Hogarth’s London

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Immerse yourself in Hogarth's London

It is almost 250 years since the artist died but his vision of the city still resonates today. Fired by viewing his etchings and paintings in a splendid retrospective at Tate Britain, Nick Trend visits the places in London that had special significance to him and his contemporaries

One of William Hogarth's consummate skills as an artist was his ability to make you feel part of his world. Take his London street scenes. You don't stand back and observe the city from a safe distance as you would with, say, Canaletto. You are swept along the alleyways, jostled from each side, forced to dodge the contents of an emptied piss-pot or to step over an inebriated harlot.


Hogarth's depictions of London low life in the early 18th century reveal the dark side of the Age of Enlightenment. This was a golden era for intellectual debate, artistic creativity and for amassing spectacular fortunes, but it was also a time of appalling poverty and suffering.


Hogarth had a deep insight into both worlds. One of the leading intellectuals of the time, he was a friend of Handel, Garrick and Henry Fielding, and well acquainted with Dr Johnson. But he grew up, the son of an educated but impoverished father, in the less than salubrious streets around Smithfield meat market and St Bart's Hospital.


Like Dickens, whose eye for character and for the detail of depravity he shares, Hogarth had a childhood blighted by the years his father spent in debtors' prison. He was also familiar with the dark bulk of Newgate Prison, now demolished, then just up the road from Smithfield. From here, every six weeks or so, condemned prisoners would be carted along what is now Oxford Street to the communal gallows at Tyburn ?- opposite present-day Speakers' Corner.


You can get a sense of the ribald chaos of the crowds of Londoners attending these events in Hogarth's etching The Idle Apprentice. It is currently on display at Tate Britain, along with virtually all his most important paintings and etchings, in what is the best overview of his work for more than 30 years.


But how much of Hogarth's portrayal of London is caricature, and how much is a true reflection of the city of the time?


Obviously Hogarth worked for effect. He laid on ironies with a shovel, and manipulated his images according to the corruption, hypocrisy or poor taste he wanted to expose.


A scene such as Gin Lane (see opposite) is his essay on the evils he attributed to the drink that had become a panacea for London's underclass. It has the air of a grotesque exaggeration. A drunken woman sprawls on the steps while her child falls into a cellar, another feeds gin to her baby, a man fights with a dog for its bone, another hangs himself in a garret. In the background a house collapses, while the only buildings that are in good repair are the pawnbroker's, the undertaker's and the distillery.


But, for all the exaggeration, the image is built on facts. Hogarth used news stories as well as his direct impressions of the street. One story, dating from the 1730s, tells of Judith Dufour, who reclaimed her two-yearold child from the workhouse and strangled the infant so that she could sell the clothes to buy gin. Another mother was accused of deliberately blinding a child, the better to elicit sympathy when begging.


The amount of gin that was consumed was extraordinary. In 1751, the year that Hogarth produced the etching, more than 9,000 children died of alcohol poisoning, every fourth house in St Giles sold the stuff and more than 11 million gallons were consumed in a city with a population of much less than a million.


The collapsing house seen in the background of Gin Lane was also a relatively common sight. Much of Hogarth's London was relatively new, rebuilt after the fire of 1666. The stonework of Wren's cathedral and his city churches must still have gleamed. But many of the houses had been hastily reconstructed and often jerry-built. Collapses ?- in which the occupants and passers-by often died ?- were commonplace. In 1738, Dr Johnson described London as a city "where falling houses thunder on your head".


Prostitution was another issue. The Strand was one of many streets lined not just with fashionable coffee shops, but with brothels. Even Casanova was impressed. "It makes a magnificent debauch," he wrote in his memoirs of London. And is there a note of enthusiasm in Boswell's description of the choices available to an interested gentleman ?- from the "splendid madame at fifty guineas a night" to the "civil nymph" who could be "had for a pint of wine and a shilling"? Many of these prostitutes were country girls who had been drawn into a city that, in some ways, was flourishing like never before (the population doubled between 1700 and 1800), but few prospered.


Hogarth appears to have been accutely sensitive to this, seeming to echo Dr Johnson's edict that a society must be judged by the way it treats its poor. He traced the fate of the young prostitutes in A Harlot's Progress. Innocent Moll Hackett arrives from the country in the first plate, and steps straight off the coach into the arms of a brothel-keeper. By plate six, aged 23, she is dead, having suffered prison, syphilis and abject poverty. It is not a simplistic narrative ?- at times Moll appears complicit in the corruption ?- but she is clearly its principal victim.


Perhaps my favourite evocation of the day to day chaos of the city is The Enraged Musician (above). Here Hogarth, ever the patriot, is poking fun at an Italian violinist who cannot hear himself practise because of the din from the streets.


Street musicians, bawling babies, a knife-grinder, the cries of itinerant salesmen, barking dogs, a drummer boy and a little girl with a rattle comprise the city orchestra. It is London in its richest variety ?- and variety, just as much as elegance, was critical to Hogarth's ideas of artistic beauty.


Walking around London today, it is easy to draw parallels between now and then ?- the traffic-jammed streets, the noise and the crime. Might Gin Lane ?- as the political commentator Andrew Marr has pointed out ?- be seen as a prophetic depiction of Heroin Alley?


But what physically remains of Hogarth's London? One or two scenes in the Tate exhibition have a familiar ring. The prospect of Covent Garden in early morning in the Four Times of the Day series has barely altered. Some of the landmarks in the backgrounds of his etchings are also recognisable: church towers such as that of St Martin-in-the-Field, for instance; the dome of St Paul's and the equestrian statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall.


But much of the city has been rebuilt more than once in the past 250 years. Gin Lane ?- had it really existed ?- was set roughly where Centrepoint is now. Ironically, the areas Hogarth would probably recognise most easily were he to return today are the smarter parts of Mayfair ?- such as Grosvenor Square. These districts were being laid out by entrepreneurial aristocrats on greenfield sites in the 1720s and 1730s, but while many of his interior scenes might have been set inside grand houses such as these, he chose not to paint or etch the elegant pavements and garden courts outside.


Hogarth preferred to explore deeper under the city's skin. Perhaps, in today's London, he would be drawn to the variety and vibrancy of streets such as Brick Lane. But there are still some shadows and echoes of his own London that you can explore ?- houses, museums, squares and streets where his spirit presides. Here is my guide to some of the highlights.

Hogarth continues at Tate Britain (020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk) until April 29. Open every day 10am-5.40pm (last admission 5pm), £10, concessions £8.

An exhibition of Canaletto, Hogarth's contemporary, is running at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (020 8693 5254, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk) until April 15.

Liza Picard's Dr Johnson's London (Phoenix, £7.99) is an excellent account of the city during Hogarth's time.