A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

1732

11 11/16” X 14 5/8” (H X W)

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A bawd welcomes the newly-arrived Moll to London, her touch while seeming a caress, assesses the merchandise. This procuress is a fascinating figure. As Derek Jarett notes, “Mother Needham,” the real-life original of the bawd who turned country girls into whores in Hogarth’s series, died in May 1731, after being viciously pelted in the pillory by the very people whom she served so well” (England 137). Mother Needham, the irony of her maternal moniker intact, introduces an important theme in the series—mal-intentioned benefactors. Ronald Paulson notes that the harlot “suffers from a lack of attention by supposedly humanitarian men” (Life, vol. 1 253). In this plate and again in plate 6, she is ignored by clergy (Some commentators have argued that the clergyman here in plate 1 is Moll’s father, making his neglect of his daughter in his absorption with his own career advancement particularly odious.); in plate 5, she is overlooked by the doctors and is ultimately “less a study of corrupted innocence” than “eager gullibility” (Life, vol. 1 255). While Paulson astutely comments on the Moll’s rejection by these potential father figures, there is also notably the mother here, who plays a more active role in Moll’s downfall. Thus, both of her surrogate parents contribute significantly to Moll’s demise. The only dependable force in Moll’s life, her sister of sorts, will be the syphilitic servant who attends her and who is the only true mourner in plate 6.

Moll’s goose is as cooked as the dead one in the basket placed near her trunk. The falling buckets portend her own impending rapid fall from innocence into sexual experience. An eager customer awaits her. Ultimately naïve Moll is completely unprepared for the corruption she faces, even just off the wagon, in London.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)

Before the Bell Inn in Wood Street, Mary or Moll Hackabout, newly arrived in London, is caught between the aggressive agents of corrupt, who are set against the crumbling tavern wall, and the ordinary (and passive) middle-class people arranged around the solidly built home. Dressed in modestly designed clothes and bearing the scissors and pin cushion of a dressmaker, she has just alighted from the York wagon. Though she appears as fresh and artless as the rose that covers her bosom, her expression suggests that she s a little flattered by the attention of the bawd.

Above Moll, a housewife, surrounded by the chamber pots and laundry, hand out clothing. She seems to represent the secure, if unexciting bourgeois life the girl leaves behind. With his back to her an affluent clergyman, perhaps Moll’s father, reads the address on a letter, probably a request to the Bishop of London for a sinecure (“To the Right Reverend Father in London”). Short-sighted and insensitive to the crises around him (including his own), like his horse, he is intent on fulfilling his personal ambitions and desires at the expense of his flock.

A bawd feels Moll with her naked hand in the same clinical way animals are inspected before purchase. This figure is said to resemble Mother Needham, the keeper of a notorious brothel patronized by the aristocracy; she had recently been stoned to death by the London populace when she was pilloried for managing a disorderly house. This procuress seems to be the instrument of the nobleman who stands in the shadow of the door leering intensely at the girl, his right hand fumbling suspiciously in his pocket. A symbol of aristocratic corruption, he has come with his pimp to prey on the indigent, naïve young girls who alight here from the country. The nobleman has been identified as Colonel Charteris, the worst of the exploitative privileged class to which he belonged.

The coffin-like trunk with Moll’s initials, the preoccupied clergyman (motifs which reappear in the final scenes) and the dead goose (“For my Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London”) giver a funereal and ominous cast to the scene (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)

The plate may have been inspired by Steele's essay "A Consideration of poor and publick Whores" in Spectator No. 266 (Jan. 4, 1711/12), where he mentioned seeing the "most artful Procuress in the Town, examining a most beautiful Country-Girl, who had come up in the same Waggon with my Things." The scene is the yard of the Bell Inn, where coaches from the country stopped; there was an inn of this name in Wood Street, Cheap- side. The girl wears the dress of a country girl, a kerchief and a full- blown rose hiding her bosom; a pincushion and a pair of scissors hang at her waist. The wagon has "B.R." and "York [Wa]gon" on its side--indicating the place from which she came—far from London and its intrigues—and also suggesting that the girl cannot afford a stagecoach. Stephens (BM Sat.) detected "with much simplicity of expression . . . , a voluptuous character in her features, and a certain frivolity." Her name, we learn in Pls. 3 and 6, is M[ary?] Hackabout (initials "M.H." are on her portmanteau). The goose she carries in a basket among her luggage, "For my Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London," bears a striking resemblance to her, and implies her own fate, as she listens to Mother Needham's blandishments. The meaning of her name is clear enough: hack is a carriage for hire, and about implies street-walking. There was, however, a prostitute of this name (her Christian name, Kate) who appears in a list of women taken into custody for disorderly conduct (Grub-street Journal, Aug. 6, 1730): "the famous Kate Hackabout (whose brother was lately hang'd at Tyburn) a woman noted in and about the Hundreds of Drury, for being a very termagant, and a terror, not only to the civil part of the neighbourhood, by her frequent fighting, noise, and swearing in the streets in the night-time, but also to other women of her own profession, who presume to pay or pick up men in her district, which is half one side of the way in Bridges-street." For the brother, Francis Hackabout, see A History of Executions, 1730, No. 2, p. 58; and the Daily Courant, February 26, 1729/30. (One result of the popularity of Hogarth's series was a racehorse named "Moll Hack-About": see Read's Weekly Journal, Apr. 21, 1750.)

The old woman who is addressing Mary Hackabout is the notorious Mother (Elizabeth) Needham, proprietress of a fashionable bagnio in Park Place, near St. James' Street. A procuress who much affected piety, she appears as Mother Punchbowl in Fielding's Covent Garden Tragedy (1732,1.2; also in the epilogue to Pasquin, 1736). The numerous beauty patches on her face suggest that she uses them partly to conceal the ravages of disease. She had but recently come to a bad end. The Grub-street Journal (May 6, 1731) cites journals of the past week to the effect that on April 30 "the noted Mother Needham stood in the pillory in Park-place [the street in which she lived], near S. James's-street; and was severely handled by the populace." And again: "She was so very ill that she laid along under the pillory, notwithstanding which, she was severely pelted, and it is thought she will die in a day or two" (which she did. May 3). For other references to Mother Needham and her fate, see Pope's Dunciad, Bk. I, 11. 323-24, and his note; BM Sat. 1833, and Mother Needham's Lamentation, published in May 1731.

The man in the doorway of the inn is Colonel Francis Charteris, or "Chartres," a name almost proverbial for vice, who had also died shortly before the appearance of A Harlot's Progress (Feb. 24, 1731/2). (Cf. the mezzotint portrait by G. White, 1730, BM. Sat. 1840.) The man behind him is "a Pimp, whom he always kept about his person" (J. Nichols, Biog. Anecd., 1782, p. i59); perhaps John Gourlay (called "Trusty Jack") or Anthony Henley. Charteris, by birth a gentleman, amassed a large fortune by gambling and lending back his winnings on the security of the loser's property; by this means and by clever speculation he collected a number of profitable estates. But his greatest fame was as a seducer or rapist of women. On one occasion a woman's rumor that her sister was in Charteris' house was sufficient to draw a mob clamoring for her release (she emerged, explaining that she did not wish to be released). Charteris went so far as to project a charity school for his natural children and draw up plans for alms houses for women who claimed he had ruined them. Age made his obsession more difficult, and at forty-six he was condemned to death for the rape of a girl he met m a country lane near Edinburgh; again in 1730, at fifty-five, he was condemned to death for luring a servant girl to his house and raping her. Both times his powerful friends and his fortune saved him, though at considerable expense. (As it happened, Francis Hackabout, Kate’s brother, was sentenced to hang at the same time and place that Charteris was sentenced a second time for rape. Moreover, the same issue of the Grub-street Journal that mentions Kate Hackabout gives [in the next column] an account of Charteris and his wife, who, having become "perfectly reconciled to each other," and his having "cashiered his trusty Jack and others of his evil agents,... are to be presented to their majesties one day this weeck." This ironic juxtaposition may have inspired Hogarth to bring the two together in his print.)

Charteris' method of seduction was to post agents in innyards to spot newly-arrived girls from the country, and (like Richardson's Mr. B.) to employ the girl as a servant in his house (see Some Authentick Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch-------s, Rape-Master of Great Britain by an Impartial Hand, 1730). The attacks on him by satirists and moralists are legion; he appears as an exemplum in Pope's Essay on Man, 4, Moral Essays, 3, Epilogue to the Satires, 1, and imitations of Horace's Satire II.i, Epistle I.6, and Donne's Satire 2; and he is summed up unsympathetically in Dr. Arbuthnot’s "Epitaph" on him (Gentleman's Magazine, 2, W2 718). Indeed, when he died, two years after his last rape trial, the people of his neighborhood attacked the hearse, strewed it with refuse, tried to tear his body from the coffin, and threw the carcasses of dogs and cats into the tomb.

Needham and Charteris may be in league or, more likely, they are simply two different threats awaiting the country girl in the city They were linked in the ordinary Londoner's mind; in a tract called Don Francisco's Descent into the Infernal Regions, an Interlude (1732), which appeared shortly after their deaths, Needham proposes in hell to marry the colonel, who is appalled at the idea. The old clergyman on a horse may be (as Rouquet claims, p. 4) Mary's father or simply a man of God who should be protecting a girl from the Needhams and Charterises of London. At any rate (like the clergymen in The South Sea Scheme) he is oblivious to all else, reading a letter “to the Right Reverend Father in God . . . ,” whom he presumably come up from the country to see (in the fourth state “London” is legible); this is a reference to the bishop of the diocese, Bishop Edmund Gibson of London, Walpole’s adviser on church patronage (alluded to in the third plate). And just as he pays no attention to what is happening to Mary, he overlooks the destruction his horse is about to perpetrate at his very feet (143-145).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times. (1971)

The subject of Hogarth’s first plate is described in detail, almost as instructions to a painter [from Spectator 266]:

The last week I went to an Inn in the City, to enquire for some Provisions which were sent by a Waggon out of the Country; and as I waited in one of the Boxes till the Chamberlain had looked over his Parcels, I heard and old and a young Voice repeating the Questions and Responses of the Church Catechism. I thought it no Breach of good Manners to peep at a Crevise, and look in at People so well employed; but who should I see there but the most artful Procuress in the Town, examining a most beautiful Country-Girl, who had come up in the same Waggon with my Things . . . Her innocent forssoth’s, yes’s, and’t please you’s, and she would do her Endeavour, pleased the good old Lady to take her out of the Hands of a Country Bumkin her Bother, and hire her for her own Maid.

