‘The Magic of Money’

A study of play, gaming, and gambling in the art of William Hogarth (1697–1764)

Robert LS Cowley

 

The illustrations are of works by William Hogarth (1697–1764) unless otherwise stated

1 The South Sea Scheme (c1721) etching and engraving, possible companion to The Lottery. Note the game of pitch and hustle in the left foreground

 

‘The magic of money’ is William Hogarth’s own phrase, appearing in his print The South Sea Scheme (Pl 1). Hogarth the social activist is best remembered for his attacks on alcoholism in Gin Lane and Beer Street, his concern for animals, and for his charity work for the Foundling Hospital in London. It is less well known that he worried throughout his working life about gambling and its consequences for all classes. Charles Dillon, the historian of the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688, and a student of the ‘culture of risk’ in 18th-century Britain, sees its triple legacy as freedom, knowledge, and – above all – risk, which manifested itself through gaming and gambling. It was a matter of prolonged concern for Hogarth.^[1]

Gambling in Hogarth’s time occurred in many forms: betting, especially side-betting on the outcomes of games and sports; lotteries including raffles; speculation in financial affairs; gambling in the metaphorical sense of taking exceptional risks with one’s own life or those of others. Hogarth’s harlots, his rake, his earl, his alderman, and their children, his wayward apprentices, are all extreme risk-takers, who gamble with their personal lives to catastrophic effect This essay is a survey of those pictures in which Hogarth depicts game-playing, bloodsports, and their associated gambling. It provides an explanation of what some of the details might mean. Their social contexts are considered, and their relevance assessed. It also provides an opportunity to look at well-known pictures from an unusual angle and to examine some of his less well-known works as well. The essay is limited to the formal side of play and sport, however, because risk-taking in life generally is too pervasive a theme to examine meaningfully.

The early 1720s saw speculation reach its craziest heights as the notorious South Sea Bubble exploded and imploded. Hogarth’s disapproval, his indignation, and his disgust were expressed in emblematic prints: The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery (Pl 2).

 

2 The Lottery (1724) etching and engraving, possible companion to The South Sea Scheme

 

The South Sea Scheme

The South Sea Scheme has, at the left-hand side, a devil-butcher feeding a crowd with flesh hacked from the corpse of the goddess Fortuna, whose carcass hangs by its hair from a railing. The butcher throws the meat over his counter to an eager crowd who shop for the meat of good fortune. Other speculators queue to ‘ride the bubble,’ on a merry-go-round: that is, symbolically, they are investors in the stock of the South Sea Company.^[2] Prospectuses for Bubble companies included schemes for perpetual motion, universal funeral furniture, turning quick-silver into gold and even one which had no clear proposals at all, but asked never the less for investments of a million pounds sterling. In Hogarth’s picture, other personifications of ancient values such as honour and honesty are broken on the wheel and whipped at the pillory. Honest trade lies forlorn in the shadows with its head on a discarded wool-sack.

In the left foreground kneeling figures play a street-game known as ‘pitch & hustle’, as Hogarth called it in his caption:

Here all Religions flock together

Like Tame & Wild Fowl of a Feather.

Leaving their strife Religious bustle

Kneel down to play at pitch and Hustle.

Players pitched their coins at an agreed mark and the player whose coin fell the closest to it had first dibs at ‘hustling’ the coins. They were hustled, that is shaken, in a hat, and tipped out. The gambler who came first won all the coins which turned up ‘heads’. They were hustled again and the second pitcher claimed the remaining ‘heads’. The game continued until all the coins had been won. Hogarth’s players gamble with several coins each since at least three ‘heads’ can be seen. The remainder have versos, stamped with a cross. In the first scene of A Rake’s Progress the Rake tries to buy off the pregnant Sarah Young with gold coins, two of which have cross-pieces (see illustration here of Fleet Gold Cobs or doubloons). A coin in the gambling scene (VI) of the same series is also golden.^[3]

 

Gold coins of the type seen in The South Sea Scheme and other Hogarth compositions

 

The three gamblers in The South Sea Scheme are representatives of different religions outside the Anglican church that were usually at war with one another: a Catholic priest with his chasuble; a Jewish High priest with a forked beard and wearing his Choshen Mishpat (breastplate of righteousness); and a pastor in his black clothes and clerical bands.^[4] It would have been bitterly appropriate that these high-ranking and greedy gamblers were playing for gold in the street rather than for farthings or halfpence.

There were few Roman Catholic stock-jobbers in Exchange Alley, the financial quarter of the City, but the Catholic English College at Douai in northern France lost endowments in the crash. In addition to the priest, a resemblance of the Catholic poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) is a central figure in Hogarth’s picture: the very short man with a hand in his friend’s pocket.^[5] At the right, Hogarth’s satirical version of the Monument to the Great Fire of London acts as a reminder of the inscription added in 1681 blaming the Catholics for the ‘horreurs’ of the fire.

Jewish brokers dealt in stock during the crisis and some lost heavily as its value declined. They were popular targets for those seeking to blame others rather than themselves. Exchange Alley was inhabited by Turks, atheists, infidels – and Jews – according to one dramatist and, in one of the popular bubble playing-cards, a Jewish broker has the devil at his elbow.

The Hope family of Presbyterians had an important role in the stock trade. A Quaker behind and to the right of Hogarth’s Puritan minister waits for his open sack to be filled with the flesh of (good) fortune. One of the founders of Barclay’s Bank, the goldsmith and Quaker John Freame, attacked the fraudulent activities of some of his colleagues in Bubble-inspired companies.

In the background at the left, a crowd of women queue at a doorway on the first floor of an anonymous-looking building. A placard above the door reads: ‘Raffleing [sic] for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes – in Here –’. Hogarth’s first thoughts in a preliminary drawing were more specific: ‘a ten thousand pound man to be raffled for…’ The sum would have been left to the imagination of his viewers. Under the influence of the bubble, a crowd of women in the picture queue for a chance to win rich husbands – or lovers. In reality, single women are known to have speculated in the hope of winning enough money to provide themselves with dowries.^[6] An anonymous ‘Florentina’ in The Original Weekly Journal (August 1720), declared that her profits would be used to purchase a husband in a South-Sea match.^[7] Hogarth’s absurd prizes were on the edge of reality.

Raffles were, and still are, a form of lottery, although they have physical objects as prizes rather than money. In 1567, the Queen Elizabeth I raised money to pay for ‘publique good works’ through a lottery: the first state-lottery-cum-raffle of modern times. The first prize was £5000 with lesser prizes of tableware, tapestries, and other rich cloths. There were private raffles, too: Jan van Eyck’s widow raffled one of his paintings. A painting of Venus kissed by Cupid, after Michelangelo, was offered as a prize in a raffle, although it was later withdrawn.

Contemporary males underestimated women in the field of finance. Yet one of the most successful investors was Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Malborough and a politician of considerable repute.^[8] She withdrew her holdings in the South Sea Company just before the Bubble crashed and made £100,000. She became the Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse. She was to be the largest individual account holder in the Bank of England. She lent Robert Walpole £200,000 to fund the government. She was worth millions at her death. There were others: Lady Mary Wortley Montague was badly advised by Alexander Pope among other friends and lost out. Today’s research shows that women were more capable in their financial activities than he and other males wished to believe at the time.

 

The Lottery

The Lottery is something of a companion to The South Sea Scheme. Both are about gambling, both depict the Guildhall, one outside, the other within. Both include personifications, ancient and modern. By the 18th century, lotteries had become big business: they had funded the colonisation of Virginia. A lottery helped finance London’s supply of clean water and funded the building of a bridge across the Thames. A state lottery in 1694 set the model for the rest. It was known as the ‘million lottery’ because it was hoped to raise a million pounds for the government to spend (on continental wars). The first prize was £5,000 and there were lesser prizes or benefits as they were called. Even they had value, providing an annuity of £1 over a period of sixteen years; it was the beginning of the trade in stocks. Later in the century, a speculator could hire or buy a part-ticket for a lottery: a practice known as ‘riding the horse’ (see note 2 above). Perhaps the saying prompted Hogarth to make a merry-go-round his centre-piece in The South Sea Scheme.

Draws for the state lotteries took place in London’s Guildhall. Hogarth’s picture was one among many lottery pictures set in Guildhall: an anonymous print of the interior of the Guildhall possibly showing the raising of funds to build Westminster Bridge was originally entitled ‘Method of the drawing a state lottery in the Guild hall’ (Pl 3).

 

3 ‘Method of the Drawing a State Lottery in the Guild Hall’, the lottery for funding the building of Westminster Bridge (?) facsimile, engraving, anon (1739)

 

The Lottery has a convenient key like that in The South Sea Scheme: boys from the charitable school, the Blue Coat School, draw tickets from the ‘wheels’, as they are called in the key. Attendants announced the results: one called out the numbers and the other declared whether they matched blanks or prizes. ‘Commissioners’, perhaps led by a ‘proclaimer’, oversaw the draws at a high table in the middle of a stage. Four ‘clerks’ at a lower table, sometimes called ‘tallymen’, recorded the results. The spectators in the foreground were rather unnecessarily labelled ‘F’. Perhaps the publisher wished to draw attention to the presence of witnesses in order to emphasise how transparent were the draws. If this lottery did fund the bridge, the crowd implies that speculators were enthusiastic for the project. Named pictures of George II and Queen Caroline decorate the back wall of Guildhall, being the ultimate patrons of the lotteries. These portraits are replaced in Hogarth’s Lottery: a city dignitary or an unnamed king with his sceptre is to the right. On the left, according to the caption, the goddess Earth sustains herself by means of a shower of rain, a weird act of auto-cannibalism. She gazes, enviously perhaps, at ships in the background, bathed in a shower of sunbeams perhaps flecked with gold.

The details in the rest of the print are different too. Upon the stage at the right, blindfolded Fortune draws ‘the blanks and prizes’. She stands upon a small cart-wheel symbolic of the Wheel of Fortune. In a later version of the scene (dated 1763) four boys wait their turn at drawing tickets on the opposite side (a longer and more repetitive task than was perhaps realised by the author of the 1739 print in Pl 3). One variant declares that an overall winner was the syndicate of a Mrs V. Dowling which won £6000 with the benefit number 18692. A pirated version with speech bubbles has a schoolboy shouting out another number, ‘35675’. Although published later than Hogarth’s picture, these numbers in their thousands do give an idea of the scale of the phenomenon that he was attacking in the 1720s.

Hogarth was reasonably accurate where the background to his lottery-picture is concerned, but he replaced the officials at the high-table with a throne and pedestal, surmounted with a deity, ‘National Credit’ along with her supporters. The grouping is so stylised that it resembles a bookplate; it is as if one artificial form were superimposed upon another.^[9] The personifications are characters from the classical past – Apollo, Justice, Minerva, Britannia – together with others that Hogarth made up for himself – National Credit, Misfortune, and Fraud. At the left of the stage, the boys are replaced by ‘Wantonness’ who, according to the caption, ‘draws the numbers’. She holds a whirligig, a symbol of the capriciousness of lotteries.

Both pictures have their puzzles: the cases in which the wheels were locked in both Hogarth’s picture and the later versions are labelled, ‘A’ and ‘B’. Were they so labelled to keep the locked wheels separate from one another out of fear of muddling blanks, prizes, and numbers as they were moved from place to place? Hogarth also included an extra pair of locked cases, seen at the rear of the stage, labelled with the same letters. Were they reserves in the case of a breakdown or were they full of tickets ready for a succeeding lottery?^[10] Hogarth accentuates the theatrical character of the occasion by enclosing his scene in marginal drapes. These perhaps anticipated the cloths hanging over the balconies in the later prints. A theatrical character is emphasised in some of them, because charity boys stand in what would have been the trap in a stage. The objects in both pictures are generously decorated with crowns to underline that these were state lotteries under the patronage of the monarchy.

One question is why Hogarth attacked the state lotteries through a fantasy which has no ordinary humans in it? Frederick Antal suggested that some of the figures recalled those in Raphael’s famous School at Athens (1509–1511).^[11]

 

4 The School of Athens by Raphael (1483–1520), 1509–1511. Fresco, Stanze della Segnatura, Vatican. Prints of the scene were available across Europe and the British Isles

 

Ronald Paulson went further: he claimed that the whole picture was a parody of Raphael’s ‘school’, an assembly of the distinguished philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of Ancient Greece, among them, Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Heraclitus (Pl 4). The allusion invites a comparison: the apex of cultural achievement in Hogarth’s 1720s is a sordid lottery admired by the multitude rather than a great assembly of intellectual icons from a revered past.

