of prints of these paintings to make them accessible to the ordinary urbanites they portray. Even if you were too poor to buy a print by Hogarth, you could still see his work for free in print-shop windows that served as the street art galleries of their time.
Hogarth’s Four Times of the Day portrays the London of nearly 300 years ago as a rollicking carnival of collisions between rich and poor, the respectable and the raunchy, the pious and the outcast. Yet one detail upset me when I noticed it earlier this year.
In his picture The Times of the Day: Night, a piss pit is emptied out of a window, a coach has crashed and caught fire, a drunken barber-surgeon is injuring his customer and an inebriated freemason is making his way home. Yet amid this mayhem, three people are sleeping, huddled together under a wooden ledge at the side of the street.
This is surely the earliest image of homelessness in British art. It is distressing to look at today – because it is an image for our time.
Hogarth portrays these rough sleepers on a street near Covent Garden with sympathy and compassion. They have nowhere to go in a country that does not care. Hogarth was working after all at the very beginning of modern capitalism, long before modern ideas of social welfare. He himself was one of Britain’s earliest social reformers, not only in the pointed satire of his art but also in his support of London’s first foundling hospital. In the background of Night, a group of desperate renters are moving their belongings by night to escape a landlord: life in this society is precarious, unprotected and you can easily fall through the gaps.
Homelessness in the London of 1736 is a secret scandal, a hidden crisis. Life goes on with no regard for the rough sleepers. Hogarth lights up the truth. He portrays a link boy – a child who made a living by lighting people’s way through the dark streets – blowing on his torch to create a powerful glow that shows us the sleepers huddled at the side of the street. These people deserve your fellow feeling, says Hogarth – don’t just look away.
Many of the ills that Hogarth satirises in his art have vanished. They belong to an age that seems savagely cruel by modern standards. There are no debtor’s prisons in today’s Britain, it is no longer acceptable to treat mental illness as a spectator sport, hanging has been abolished – to take some of the images of the raw and violent past that fill Hogarth’s prints and paintings.
Yet Hogarth’s compassionate portrayal of rough sleepers on the streets of London is terrifyingly up to date. This is not an image from the past. It is a picture of the present. Walk through the capital tonight, any night, and you will see the same scene. How can a grotesque image of the heartlessness of 18th-century Britain still portray how we live now?
Homelessness is getting worse. Anyone can see that, as clearly as if Hogarth’s boy was holding up a light. If you need statistics, government figures reveal that the number of people sleeping on London’s streets doubled between 2009-10 and 2015. The number of people sleeping rough across Britain went up 14% in a 12 month period in 2015. According to Crisis, local agency figures show that at least 8,096 slept rough in London in 2015/16.
Government cuts have had a visible impact on this dire situation. Hostels have closed, leaving emergency beds unavailable – a brutal reduction in one of the simplest forms of basic compassion. But just being empirical and seeing a reality that is everywhere in our city streets, it’s hard for anyone who remembers the 1980s not to see a parallel. Conservative governments always seem to result in more homelessness. Funny coincidence, that. And what a shame the Labour Party can’t get into power and do something about it.
Even in Bethlehem 2000 years ago people offered space in a stable to the desperate. When William Hogarth portrayed rough sleepers in 1736, he was recording the reality of his time. Does it also have to be the reality of ours?