Thus the whole situation of Plate 1, down to the clergyman—who no doubt reflects Hogarth’s natural feelings of impatience at Mr. Spectator’s refusal, with all his awareness of the situation, to involve himself on the girl’s behalf. He merely stays hidden in his box, as the clergyman does behind his piece of paper (vol. 1 239-240).

. . . Hogarth shows the girl just off the York Wagon, met by a bawd, with Colonel Charteris, and “trusty Jack” Gourly waiting in the background. All of these were easily recongnizable portraits (vol. 1 250).

For the bawd who seduces M. Hackabout in the inn-yard, Hogarth drew the most famous procuress of the time, Elizabeth Needham. In 1727 when Mrs. Davys had needed a bawd in her Accomplish’d Rake, she called upon “Mother N—d—m” and showed her trying to peddle a girl “just come out of the country.” . . . As early as March 1722/3 Mother Needham was keeping her “Vaulting-School in Pulteney-Street” and was arrested with seventeen (or twelve in another source) “of her Daughters.” She was committed to the Gatehouse and immediately freed on bail; the girls went to Tothill Fields Bridewell to beat hemp. In May she had moved her house, and on 21 July 1724 she was apprehended again; “the first time Mrs. Needham ever received Correction, since her being at the Head of Veneal Affairs in this Town.” But the next day she was again bailed.

In October 1726 the first of a series of calculated reports of her death appeared, with an epitaph in verse about her dying from being pelted in the pillory—a grisly prophecy, as it happened. . . .On Friday 30 April, a month after Hogarth had begun his subscription for the Harlot’s Progress, “the noted” Mother Needham stood in the pillory facing Park Place and was so “severely handled by the populace” that she died on 3 May without having to stand again in the pillory. “She declared in her last words, that what most affected her was the terror of standing in the pillory tomorrow in New Palace-Yard, having been so ungratefully used by the Populace on Wednesday.” And the Grub-Street Journal adds, “They acted very ungratefully, considering how much she had done to oblige them”—a statement that Hogarth would have found very interesting. . . .She is of course the Harlot’s original corrupter, the bawd who usually escaped detention while her girls beat hemp; yet she is only an intermediary for the Charterises, and her death, analogous to the Harlot’s, is an ugly one, with the very people she has served clamoring for her punishment.

There are at least three circles of guilt in Plate 1: the girl herself; Mother Needham who is exploiting her; and Charteris, who is exploiting Mother Needham, and will no doubt be one of those who pelt her in the pillory.

The clergyman is also part of the guilt explored in Plate 1, turning his back on Hackabout, Needham, and Charteris, while his horse is casually knocking over a pile of buckets. The reason for his absorption is the address he is trying to make out on the paper in his hand: “to the Right Reverend Father in God . . . London.” The reference is to Bishop Gibson of London, who was Sir Robert Walpole’s chief adviser in the matter of ecclesiastical preferment: the clergyman is thinking about his advancement rather than his duty. Hogarth even incriminated the girl’s “lofing cosen in Tems Street in London,” to whom her luggage is directed, and who has failed to meet her, leaving Needham to fill the gap. As her antagonists, the forces of pleasure and corruption are augmented by the entire social structure of family ties, law, order, and religion.

Thus the Harlot suffers from lack of attention by supposedly humanitarian professional men (vol. 1 251-253).

It is misleading to view the Harlot series as an anticipation of Pamela, Richardson’s sentimental account of the sufferings experienced by a young girl threatened with sexual degradation. . . the cumulative effect is quite different from that of the sentimental novel. Hogarth’s print is packed with complicating detail which establishes a reciprocal pattern of guilt and innocence, cause and effect. Not only do Charteris and Mother Needham appear, but also the parson studying the address of the Bishop of London. The behavior of the hungry, blinkered horse and its consequence—the falling pile of buckets—indicates what will follow from his master’s self-concerns (with overtones of Balaam and his ass). The girl herself is less a study of innocence than of eager gullibility. There is a distinct impression of eagerness in her attention to the bawd’s words, and a notable resemblance between her profile and that of the goose hanging from her basket. Hogarth’s scenes are constructed of such parallels and interdependencies: the parson and his horse, the girl and her goose, Mother Needham with the sign of the Bell (Belle) over her head (vol. 1 255).

In Plate 1, he shows, from left to right, the York Wagon and the young girl who has dismounted, the girl in conversation with a procuress, and the waiting figure of the aristocratic keeper: past, present, and future. . . . There is usually a central group and one in the rear; the first represents the present. And the second (which, through the disposition, focus, light, and shade, one sees the second) the next step in the action; the walls then convey exegesis, commentary and prolepsis. Here is a rigorous attempt to relate a temporal story in a spatial genre (vol. 1 265)

Plate 1 follows the typical Visitation composition, which shows Mary and Elizabeth embracing in the foreground and Zacharias watching from a doorway in the background (vol. 1 270).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)

In Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, in 1732, a country girl gets off the York coach, her doom foretold as an old bawd greets her. Behind her, facing the other way, a nervous, shortsighted clergyman is reading a letter of recommendation: it is addressed to Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London(9).

Moll’s trunk is simply labeled “M. Hackabout”—“M” was the initial used in the Prayer Book catechism to stand in for the first name, so the alarming implication is that Hogarth’s “M” can be any woman, any girl, any country innocent (197).

The cycle starts with a sweet country girl with a rose in her bosom and her little purse and scissors hanging by her side, arriving off the York wagon at the Bell Inn (the women still inside the wagon, ranged tightly behind the bar, also look like sheep bound for market). Hogarth told the French commentator Jean Andre Rouquet that the clergyman so deep in his letter to Edmund Gibson that he ignores the girl's plight (as ambitious clerics ignored their flock) was Moll's father. Rouquet had to explain this to his Catholic readers:

'The clergy in England are not bound to celibacy, and make great use of their privilege. They all marry, and as the revenue of their benefices is not enough for the establishment of several children in the world, these children and above all the daughters, are reduced to strange ways of providing for their own subsistence.'

This, too, was an old line: Tom Brown's huge, greasy bawd who collects 'whole wagon-loads' of country lasses, explains that one other girls 'had been a celebrated beauty, a parson's daughter'.

In Hogarth's print, the confident bawd is the most dramatic figure, with her finery and patches, immediately recognizable as Mother Needham. (Moll stands, in effect, between 'father' and 'mother', both grotesque parodies of the parental role.) Behind the bawd, with his hand suspiciously deep in his pocket, is Colonel Charteris, attended by a cringing Jack Gourlay. Gourlay's supplicating crossed hands mirror Moll's--both are 'bound' as servants to satisfy Charteris's needs. Ordinary life goes on behind them as a woman hangs her washing out against a cloudy sky, but the tokens are ominous. The neck of the goose, neatly labelled for 'my lofing Cosen in Terns Street', droops over the edge of the basket; the panniers pushed by the munching horse are about to tumble to the ground. Even when she is at the height other career, Moll (like the townswoman in After} is surrounded by objects falling, crashing, scattering (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)

The drama opens in the City of London, where the York Waggon, favoured by travelers who cannot afford the stage-coach, has lately rolled into the squalid yard of the Bell posting-house in Wood Street. It was brought a young girl up from the depth of the country, protected only by her father, and old and absent-minded clergyman, who has followed the waggon on his ancient horse and is now anxiously scanning the superscription of a letter addressed to some influential prelate, while his mount snatches at the straw packing of a pyramid of pots and pans. As she awaits him, the ingenuous country-girl, distinguishable amid the London crowd by the plain kerchief that covers her shoulders, the fresh rose punned to her bodice and the pair of workmanlike scissors dangling from the bag she carries, encounters a large, imposing, magnificently dressed personage in laces, ribbons, velvet mantle and expansive satin skirts. Moll’s pathetic luggage is spread at her feet—her trunk with her initials, M. H., stamped on the top in brass nails, a corded box, and a basketed goose—perhaps it is a “green goose”—a gift labeled “For my lofing Cosen in Tems Street in London”. Alas, her helpful acquaintance is the “pious Needham”!—so called by contemporary satirists because she was reputed to be “very religious” according to her own lights, and constantly prayed that she might gain enough by her profession to leave it off in good time. Her prayer, as we know, was to remain unanswered: not far ahead loom the dreadful Sir John Gonson and the vindictive mob around the pillory. But, in the Progress, she continues to ply her trade; and an employer, more notorious even than herself is hovering in the background. Colonel Chartres, attended by his jackal, John Gourlay, a pimp whom, we are told, he “always kept about is person”, has just appeared in the doorway and looks on with a lickerish grin.