Why did Hogarth attack lotteries and speculation? In his personal life, his father was a failed Latinist and failed proprietor of a coffee-shop who ended up in a debtor’s prison. The family scraped enough money together to pay for his son’s apprenticeship to a silversmith. In the 1720s, he was working hard to support the needy members of his family, to build up his own engraving business, and pay for drawing and painting lessons. He would have had little time for those who sought to make a living from gambling. There was an exception, however: many years later, when The Lottery was almost forgotten, Hogarth set up a subscription for Luke Sullivan’s engraving of his painting, The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750). He offered a choice of subscription: seven-shillings-and-sixpence or half-a-guinea. If a subscriber were to choose the latter, his or her receipt became a ‘chance’ in a raffle with the painting as the prize. Since many of his well-to-do subscribers could not be bothered with small coins, they paid the full amount. He sold 1843 tickets out of 2000. He donated the remaining tickets to the Foundling Hospital, his favourite charity. The General Advertiser for 1 May announced that ‘the fortunate chance was number 1941, which belongs to the said Hospital; and the same night Mr Hogarth delivered the picture to the governors’. Hogarth is recorded as having made £900 from his lottery and would have made more from his prints of the subject in the future. Was the raffle rigged? Of course it was. Had Hogarth forgotten his earlier indignation against lotteries? Of course he had, conveniently so, for a good cause and his own profit.

One detail in his first series, A Harlot’s Progress, is suggestive of gambling in its formal sense. In plate IV, a well-dressed and amazed Harlot is confined in Bridewell, the House of Correction (Pl 5). She inexpertly beats hemp, the raw material for string, rope, and sacks. A man beside her is equally ineffectual and equally well-dressed. He has an elaborate top-coat and shirt with ruffled sleeves. His tricorn hat hangs on the wall behind him. He is a gentleman-sharper who made his living at cards. He was unsuccessful since he is imprisoned, probably for playing games like basset or its successor, faro (see below). His attribute, a torn and discarded playing-card, lies at his feet: it signifies that his previous way of life is over.

 

5 ‘In Bridewell’, A Harlot’s Progress, IV (1732) engraving and etching

 

Ronald Paulson has shown how the figure of the Harlot in her unsuitable clothing was modelled on newspaper accounts of a real ‘Kate Hackabout’, who had beenincarcerated in all her finery. A similar set of events may have prompted Hogarth to include a card-sharper alongside her. The historian Rictor Norman has described accounts of events at a well-known gaming-club, the Phoenix in the Haymarket.^[12] It was raided in late March 1729 by the reforming magistrate, John Gonson. Several gamesters were arrested and sent to Bridewell in Tothill Fields to beat hemp. The club was raided again in January 1731 and three more gamesters were sentenced to beat hemp. Are these accounts the source of Hogarth’s anecdote? Justice Gonson’s likeness was introduced in the previous picture of the series (Pl 6), and a matchstick cartoon of him as a hanged man is on the back-wall of this, the prison scene. If the sharpster was imprisoned for his sleight-of-hand, then beating hemp would have destroyed his skill in much the same way that the punishment has destroyed the freedom of the Harlot to follow her trade.

 

6 A Harlot’s Progress, III

 

The card at his feet is identifiable as an eight-of-spades. The reading of cards was a popular pastime and fortune-books gave meaning to each of the fifty-two cards. To search for the meaning of individual playing cards in cartomancy, however, is to enter a region of shifting sands: explanations vary from culture to culture, from one belief system to another, from one geographical region to the next. The eight-of-spades on one site symbolises power, elsewhere it represents light. One site sees it as referring to someone backed into a corner and lacking the capacity to choose how the future might pan out. Such ideas fit both the gambler’s and the Harlot’s situations: her only way out of prison proves to be death. An interpretation that comes the nearest to a consensus is that the eight-of-spades is a sinister card, the card of sickness, an omen of plague, a warning that injuries may prove fatal. In so far as the gambler and his card are present to illuminate the Harlot’s journey through life, the card and its imprisoned owner preview her death from sexually transmitted disease. She dies during a ‘salivation’ in the fifth picture. A minor, even trivial, detail is an augur.

Gambling is part of the spendthrift Rake’s life in Hogarth’s second series. It begins in the second picture (Pl 7): Rakewell dithers over which (expensive) pastime to follow.

 

7 A Rake’s Progress, II, 1734. Oil on canvas. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

 

A jockey kneeling to one side holds a silver punchbowl with ‘Won at Epsom’ engraved above a galloping horse and jockey.^[13] Horse-racing was, and is, the sport of kings, and it would be a sign of the feeble Rake’s ambition that he aspired to a royal sport (King Charles II was present at the first race at Epsom Downs in March 1661). The winning horse in Hogarth’s picture is ‘Silly Tom’. The first meanings of ‘silly’ in Johnson’s Dictionary are ‘harmless’ and ‘weak’. ‘Tom’ was a universal forename representing everyman. Hogarth was to use the name for inadequate or disturbed figures in his later working life, Thomas Idle and Thomas Nero. He included reference to Rakewell three times in this picture: on the silver bowl, as part of the dedication of a poem, and on the elaborate scroll behind the keyboard-player’s back. Hogarth was making sure that his subscribers understood what he thought of his Rake as a gambling man.

The fourth picture of A Rake’s Progress was entitled ‘Arrested, Going to Court’. At first sight, it is not a gambling picture: The Rake is on his way along St James’s Street to a levée in St James’s Palace on the occasion of Queen Caroline’s birthday (Pl 8).

 

8 ‘Arrested, Going to Court’, A Rake’s Progress, IV (1735) etching and engraving, as issued to subscribers

 

Hogarth makes no mention of the several coffee-houses in the street where high-stakes gambling took place. However, by the time the second, revised, state of the print was published (the early 1740s?), it was transformed into a satire on gambling (Pl 9). One of the terraced houses now has a sign reading ‘White[s]’. Attention is drawn to it by a bolt of lightning, threatening the coffee-house.

 

9 A Rake’s Progress, IV, as sold to later purchasers, showing the lightning strike and gambling street boys. Hogarth did not include White’s in the title

 

In the early 1690s, a Francis White opened a coffee-house in St James’s Street. He was the founder of what was to become one of the most exclusive private clubs in London. By 1698, he had moved to a property on the west side which became notorious for its gambling rooms, the high stakes involved, and its dubious clientele. Jonathan Swift called White’s a common rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies. Dillon was to describe White’s as the bane of half the English nobility.^[14] A coffee-house continued in the hands of the family until April 1733 when it burned down and the business was rehoused temporarily in another coffee-house in the same street. The buildings were quickly rebuilt; a club at White’s is first mentioned in 1735 (see below).

In the second version of the picture (Pl 9), Hogarth also added six boys to the solitary lad stealing the Rake’s handkerchief as in the first state of the print. Two shoe-blacks gamble, probably playing the popular game, Hazard, which was played with two dice (also see below). A ‘caster’ called a number from five to nine, known as the ‘main’, the principal target. He would then declare the sum of money that he was prepared to bet. His opponent rolled the dice. If he or she came up with a value of less than five, then he lost. If he were fortunate enough to throw the ‘main’, he won. If not, there were ways of recovering a position by casting the dice several times in the hope of finding favourable outcomes. The boy about to cast his dice in Hogarth’s picture has lost most of his clothes to his opponent and is using the tools of his livelihood as a last stake, a folly similar to those of his supposed betters, the careless and obsessed adults in the gaming-rooms of White’s coffee-house itself. It looks as if he is about to lose again because the dice in his cup shows one pip and a three.^[15] The boy to the right is winning since he has the loser’s clothes in his lap.

This second boy could be a cheat, because three thimbles and a pea lie at his feet. ^[16] These were part of an age-old trick, known as ‘thimble rigging’. A punter would bet on which thimble hid the pea. The tricksters did their best to fool the players by means of sleight-of-hand, rapidly switching the thimbles or hiding the pea: they did not often lose. A similar trick is played out in The Humours of a Fair (later known as Southwark Fair), which was published with A Rake’s Progress. A game is being played on a low table (see right-hand side of painting, Pl 26). The punter holds a shaker and a seated women points at a dice. At the same time, she covers coins with her other hand. They were probably playing a game which is now known as ‘Pig’ in which two players take turns at casting a dice until a winner reaches a total of a hundred pips. If a ‘one’ turns up there is no score and the dice is then passed to the other player. The dice on Hogarth’s table shows the familiar pip on one side and a three on the other so that the winner has thrown a two or a five. A child tries to pull his obsessed father away and the suspicion is that he, too, is being cheated by the female gamester.

In the far right-hand bottom corner of in the revised plate IV of A Rake’s Progress, two boys play at cards; one leads with a knave or jack of hearts in possibly a game of piquet. The attribute suggests, metaphorically speaking, that he is a knavish gambler as hard as diamonds.^[17] An accomplice may signal to him, but his gesture with two fingers is too limp to be read with confidence. What is important is that they cheat – just as the habitués of upper-class gaming-houses did.^[18] One of the boys to one side of the group, a hawker of newspapers, reads The Farthing Post. Hogarth’s point is that newspapers were read by the humblest in society as well as the upper-classes in their coffee-houses. Paulson has explained that The Farthing Post was a scandal-sheet the price of which was kept low in order to avoid tax. Hogarth may have been prompted to include the paper because of the pun – the street-boys play for farthings (instead of golden guineas).

 

10 ‘At a Gaming House’, A Rake’s Progress, VI, as issued to subscribers

 

In narrative terms the additions, especially the bolt of lightning, bring the fourth picture of A Rake’s Progress closer to the sixth scene (Pl 10). The fire swelling behind the panelling in the latter picture is a tell-tale sign and Londoners would unhesitatingly have associated it with the fire at the notorious White’s. The coffee-house had burned down at the end of April 1733 and the fire was an integral part of Hogarth’s scene from the outset, because several figures within the pyramidal group, including the watchman and the croupier with his rake respond to the smoke. The picture can reasonably be said to show what a lightning bolt did to the building (according to Hogarth’s imagination) in the small hours of 28 April.

Uncertainties do remain, however: a dog’s collar has an address in Covent Garden rather than St James’s and gambling dens and coffee-houses in general were always fire risks in a city which still recalled the Great Fire. It may have been that Hogarth was content to fudge the issue because some of his prospective politically active subscribers would have gambled at White’s and would have been members of the new Club, established while he was advertising his subscription.^[19]

The sixth picture in the progress is climactic. The Rake’s downfall occurs because he has gambled away a second fortune and he is never to be seen as a free agent again. He kneels in the grip of a seizure brought about by anger, despair or epilepsy.^[20] The gamblers would appear to be playing Hazard. The dice on the table show the same values as those added to the boys’ game in the fourth picture, a single pip and a three. It strengthened the satirical contrasting relationship between the childish players outside and the fashionably adult gamblers in the coffee-house. The contrast is accentuated since one is White’s, and the other is ‘Black’, according to a tell-tale name added to a bollard behind the boys.^[21]

Behind the Rake in plate VI a winner rakes in gold coins similar to those in The South Sea Scheme. Opposite, an enraged man is restrained from attacking the winner with the pommel of a sword.^[22] The shaker-cup lies close to the tail of his coat suggesting that he is the ‘caster’. A second winner to the right of the print counts coins into the hands of an accomplice. An interplay of fingers elsewhere suggests that some cheating had been going on. A loser by the fire bites his nails. A parson, identified by his bands and black clothes, turns from the table in despair, pulling his clerical hat over his eyes. On the far left of the print, a money-lender writes out a loan to ‘Lord Cogg’. To ‘cog’ dice meant to load them unfairly or to cheat in other ways. £500 was not excessive when gambling losses of thousands were not uncommon at White’s. A seated man by the fire eyes the Rake in his paroxysm. He is customarily thought of as a highwayman because of his riding boots, spurs, pistol, and mask. Highwaymen frequented the gaming-rooms, searching for prospective victims as a means of settling their own debts.