Like Mother Needham, he had recently died—during the course of the previous year, at the age of sixty-two, having persevered (observed a satirical epitaph) “with an inflexible constancy and inimitable uniformity . . . in the practice of every human vice, excepting prodigality and hypocrisy”: he was exempted from the latter by his “matchless impudence”, from the former (we are told) by his “insatiable avarice”. Drummed out of his regiment for card-sharping, banished for the same reason from several European cities, he had become a money-lender at exorbitant rates and had thereby increased his substantial private fortune. His residence, the chroniclers add, was a “perpetual bawdy house”. Twice convicted of rape, he had twice been pardoned—on the second occasion, however, not without imprisonment in Newgate” and large financial penalties; and, when he died in Scotland in 1731, the legend of Francis Chartres had grown so dark and widespread that his funeral procession provoked a serious riot, his body was nearly torn from the coffin, and the indignant mob hurled “dead dogs &c. into the grave along with it”. At Hogarth’s bidding he rises again, a sly, shabby figure, escorted by his dapper pimp, prepared to step into the foreground once Mother Needham has secured her prey. He will provide Moll Hackabout’s introduction to the hazardous world of kept women (92-94).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Ireland, John and John Nichols. Hogarth’s Works. (1883)

The first scene of this domestic tragedy is laid at the Bell Inn, in Wood Street, and the heroine may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman who is reading the direction of a letter close to the York waggon, from which vehicle she has just alighted. In attire, neat, plain, unadorned; in demeanour, artless, modest, diffident; in the bloom of youth, and more distinguished by native innocence than elegant symmetry; her conscious blush and downcast eyes attract the attention of a female fiend who panders to the vices of the opulent and libidinous. Coming out of the door of the inn we discover two men, one of whom is eagerly gloating on the devoted victim. This is a portrait, and said to be a strong resemblance of Colonel Francis Chartres (The attendant represents John Gourlay, the Colonel’s favourite and confidant.); whose epitaph was written by Doctor Arbuthnot: in that epitaph his character is most emphatically described:

The old procuress, immediately after the girl’s alighting from the waggon, addresses her with the familiarity of a friend rather than the reserve of one who is to be her mistress.

Had her father been versed in even the rudiments of physiognomy, he would have prevented her engaging with one of so decided an aspect; for this also is the portrait of a woman infamous in her day (Mother Needham, who stood in the pillory at Park Place on the 5th of May 1734, and was so roughly treated by the populace that she died a few days afterwards. The crime for which she suffered was, keeping a disorderly house.): but he, good, easy man, unsuspicious as Fielding’s Parson Adams, is wholly engrossed in the contemplation of a superscription to a letter addressed to the bishop of the diocese. So important an object prevents his attending to his daughter, or regarding the devastation occasioned by his gaunt and hungry Rozinate having snatched at the straw that packs up some earthenware, and produced “The wreck of flower-pots, and the crash of pans!”

From the inn she is taken to the house of the procuress, divested of her home-spun garb, dressed in the gayest style of the day, and the tender native hue of her complexion encrusted with paint and disguised by patches. She is then introduced to Colonel Chartres, and by artful flattery and liberal promises becomes intoxicated with the dreams of imaginary greatness A short time convinces her of how light a breath these promises were composed. Deserted by her keeper, and terrified by threats of an immediate arrest for the pompous paraphernalia of prostitution, after being a short time protected by one of the tribe of Levi, she is reduced to the hard necessity of wandering the streets for that precarious subsistence which flows from the drunken rake or the profligate debauchee. Here her situation is truly pitiable! Chilled by nipping frost and midnight dew, the repentant tear tricking down on her heaving bosom, she endeavours to drown reflection in draughts of destructive poison. This, added to the contagious company of women of her own description, vitiates her mind, eradicates the native seeds of virtue, destroys that elegant and fascinating simplicity which gives additional charms to beauty, and leaves in its place art, affectation and impudence.

The balcony, with linen hanging to dry; the York waggon, which intimates the county that gave birth to our young adventurer; the parcels lying on the ground, and a goose, directed To my lofen coosin in Tems Stret London, prove the peculiar attention he paid to this minutiæ. The initials M.H. one one of the trunks give us the name of the heroine of this drama,--Hackabout was a character then well known and infamous for her licentiousness and debauchery (The Grub Street Journal for August 6, 1730, giving an account of several prostitutes who were taken up, informs us that “the fourth was Kate Hackabout—whose brother was lately hanged at Tyburn—a woman noted in and about the hundreds of Drury, etc.).

Of elegant beauty Mr. Hogarth had not idea; but he has marked his heroine with natural simplicity. To the old procuress he has given her physiognomical distinction, and to the Colonel his appropriate stamp (101-106).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)

In the first plate of A Harlot’s Progress (back in 1732) the clergyman was deciphering the address of the bishop of London (Walpole’s agent for ecclesiastical preferment) while ignoring the poor country girl who is being lured into prostitution; precisely the same paradigm used in Beer Street and Gin Lane twenty years later (19).

Hogarth, in A Harlot’s Progress, plate 1, places the sign of a bell against the wall of a tavern so that is appears directly above the head of the bawd Mother Needham (bawds, Addison says . . . ought not violate decorum by operating at the sign of the “Angel”): hanging just over her dowdy head, it suggests the verbal pun belle (33-34).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)

The man at the door and the elderly woman in Plate I., undoubtedly represented in infamous Colonel Francis Charteris and the equally famous Mother Needham, the latter of whom died after exposure in the pillory in 1731 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1

Lichtenberg, G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. (1784-1796). Translated from the German by Innes and Gustav Herdan (1966)

The heroine of the piece is the daughter of a poor village parson from Yorkshire. We see both father and daughter in the first Plate. The girl, standing in the foreground, has just got down from the wretched cart which, as appears from its superscription, has brought her from the country; the father in the background is not so much riding as merely straddling his horse. How the girl stands there! Of course she is not a great beauty—one can see that. Hogarth was no painter of beauty; as far as I know, only two people in his whole life have claimed this for him: one was Hogarth himself and the other his good wife. But what the girl lacks in refinement is more than compensated by good health, childish simplicity, and gentle innocence. Her manner is that of a sturdy, clean, well-behaved village girl, who could be made into something—and that is just what happens. Her figure seems to have developed somewhat on the broad side, in the rough service of Ceres and Pomona. Had she been gathering forget-me-nots, daisies, violets and all the rest of the sentimental love-posies, she would perhaps have been cast in a finer mould. However, she is still in her middle teens, and still growing, and doubtless much of the angularity in her appearance must be put to the account of the village tailor.

In her attire, so simple and countrified, like her whole person, there is not a trace of falsehood; nothing is built up too high or spread too wide. Hat, corsage, and neckerchief guard and protect what has been entrusted to them faithfully, without bragging, and with the least possible display, like honeycombs. There are no unoccupied storeys in the former, and in the latter no empty galleries. Her face which reposes under the former speaks for itself in eloquent silence, is understandable to all and open to all, and needs no interpretation; to what is beneath the latter, on the other hand, where only conjectures are permitted, Flora has given an almost superfluous security by fixing a little rose there: innocence with the bloom of youth. From here the fortification proceeds downwards in the usual manner with three-or four-fold wall right to the little feet, standing very general in parallel. If the commander is not susceptible to bribery, then, as far as that quarter is concerned, the campaign looks promising. At her side hangs a needle-case and a little pair of scissors, and from her right arm a small bundle: they were probably put there by the poor weeping mother when she said goodbye, for occupation and refreshment on the journey. Much of the utter resignation in the attitude of her arms and the shyness in her glance are due, however, to the fascination exercised by the elegant watch of the great lady with whom the good child is here put en rapport. The reader will hear about Her Ladyship in due course. As yet we have to deal only with innocence, and therefore proceed immediately to the poor father. There he sits upon the faithful family chattel, a miserable grey who has probably done his best for sixteen years already to support (though, of course, some other of God's creatures could have done it better) the poor equestrian with a wife and ten children living on an income of 150 thalers net in the rich countryside where they all belong. A sorry figure to be sure! The skin on his knees has been kneed through in heavy service, and but perfunctorily patched up again by Nature. The shape of the neck and the position of the legs which have something of the cow about them and something of the lathe, do nothing to improve matters. Nor can one say that the horse, as might sometimes happen, is in the least ennobled by the figure of its rider. In the service of Holy Church the latter is in rather the same position as his loyal quadruped would be in any princely stable. He too is old, stiff, tottering, and in heavy service—bless us!—he too has worn out his knees, and like his friend is now without hope of a softer bed. Just look at his parched mouth and the highlights on the joints of his shrivelled hands! One would sooner expect to see in them the scythe of the general friend of living nature, than the reins. He sits there in his clerical garb, the only suit left in his wardrobe which could command such respect on the road as would certainly have been denied to the state of innocence underneath; the same applies to the breeches. They are certainly kneed through, and the high shovel hat serves not only for ornament but is at the same time a protection against mockery and moths. Every ornament in the world ought to be of that sort: decus et tutamen. The bleached, washed out and thinned out wig is of great significance here. It was not very thoughtful of the Reformation to allow the tonsure, which after all can be undone by Nature, to be covered by a wig, and yet to deprive a tonsured wig, which is much more difficult to restore, of the covering of the monk's hood, which would have concealed all deficiency. In Germany we have not the least idea of what the English clergyman's wig is like. Haven't we really?—No! And if anyone tries to contradict me, I shall say outright that in Germany we simply do not know at all what a wig is. Ours are mere anatomical specimens of wigs. In short: as regards dignity and impressiveness they are the exact counterpart of the beard of the ancients, with this difference only, that the hair is fixed on the other side of the face. And the form of it? Very well, I will describe the clergyman's wig, in its flowering time of course, in the manner of Linnaeus. Everyone knows how onions blossom. The little flowers form together a sort of sphere which is set high and firmly at the end of a long stem, as if on a spit. Now imagine the hollow stem to be the neck, and imagine from that sphere as many little flowers cut away in front as would be needful to accommodate a mask, and from the top as many as needful to accommodate a hat, but with no mask or hat there, and you have exactly the shape and even the colour of the English clergyman's wig. I do not know whether it is a deranged imagination or some other metastasis of the poetic gift in me, but often on fine summer evenings, when I could no longer clearly discern the thin, hollow stems, I could not help comparing a field of onions in flower with an English Church Convention. Now let us cast a final glance at that washed-out sheepskin of a poor man there upon the grey. Hogarth speaks here to our hearts, and Heaven forbid that we should add the smallest touch which would lead in a different direction. He speaks, I say, straight to the heart of those in this world who know what an amount of brushing and rubbing and combing it must have cost the honest man before he arrived at the point, through no fault of his own, of being no longer able to display in public the miserable insignia of his state and order; the order to which, in the eyes of the eternal Judge, he will often do more honour than his temporal Superior. I am in earnest here, my dear reader, and therefore I beg your attention for another moment. Oh, if this figure of death would but once ride as if alive, like Lenore's Wilhelm, over the ceiling of the Hall where the Bishop or the Rector are at their Te Deum—by feasting, or if he rode his screw across the path on which they gallop in coach and four, and if they were to recognize in that image a man of their own flesh and blood and calling (of their wig, one might almost say) who despite his greater merit had made his Te Deum—by hungering all his life, it would be better for the poor clergy in rich England. But that is poetry: away with it—in times like these.