A notice on the wall to the far right has the Royal Coat of Arms as a head-piece and it belongs to: ‘R Tustian Card-Maker to his Maj[esty] and the … royal Family’. The separation of king from family in the wording may have been Hogarth’s dig at George II whose relationship with his children was notoriously difficult. Little is known of Tustian, but the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards records that he was a Master card-maker – in 1701, 1713, and 1717.^[23] He may even have had a royal warrant as a card-maker.^[24] Richard Tustian appears to have been succeeded by his son, John, as Master in 1730. Presumably, the Tustian family supplied cards in bulk to establishments such as White’s coffee-house, and so the notice could have been some free publicity (as Hogarth had done with the name of his friend, William Tothall, on a bill in one version of Plate I of the same series). Although none of the Rake’s companions in the picture is playing cards, the inclusion of a royal warrant might have been intended to assist in distinguishing this particular gambling hell from others. The Rake continued to aspire to what he considered to be the best, even if his aspirations ruin him.

The Rake kneels, literally, in a hell-on-earth. Gambling dens were known as ‘copper hells’ or ‘golden hells’, according to their status. A popular derogatory term for ne’er-do-wells was ‘rakehell’ in both fact and fiction and the word is easily confused with the Rake’s full name ‘Rakewell’.^[25] The fire at White’s is supposed to have begun early in the morning in a gaming-room also nick-named ‘Hell’. The associations contribute to a sequence of perverse religious imagery running throughout the series: the Rake’s figure is superimposed on a veiled mock-crucifix formed by the cross-piece of the window behind him in the first picture. He is bracketed by the cross-pieces of his sedan-chair, one of them also apparently veiled, to make his arrest a parodic echo of that in the Garden of Gethsemane in the fourth picture. His aged bride has a mock-halo in the form of the glory on the pulpit behind her head in the fifth picture of the series (Pl 11).

 

11 A Rake’s Progress, V

 

She is elevated to the status of a mock-Bride of Christ to complement the Rake, her (un)holy bridegroom. His semi-naked figure in the final picture of the series recalls Christ’s body in deposition pictures (Pl 12).

 

12 A Rake’s Progress, VIII

 

It is tempting to see the Rake’s anti-apotheosis in the imminently fiery hell of the burning gaming-room as a mock-equivalent of the Descensus Christi ad Inferna, a descent into hell with the Rake, an anti-Christ, surrounded by other sinners. He suffers in hell rather than harrows it as Jesus was supposed to have done. Hogarth’s subscribers would not have been surprised to discover and delight in the diabolical associations.

In the sixth scene (Pl 10) a black dog has its paws on the Rake’s overturned chair and barks or growls in his direction. To suffer ‘the black dog’ mentally was to be depressed as both Samuel Johnson and Winston Churchill knew. Hogarth’s dog with its paws on the Rake’s overturned chair barks at him as if to recognise, or even fear, his moment of intense depression.^[26] A black dog in folklore was an associate of the Devil, an incarnation of the Hell-hound, whose appearance was an omen of approaching death.^[27] In churchyards, the protective spirit, the church ‘grim’, was often believed to be a black dog. Here, he adds to the association of the now doomed Rake with the anti-Christ. A watchman with a kindly lantern, Christ’s true representative in a contemporary context, rushes in too late to prevent the imminent destruction of the Rake’s hellish world. Gambling is a not unimportant subject in A Rake’s Progress and Hogarth’s later additions add to its mock-heroism.

The presence of Hazard in A Rake’s Progress, VI, makes this an appropriate point at which to consider an undated drawing once thought to be by Hogarth, entitled Hazard Table (Pl 13).^[28]

 

13 Hazard Table, drawing perhaps by Philippe Mercier (1689–1760). Royal Collection

 

Players sit at a gaming table with, behind them, a croupier, holding his wooden rake. In this sketch, a cleric is not a despairing gambler, rather he is the castor himself. He readies a cup in one hand and covers the coins in the ‘house’ with the other. A punter with a Star of the Garter draws attention to the aristocratic, even royal, character of the pastime. Unlike Lord Cogg, he has no need of a loan. Three other players, two of them women, have coins in front of them. The figures are so stiff and expressionless that it is to be wondered whether the drawing represents first thoughts for a conversation-piece, and that has indeed been the suggestion of John Eglin, who believes the painting would have been abandoned in the light of possible accusations of hypocrisy in the court (see n28 above). Its staidness contrasts with Thomas Rowlandson’s later, riotous picture, A Kick-up at a Hazard Table (Pl 14).

 

14 A Kick-up at a Hazard Table by Thomas Rowlandson. Etching and aquatint, 1787

 

Card games were not confined to Hogarth’s moral subjects. Like the taking of tea, the placing of figures round a card-table gave narrative purpose to some of the more crowded family-pieces such as William Wollaston and his Family (Pl 15).

 

15 William Wollaston and his Family, 1730. Oil on canvas, 102.5 x W 126.4 cm. Leicester City Museum. Note the pack in the hand of the central figure

 

Wollaston, in the group at the left, holds a pack of playing-cards as if he is about to invite the tea-drinkers on the right to join the card-players on the left. There, four sitters and their advisors play a hand of whist.^[29] One of them plays a black ace, which could be read as a sign of good fortune, appropriate to a family-picture. Two of the players are female, implying that it was acceptable in upper-class families not to segregate the sexes at the card-table. In The House of Cards (also 1730), a child is putting the finishing touches to her house of cards (Pl 16).

 

16 The House of Cards, Children at Play, I, 1730. Oil on canvas. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales

 

This picture and its companion-piece are ‘full of foreboding’, because in the companion-piece one of the children seen here is absent.^[30] He may have died during the course of Hogarth’s commission so that a house of cards becomes a metaphorical expression of the precariousness of youthful life.

In 1742, Hogarth’s patron and friend, Mary Edwards (1705–1743), asked him to paint a satire on contemporary fashion as her sort of revenge on those who accused one of the richest women in England of eccentricity in dress. Taste in High Life, also called Taste A-la-Mode, was the result: a moral-subject of absurd figures in absurd clothing (Pl 17).

 

17 Taste in High Life, 1742. Oil on canvas 63.5 x 76.1 cm. Sotheby’s 5 July 2023, Lot 34 (from the Iveagh Collection)

 

An irregular pyramid of tablets is in the bottom left-hand corner. It is built up of packs of playing-cards and a court-card is perched on the apex.^[31] The packs look relatively thin and so it could be that were for the game of quadrille, which had only forty cards, or piquet, which had thirty-two. The gaming-rooms and gambling-dens used large quantities of new packs which kept firms such as Tustian’s in business.

A bill by the pyramid reads: ‘Lady Basto Dr to [Lord?] Pip for cards’ (legible in the engraving after Hogarth’s painting). The phrase, ‘Dr to … ’ identifies a supplier who submitted a bill for a service – in this case for ‘[£]300’. For want of an alternative, it may be assumed that ‘Lord Pip’ is the trait-name of the aged beau to the right of the picture. (Einberg notes that ‘to pip’ could also mean to cheat at cards.) Packs cost as little as twopence, and so the £300 spent was not only an excessive amount, but an absurd one, in keeping with the rest of the expensive follies in the picture.^[32] The name, Lady Basto, the trait-name for the supplier of the cards, was the name of the ace of clubs in quadrille.

John Ireland has a charming story about Jane and William Hogarth and quadrille. ^[33] Jane was a player, and had the customary stock of counters kept in a ‘pool’ in the middle of the table. Because of the name, the counters were shaped to look like fish. William did not play at cards (which is not surprising when one considered how he treated card-players). He is supposed to have passed some of the time, while she was playing, carving scales and fish-eyes on the counters. Some of these survived long enough for a print to be made of the fish, attributed to him (Pl 18).^[34]

 

18 `Three Fish`, engraving, end-piece to John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated (short title; London, 1804) vol 3, p366

 

Did Hogarth avoid playing because he would not have been the centre of attention, or because he was bored? Did he refuse to play because most card-games were of French origin, or because he was unhappy about the freedoms and excesses that they brought to players, particularly women, including his wife?

Marriage A-la-Mode as a series is not directly about formal gaming and gambling, although an alliance between an impoverished Westminster Earl and a miserly City of London Alderman is a dangerous mix of oil and water and proved to be catastrophic for the younger generations in this case. One striking reference to card-playing is in the second picture and a discreet innuendo is found in the fourth.

 

19 Marriage A-la-Mode, II, known as ‘The Tete-a-Tete’, engraved by Bernard Baron, April 1745

 

The second picture, ironically called ‘The Tete-a-Tete’, shows the couple at home (Pl 19). He has been out all night with another woman, whereas she has stayed in, playing and learning the strategies of whist, the classic trick-taking card-game. At her feet lies a famous manual, Hoyle on Whist. Edmond Hoyle (1672–1769) was the century’s authority on card-games who published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist between 1742 and 1744, while Hogarth was working on Marriage A-la-Mode. Hoyle assumed that people knew the basic rules and procedure of a game (in this case, whist), and concerned himself primarily with strategies and tables of odds for those who wished to bet.^[35] He also designed an artificial memory for the game and wrote a treatise on probability theory. That subject, new at the time, was not only of profound interest to the professional gambler but provided the bedrock of the burgeoning insurance and financial industries. A passage from The Book of Days is worth quoting in full for its praise of Hoyle and his influence on society:

Whilst Ombre and Quadrille at court were used,

And Basset’s power the city dames amused,

Imperial Whist was yet light esteemed

And pastime fit for none but rustics deemed.

How slow, at first, is still the growth of fame!

And what obstructions wait each rising name!

Our stupid fathers thus neglected long,

The glorious boast of Milton’s epic song;

But Milton’s muse, at last, a critic found,

Who spread his praise o’er all the world around;

And Hoyle, at length, for Whist performed the same,

And proved its right to universal fame.

 

The wife’s smirk implies that her whist-party in the untidy gaming-room behind her has been a successful all-night occasion. The scattering of the cards at the foot of the archway suggests that she had graduated from a fairly harmless game to a riskier pastime: playing the violin with a music-master whose discarded violins and overturned chair suggests that he has had to leave quickly.^[36]

 

20 Marriage A-la-Mode, IV, known as ‘The Toilette’, engraved by Bernard Baron, April 1745

 

The fourth picture in the series (Pl 20) shows the Countess and her lover at her morning levée. The scattered playing-cards have been used as calling-cards. Three of the messages are legible, written in what Jonathan Swift called ‘beau spelling’. Two of them have bearing on the subject of gambling: ‘Count Basset begs to no how lade Squander sleapt last nite’ and ‘Ly Squanders Com[pany] is desir’d at Lady Townlys Drum Monday next’. Basset was a predecessor of faro, where bets were placed on upturned cards. It was a risky game because stakes were easily raised and the odds clearly favoured the bank rather than the punters. It was a game more popular with the ‘city dames’, as the paean to whist asserts, than with the ladies of the court and thus was appropriate to the daughter of a bourgeois Alderman of the City of London.

Count Basset and Lady Townly were characters in the popular comedy The Provok’d Husband.^[37] She leads a dramatically wasteful life including gambling on cards, much to the distress of her sober-sided husband, Lord Townly. In the play, the name ‘Lady Squander’ occurs in a list of masqueraders at Lady Townly’s ball and Hogarth may have taken his name from this list. Some of the characters come up to town from the fictional borough of ‘Guzzledown’, a name that Hogarth was also to use in his Election series (published 1755–8). Count Basset is a villain typical of post-Restoration comedy, a sharper, who plots against everyone. Of course, Lady Townly repents her gambling ways and is redeemed by the end of the play (unlike Hogarth’s Lady Squander). The whist party in the second picture of Marriage A-la-Mode and the calling cards make her one among the imagined card-playing community of women, but one which never the less had its roots in reality (see below). Alexander Pope’s sexual battle between the chaste Belinda and the predatory baron in his famous Rape of the Lock is expressed in an extended metaphor of cards. Basset’s enquiry of how well Lady Squander slept is charged with sexual innuendo.

 

21 ‘The Idle ’Prentice at Play’, Industry & Idleness, III. Engraving, September 1747

 

On his second appearance in William Hogarth’s series Industry and Idleness (1747), Thomas Idle lounges on a tombstone in the churchyard of St Paul’s Church in the East End of London (Pl 21). Hogarth has him playing ‘pitch and hustle’ and he is at the moment of withdrawing his hat to reveal the coins beneath. (The game is at a similar point to that in The South Sea Scheme). Idle’s friend watches him intently perhaps out of fear that he is cheating. He may be, since all four coins turn out to be heads. Pitch and hustle is an especially appropriate game for a series about the contrasting lives of two apprentices, one on his way to Tyburn, the other to become Lord Mayor of London. Its success and failure as a game depended on how a coin fell one way or another, obverse or reverse.

Idle then goes to sea and on his return is seen in bed with his ‘whore’ (Hogarth’s word) where, judging from the pistols beside the bed, it looks as if he is already a footpad. On his succeeding appearance in ‘The Idle ’Prentice betray’d’, plate IX in the series, he has pistols in his pocket and examines more loot with his accomplice, while his whore betrays him to the magistrate for a single coin. Idle has discarded his playing cards which lie on the floor in the left-hand corner (Pl 22).

 

22 ‘The Idle ’Prentice Betrayed’, Industry & Idleness, IX. Engraving, September 1747

 

Some are just legible: a five-of-clubs lies on a four-of-hearts. In the fortune-books concerned with affairs of the heart, a five-of-clubs warns that a man ‘shall be wed to a dirty sow’ while the four-of-hearts signifies that a man would be faithful, but a woman would be false.

 

The Four Stages of Cruelty

The year 1751 saw some of Hogarth’s most powerful social criticism in Gin Lane and The Four Stages of Cruelty (of which he was particularly proud). He attacked alcoholism, cruelty to women, callousness, brutal sports, and public indifference to the suffering of domestic animals. The first stage of Cruelty is an assemblage of the ways in which sadistic youths might amuse themselves by torturing animals. One horrible practice was a traditional blood-sport played on Shrove Tuesday, known as ‘cock-throwing’ or ‘cock-squailing’ (Pl 23).^[38]

 

23 ‘First Stage of Cruelty’ from The Four Stages of Cruelty. Engraving, February 1751

 

A contemporary letter in the Public advertiser (1757) provides an indignant and mockingly heroic account of the sport:

[The bird] is fastened to a stake, while some lubberly fool of six foot high, armed with a stick sufficient to level a Goliath, at a small distance, is to divert himself by breaking every bone in this poor creature’s skin. First the successful hero breaks a leg; then the courageous cock stands on one; the next trophy is a broken wing, the second leg then falls a sacrifice to the hero’s rage. Still the cock clears [stands?] his ground, and when he can no longer stand to face his enemy, he is put in a hat, and becomes the hero’s prize if his stick but touch him; the owner is pleased with the money he has made, and the victor glories in the conquest of so stubborn a foe.

The origins of this appalling game are mysterious. I suspect that it had to do with the cock as a symbol of time (quite apart from its role in St Peter’s betrayal of Christ), since it crows at dawn and Shrove Tuesday is the prelude to, that is to say the dawn of, the season of Lent. In Hogarth’s picture, a youth close to the left-hand margin aims his stick – the ‘cockstele’, which was weighted with lead at one end – across the picture, at a cock held by a kneeling colleague. Another youth behind the thrower has another bird in his arms. Hogarth’s detail is symbolic rather than an accurate representation of the game itself, since the cockstele is as likely to hit the boy as it is the cock. It may have been included to help put the ‘four stages’ on a time-scale, making the series a ghastly parody of the Easter story.

 

24 ‘Second Stage of Cruelty’ from The Four Stages of Cruelty. Engraving, February 1751

 

The second picture (Pl 24) is another study in contempt for the suffering of animals. The villain of the series, Tom Nero, flogs his over-burdened horse to death. Other animals are beaten, chased or neglected elsewhere in the picture. The passengers in Nero’s overturned cab are hefty lawyers who have left Thavies Inn coffee-house behind them. Two notices of forthcoming events are attached to a downpipe from the guttering of the Inn, the first of which reads:

A.J. Broughtons Amphitheater [sic]

[illegible line]

James Field

And

Geo: Taylor

[illegible line].^[39]

The notice brings martial arts into this discussion – a form of mass entertainment that appealed to all classes from royalty to the humblest street-dweller. ‘A.J.’, better known as Jack, Broughton (1704–1789) was a pugilist best remembered for his scientific approach to boxing. What brings him into the orbit of this essay is the claim that he was the father of modern boxing.^[40] Hitherto bare-knuckle fighting had been a free-for-all which continued until one of the contestants gave up, lost consciousness, or even died. It took place in out-of-the way places, the best-known being a muddy open space on Clerkenwell Green at Hockley-in-the-Hole, which was notorious for its cruel sports and general disorderliness.

Broughton published a set of ‘Proposals’ to build an amphitheatre for the promotion of boxing, martial arts, and fencing on 1 January, 1742–3. His notice is remarkable: it begins with an epigraph of four lines from Vergil. Would a modern promoter ever introduce his publicity with a quotation from, say, John Milton? Broughton called himself a ‘professor of athletics’. He justified his occupation by comparing modern pugilists to the athletes of the classical past, especially the Spartans. In ancient Rome, he claimed, even princes and nobles entered the lists as competitors. Upper-class Britons were to consider themselves the inheritors of Spartan prowess and Roman virtues by learning how to fight as a means of eradicating ‘foreign effeminancy’. Broughton was making a play for the educated classes to learn self-defence in his arena as a gentlemanly, and for him, profitable activity. It was part of the shift away from bare-knuckle fighting as a popular lower-class and riotous activity to an aristocratic celebrity sport: Broughton was sponsored by the Duke of Cumberland, who was to lose £10,000 when Broughton eventually was beaten by Jack Slack. A print of the wounding of Broughton by Slack gives a view of his amphitheatre (Pl 25).

 

25 The Bruiser Bruis’d; or, the Knowing-Ones Taken-in.
Etching by Louis Philippe Boitard, c1750

 

The bout takes place on a perhaps octagonal dais; the flimsy-looking railing is no more than waist-high, the spectators throng the pit, and a bigger crowd occupies a raised gallery.

In 1741, Broughton thrashed an opponent so severely that he died. The tragedy drove him to compose and publish a set of rules ‘to be observed in all battles’ on purpose-built stages. To prevent a brawler from taking unfair advantage at the start of a bout, a square was chalked in the middle of the ring and the contestants had to stand outside the square, face-to-face. Pugilists were not allowed to hit each other while within it. Later, the square was reduced to a line, one of the sources of the saying, ‘to come up to scratch’ (cock-fighting is probably the origin of the term ‘scratch’ for this line, since the cocks were brought to a line scratched in the ground).^[41] Broughton set a limit of thirty seconds for a hurt pugilist to retreat, recover, and return to the square, which was the origin of the concept of rounds. Only officials, such as a boxer’s seconds and the promoter, were allowed on the stage during a main bout. Seconds had to bring their principal to the square at the beginning of a round otherwise he would forfeit the bout; they were not to challenge or abuse his opponent verbally. A fighter was not to attack a man when he was down, and that included when he was on his knees (see below).

The Broughton rules outlawed some of the worst activities such as gouging, slapping, biting, and throttling. Hair-pulling was not forbidden, which is why the professionals shaved their heads. Gentlemen-umpires were appointed to rule on disputes and a third party stood by to adjudicate if they failed to agree. The monies collected were to be divided in front of everybody after the bout. The winner was to receive two-thirds of the sum in spite of any pre-existing agreements to the contrary. The caption to the Rules stated that they were approved ‘by several gentlemen’ at the amphitheatre on 16 August 1747. The mention of ‘gentlemen’ is significant and not a matter of politesse because the sport was patronised by the aristocracy who possessed the big money.

 

26 Southwark Fair, 1733. Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 120.7 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum

 

Broughton was not the first to open an academy or amphitheatre. He had been a pupil of James Figg, the ‘Master of ye noble science of defence’ as he, Figg, termed himself: he was undefeated in over two hundred bouts. His specialisms were fencing and quarterstaff play, as well as boxing and wrestling. He had a tiled booth on the bowling green that was the site of Southwark Fair (Pl 26), where he would challenge fair-goers to fight.^[42] Hogarth shows him not in his booth but on horseback with the shaven head and patches of a pugilist (Pl 26a).

 

26a Detail of Pl 26 showing James Figg as a pugilist on horseback

 

He scowls fiercely and holds his sword as if he were ready to fight as a malign guardian of the Fair, and two of the fair-goers close by react out of fear. Figg retired probably in 1729, while Hogarth was perhaps already at work on his picture. Is his view of Figg on horseback a kind of memorial to one of the greatest masters of martial arts of his time?

 

27 Detail of the engraving of Southwark Fair. Note the horse’s head. Is the horse blind?

 

One puzzle in the picture is why a master of the martial arts should be represented as a horseman when his skills were exercised on foot. A further curiosity is that, in the engraving, Figg’s horse is thought to be blind (Pl 27).

A hero on a blind horse has a history. A story in England gave a Lincolnshire hamlet its name, Byards [sic] Leap.^[43] The name was a corruption of Bayard, the most famous horse of medieval folklore. He could carry four grown men at a time. He could change his shape. He could understand human language. His owner was forced to hand the horse over to the Emperor Charlemagne who tried to drown it, but the horse outmanoeuvred the emperor and escaped. The English versions of the legend appear to be the only ones in which the magical horse is blind. The story goes that the Lincolnshire hamlet was oppressed by a local witch, Old Meg. A retired soldier promised to get rid of her. He chose ‘Blind Byard’, as a steed because it proved itself to be especially alert and, being blind, would not be afraid of the witch. She attacked the horseman by digging her sharp fingernails into the horse’s rump, which leapt sixty feet into the air out of shock. When he crashed to earth, she was dislodged and the rider thrust his sword through her heart. Events commemorating the hamlet’s freedom from oppression take place today and Byard’s leap is at the centre of the celebrations.

Blind Bayard, or Byard, became well-known in popular British culture.^[44] Geoffrey Chaucer in the ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ alluded to a horse as Bayard the blind who blunders about and fears no peril. In the Tudor play, Edward III (published anonymously 1596), Edward is described as a ‘Bayard-like, overweening Ned’ – the blind horse became a symbol of reckless bravery. ^[45] If Hogarth’s subscribers did spot the minute detail of the eyeless socket in their print of the Fair (assuming that there is one), they might have regarded the modern pugilist in a new light – a mock-chivalric hero riding a magic bay-horse guarding fair-goers against supernatural attack. Did his author, through his surprising choice of a horse, also suggest that Figg, the man, was reckless, brave, and proud? It all depends on whether Hogarth really did intend to show the horse as blind.

Figg on horseback might refer to yet another, more famously grandiose story: that of St George and the Dragon, since George also rescued a village from a monster of folklore. In some accounts, his fearless horse was called Bayard. Is Figg, the gamester and pugilist, a modern equivalent of the dedicatee of the Church of St George the Martyr – which is seen in the background of Southwark Fair? St George was an epitome of chivalry, and the patron saint of Figg’s country, England. The two flags flying above the fair, the Union flag and a plain red one, hint that it might be the Union itself which is in danger (from the Jacobites?). Metaphorically, England is guarded by James Figg, lately a pugilist, stave fighter, swordsman – and mock-heroic figure.

 

28 Detail of A Midnight Modern Conversation, etching and engraving, 1733, showing a fallen James Figg

 

That Figg had already amused Hogarth is apparent in his inclusion of the pugilist’s likeness in the earlier mock-conversation-piece A Midnight Modern Conversation (Pl 28) painted the year before Figg died and published in 1733. This alcoholic romp is one in a cluster of works in which pugilists feature, including A Rake’s Progress, which was the companion series to Southwark Fair, and Hogarth’s affectionate picture of a quarter-staff-player (described below). A Midnight Modern Conversation shows eleven topers who have been drinking and pontificating until dawn. One of them has fallen semi-conscious from his chair, and is identified as Figg on the basis of his shaven head and his scars covered with patches. One of these is crescent-shaped, a decoration unusual for a male prize-fighter (Hogarth may have been drawing attention to Figg’s vanity). His fallen body is part of a punning anecdote within the picture, whereby he has been knocked-out not by a blow, but, metaphorically, by the ‘punch’ that he has been drinking.^[46] Lars Tharp has observed that only alcohol could knock Figg out. A tipsy colleague, the boxer’s comic ‘second’, appears accidentally to revive him by letting wine from his onion-bottle cascade on to Figg’s head.