Away with poetry, that is; for we must still linger a moment with the poor parson and his daughter. The old man has accompanied her to town, the first of his children to attain by Nature a sort of currency value in the world, she in the cart and he upon the poor grey. He had had to choose between two shock machines, and chose for himself the cheaper, not the more comfortable one. They have just arrived at the Bell Inn in Wood Street, a well-known public house. The old man is reading the address on a letter of introduction: 'To the Right Reverend Bishop—London'. A testimonial which might hit its mark, provided it was loaded with a bullet. He has not got his spectacles with him .and is laboriously studying the address. The grey takes advantage of this moment to make up for what he has missed on the way, and snatches greedily at the packing straw of some earthenware which is here displayed for sale. As a result, flower pots, dishes and pans and what-not, all empty, are tumbling around the famished animal. Very ominous. In all probability, if it comes to an argument, the bill for these empty dishes will far exceed the price of many a full one which the poor man has denied himself on the journey, and all that had been saved through the use of the shock-machine, and (deducting the hopes) the whole value of the letter to the Right Reverend! But we must leave this woeful scene, for much still lies before us. Farewell then, unhappy pair; we shall not meet again so soon. Endure in patience a little longer the few blows of your common fate which may still lie in store until the great knock-out blow of Nature falls, which makes an end of all. It will save you at the same time, my good old man, from witnessing the unspeakable misery which awaits your beloved Mary. As yet you do not know that the procession which you and your faithful servant led here from York was a funeral procession in which the virtue and, therefore, the happiness of your daughter, were conducted to a most terrible grave! And you, faithful grey, in whose side I discern, just behind your rider's spur, a little spot of reality which has cost the artist but a slight pressure of his stylus, but has cost you precious blood; believe me, the discovery has made me feel for you three times more keenly. I was sorry to discover, so shortly before our parting, this sign of conjunction between you and your master. But be comforted! The similarity between the two of you is even greater than you imagine: he too all his life long has carried just such a merciless rider as you have, and it would have cost the artist more than a single stroke to depict the scars which the poor victim covers here with the clerical Copri-miseria.

Our heroine, the good, honest, village girl from Yorkshire, thus alights at the Bell Inn in London. The healthy, country flower is transplanted from its native soil into this boundless garden amidst fertilizers and insects in a thousand forms, unknown in Yorkshire; unfortunately, she just chances to light on one of the most infamous flower-beds for miles around. Before she has time to strike root, an insect (I mean here Her Ladyship with the dainty watch) fastens in its sting, which is to ruin her straight growth for ever, at least upon this earth. The explanation is as follows:

Hogarth makes the girl come from Yorkshire. Why from Yorkshire? The artist and writer for posterity makes no stroke without meaning. Yorkshire produces (I speak here as a statistician) the prettiest girls; that it breeds the finest horses is already well known. And a cart laden with the poorest, though by no means the plainest, of these creatures puts up every week at the Bell Inn in Wood Street, or at least calls there. This is the scene here. To paint it yet clearer, still a few more words. Above the front door we see the chessboard sign: its meaning has often been a subject of controversy in English journals, and still is. The dispute however seems now to be resolved. It is the sign which all houses selling strong spirits are obliged to display. The Warren family, whose coat-of- arms bears such a chessboard, has in fact up to the present day the exclusive right of distributing licences to such retailers, and it is customary, for the convenience of the tax-collector, to have that chessboard painted over the doorway and on the door posts, so that the houses can be recognized from a distance. It turns up in various places in the work of our artist, just like the people who are usually found in such houses. The courtyard of the Inn is situated, as one sees, in a miserable quarter. Although there may be houses in the neighbourhood which have their good side, so much is certain, they are not turning their more respectable one to us here. For instance, in the house to the left, on the veranda, which incidentally is partly propped on posts and partly suspended from poles, we see two inverted chamber-pots. This seems to be their customary residence during the day, to get some fresh air; at night they retire dutifully to the service of the family, whose size is thus indicated by the number of these objects. On the line hangs the washing, or at least something that was in the water that morning, whether destined for future use on the human frame or merely for the limbo of the paper mill would be difficult to decide, from one piece at least. The girl who peers down is holding either a pair of boots or a pair of stiff stockings which seem to have a generous admixture of water. Evidently some of it is meant to run off, and she seems to contemplate a bath of drips for some passers-by with good hope of success.

Into that wretched hedge-alehouse, disregarding all the misery around, has ventured the man with the somewhat ungainly calves whom we now see standing in the doorway. That there is a servant with hair-bag, evidently a most devoted one, standing behind him, leads us to expect something high-class. He has come here expressly to wait for the cart with the Yorkshire girls so as to have first pick when it was unloaded. Apart from the satellite with the hair-bag behind him, there is also the great lady with the cul-de-Paris who has evidently come with him. Who can the man be? This the reader will now hear in detail.

The man who stands here with one foot in the courtyard and the other still in the doorway, with the left hand resting on a stick, and the right engaged in some private business, is the notorious Colonel Charters. Those who know how readily Hogarth could hit off a face and figure must be gratified to see preserved upon this Plate the physiognomy and form of one of the greatest scoundrels the stylus has ever rendered immortal. Two of the actors in our drama die on the gallows, but that man is not one of them, though he deserved it just as much. He only escaped hanging because in addition to the numerous fraudulent practices which lead to the gallows, in all of which he was a past master, he had been clever enough to study that one by which the gallows themselves are deprived of their due. Never, perhaps, had the gallows been so cheated as on the day when that beast died in his bed. For those of our readers who are familiar with Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and in general with the English classical writers of that time, or who have found pleasure in studying the spirit and character of that nation great even in its monstrosities, as they annually come before its Criminal Courts, we are not recording anything new here. Felon, scoundrel, whoremonger, are so many descriptions of Colonel Charters. Pope, to put it in a nutshell, once spoke of 'Charters and the Devil'. Charters and the Devil. That sounds almost like a Trading Company. They had indeed a sort of traffic with one another just as the French Charters has nowadays with those hotter regions. And it would not, I think, have shamed the Devil to sign some of his newest bills on Nantes and Bordeaux with 'Charters, Bros. & Co.'

Now to a more detailed description of the creature. We shall begin with Pope's own note on the passage we mentioned; in cold-blooded prose.

Francis Charters, a man infamous for all manner of vices. When he was an ensign in the army he was drummed out of the regiment for a cheat; he was next banished Brussels and drummed out of Ghent on the same account. After a hundred tricks at the gaming tables he took to lending money at exorbitant interest and on great penalties, accumulating premium, interest, and capital into a new capital, and seizing to a minute when the payments became due; in a word, by a constant attention to the vices, wants and follies of mankind, he acquired an immense fortune. His house was a perpetual bawdy-house. He was twice condemned for rapes, and pardoned; but the last time not without imprisonment in Newgate, and large confiscations. He died in Scotland in 1731, aged 62. The populace at his funeral raised a great riot, almost tore the body out of the coffin, and cast dead dogs, etc., into the grave along with it.

The following Epitaph contains his character very justly drawn by Dr Arbuthnot:

Now that is what I call an epitaph. Sit tibi terra levis, Charters, with thy dead dogs!

There is some drumming here, it is true. If, however, we consider the high and solid character of Dr Arbuthnot, the certificate loses through its poetic form nothing of its force and has the weight of prose.

Why do we never read such epitaphs in churchyards? Indeed, when we walk through a churchyard and read the stone receipts which our common mother draws up in exchange for the nailed-up boxes deposited with her, one cannot help thinking that she must either be a very rich and kindly mother who intends one day to make good the defects out of her own means, or a very foolish one who lets herself be taken in quite lamentably by some of those bereaved families. I must confess that when I read the inscriptions on tombstones I am often at a loss to know which is really the side of glory. For there could surely be no happier world than one where the graves gave up without the smallest rebate everything which according to the tombstone inscriptions they had received; or one in which all those who escaped hanging really were such paragons as are said to have been delivered here.

Now only a few lines more on behalf of the Tout comme chez nous: a few days after Charters' death the following touching article is said to have appeared on the back page of an Edinburgh newspaper among the writs of arrest issued for thieves, and the advertisements of new books and patent medicines which encourage the reader partly to catch and partly to be caught:

This Charters, with an income of 60,000 thalers, comes now to that dirty hovel simply to wait for the consignment of girls from Yorkshire. The fellow behind him is a certain John Gourlay, who usually accompanied Charters, especially when something was to be acquired for the household, a sort of blood-hound. About the lips of that noble pair there hovers an expression, not so much ingratiating as actually of savouring something, which has such an abominable effect that it might tempt the hand of any honest and honour-loving fellow to apply itself thereto in the form of a fist, and with accelerated motion, without any more ado. They have, however, no confidence in their own appearance when confronting innocence and have found it necessary to interpose between themselves and the poor inexperienced village girl a little object of attraction. This is Her Ladyship, an old cunning decoy-bird, who as a rule sings only bawdy songs, but on occasions like these still knows how to pipe her woodland airs and to lure the free flight of the little birds of heaven towards the cages of London. A notorious woman who, though not hanged, met a death which in shamefulness was only a few degrees removed from death on the gallows, and which in every other respect was much more painful. It is in fact a portrait of a Madam Needham, commonly known as Mother Needham, a notorious and generally despised character of those times. She kept a bawdy house in Park Place, a cul-de-sac, if I am not mistaken, off St. James's Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the City. She was called 'Mother', no doubt, because she had the virtue and honour of her pupils just as much at heart as her own. Pope has immortalized her too. He calls her 'pious Needham'. To call a go-between and procuress 'pious' merely in irony would have been a far too commonplace joke for so witty a man. No; she really was pious, and exercised her piety, as it is exercised by thousands, regularly, according to the clock. She washed herself morning and evening with her prayers, according to the best prescriptions, and every Sunday she had a grand washing day; the remaining time she spent in her office or was otherwise occupied. One might perhaps imagine she was a religious hypocrite. That sort of thing would depreciate Pope's remark still more, for what is more common than procuresses who are also hypocrites? No; she is said to have really thought sometimes when she prayed, which is differentia specifica, and thus Pope's comment acquires significance. It was expressly remembered of her that she often implored Heaven with tears for a blessing on her occupation, so that she might one day freed from shame, serve Heaven fully in spirit and in truth. Was this a pious fraud? Heaven declined to grant that well-meant request. She was arrested, put in the pillory, and on the second occasion (she was to undergo the operation three times) was so badly mauled by the rabble on the maxim: 'I love treason but hate the traitor', that she died before it came to the third ordeal. This was indeed worse than a hanging.

Here she stands, albeit rather weathered; the facing begins to crumble just like the wall of the alehouse which serves as a significant background to her head. In order, however, to impede as far as possible the flight of her remaining charms, she has stuck little plasters over the main avenues of escape, through which they usually disappear, while the faded ones have evidently been freshened up. I may be mistaken, but whenever I look at that nose I cannot help thinking of snuff and spectacle marks. Besides, one can very well see how the face, especially that delightful mouth, is doing everything it can to mask the repellent traces which the habits of fifty years have left in some of its regions. To bring her heart close to the poor girl's through her finger tips, she has taken off her glove, for the theatrical gesture which she is performing would not penetrate through calf skin. And so the poor little bird sinks into a charmed sleep while being put into the cage of a seemingly great lady, a cage however which has a little back gate through Charters' hedge, and so—everything is lost' And all this is happening while our good old man m poring over an address forgets to alight from his horse. Thus here is another case of fragile goods—tumbling down, to the detriment of the poor devil, which no bishopric will ever restore. So much for a letter of introduction!

So much for the essential features of this first scene. Now a little more about the decorations. In the lower right-hand corner stands quite a sizeable trunk with M.H. painted on the lid. It contains the girl's trousseau for this marriage others with—shame and destruction. With a sort of prophetic foresight which nothing in the world can justify, Hogarth has given his heroine the name of Mary Hackabout, thus not so much expressing her character as her future fate. This would have been better left undone. The English word 'to hack', if used of a woman, denotes every possible shame which could be put to her account. Mamselle Maria Everybody's would be the most literal translation, and this is at least free of the ugly associations from which the English word can only with difficulty be separated, including even saddle and reins. Why this in such a work of art? And if the girl's name was Hackabout, what was then the name of the poor innocent father? It is to the credit of the Germans that they do not permit, or only reluctantly, such treason of writers against their heroes. Woe to the author who has to give his hero a label in order to draw attention to him. Hogarth was least of all in need of such a device. He sets forth the girl's story in such a way, and describes her life so clearly, that in the end one would have to regard her as a Hackabout even if the saddler had nailed 'Susannah' upon the trunk. And this, I think, is the right way. In Greek or Hebrew such names may perhaps pass; one has grown accustomed to them, just as one is used to 'Doctor' and 'Magister' which nowadays begin to acquire the character of Christian names. The love of God of some Theophilus is of about the same degree as the blessed state of some aetheist Benedict, like Spinoza. Little Pandemos would have been perhaps the most suitable name if Hogarth had wanted to indicate his intentions. So far as I know the name does not appear in any calendar, unless perhaps in a ladies' calendar, and those I do not read. Close to the trunk lies a poor goose almost strangled by the address label round its neck (in a way, like the poor parson on horseback through his). It reads: 'te my lofing Cosen in Terns-street in London.' New orthography with old-time folly in sisterly conjunction as usual. Where now is little Pandernos to go? For in Thames Street, one of the most roaring and crowded thoroughfares in London, live lofing Cosens by the thousand who are only too willing to accept unlabelled geese with their heart in their mouth. The poor animal is addressed, just like you, my good little Mary, and like your poor Yorkshire travelling companions in the cart who are going on farther and who will not lack lofing Cosens, either! Lying on the ground is a packed case also with an address. We mention this merely to tell the reader that the address upon the original is intentionally just as unreadable as here. It is merely something typical which is always happening, a box waiting patiently for the fulfilment of its cite citissime until in the end an honest carrier who cannot read, or a sly thief who does not want to, takes charge of it (4-15).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

View this detail in copper here.

A bawd welcomes the newly-arrived Moll to London, her touch while seeming a caress, assesses the merchandise. This procuress is a fascinating figure. As Derek Jarett notes, “Mother Needham,” the real-life original of the bawd who turned country girls into whores in Hogarth’s series, died in May 1731, after being viciously pelted in the pillory by the very people whom she served so well” (England 137). Mother Needham, the irony of her maternal moniker intact, introduces an important theme in the series—mal-intentioned benefactors.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Shesgreen

A bawd feels Moll with her naked hand in the same clinical way animals are inspected before purchase. This figure is said to resemble Mother Needham, the keeper of a notorious brother patronized by the aristocracy; she had recently been stoned to death by the London populace when she was pilloried for managing a disorderly house. This procuress seems to be the instrument of the nobleman who stands in the shadow of the door leering intensely at the girl, his right hand fumbling suspiciously in his pocket. A symbol of aristocratic corruption, he has come with his pimp to prey on the indigent, naïve young girls who alight here from the country. The nobleman has been identified as Colonel Charteris, the worst of the exploitative privileged class to which he belonged (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works

The old woman who is addressing Mary Hackabout is the notorious Mother (Elizabeth) Needham, proprietress of a fashionable bagnio in Park Place, near St. James' Street. A procuress who much affected piety, she appears as Mother Punchbowl in Fielding's Covent Garden Tragedy (1732,1.2; also in the epilogue to Pasquin, 1736). The numerous beauty patches on her face suggest that she uses them partly to conceal the ravages of disease. She had but recently come to a bad end. The Grub-street Journal (May 6, 1731) cites journals of the past week to the effect that on April 30 "the noted Mother Needham stood in the pillory in Park-place [the street in which she lived], near S. James's-street; and was severely handled by the populace." And again: "She was so very ill that she laid along under the pillory, notwithstanding which, she was severely pelted, and it is thought she will die in a day or two" (which she did. May 3). For other references to Mother Needham and her fate, see Pope's Dunciad, Bk. I, 11. 323-24, and his note; BM Sat. 1833, and Mother Needham's Lamentation, published in May 1731 (144).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

For the bawd who seduces M. Hackabout in the inn-yard, Hogarth drew the most famous procuress of the time, Elizabeth Needham. In 1727 when Mrs. Davys had needed a bawd in her Accomplish’d Rake, she called upon “Mother N—d—m” and showed her trying to peddle a girl “just come out of the country.” . . . As early as March 1722/3 Mother Needham was keeping her “Vaulting-School in Pulteney-Street” and was arrested with seventeen (or twelve in another source) “of her Daughters.” She was committed to the Gatehouse and immediately freed on bail; the girls went to Tothill Fields Bridewell to beat hemp. In May she had moved her house, and on 21 July 1724 she was apprehended again; “the first time Mrs. Needham ever received Correction, since her being at the Head of Veneal Affairs in this Town.” But the next day she was again bailed. In October 1726 the first of a series of calculated reports of her death appeared, with an epitaph in verse about her dying from being pelted in the pillory—a grisly prophecy, as it happened. . . .On Friday 30 April, a month after Hogarth had begun his subscription for the Harlot’s Progress, “the noted” Mother Needham stood in the pillory facing Park Place and was so “severely handled by the populace” that she died on 3 May without having to stand again in the pillory. “She declared in her last words, that what most affected her was the terror of standing in the pillory tomorrow in New Palace-Yard, having been so ungratefully used by the Populace on Wednesday.” And the Grub-Street Journal adds, “They acted very ungratefully, considering how much she had done to oblige them”—a statement that Hogarth would have found very interesting. . . .She is of course the Harlot’s original corrupter, the bawd who usually escaped detention while her girls beat hemp; yet she is only an intermediary for the Charterises, and her death, analogous to the Harlot’s, is an ugly one, with the very people she has served clamoring for her punishment (vol. 1 251-252).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Uglow

In Hogarth's print, the confident bawd is the most dramatic figure, with her finery and patches, immediately recognizable as Mother Needham. (Moll stands, in effect, between 'father' and 'mother', both grotesque parodies of the parental role.) (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Quennell

Alas, her helpful acquaintance is the “pious Needham”!—so called by contemporary satirists because she was reputed to be “very religious” according to her own lights, and constantly prayed that she might gain enough by her profession to leave it off in good time. Her prayer, as we know, was to remain unanswered: not far ahead loom the dreadful Sir John Gonson and the vindictive mob around the pillory. But, in the Progress, she continues to ply her trade; and an employer, more notorious even than herself is hovering in the background. Colonel Chartres, attended by his jackal, John Gourlay, a pimp whom, we are told, he “always kept about is person”, has just appeared in the doorway and looks on with a lickerish grin (93).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Ireland

her conscious blush and downcast eyes attract the attention of a female fiend who panders to the vices of the opulent and libidinous. The old procuress, immediately after the girl’s alighting from the waggon, addresses her with the familiarity of a friend rather than the reserve of one who is to be her mistress. Had her father been versed in even the rudiments of physiognomy, he would have prevented her engaging with one of so decided an aspect; for this also is the portrait of a woman infamous in her day (Mother Needham, who stood in the pillory at Park Place on the 5th of May 1734, and was so roughly treated by the populace that she died a few days afterwards. The crime for which she suffered was, keeping a disorderly house.): but he, good, easy man, unsuspicious as Fielding’s Parson Adams, is wholly engrossed in the contemplation of a superscription to a letter addressed to the bishop of the diocese. So important an object prevents his attending to his daughter, or regarding the devastation occasioned by his gaunt and hungry Rozinate having snatched at the straw that packs up some earthenware, and produced “The wreck of flower-pots, and the crash of pans!” (102-104).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