 

In A Rake’s Progress, II (Pl 7 above), Figg stands in the background with his quarter-staves as representative of one of the Rake’s supposedly manly (and expensive) pursuits. Figg’s patient tolerance of a foolish young man is undercut because he sneers at a posturing fencing-master who would have been a far less capable swordsman than he. That the Rake failed to profit from any lessons that he may have had with Figg is shown in the next picture where his sword is mis-sheathed after a skirmish with a watchman, who is no more fearsome an opponent than the heads of the Rake’s ‘rivals’, the portraits of the Roman Emperors hanging on the cellar walls of the Tavern. Hogarth also had time to paint a full-length portrait of Figg as a quarter-staff player (Pl 29).

 

29 A Quarterstaff Player, Probably James Figg (landscape by George Lambert). Oil on canvas, c1732–1735. On loan to the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

Fighting with quarter-staves was a type of pole-fighting found across Europe. I suspect that it derived from the staves of pilgrims as their defence against attacks from stray dogs, or from the farmers’ use of flails in battle for want of proper close-combat weapons. The poles may have been named after the custom of cutting logs into quarters and then shaping them. A tailor-made staff was about the same length as the height of the owner plus a few inches. The techniques were set out in manuals dating back to Tudor times, including how to make downward blows, how to thrust and parry, how to recoil, and counter-attack. Combatants fought for prizes which gave rise to the term ‘prize-fighting’. In the time of Broughton and Figg, the displays of martial prowess in the amphitheatres included sequences of sword-fighting, boxing, and combats with quarter-staves, the three carried out in turn by the same combatants during the same session.

Hogarth’s portrait is of a plain-clothed figure in a landscape. He carries his quarter-staff in one hand and a countryman’s hat in the other. That his hat is not on his bald and wigless head out-of-doors in a portrait was mildly indecorous. His shaven head lacks the patches which are apparent in Southwark Fair, and so it is presumed that he has not fought recently; indeed, his hair is beginning to grow back as a fuzz. Figg retired to become a park-keeper in 1729 and the rural background may allude to Upper St James’s Park, where he worked. Einberg notes that the tree stump in the background symbolises an ending. It is possible that Hogarth’s picture is another kind of reminder of a respected celebrity at the time of his retirement.

Einberg has wondered whether the figure’s sinuous pose and footwork meant that Figg was dancing. In view of his expertise and the links between the then modern martial-arts and those of an athletic classical past, it is also to be wondered whether the pose is an allusion to the most famous war-dance of classical times, the Pyrrhic dance.^[47] Its moves imitated the quick movements that warriors needed to help them dodge missiles and blows, just as 18th-century masters of the martial arts did. In addition, it is impossible to say exactly when Hogarth first thought of his ‘line of beauty’, but Figg’s curving stance also suggests that Hogarth regarded his figure as particularly graceful. He was to admire the physiques of boxers in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), and compared them favourably, albeit indirectly, to Lysippus’ statue, The Wrestlers (1st century BC). He also preferred the graceful lines of the classical statue of Emperor Hadrian’s partner, Antinous, and the Apollo Belvedere to the heavy musculature of a Hercules or Atlas. It has been claimed that some of the models for the St Martin’s drawing school that Hogarth ran were celebrity fighters, chosen for their physique. The sculptor John Michael Rysbrack is known to have used Broughton’s biceps as the model for his statue of Hercules.^[48]

Figg had opened his academy in 1719 in a hall at the Adam and Eve Tavern on the road to Tottenham. In the background to The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750), Hogarth shows a bare-knuckled bout taking place in the inn-yard, where it is surrounded by an excitable crowd (Pl 30).

 

30 Detail of A Representation of the March of the Guards towards Scotland in the Year 1745 (The March to Finchley), showing the prize-fight beneath the sign of the Adam and Eve inn (prop: ‘Giles Gardiner’) and the bruised drummer in the foreground. Etching and engraving by Luke Sullivan after Hogarth, December 1750

 

The pugilists are both shaven-headed, like those of many fighters, but the picture was composed more than fifteen years after Southwark Fair was published and long after Figg had died, and so neither is likely to represent Figg himself. ^[49] One of them could, however, be his pupil, George Taylor, who inherited Figg’s businesses (see below).^[50] The inn-sign also implies that bare-knuckle fighting had a history as old as humanity itself. It was not confined to men, however: A Sarah Stokes (née Wilkinson) fought Hannah Highfield in 1722. They held half-a-crown coins in their fists to prevent them from scratching and gouging their opponents. The first woman to drop her coin lost the bout. Stokes became a popular attraction in Figg’s booths where she acted as a second to her husband and they would fight in tandem, the one against another woman, the other against a man.

 

30a ‘The Reward of Cruelty’, from The Four Stages of Cruelty. Engraving, February 1751

 

James Field, the pugilist named in Broughton’s advert (see Pl 24 above), was a ruffian, the antithesis of the gentleman boxer (born c1714, hanged 1751). When he was wanted for petty crime in Dublin, he ran away to London. After committing more crimes there, he ran away to sea. On his return, he became a formidable pugilist. He was so feared by the bailiffs that they avoided him. Eventually, he was seized, tried, and sentenced by Hogarth’s friend, the magistrate Henry Fielding. That Hogarth was taking advantage of the trial and execution of a notorious pugilist is confirmed by the alterations he made to the last picture in the series, ‘The Reward of Cruelty’ (Pl 30a). A skeleton in a background niche at the left, a teaching aid, was entitled ‘GENTn HARRY’ in a first state. This was the nickname of Henry Simms, a robber, highwayman, and gamester, who also ran away to sea to avoid arrest. He was so-called because he was well-dressed even on his way to Tyburn. He had been brought up in the parish of St Giles’s, and the badge on Nero’s arm implies that he was a charity boy of the same parish. Simms worked as a coach-driver for a while, as Nero does. While waiting to be executed, Simms befriended a fellow-prisoner, Mary Allen. One can see why Hogarth would have included his name in the series since there were parallels between Simms and Allen in real life and the fictional Thomas Nero and his murdered mistress, Ann Gill. The circumstances are also quite close to that of the imagined life of Thomas Idle, the co-protagonist of Industry and Idleness, also published in 1747 (above). In the third state of ‘The Reward of Cruelty’ shown here, however, Hogarth changed the name to ‘James Field’, in order to be bang up-to-date, because Field was hanged on 11 February 1751 (although the print still bears the initial date of publication, ‘Feb. 1 1751’.^[51]

The second pugilist mentioned in the advertisement (see Pl 24), George Taylor (1716–1758), was possibly Hogarth’s favourite celebrity-pugilist. They may have first met if and when Taylor modelled in the St Martin’s Lane Academy. As he sat for at least four portraits by other artists, he must have been a handsome man and probably was as cocky as Hogarth himself. He was a pupil of Figg, beginning to box as a teenager in his Great Room. After Figg’s death, he took over the amphitheatre and claimed the title of champion of England. He charged an entry fee of half-a-crown and his total purse could be up to £150 a session. Taylor’s claim to be champion may have angered Broughton, who had fought for him and so he, Broughton, set up a rival academy almost next-door to Taylor’s. Broughton ultimately forced Taylor to close his academy because his was the more popular and comfortable arena in which to watch and practise. Thereafter, Taylor agreed to work for Broughton as a pugilist on condition that Broughton paid him compensation for his losses.

Taylor won nearly all his fights, until around 1750 or ’51, when he retired from the ring to become landlord of the Fountain Inn in Deptford. He unwisely returned to the ring in the summer of 1758 and suffered a rare, but predictable, loss which led to his death in December. A fight between the real Field and the real Taylor had been negotiated in March 1743, but was called off.^[52] Broughton’s amphitheatre closed after Broughton lost a bout and so a disappointed Duke of Cumberland withdrew his patronage in favour of his opponent (c1750), again, while Hogarth was preparing to publish his series on cruelty. In focusing on a non-event from nearly ten years before ‘The Second Stage of Cruelty’ was published, and supposedly one taking place in an amphitheatre on the point of closure, Hogarth ensured that the scene before Thavies coffee-house was out-of-time as an echo of times past. The London amphitheatres were closed down in 1754 and boxing was forced out into the country, and so perhaps in 1751 Hogarth foresaw their end.

 

31 George Taylor’s Epitaph: Death Giving George Taylor a Cross Buttock, c1750. Pen and brown ink and graphite, 22.5 x 31.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

32 George Taylor’s Epitaph: George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death, c1750. Pen and brown ink, graphite, and red chalk, 23.2 x 32.4 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

At the time of Taylor’s death, Hogarth was asked to design an epitaph for his headstone. His initial pen sketches have survived (Pl 31, Pl 32), and they can reasonably be dated to 1750, since Taylor’s death occurred in on 21 February 1750. AP Oppé, the editor of Hogarth’s drawings, entitled them: Death Giving George Taylor a Cross Buttock and George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death. Oppé reported that Mrs Hogarth’s assistant Richard Livesay (?1750–1826) recorded that the sketches were originally in the hands of ‘a lady’, without naming her. With no evidence to go on, I suspect that she was Taylor’s widow, but in any event this lady presented them to Mrs Hogarth.^[53] The manuscript epitaph to Taylor, as recorded by Livesay, among other plaudits, praised Taylor for having been good enough to have brought ‘Honour to the Roman Circus’ – reinforcing the association of pugilism with classical tradition.

There is nothing in Hogarth’s sketches to suggest a particular likeness: it is through Taylor’s actions and the context that he is recognisable. Taylor was renowned for his deftness in delivering a ‘cross-buttock’ and his success relied upon his agility rather than brute strength. A pugilist would grab the waistband of an opponent’s breeches with one hand and his shoulder with the other, causing the opponent to twist over his buttock and fall head-first onto his back. The illustrating of a complex throw such as a cross-buttock was a challenging project for a draughtsman. It required a close knowledge of the throws in martial arts and considerable technical skill. Hogarth may not himself have fought, but he must have been an acute observer of fights and his knowledge of anatomy was extensive. Not for nothing was he a friend of the anatomists William Cheselden and William Hunter.

The Tate owns two finished red chalk drawings developed by Hogarth from his pen sketches (Pl 33, Pl 34) which came to the gallery as part of the Oppé collection.^[54] The second of these has clouds and a trumpet in the top as if to emphasise Taylor’s final goal, while changes to his clothing indicate the shift from his mortal fate to his immortal destiny, an ingenious iconography on the part of Hogarth that was evidently part of his original conception, judging by the pen sketches. Taylor wears breeches and shoes in the first sketch but these are replaced by a cloth, a winding sheet maybe, in the second where he also has bare feet. The change is a reversal of the Rake’s clothing in the last picture of A Rake’s Progress (Pl 12) where a filmy cloth in the painting is transformed into more solid breeches in the engraved version, making him less obviously a mockery of a deposed Christ.

 

33 Death Giving George Taylor a Cross Buttock, c1750. Red chalk, 40.2 x 48 cm. Tate Britain

 

34 George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death, c1750. Red chalk, 49.5 x 39.6 cm. Tate Britain

 

There is a narrative sequence in the sketches: in the first, Death has flipped Taylor onto his back and leans over him, while Taylor holds him by the forearm. In the second, Taylor has counter-attacked and turned Death onto his back. Illegally, in the real world, he has kneed Death in the ribs. Instead of crouching over him, as Death does in the first picture, Taylor has lifted himself above his opponent and raised his arm aloft. He gazes upwards, as if seeking his ultimate destination in heaven and an eternal life of triumph.

The church authorities rejected Hogarth’s ideas for a headstone, as much out of fear for the crowds they might draw to the churchyard as for their unorthodoxy. Although his designs would have made an unusual epitaph on a churchyard, the subject of the first of his compositions would have been familiar, since the triumph of Death over a human figure was a commonplace subject, when it was often treated with grisly humour. Hans Holbein the Elder’s skeletons interact with all classes of people in his Dance of Death – from an emperor to a ploughman, from an old man to a child. Hogarth’s picture could readily fit into such as series, featuring as ‘Death and the Pugilist’. Pieter Breugel the Elder’s Triumph (c1562) is a vision of an army of skeletal ‘deaths’ going about their ghastly daily business. Hogarth’s sketches would, in particular, have been an apt addition to the churchyard of St Nicholas’s Church, Deptford, which has its gateposts adorned with skulls and crossbones. A source for the sketches may have been a written press-notice of Figg’s death, which is reproduced in Roy Case’s blog and is memorable for its mock-heroic treatment:

Last Saturday there was a trial of skill between the unconquered hero Death on the one side and ’till then the unconquered hero Mr. James Figg, the famous prize-fighter and master of the noble science of defence on the other. The battle was most obstinately fought on both sides, but at last the former obtained an entire victory and the latter, tho’ he was obliged to submit to a superior foe yet fearless and with disdain, he retired and that evening expired at his house in Oxford road. (December 1734).