Hogarth, in A Harlot’s Progress, plate 1, places the sign of a bell against the wall of a tavern so that is appears directly above the head of the bawd Mother Needham (bawds, Addison says . . . ought not violate decorum by operating at the sign of the “Angel”): hanging just over her dowdy head, it suggests the verbal pun belle (33-34).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Dobson

The man at the door and the elderly woman in Plate I., undoubtedly represented in infamous Colonel Francis Charteris and the equally famous Mother Needham, the latter of whom died after exposure in the pillory in 1731 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bawd

Lichtenberg

This is Her Ladyship, an old cunning decoy-bird, who as a rule sings only bawdy songs, but on occasions like these still knows how to pipe her woodland airs and to lure the free flight of the little birds of heaven towards the cages of London. A notorious woman who, though not hanged, met a death which in shamefulness was only a few degrees removed from death on the gallows, and which in every other respect was much more painful. It is in fact a portrait of a Madam Needham, commonly known as Mother Needham, a notorious and generally despised character of those times. She kept a bawdy house in Park Place, a cul-de-sac, if I am not mistaken, off St. James's Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the City. She was called 'Mother', no doubt, because she had the virtue and honour of her pupils just as much at heart as her own. Pope has immortalized her too. He calls her 'pious Needham'. To call a go-between and procuress 'pious' merely in irony would have been a far too commonplace joke for so witty a man. No; she really was pious, and exercised her piety, as it is exercised by thousands, regularly, according to the clock. She washed herself morning and evening with her prayers, according to the best prescriptions, and every Sunday she had a grand washing day; the remaining time she spent in her office or was otherwise occupied. One might perhaps imagine she was a religious hypocrite. That sort of thing would depreciate Pope's remark still more, for what is more common than procuresses who are also hypocrites? No; she is said to have really thought sometimes when she prayed, which is differentia specifica, and thus Pope's comment acquires significance. It was expressly remembered of her that she often implored Heaven with tears for a blessing on her occupation, so that she might one day freed from shame, serve Heaven fully in spirit and in truth. Was this a pious fraud? Heaven declined to grant that well-meant request. She was arrested, put in the pillory, and on the second occasion (she was to undergo the operation three times) was so badly mauled by the rabble on the maxim: 'I love treason but hate the traitor', that she died before it came to the third ordeal. This was indeed worse than a hanging.

Here she stands, albeit rather weathered; the facing begins to crumble just like the wall of the alehouse which serves as a significant background to her head. In order, however, to impede as far as possible the flight of her remaining charms, she has stuck little plasters over the main avenues of escape, through which they usually disappear, while the faded ones have evidently been freshened up. I may be mistaken, but whenever I look at that nose I cannot help thinking of snuff and spectacle marks. Besides, one can very well see how the face, especially that delightful mouth, is doing everything it can to mask the repellent traces which the habits of fifty years have left in some of its regions. To bring her heart close to the poor girl's through her finger tips, she has taken off her glove, for the theatrical gesture which she is performing would not penetrate through calf skin. And so the poor little bird sinks into a charmed sleep while being put into the cage of a seemingly great lady, a cage however which has a little back gate through Charters' hedge, and so—everything is lost' And all this is happening while our good old man m poring over an address forgets to alight from his horse. Thus here is another case of fragile goods—tumbling down, to the detriment of the poor devil, which no bishopric will ever restore. So much for a letter of introduction! (13-14).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

View this detail in copper here.

Mother Needham welcomes the newly-arrived Moll to London, her touch while seeming a caress, assesses the merchandise. Needham is placed below this bell. Commentators agree that this denotes the Bell Inn in Wood Street. Paulson also notes a pun on belle, ironically attributed to the bawd.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Shesgreen

Before the Bell Inn in Wood Street, Mary or Moll Hackabout, newly arrived in London, is caught between the aggressive agents of corrupt, who are set against the crumbling tavern wall, and the ordinary (and passive) middle-class people arranged around the solidly built home (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

Hogarth’s scenes are constructed of such parallels and interdependencies: the parson and his horse, the girl and her goose, Mother Needham with the sign of the Bell (Belle) over her head (vol. 1 255).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Uglow

The cycle starts with a sweet country girl with a rose in her bosom and her little purse and scissors hanging by her side, arriving off the York wagon at the Bell Inn (the women still inside the wagon, ranged tightly behind the bar, also looklike sheep bound for market) (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Ireland

The first scene of this domestic tragedy is laid at the Bell Inn, in Wood Street (101).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

Hogarth, in A Harlot’s Progress, plate 1, places the sign of a bell against the wall of a tavern so that is appears directly above the head of the bawd Mother Needham (bawds, Addison says . . . ought not violate decorum by operating at the sign of the “Angel”): hanging just over her dowdy head, it suggests the verbal pun belle (33-34).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Bell

Lichtenberg

They have just arrived at the Bell Inn in Wood Street, a well-known public house (6).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

View this detail in copper here.

Moll’s goose is as cooked as the dead one in the basket placed near her trunk

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

Shesgreen

The coffin-like trunk with Moll’s initials, the preoccupied clergyman (motifs which reappear in the final scenes) and the dead goose (“For my Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London”) giver a funereal and ominous cast to the scene (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

Uglow

Moll’s trunk is simply labeled “M. Hackabout”—“M” was the initial used in the Prayer Book catechism to stand in for the first name, so the alarming implication is that Hogarth’s “M” can be any woman, any girl, any country innocent (197).

The neck of the goose, neatly labelled for 'my lofing Cosen in Terns Street', droops over the edge of the basket; the panniers pushed by the munching horse are about to tumble to the ground. Even when she is at the height other career, Moll (like the townswoman in After} is surrounded by objects falling, crashing, scattering (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

Quennell

Moll’s pathetic luggage is spread at her feet—her trunk with her initials, M. H., stamped on the top in brass nails, a corded box, and a basketed goose—perhaps it is a “green goose”—a gift labeled “For my lofing Cosen in Tems Street in London” (93).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

Ireland

The initials M.H. one one of the trunks give us the name of the heroine of this drama,--Hackabout was a character then well known and infamous for her licentiousness and debauchery (The Grub Street Journal for August 6, 1730, giving an account of several prostitutes who were taken up, informs us that “the fourth was Kate Hackabout—whose brother was lately hanged at Tyburn—a woman noted in and about the hundreds of Drury, etc.) (106).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Box and Basket

Lichtenberg

In the lower right-hand corner stands quite a sizeable trunk with M.H. painted on the lid. It contains the girl's trousseau for this marriage others with—shame and destruction. With a sort of prophetic foresight which nothing in the world can justify, Hogarth has given his heroine the name of Mary Hackabout, thus not so much expressing her character as her future fate. This would have been better left undone. The English word 'to hack', if used of a woman, denotes every possible shame which could be put to her account. Mamselle Maria Everybody's would be the most literal translation, and this is at least free of the ugly associations from which the English word can only with difficulty be separated, including even saddle and reins. Why this in such a work of art? And if the girl's name was Hackabout, what was then the name of the poor innocent father? It is to the credit of the Germans that they do not permit, or only reluctantly, such treason of writers against their heroes. Woe to the author who has to give his hero a label in order to draw attention to him. Hogarth was least of all in need of such a device. He sets forth the girl's story in such a way, and describes her life so clearly, that in the end one would have to regard her as a Hackabout even if the saddler had nailed 'Susannah' upon the trunk. And this, I think, is the right way. In Greek or Hebrew such names may perhaps pass; one has grown accustomed to them, just as one is used to 'Doctor' and 'Magister' which nowadays begin to acquire the character of Christian names. The love of God of some Theophilus is of about the same degree as the blessed state of some aetheist Benedict, like Spinoza. Little Pandemos would have been perhaps the most suitable name if Hogarth had wanted to indicate his intentions. So far as I know the name does not appear in any calendar, unless perhaps in a ladies' calendar, and those I do not read. Close to the trunk lies a poor goose almost strangled by the address label round its neck (in a way, like the poor parson on horseback through his). It reads: 'te my lofing Cosen in Terns-street in London.' New orthography with old-time folly in sisterly conjunction as usual. Where now is little Pandernos to go? For in Thames Street, one of the most roaring and crowded thoroughfares in London, live lofing Cosens by the thousand who are only too willing to accept unlabelled geese with their heart in their mouth. The poor animal is addressed, just like you, my good little Mary, and like your poor Yorkshire travelling companions in the cart who are going on farther and who will not lack lofing Cosens, either! Lying on the ground is a packed case also with an address. We mention this merely to tell the reader that the address upon the original is intentionally just as unreadable as here. It is merely something typical which is always happening, a box waiting patiently for the fulfilment of its cite citissime until in the end an honest carrier who cannot read, or a sly thief who does not want to, takes charge of it (14-15).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

View this detail in copper here.

The falling buckets portend her own impending rapid fall from innocence into sexual experience.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

At any rate (like the clergymen in The South Sea Scheme) he is oblivious to all else, reading a letter “to the Right Reverend Father in God . . . ,” whom he presumably come up from the country to see (in the fourth state “London” is legible); this is a reference to the bishop of the diocese, Bishop Edmund Gibson of London, Walpole’s adviser on church patronage (alluded to in the third plate). And just as he pays no attention to what is happening to Mary, he overlooks the destruction his horse is about to perpetrate at his very feet (144-145).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

The clergyman is also part of the guilt explored in Plate 1, turning his back on Hackabout, Needham, and Charteris, while his horse is casually knocking over a pile of buckets (vol. 1 253).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

Uglow

The neck of the goose, neatly labelled for 'my lofing Cosen in Terns Street', droops over the edge of the basket; the panniers pushed by the munching horse are about to tumble to the ground. Even when she is at the height other career, Moll (like the townswoman in After} is surrounded by objects falling, crashing, scattering (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

Quennell

The drama opens in the City of London, where the York Waggon, favoured by travelers who cannot afford the stage-coach, has lately rolled into the squalid yard of the Bell posting-house in Wood Street. It was brought a young girl up from the depth of the country, protected only by her father, and old and absent-minded clergyman, who has followed the waggon on his ancient horse and is now anxiously scanning the superscription of a letter addressed to some influential prelate, while his mount snatches at the straw packing of a pyramid of pots and pans (92).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Buckets

Ireland

So important an object prevents his attending to his daughter, or regarding the devastation occasioned by his gaunt and hungry Rozinate having snatched at the straw that packs up some earthenware, and produced “The wreck of flower-pots, and the crash of pans!” (104).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Checker

View this detail in copper here.