Did Hogarth recall this obituary and did it give him the idea for his epitaph to Figg’s one-time pupil?

The second notice on the downpipe in ‘The Second Stage of Cruelty’ (see Pl 24) advertises cock-fighting, the most popular of the blood-sports. It has what was then the familiar headpiece of two fighting cocks facing off against one another and with the word ‘cockfighting’ printed below. The juxtaposition offers a parallel between a cockfight and the bout between Field and Taylor: the men were to be pitted against each other in the manner of fighting cocks. In November 1759, Hogarth published a seemingly simple picture of a battle between two cocks. His picture is not untypical of the many cockfighting scenes around at the time: the stereotype being two cocks facing each other on a round table in a pit, which was possibly below-ground (Pl 35).

 

35 The Cockpit, untitled engraving, November 1759

 

Hogarth enlivened the genre through his treatment of the spectators, each carefully differentiated one from another by occupation and activity.^[55] Hogarth’s powers of imagination may be appreciated through comparison with the humdrum spectators in John Kay’s Cock-fighting match (Pl 36).

 

36 Cock-fighting Match (possibly a ‘Main’ between the counties of Lanark and Haddington). Etching by John Kay, 1785.

 

As with the Broughton Rules, an enthusiast, John Ardesois, the sub-lessee, set out his ‘Rules and order of cocking’ to be sanctioned for use in the Royal Cockpits.^[56] They are paraphrased and commented on as follows:

Fighting-cocks (as opposed to the mundane dung-hill cock) had to be evenly matched and fight in weight-based and age-related categories. The favoured weight was for birds of between three and four pounds and there were classes, for example, for ‘stags’, cocks under a year-old, and one for ‘blankards’, that is one-eyed cocks. Their metal spurs had also to be of similar weight and length. The birds were hooded until the cock-fight began. Their handlers, cock-feeders, were allowed to hold the birds in the ring at the start and to encourage them to peck at each other. Once the fight began, no one was permitted to touch them. Cocks’ were not to be deliberately blinded under the risk of a penalty of forty shillings. Feeders were not to goad the birds with pricks under a penalty of twenty shillings. Dogs and other animals were banned from the pit [Hogarth’s eager mastiff on the balcony has been overlooked].

The officials consisted of a ‘master’ of the pit who supervised the ‘main’, that is the major programme of the tournament. He was chosen by ballot and could remain in post for as long as a month. He ruled on disputes and dealt with offenders. ‘Wardens’ acted as umpires, and a ‘stake-holder’ held the purse. Hogarth’s stake-holder is a portrait of the blind Lord Albemarle Bertie (c1720–1765) who lost his sight in an accident but nevertheless remained a fanatical sportsman.^[57] He, however, was vulnerable to theft, as Hogarth shows him to have been (someone appears to steal promissory notes from him). Dues and fines were to be paid to the Master and, if cocks fought themselves to a standstill and the wardens could not agree on a winner, then a final decision rested on the throw of a dice. Publicity was an important factor: notices were posted in fixed places, giving lists of the bouts and the days on which they were to take place. (There could be as many as thirty bouts in a day.) Everyone was expected to be quiet during a battle and in Hogarth’s picture a farrier attempts to stifle a beadle’s sneeze that has been prompted by a gentleman’s snuff.

Betting was big business and the rules stated that any member who failed to pay his debts, but continued to bet, was to be punished. The Ardesois rules stated that such a culprit should be hung up in a basket in the eaves of the pit where he could be seen by all. He was to hang there until the end of the day and then was banished from the rest of the ‘Main’. Gamblers would shout ‘Basket, basket’ at defaulters. Hogarth shows the shadow of a culprit falling on the arena – and so he knew the rules. A man to the left of the blind stake-holder makes a note in the betting book, where the word ‘BETS’ was printed upside down to help a viewer recognise the word. Another cry was supposed to be ‘Bet, Bet!’ so that the recorder would take note.

‘Feeders’ trained their cocks for months, and a correct diet was essential: popular ingredients included brandy, raw steak, maggots, and urine. Many prints show cock-feeders in the ring along with their birds. Hogarth dodged the stereotype by letting only their feet show on either side of the ring. A miserable man holds a bag with a cock in it (its head only is seen). The sport had local variants: a knockout competition, known as the ‘Welsh main’, required a prize-winning bird to battle several times in a single day. A ‘battle royal’ was a free-for-all, involving as many as a dozen cocks fighting in a general melée until the winner was the last cock standing. Pocklington in Yorkshire was a famous centre where the Ardesois rules were followed. In May 1746, a Main was held at the Black Bull, where the birds fought for a prize of ten guineas a bout and a hundred guineas was awarded to the overall winner of the tournament. There were famous local rivalries: the cocks of the gentlemen from Hull and Beverley competed against those from Leeds and Pocklington and there was even a Roses ‘long’ Main between the gentlemen of Lancashire and Yorkshire – and their birds.

A picture of a certain ‘NAN RAWLINGS’ is pinned to the back-wall of Hogarth’s cockpit. She sits in an armchair with a game-cock on her lap, which might have been meant as a cocking-chair. She was, in fact, a breeder, who was well-known on the cock-fighting circuit. Her nicknames were ‘Deptford Nan’ or ‘The duchess of Deptford’. Little is known about her, but there was a cockpit in Deptford near the site of the workhouse. Although it was taken over by a cabinet-maker in 1745, Rawlings could have trained cocks there before moving on to Birdcage Walk and Newmarket race-course.^[58] It may be wondered whether Hogarth included her because of his recent recollections of the churchyard of Saint Nicholas and the Fountain Inn in Deptford.

A royal coat-of-arms graces the other side of the picture (putting Nan on a level with royalty…). It draws attention to the participation of the royal family in cock-fighting. (James I appointed a Royal Cock Master; Charles II built the Cockpit; the sporting Duke of Cumberland was an enthusiast from an early age.) Hogarth made a point similar to that with the card-maker to royalty, Richard Tustian in A Rake’s Progress. A medallion appears to be stamped on the bottom border of the picture (Pl 35 detail of print cock ‘ticket’). As if it were a seal of approval, it includes the words ‘Royal Sport’. It is flanked by the words ‘Pit Ticket’, giving rise to the misunderstanding that Hogarth’s picture itself was an actual cock-pit ticket. Regular members of the pit were given silver ‘tickets’ attached to ribbons, a fine example of which survives that belonged to the Prince of Wales’s jockey, Samuel Chifney (three jockeys in fact feature in The Cockpit) (Pl 37). Hogarth used such a ticket as his model for the detail at the bottom centre of his print (Pl 38).

 

38 Cockpit ticket or pass of Samuel Chifney, mid-18th century. Baldwin’s of St James’s Auctions, 9 December 2020 and detail of The Cockpit (Pl 35)

 

Hogarth did not argue for the abandonment of blood-sports as such but, implicitly, asked for their better regulation. Calls for the eradication of such evils and their enlightened control were gathering pace during his working lifetime and were realised with varying degrees of success in the following century. The Rake’s horse supposedly ran at Epsom, where in reality a Clerk of the Course had been in post since 1684. The Jockey Club was founded in 1750 to ensure that racing at Newmarket was fair and followed the club’s rules, which included a system of handicapping, and its influence spread to other courses, including Epsom. Gaming-dens were closed down by magistrates such as Gonson and Fielding, only to have others spring up in their place. Prize-fighting was slowly replaced by boxing, first according to the Broughton rules and then the London Prize ring rules, and ultimately the Queensbury rules. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in a coffee-house in 1824. Cockfighting and bear-baiting were eventually banned in 1835. Hogarth was near the beginning of the movement for reform and helped it along as best he could – as he did with concern over alcohol abuse.

 

The Lady’s Last Stake

Hogarth’s last moral subject is an oil-painting called by Hogarth Piquet: or Virtue in Danger (Pl 39), and long known as The Lady’s Last Stake. It is about the long-standing concern for women of the leisured classes who bankrupted themselves at cards and so were forced to use themselves as collateral.^[59]

 

39 Piquet: or Virtue in Danger, later called The Lady’s Last Stake. Oil on canvas, 1758–1760. Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York

 

Hogarth explained the situation himself:

The subject of [the picture] was a virtuous married lady that had lost all at cards to a young officer wavering in her suit whether she should part with her honr [sic] or no to regain the loss which was offered to her.^[60]

Some cards lie scattered on the floor, while others burn in the fire. Hogarth’s lady, in a fit of temper perhaps, has burnt her boats because she has no other cards with which to gamble and so recover her debts. As a married woman, she had already compromised herself by playing one of the more intimate card-games without a chaperone. Hogarth’s choice of title puts the game first and only then the threat to the lady’s virtue.

Piquet was a game for two players with a reduced pack of 32 cards. The dealer dealt twelve cards to each player and the remainder were pooled in a ‘talon’. The players then exchanged their weakest cards with cards from the talon in the hope of strengthening their hand. Points were awarded at each stage of the game, particularly after the ‘declaration’ when the players were required to announce the strength of their hands. (Incidentally, an outright winner with many points might be awarded a ‘pique’.) The declaration was followed by a trick-taking stage which concluded a deal. Piquet au cent was a variant in which the first player to reach a hundred points after playing several hands scooped the pool. Piquet was a tactical, time-consuming game, difficult to describe in few words.^[61] Needless to say, Hoyle published a pamphlet on its procedures and tactics. Cheating occurred when facial expressions adopted by onlookers were employed as signals that were difficult to detect. Such a signal on the part of an onlooker is provided by the boy in A Rake’s Progress, plate IV (Pl 8 above).

The army officer wears a splendid red coat. He does not appear to have been modelled on a particular person, and so he is probably a typical card-playing, gambling soldier. Army officers became adept at card-playing since they had little else to do in the long periods of time before and after action. Card-games such as piquet were sometimes played as a means of teaching strategy and tactics and so it should not be a surprise that the officer has wiped the floor with his opponent.

A lady obsessed by cards was also a popular stereotype: the witty, rakish female character eager to challenge the female status quo of the sober-sided stay-at-home, decorous woman of the plays and newspapers. As early as 1713, Richard Steele had written an indignant article in the Guardian weekly on the subject of female gambling. The ‘viragos’, as he called them, were bored and only became alive when the playing season began again. They filled their heads with pips and counters. Being a man, he asserted that the women neglected their household duties, stayed out until the small hours, and were too tired the next day to manage the house. They only woke up when card-playing began again at night. Gaming ruined their health: he claimed to have seen a woman carried off half-dead from playing basset. Lady Squander of Marriage A-la-Mode leads such a life (although she remains healthy-looking until her suicide). Steele went on to observe, tellingly, that men paid their debts out of their estates, but that the women had to find something else when their pin-money was gone: ‘The husband has his lands to dispose of, the wife her person [my italics].’

Elizabeth Einberg has constructed a picture of the lady’s husband from the suggestive details of the picture. He is rich enough to have his wife fashionably and expensively dressed. He could afford to have his miniature painted (which she has already used as a stake). The fire-screen is decorated with exotic fruit from South America and the Indies. A pineapple was a symbol of prosperity, but the hypothetical husband’s riches are not wholly secure since this fruit has been cut open. Einberg imagines him as being in the West Indies, managing plantations, and sending affectionate letters home. He sends his wife money indulgently although he is no more concerned about her profligacy than Lord Townly is at the beginning of the play. The husband came into his wealth a short time before because his Palladian house with its Venetian windows is modern. The French clock and the Old Master painting above the chimney hint that he is a connoisseur. The clock’s motto, ‘Nunc, nunc’, urges the lady to come to a decision and symbolises the passage of life as well as time. The pressure is on a mature woman moving towards middle-age when her beauty will be a thing of the past and she herself will have lost her worth as a stake. ‘Now’ is the time for her and as a stake it is, correctly, her last.

The wording of a paper on the floor to the right is now obscured. Two accounts of what it once said have survived. The original owner of the painting, the Irish statesman and author James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont (1728–1729), recalled it as reading, ‘My dearest Charlotte – your affectionate Townly – I will send you the remainder of the note by the next post.’ The second recollection is that of Richard Livesay mentioned above, artist and delicate draughtsman, who lodged with Jane Hogarth between 1777 and 1785. He prepared facsimile drawings of her husband’s works for her to sell from her home in Leicester Fields, including one of this painting. He was as close to Hogarth’s way of thinking as was the owner himself and repeated Caulfeild’s words, including the same names, and the promissory note to which he added a date, ‘May 10^th 1758’. He replaced Caulfeild’s ‘affectionate’ with the word ‘husband’ as if to define a relationship.