The checker square indicates that Charter is and Gourlay are emerging from a tavern. Commentators have located the picture at the Bell Inn on Wood Street. Including the tavern sign emphasizes the vice present in the print.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Checker

Shesgreen

Before the Bell Inn in Wood Street, Mary or Moll Hackabout, newly arrived in London, is caught between the aggressive agents of corrupt, who are set against the crumbling tavern wall, and the ordinary (and passive) middle-class people arranged around the solidly built home (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

View this detail in copper here.

Ronald Paulson notes that the harlot “suffers from a lack of attention by supposedly humanitarian men” (Life vol. 1 253). In this plate and again in plate 6, she is ignored by clergy (Some commentators have argued that the clergyman here in plate 1 is Moll’s father, making his neglect of his daughter in his absorption with his own career advancement particularly odious.).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Shesgreen

Above Moll, a housewife, surrounded by the chamber pots and laundry, hand out clothing. She seems to represent the secure, if unexciting bourgeois life the girl leaves behind. With his back to her an affluent clergyman, perhaps Moll’s father, reads the address on a letter, probably a request to the Bishop of London for a sinecure (“To the Right Reverend Father in London”). Short-sighted and insensitive to the crises around him (including his own), like his horse, he is intent on fulfilling his personal ambitions and desires at the expense of his flock (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

At any rate (like the clergymen in The South Sea Scheme) he is oblivious to all else, reading a letter “to the Right Reverend Father in God . . . ,” whom he presumably come up from the country to see (in the fourth state “London” is legible); this is a reference to the bishop of the diocese, Bishop Edmund Gibson of London, Walpole’s adviser on church patronage (alluded to in the third plate). And just as he pays no attention to what is happening to Mary, he overlooks the destruction his horse is about to perpetrate at his very feet (144-145).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Paulson, Life, Art and Times

The clergyman is also part of the guilt explored in Plate 1, turning his back on Hackabout, Needham, and Charteris, while his horse is casually knocking over a pile of buckets. The reason for his absorption is the address he is trying to make out on the paper in his hand: “to the Right Reverend Father in God . . . London.” The reference is to Bishop Gibson of London, who was Sir Robert Walpole’s chief adviser in the matter of ecclesiastical preferment: the clergyman is thinking about his advancement rather than his duty. Hogarth even incriminated the girl’s “lofing cosen in Tems Street in London,” to whom her luggage is directed, and who has failed to meet her, leaving Needham to fill the gap. As her antagonists, the forces of pleasure and corruption are augmented by the entire social structure of family ties, law, order, and religion (vol. 1 253).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Uglow

Hogarth told the French commentator Jean Andre Rouquet that the clergyman so deep in his letter to Edmund Gibson that he ignores the girl's plight (as ambitious clerics ignored their flock) was Moll's father. Rouquet had to explain this to his Catholic readers: 'The clergy in England are not bound to celibacy, and make great use of their privilege. They all marry, and as the revenue of their benefices is not enough for the establishment of several children in the world, these children and above all the daughters, are reduced to strange ways of providing for their own subsistence.'

This, too, was an old line: Tom Brown's huge, greasy bawd who collects 'whole wagon-loads' of country lasses, explains that one other girls 'had been a celebrated beauty, a parson's daughter' (201).).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Quennell

The drama opens in the City of London, where the York Waggon, favoured by travelers who cannot afford the stage-coach, has lately rolled into the squalid yard of the Bell posting-house in Wood Street. It was brought a young girl up from the depth of the country, protected only by her father, and old and absent-minded clergyman, who has followed the waggon on his ancient horse and is now anxiously scanning the superscription of a letter addressed to some influential prelate, while his mount snatches at the straw packing of a pyramid of pots and pans (92).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Ireland

the heroine may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman who is reading the direction of a letter close to the York waggon, from which vehicle she has just alighted (102).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

In the first plate of A Harlot’s Progress (back in 1732) the clergyman was deciphering the address of the bishop of London (Walpole’s agent for ecclesiastical preferment) while ignoring the poor country girl who is being lured into prostitution; precisely the same paradigm used in Beer Street and Gin Lane twenty years later (19).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Clergy

Lichtenberg

There he sits upon the faithful family chattel, a miserable grey who has probably done his best for sixteen years already to support (though, of course, some other of God's creatures could have done it better) the poor equestrian with a wife and ten children living on an income of 150 thalers net in the rich countryside where they all belong. A sorry figure to be sure! The skin on his knees has been kneed through in heavy service, and but perfunctorily patched up again by Nature. The shape of the neck and the position of the legs which have something of the cow about them and something of the lathe, do nothing to improve matters. Nor can one say that the horse, as might sometimes happen, is in the least ennobled by the figure of its rider. In the service of Holy Church the latter is in rather the same position as his loyal quadruped would be in any princely stable. He too is old, stiff, tottering, and in heavy service—bless us!—he too has worn out his knees, and like his friend is now without hope of a softer bed. Just look at his parched mouth and the highlights on the joints of his shrivelled hands! One would sooner expect to see in them the scythe of the general friend of living nature, than the reins. He sits there in his clerical garb, the only suit left in his wardrobe which could command such respect on the road as would certainly have been denied to the state of innocence underneath; the same applies to the breeches. They are certainly kneed through, and the high shovel hat serves not only for ornament but is at the same time a protection against mockery and moths. Every ornament in the world ought to be of that sort: decus et tutamen. The bleached, washed out and thinned out wig is of great significance here. It was not very thoughtful of the Reformation to allow the tonsure, which after all can be undone by Nature, to be covered by a wig, and yet to deprive a tonsured wig, which is much more difficult to restore, of the covering of the monk's hood, which would have concealed all deficiency. In Germany we have not the least idea of what the English clergyman's wig is like. Haven't we really?—No! And if anyone tries to contradict me, I shall say outright that in Germany we simply do not know at all what a wig is. Ours are mere anatomical specimens of wigs. In short: as regards dignity and impressiveness they are the exact counterpart of the beard of the ancients, with this difference only, that the hair is fixed on the other side of the face. And the form of it? Very well, I will describe the clergyman's wig, in its flowering time of course, in the manner of Linnaeus. Everyone knows how onions blossom. The little flowers form together a sort of sphere which is set high and firmly at the end of a long stem, as if on a spit. Now imagine the hollow stem to be the neck, and imagine from that sphere as many little flowers cut away in front as would be needful to accommodate a mask, and from the top as many as needful to accommodate a hat, but with no mask or hat there, and you have exactly the shape and even the colour of the English clergyman's wig. I do not know whether it is a deranged imagination or some other metastasis of the poetic gift in me, but often on fine summer evenings, when I could no longer clearly discern the thin, hollow stems, I could not help comparing a field of onions in flower with an English Church Convention. Now let us cast a final glance at that washed-out sheepskin of a poor man there upon the grey. Hogarth speaks here to our hearts, and Heaven forbid that we should add the smallest touch which would lead in a different direction. He speaks, I say, straight to the heart of those in this world who know what an amount of brushing and rubbing and combing it must have cost the honest man before he arrived at the point, through no fault of his own, of being no longer able to display in public the miserable insignia of his state and order; the order to which, in the eyes of the eternal Judge, he will often do more honour than his temporal Superior. I am in earnest here, my dear reader, and therefore I beg your attention for another moment. Oh, if this figure of death would but once ride as if alive, like Lenore's Wilhelm, over the ceiling of the Hall where the Bishop or the Rector are at their Te Deum—by feasting, or if he rode his screw across the path on which they gallop in coach and four, and if they were to recognize in that image a man of their own flesh and blood and calling (of their wig, one might almost say) who despite his greater merit had made his Te Deum—by hungering all his life, it would be better for the poor clergy in rich England. But that is poetry: away with it—in times like these (5-7).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

View this detail in copper here.

A bawd welcomes the newly-arrived Moll to London, her touch while seeming a caress, assesses the merchandise. While Paulson astutely comments on the Moll’s rejection by these potential father figures (Life vol. 1 253), there is also notably the mother here, who plays a more active role in Moll’s downfall. Thus, both of her surrogate parents contribute significantly to Moll’s demise. The only dependable force in Moll’s life, her sister of sorts, will be the syphilitic servant who attends her and who is the only true mourner in plate 6. Moll’s goose is as cooked as the dead one in the basket placed near her trunk. The falling buckets portend her own impending rapid fall from innocence into sexual experience. An eager customer awaits her. Ultimately naïve Moll is completely unprepared for the corruption she faces, even just off the wagon, in London.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Shesgreen