Livesay repeated the name ‘Townly’. Lord Townly is the husband in the comedy The Provok’d Husband to which Hogarth had referred in Marriage A-la-Mode and his Election series (see above).^[62] It is therefore worth considering the relationship between the couple in the play, and Hogarth’s lady and her (hypothetical) husband in the picture because of the possibility that Hogarth and his patron saw the picture as an amusing sort of interlude or after-piece to the play. In his ‘Dedication’, Cibber identified the aim of the play as being to intended to reform ‘the licentious irregularities that, too often, break in upon the place and happiness of the married state’. In his opening speech, Lord Townly laments that his wife’s life is ‘one continual round of cards and good company’.^[63] She boasts that she ‘has owed a hundred pounds’ for over three weeks. Later, Townly admits that he is indulgent towards her, having given her £500, more or less whenever she wanted it. She is insatiable: she wants money ‘infinitely oftener’ than her husband is prepared to give. Lady Townly’s rhapsody on assemblies and cards is erotic in tone, a note which Hogarth may have picked upon in his mildly erotic picture:

I dote upon assemblies! My heart bounds, at a ball; and at an opera – I expire! Then I love play, to distraction! Cards enchant me! And dice – put me out of my little wits. Dear, dear Hazard! Oh – what a flow of spirits it gives one.

She agrees that ‘passion’ sums up her feelings. Eventually Townly threatens to eject his errant wife from the house. But, under the influence of her sober-sided relation, Lady Grace, Lady Townly miraculously reforms and the play ends with a reconciliation. (In Vanbrugh’ s earlier version, she is turned out of doors.) The fate of one of the ‘lower characters’ as Cibber called them, in his ‘Address to the reader’, is also illuminating. Myrtilla recalls that she has gamed with the (false) Count Basset. She loses to him at cards and paid him with ‘what I shall never recover’. Hogarth is subtler than the playwrights: playgoers could readily anticipate what would happen to Lady Townly at the end of a romantic comedy. Hogarth’s spectators at the Exhibition of 1761 could only wonder at what might happen to the lady in his painting because she ‘wavers’ forever.

Another tantalising detail is the playing cards themselves. The lady has thrown some on the fire and discarded others as if in a fit of temper at losing. Several cards are partly readable, if some guesswork is permitted. In so far as the situation is one between a lover and a lady, then Flamsteed and Partridge’s manual is a useful source. A black ace lies on the floor next to a black ten and a red six is a little further off. The suits and pips are recognisable details, although they are too blobby to identify individual cards. The following alternatives are offered: he who is dealt an ace-of-clubs ‘must expect a thousand snubs/ From his wife’; he who is dealt an ace-of-spades is likely to be ‘flouted by the maids’. Both fit the lady’s hypothetical husband. A ten-of-spades suggests that while a man might have many trades, a woman ‘can’t work but [only] play’. A ten-of-clubs, a half-score, meant that the man would be ‘wretched poor’. The six-of-hearts is ‘where honour dwells’. The lady has thrown the honour-card away so she suffers ‘scorn and pride’. The six-of-diamonds might apply to Hogarth’s officer because he exhibits ‘sly and cunning tricks’. The army officer is culpable in that he encourages the lady in her addiction for his own ends. There is no evidence that he cheats; his occupation suggests that he is simply more experienced at piquet than she and that he knows exactly what he wants. A woman who draws this card, however, is free of blame. In the fire, a five-of-hearts meant that women will ‘love any sort of men’ and the five-of-diamonds warned of separation. It seems to reflect on the hypothetical husband’s situation:

He who draws the number five

Where he lives he best would thrive,

But if drawn by woman kind

They better luck abroad will find.

 

Instead of a source in the heroic past as in traditional history-painting, Hogarth chose a commonplace situation typical of real people. His Piquet is an interpretation not of a significant act in history, but of a moment from a romantic comedy. The subject is in line with Fielding’s view of his friend as a comic history painter, where ‘comic’ meant the serious every-day.^[64]

 

Conclusion

Piquet concluded Hogarth’s interest in and concern for the nature and effects of card-play, gaming, and betting, begun many years before. It is tempting to search for a pattern among these preoccupations, but to do so would be a mistake. His concern is intermittent and variable: it ranges from a tiny detail, such as thimbles, to allusions to famous speculators, both successful and unsuccessful. It can be claimed, however, that he began with crude expressions of disgust in his early prints, and ended with a beautiful, subtle, and morally worrisome painting. His treatment of vices is rarely exaggerated and the reality behind his art could be worse than he showed it to be. He laid out the variousness of contemporary games and gamesters often discreetly and accurately. His paradox, as always, was that social defects could became clever and profitable art. He was ambivalent where celebrities were concerned. He disapproved of their brutality, their aggression, and quarrelsome natures, but admired their physique and regarded some of them as acquaintances, even friends. Betting, sponsorship, investment, gambling, speculation and spoils are in the life-blood of Hogarth’s moral subjects, whether formalised or not. The historians make the point that both winning and losing softened social distinctions. A pugilist could become a celebrity and a man-about-town could end up in Bedlam: such transformations depended on the magical results of money.

Was Hogarth’s art an effective tool of social reform? No evidence shows that his work led directly to any changes in behaviour. Rather, he was part of a groundswell of opinion that led to the fuller regulation of bare-knuckle boxing and gambling, later in the century and beyond. His depictions of the follies associated with card-playing seems to have made little difference. Indeed, the excesses of the successors of his Lady Squander or Lady ‘Charlotte’ Townly, the notorious Faro ladies and members of the [bon] ton, suggest that things remained the same, or became more notorious, among the female leisured classes at least. The aristocratic males carried on much as they had before – as might be expected.

 

 

1. I have been influenced by Patrick Dillon’s The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World, particularly Part II, London 2006, p 378 for his triple legacy (= Dillon). The literature on gaming and blood-sports grows exponentially. I run the risk of overlooking important discussions, for which I apologise in advance. I have attempted to select those relevant to Hogarth. I rely on Ronald Paulson’s Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd revised edn, London 1989 (=HGW), and Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2016 (=Einberg). ↑
2. A saying for those who wanted to hire lottery tickets for a short period was ‘riding the horse’. Clare Walcott quotes the proverb ‘set a beggar on horse-back, and he’ll ride’. She notes that upstart ladies and young mushroom nobles rode to the Devil in her article, ‘William Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme and the topography of speculative finance’, the British Library project, Picturing Places, online (2019). Jason Sweig also provides valuable background from the point of view of a financier in his online blog, ‘The Art of the bubble (1 September 2020). If Hogarth’s merry-go-round looks improbable, that at the Surrey County Agricultural Fair today is (at least, was, not so long ago) similar in design, only the twentieth-century fair-goers rode on elephants. ↑
3. The coins may be ‘Fleet Gold Cobs’ identified by their cross design. These were the Spanish ‘doubloons’ legendarily sought after by pirates. ↑
4. I am grateful to Madame Marie-Suzanne Descamps of the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Aire-sur-la-Lys, for confirming the presence of a chasuble. ↑
5. The anecdote is a curious by-way in the history of English culture: Pope’s friend is identified as the poet, John Gay (1685–1732) who is best remembered for The Beggar’s Opera (1728). He was a naive person and a gambler. He lost disastrously in the Bubble mania, probably on Pope’s advice. It could be that Pope’s obscure gesture implies that he extracted money from his friend or at least is an influence on his pocket. Hogarth was to use the Monument and its inscription for a second time in the background of another commerce-based picture, Industry and Idleness, VI (1747). ↑
6. See The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Michelangelo-raffle-ticket-venus-kissed-by-cupid, 2018. ↑
7. A growing literature exists on women’s role in the Bubbles and finance more generally. I have drawn on Anne Murphy’s online essay, the corrective ‘Women were to blame for the South Sea Bubble (according to men)’ (2017). See Amy Froide’s online essay, ‘The Real Women of The Favourite Including an 18th-century Warren Buffet’, UMBC magazine, 2019. ↑
8. ↑
9. Hogarth’s bookplate for George Lambert comes to mind. ↑
10. Hogarth does not include large cannon-shell like objects on either side of the wheels which appear in a later version; were they shelters for watchmen who guarded the lottery wheels overnight? The raised dais at the eastern end of Guildhall was used for the Court of Hustings and for election polls, a raised stage had its purpose other than for lotteries. ↑
11. Frederick Antal, ‘Hogarth and his borrowings’ in The Art Bulletin, vol 29, 1 March 1947, pp 36–48, esp p 40. Antal confined the parallel to some figures but Paulson claimed that Hogarth’s whole composition parodies the Raphael (HGW p51). I am tempted to suggest that Hogarth took a view of the Guildhall, slapped a bookplate on top, and rounded it off with the remnants of a famous history painting to make a pastiche. ↑
12. Rictor Norton, online essay, ‘The Georgian Underworld: a Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-century England’, see 14, ‘The sporting fraternity: gambling, boxing, and cockfighting’ (no date given) ↑
13. The aristocratic blood-sport of hunting comes to mind in the figure of a huntsman blowing a horn and holding in his hernia at the same time. The associated literature is enormous. ↑
14. Dillon, p267. ↑
15. The numbers are for the viewer’s benefit. They would not necessarily fall the same way in reality. It was time-consuming to show the sides of a dice with more pips (from a four upwards) and so Hogarth may have chosen the pips easiest to inscribe on a small object. ↑
16. Dillon, p287. ↑
17. The interpretations in cartomancy are so varied that I cannot be definite, but the card may have been understood as an unfaithful assistant or general untrustworthiness. ↑
18. HGW, p95: cheating at piquet by adult gamesters involved a ‘telegraph’ that employed facial expression. ↑
19. Einberg records the existence of a lost oil-sketch of the scene, dated as c1730–1733 (p138). It is not known whether it included the fire. Hogarth opened his subscription in late 1733 and I suspect that there was opportunism involved as well as delays. ↑
20. See my MA thesis, An Examination and Interpretation of Narrative Features in A Rake’s Progress (1972, now an ethesis, University of Birmingham Repository), pp70, 104. ↑
21. A dining club was founded as ‘Black’s’ in Soho by David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson (1764) to rival White’s, and Tim Hitchcock notes that there was a band of street children known as the Black Guard in Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century, London, London 2004, pp84–8, n59. ↑
22. Dillon observed that most night’s gambling ended in violence and quoted a contemporary who said that the violence turned a den into ‘a perfect type of hell’. He describes touts standing outside gambling dens to persuade the unwary to enter (p286). ↑
23. I am grateful to Annie Prouse, Clerk of The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, for the dates and drawing my attention to the name Tustian instead of Justian. ‘T’ and ‘J’ are readily confused in 18th-century italic script. That Hogarth meant a ‘T’ rather than a ‘J’ is confirmed in a notice in his Second Stage of Cruelty (1751, see below). ↑
24. The Royal Warrant Holders’ Association has currently no record of the Tustians as warrant holders. ↑
25. The analogies are extensive: a despoiled bible and a broken plaque of the ten commandments, a mock-Bathsheba or Salome about to dance in the orgy scene, a sorrowing Magdalen. Bernd Krysmanski has described the progress as an anti-passion. The Earl of Rochester was the original rakehell. Hogarth was to paint another, Sir Francis Dashwood, at his supposed devotions (1730s). Hogarth’s Rakewell is feeble in comparison with the reality. Usurers occupy the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno (Circle VII, canto 17). One translation calls them ‘wanton spendthrifts’. ↑
26. The dog’s eye-line is difficult to follow in the painting, but in the print its eye appears turned towards the viewer. ↑
27. See Joshua Panduro Preston, ‘The History of the “Black Dog” as Metaphor’ (online, 2013).The dog’s collar is labelled ‘Covent Garden’. I have not found an explanation for the reference. Boxing took place in John Spenser’s tavern, The Black Dog in Kentish Town. ↑
28. See Oppé, cat. 20, Pl 19, p31. A print of this composition by Le Coeur was issued in 1794 stating that it was after a drawing by Hogarth, but the style does not resemble his. A more convincing attribution would be to Philippe Mercier, a suggestion that has been put forward by John Eglin in The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency, Oxford 2023 (reported online, OUPblog 24 November 2023). Eglin dates it to 1731, in the context of the resumption at court during Twelfth Night celebrations of the hitherto-banned game of Hazard. The Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1731, p25, notes the Royal Family playing at Hazard during Twelfth Night (for vast sums) and also lists the ‘Officers’ involved in the running of gaming-houses. Eglin notes that raids on gaming-houses ceased entirely in 1735. The list of officials is taken with slight variations from De la Motraye`s account of those in a gambling house – as set out in the Appendix to this essay. The famous prostitute and bawd Betty Careless had a house in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden. Her obituary says that she helped ‘the gay gentlemen of this country to squander £50,000’ (Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1752). A reference to her is in A Rake’s Progress, VIII. She was buried in St Paul’s churchyard, Covent Garden, the church shown in the background of Hogarth’s ‘Morning’ from the Four Times of the Day. ↑
29. David Solkin identified the game as whist in Painting for Money (London 1993) pp 88–89. I have drawn on Paulson’s ‘Card games and Hoyle’s whist’, ch 7, pp 85–102, of Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (London 1979) and Arthur Pitt’s MA thesis, A Study of Gamblers and Gaming Culture in London c. 1780–1844’ (2012), esp ch 2. ↑
30. Einberg, p71. In cartomancy, the black aces could be death cards as well as good fortune; the subject is not consistent. ↑
31. Einberg (p 248) wondered whether the pile was chips for faro or dominoes (p 248). Faro chips were octagonal-shaped coppers and dominoes, the game, was not introduced to England until the end of the century. Hogarth preferred pyramids to cones in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) ↑
32. Card-playing was a cheap and widespread pastime in the winter months for semi-literate as well as literate families. It could be played by candle-light and even firelight alone since the pips were sufficiently distinct. Whist, meaning ‘pay attention’, became more than a fashionable craze. ↑
33. John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated (3rd edn, London 1812), vol 3, p366 ,for the account of Jane’s game and the fishy ‘tail-piece’. ↑
34. A 1750 print after H-F Gravelot’s Vauxhall painting of a game of quadrille has ‘fish’ on the table. Lady Townly in the play mentions a quadrille party where they played for two guineas a fish (see below). ↑
35. The fifteenth edition of Hoyle’s collection included a case-study of whist at White’s coffee-house. ↑
36. The recognisable card in the jumble is a five-of-diamonds, the most likely interpretation of which is reconciliation. The wife appears to beg forgiveness of her dying husband in the fifth picture of the series. A ‘drum’ in this context meant a fashionable assembly with music, dancing and liaison. ↑
37. The Provok’d Husband; or, a Journey to London, a comedy, as acted at the Theatre-Royal by his Majesty’s servants, Written by the late Sir John Vanburgh, and Mr Cibber (London 1727/8). This play is discussed below. A Lady Townly is a character in George Etherege’s popular comedy The Man of Mode, or, Sr Fopling Flutter (1676). The parties are held in her house. Faro, the successor to basset, was even more popular. It was reputedly named after one of the picture-cards in a French pack which included a Pharoah: the rules were simple and, if played honestly, gave a punter a reasonable chance of winning, but it has been estimated that were over a hundred ways of placing a bet in the course of the game. It has been described as a cheater’s paradise – fortunes were made and lost, usually to the advantage of the house. Two notorious players of faro in 18th-century London were the politician Charles James Fox and the Duchess of Devonshire (appropriately named the ‘Queen of Clubs’). They would lose thousands in a night. ↑
38. Shrove Tuesday is the day before Lent, requiring self-examination, repentance, and the need for absolution – the reverse of how Nero and his compatriots spend the day. The description is in Hannah Velten, Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City (Goring 2013), p106. ↑
39. I have drawn on Roy Case, ‘The prize-fighter – Figg’, Playing Pasts, June 2019; Dave Day, ed, ‘Entrepreneurial pugilists of the eighteenth-century’, Playing Pasts, 2010; and Mike Huggins, ‘Forms of competition in proto-modern eighteenth-century English sport: a tentative typology’, Sport in History, 31, 4, pp469–495 (all online). For a detailed account of the cocking industry, see Robert Howlett’s The Royal Pastime of Cock-fighting, London 1709, available as a Gutenberg ebook. In ‘The Second Stage of Cruelty’ a crowd chases a bull, which tosses a male figure in the air. It is difficult to decide whether this is bull-running or a crowd trying to catch a beast that has escaped on its way to the abattoirs near Thavies Inn. ↑
40. I draw on Gary Holland ,‘The History of London Boxing: the Father of English Boxing: the Story of Jack Broughton’ (online, 2014). ↑
41. Tony Gee, boxing historian, used the phrase as a title, Up to Scratch: Bare-knuckle Fighting and the Champions of the Prize Ring, 1998. Rictor Norton, The Georgian Underworld: a Study of Crucial Sub-Cultures in Eighteenth-century England, ebook, esp section 14, ‘The Sporting Fraternity’. ↑
42. A tiled booth seems to be an odd pitch. There were several on the site of Southwark Fair which were evidently at least semi-permanent fixtures, and one was certainly permanent. The painting is catalogued as A Quarter-staff Player, Probably James Figg, Formerly Called ‘Broughton’, see Einberg, cat. 62, pp104–107. She wonders whether it was painted for one of his circle keen on pugilism; it could have been given to Figg’s widow or to his pupil, George Taylor, who assumed Figg’s businesses after his death (see below). The print of Southwark Fair was published together with A Rake’s Progress for which it had been intended as a subscription reward. ↑
43. Byards Leap is situated off the old Roman road, Ermine Street, a few miles south of Lincoln. See the ‘History of Byards Leap’ (Cranwell, Brauncewell and Byards Leap Parish Council (online, 2023) for the story. Other accounts vary slightly ↑
44. Blind work-horses were uncommon but not unheard of. They were used to power mills and pumps by pushing levers endlessly round in circles. The saying ‘a nod is as good a wink to a blind horse’ was introduced in print in the 1740s and was probably in the oral culture before that. Geoffrey Chaucer:You are as bold as Bayard is, the blind,That blunders forth and thinks of danger, none;He is as bold to rush against a stoneAs to go ambling down the broad highway.‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ The Canterbury Tales, ll. 860–863 librariescom.yeotale.tr ↑
45. Internet Shakespeare edition, Edward III (modern) Scene V, l.1105. Bay as the name of a reddish-brown horse is short for bayard. ↑
46. Lars Tharp is author of Hogarth’s China (1997) and a regular on the BBC’s Antiques Road Show. Figg’s likeness holds his broken bottle by its neck as if he has been trying to use it as a weapon. Figg’s ‘second’ is thought to resemble Hogarth’s personal doctor and Chiswick neighbour, John Ranby (1703–1773), whose children he painted. Was he trying to attack Hogarth’s viewer? There is no obvious opponent in the picture and his squinting eyes peer out of the picture. ↑
47. I have failed to find a picture of Pyrrhic dancing pose comparable to Figg’s stance. Facsimile Analysis, pp80, 85–6. I draw on Joanne Begiato, ‘Manly Beauty: what can Boxers tell us about 18th-century Masculine Beauty’ Part 3 (online, jbhistwordpress, 2019). The Tate gallery’s catalogue entry on Hogarth’s drawing of George Taylor supports her view. In The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth praised the physique of English boxers: ‘I firmly believe, that one of our common proficients in the athletic art would be able to instruct and direct the best sculptor living … in what would give the statue of an English-boxer, a much better proportion, as to character, than is to be seen, even in the famous group of antique boxers, … so much admired to this day’ (p80). ↑
48. Hogarth’s friends Francis Hayman and John Ellys were reportedly amateur pugilists, but I cannot imagine that artists would risk damaging their hands in bare-knuckle fighting. I suspect that like Hogarth himself they were enthusiastic spectators and no more. ↑
49. A rematch between Figg and Sutton took place at the Adam and Eve Inn in 1727. Hogarth’s detail may have been a recollection of it. ↑
50. Einberg suggests that the drummer in the foreground has been boxing, He looks shaky and is bloody in the painting. He has a closed and black eye in the print. His figure is at a distance from the pugilists in the inn-yard and so it is not clear how or why he was beaten. ↑
51. The inscriptions were among the last details to be engraved, usually by a specialist in mirror-writing. Hogarth probably learnt the details of Simms’s life through hearsay, although he could have read Simms’s autobiography, The Life of Henry Simms, from his Birth to his Exit… as Wrote by Himself while under Sentence of Death in Newgate, London 1747. ↑
52. According to the Cyber Boxing Zone Encyclopedia (online). ↑
53. Oppé, cat. 79, pl 75, pl 76. ↑
54. A pair of offsets, ie in reverse, of these drawings is recorded. ↑
55. The long list includes a man with an empty purse, a sow-gelder, a lord, a knight, a farrier, quarrelling or betting jockeys touching the butts of their whips and shouting ‘“Done” at the moment a bet was agreed’ – as the Rules required (Phillips, p27) – a man with gallows chalked on his back, an eager-looking mastiff, and a chimney sweep. One curiosity is a gentleman wearing a crucifix hanging from a bow. This is traditionally identified as the French order of the Cross of St Louis, but Hogarth’s medal is unlike the elaborate cross of that Order. It probably indicates that even a Roman Catholic could be included at a cock-fight. ↑
56. Facsimiles of the Ardesois’ rules are available on the internet, but their wording is illegible in reproductions. They were hand-written in 1754 and published as a booklet in 1763. Phillips noted that John Ardesois was the sub-lessee of the Royal Cockpit in Birdcage Walk (p27). An account of his grotesque death has survived in the monthly transactions of The Sporting Magazine, vol 19 (1802), pp 21–22: ‘A striking instance of brutality’. Ardesois was a wealthy man from Tottenham who lost a bet on his favourite cock and was so angry that he tied the bird alive to a spit and roasted it. He attacked those who tried to rescue the bird with a poker and was so angry that he died of a heart-attack. The obituary concluded that he was ‘a great pillar of humanity’! ↑
57. Albemarle Bertie may have been a spectator at the prize-fight in The March to Finchley. Paulson suggests that his figure is an inverted parody of Christ descending among men (HGW, p172). ↑
58. Commentators disagree over the site of The Cockpit. Prompted by the presence of the royal coat-of-arms some have claimed it to be in London, just off Birdcage Walk. The presence of three jockeys in the foreground with their caps, whips and in one case a vest has prompted others to identify the pit as at Newmarket. I think it unlikely that someone in the clothes of a working jockey would be at the Birdcage Walk establishment. The royal coat-of-arms could have decorated any of the many pits at Newmarket. There is a claim for a royal pit to have been in the High Street at Newmarket (no. 29). Could it be that Hogarth’s pit is a composite? ↑
59. This picture is popularly known as The Lady’s Last Stake, but Hogarth entitled it Piquet in the Society of Arts Exhibition of 1761. It is sometimes identified as a conversation piece. Suggestions as to who sat for the lady include Jane Hogarth and Hester Salusbury. The latter recalled sitting for Hogarth and being warned by him not to behave like the lady in the picture. ↑
60. Joseph Burke, ed, The Analysis of Beauty, Oxford 1955, pp 219–20. ↑
61. I have relied on the Wikipedia account of ‘piquet’ (online, July 2023). ↑
62. Hogarth may have deliberately obscured the wording of the letter when preparing a private picture for public exhibition (Society of Artists, 1761). His friend James Townley had been appointed Headmaster of a prestigious school the year before, and had an afterpiece performed and a text published, High Life Below Stairs (1759). It was a comic attack on servants who aped the excesses of their employers and caused outrage among the serving-classes and amusement in everyone else. Its central character was a white landowner in the West Indies. A black servant, Kingston, is treated contemptuously. Hogarth would have wished to avoid his picture becoming part of a cause célèbre. It is a stretch to suggest that the white Squire Lovel, ‘the great West-Indian’, was a model for the absent husband in Piquet, but not impossible. ↑
63. In the sub-plot Lady Wronghead proposes to visit an assembly on Sunday to see the ladies play the (French) games, ‘Quadrille, Piquet, Ombre, Hazard, and Basset’; she does not mention whist, the less fashionable English game and Lady Squander’s favourite. ↑
64. Johnson defined comedy as a representation of the lighter faults of mankind. Alexander Pope could speak of a kind of life that would be ‘a long, exact and serious comedy’ (Epistle to Miss Blount). ↑