Before the Bell Inn in Wood Street, Mary or Moll Hackabout, newly arrived in London, is caught between the aggressive agents of corrupt, who are set against the crumbling tavern wall, and the ordinary (and passive) middle-class people arranged around the solidly built home. Dressed in modestly designed clothes and bearing the scissors and pin cushion of a dressmaker, she has just alighted from the York wagon. Though she appears as fresh and artless as the rose that covers her bosom, her expression suggests that she s a little flattered by the attention of the bawd (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The plate may have been inspired by Steele's essay "A Consideration of poor and publick Whores" in Spectator No. 266 (Jan. 4, 1711/12), where he mentioned seeing the "most artful Procuress in the Town, examining a most beautiful Country-Girl, who had come up in the same Waggon with my Things." The scene is the yard of the Bell Inn, where coaches from the country stopped; there was an inn of this name in Wood Street, Cheap- side. The girl wears the dress of a country girl, a kerchief and a full- blown rose hiding her bosom; a pincushion and a pair of scissors hang at her waist. The wagon has "B.R." and "York [Wa]gon" on its side--indicating the place from which she came—far from London and its intrigues—and also suggesting that the girl cannot afford a stagecoach. Stephens (BM Sat.) detected "with much simplicity of expression . . . , a voluptuous character in her features, and a certain frivolity." Her name, we learn in Pls. 3 and 6, is M[ary?] Hackabout (initials "M.H." are on her portmanteau). The goose she carries in a basket among her luggage, "For my Lofing Cosen in Tems Stret in London," bears a striking resemblance to her, and implies her own fate, as she listens to Mother Needham's blandishments. The meaning of her name is clear enough: hack is a carriage for hire, and about implies street-walking. There was, however, a prostitute of this name (her Christian name, Kate) who appears in a list of women taken into custody for disorderly conduct (Grub-street Journal, Aug. 6, 1730): "the famous Kate Hackabout (whose brother was lately hang'd at Tyburn) a woman noted in and about the Hundreds of Drury, for being a very termagant, and a terror, not only to the civil part of the neighbourhood, by her frequent fighting, noise, and swearing in the streets in the night-time, but also to other women of her own profession, who presume to pay or pick up men in her district, which is half one side of the way in Bridges-street." For the brother, Francis Hackabout, see A History of Executions, 1730, No. 2, p. 58; and the Daily Courant, February 26, 1729/30. (One result of the popularity of Hogarth's series was a racehorse named "Moll Hack-About": see Read's Weekly Journal, Apr. 21, 1750.) (143-144).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times

The girl herself is less a study of innocence than of eager gullibility. There is a distinct impression of eagerness in her attention to the bawd’s words, and a notable resemblance between her profile and that of the goose hanging from her basket (vol.1 255).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Uglow

In Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, in 1732, a country girl gets off the York coach, her doom foretold as an old bawd greets her. Behind her, facing the other way, a nervous, shortsighted clergyman is reading a letter of recommendation: it is addressed to Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London (9).

Moll’s trunk is simply labeled “M. Hackabout”—“M” was the initial used in the Prayer Book catechism to stand in for the first name, so the alarming implication is that Hogarth’s “M” can be any woman, any girl, any country innocent (197).

The cycle starts with a sweet country girl with a rose in her bosom and her little purse and scissors hanging by her side, arriving off the York wagon at the Bell Inn (the women still inside the wagon, ranged tightly behind the bar, also look like sheep bound for market). Hogarth told the French commentator Jean Andre Rouquet that the clergyman so deep in his letter to Edmund Gibson that he ignores the girl's plight (as ambitious clerics ignored their flock) was Moll's father (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Quennell

The drama opens in the City of London, where the York Waggon, favoured by travelers who cannot afford the stage-coach, has lately rolled into the squalid yard of the Bell posting-house in Wood Street. It was brought a young girl up from the depth of the country, protected only by her father, and old and absent-minded clergyman, who has followed the waggon on his ancient horse and is now anxiously scanning the superscription of a letter addressed to some influential prelate, while his mount snatches at the straw packing of a pyramid of pots and pans. As she awaits him, the ingenuous country-girl, distinguishable amid the London crowd by the plain kerchief that covers her shoulders, the fresh rose punned to her bodice and the pair of workmanlike scissors dangling from the bag she carries, encounters a large, imposing, magnificently dressed personage in laces, ribbons, velvet mantle and expansive satin skirts. Moll’s pathetic luggage is spread at her feet—her trunk with her initials, M. H., stamped on the top in brass nails, a corded box, and a basketed goose—perhaps it is a “green goose”—a gift labeled “For my lofing Cosen in Tems Street in London” (92-93).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Ireland

the heroine may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman who is reading the direction of a letter close to the York waggon, from which vehicle she has just alighted. In attire, neat, plain, unadorned; in demeanour, artless, modest, diffident; in the bloom of youth, and more distinguished by native innocence than elegant symmetry; her conscious blush and downcast eyes attract the attention of a female fiend who panders to the vices of the opulent and libidinous. From the inn she is taken to the house of the procuress, divested of her home-spun garb, dressed in the gayest style of the day, and the tender native hue of her complexion encrusted with paint and disguised by patches. She is then introduced to Colonel Chartres, and by artful flattery and liberal promises becomes intoxicated with the dreams of imaginary greatness A short time convinces her of how light a breath these promises were composed. Deserted by her keeper, and terrified by threats of an immediate arrest for the pompous paraphernalia of prostitution, after being a short time protected by one of the tribe of Levi, she is reduced to the hard necessity of wandering the streets for that precarious subsistence which flows from the drunken rake or the profligate debauchee. Here her situation is truly pitiable! Chilled by nipping frost and midnight dew, the repentant tear tricking down on her heaving bosom, she endeavours to drown reflection in draughts of destructive poison. This, added to the contagious company of women of her own description, vitiates her mind, eradicates the native seeds of virtue, destroys that elegant and fascinating simplicity which gives additional charms to beauty, and leaves in its place art, affectation and impudence. The balcony, with linen hanging to dry; the York waggon, which intimates the county that gave birth to our young adventurer; the parcels lying on the ground, and a goose, directed To my lofen coosin in Tems Stret London, prove the peculiar attention he paid to this minutiæ. The initials M.H. one one of the trunks give us the name of the heroine of this drama,--Hackabout was a character then well known and infamous for her licentiousness and debauchery (The Grub Street Journal for August 6, 1730, giving an account of several prostitutes who were taken up, informs us that “the fourth was Kate Hackabout—whose brother was lately hanged at Tyburn—a woman noted in and about the hundreds of Drury, etc.) (104-106).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Harlot

Lichtenberg

The heroine of the piece is the daughter of a poor village parson from Yorkshire. We see both father and daughter in the first Plate. The girl, standing in the foreground, has just got down from the wretched cart which, as appears from its superscription, has brought her from the country; the father in the background is not so much riding as merely straddling his horse. How the girl stands there! Of course she is not a great beauty—one can see that. Hogarth was no painter of beauty; as far as I know, only two people in his whole life have claimed this for him: one was Hogarth himself and the other his good wife. But what the girl lacks in refinement is more than compensated by good health, childish simplicity, and gentle innocence. Her manner is that of a sturdy, clean, well-behaved village girl, who could be made into something—and that is just what happens. Her figure seems to have developed somewhat on the broad side, in the rough service of Ceres and Pomona. Had she been gathering forget-me-nots, daisies, violets and all the rest of the sentimental love-posies, she would perhaps have been cast in a finer mould. However, she is still in her middle teens, and still growing, and doubtless much of the angularity in her appearance must be put to the account of the village tailor.

In her attire, so simple and countrified, like her whole person, there is not a trace of falsehood; nothing is built up too high or spread too wide. Hat, corsage, and neckerchief guard and protect what has been entrusted to them faithfully, without bragging, and with the least possible display, like honeycombs. There are no unoccupied storeys in the former, and in the latter no empty galleries. Her face which reposes under the former speaks for itself in eloquent silence, is understandable to all and open to all, and needs no interpretation; to what is beneath the latter, on the other hand, where only conjectures are permitted, Flora has given an almost superfluous security by fixing a little rose there: innocence with the bloom of youth. From here the fortification proceeds downwards in the usual manner with three-or four-fold wall right to the little feet, standing very general in parallel. If the commander is not susceptible to bribery, then, as far as that quarter is concerned, the campaign looks promising. At her side hangs a needle-case and a little pair of scissors, and from her right arm a small bundle: they were probably put there by the poor weeping mother when she said goodbye, for occupation and refreshment on the journey(4-5).

Our heroine, the good, honest, village girl from Yorkshire, thus alights at the Bell Inn in London. The healthy, country flower is transplanted from its native soil into this boundless garden amidst fertilizers and insects in a thousand forms, unknown in Yorkshire; unfortunately, she just chances to light on one of the most infamous flower-beds for miles around. Before she has time to strike root, an insect (I mean here Her Ladyship with the dainty watch) fastens in its sting, which is to ruin her straight growth for ever, at least upon this earth. The explanation is as follows: Hogarth makes the girl come from Yorkshire. Why from Yorkshire? The artist and writer for posterity makes no stroke without meaning. Yorkshire produces (I speak here as a statistician) the prettiest girls; that it breeds the finest horses is already well known (8).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Horse

View this detail in copper here.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

View this detail in copper here.

An eager customer awaits Moll as she is assessed by the bawd. He has been identified as Colonel Charteris.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Shesgreen

This procuress seems to be the instrument of the nobleman who stands in the shadow of the door leering intensely at the girl, his right hand fumbling suspiciously in his pocket. A symbol of aristocratic corruption, he has come with his pimp to prey on the indigent, naïve young girls who alight here from the country. The nobleman has been identified as Colonel Charteris, the worst of the exploitative privileged class to which he belonged (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The man in the doorway of the inn is Colonel Francis Charteris, or "Chartres," a name almost proverbial for vice, who had also died shortly before the appearance of A Harlot's Progress (Feb. 24, 1731/2). (Cf. the mezzotint portrait by G. White, 1730, BM. Sat. 1840.) The man behind him is "a Pimp, whom he always kept about his person" (J. Nichols, Biog. Anecd., 1782, p. i59); perhaps John Gourlay (called "Trusty Jack") or Anthony Henley. Charteris, by birth a gentleman, amassed a large fortune by gambling and lending back his winnings on the security of the loser's property; by this means and by clever speculation he collected a number of profitable estates. But his greatest fame was as a seducer or rapist of women. On one occasion a woman's rumor that her sister was in Charteris' house was sufficient to draw a mob clamoring for her release (she emerged, explaining that she did not wish to be released). Charteris went so far as to project a charity school for his natural children and draw up plans for alms houses for women who claimed he had ruined them. Age made his obsession more difficult, and at forty-six he was condemned to death for the rape of a girl he met m a country lane near Edinburgh; again in 1730, at fifty-five, he was condemned to death for luring a servant girl to his house and raping her. Both times his powerful friends and his fortune saved him, though at considerable expense. (As it happened, Francis Hackabout, Kate’s brother, was sentenced to hang at the same time and place that Charteris was sentenced a second time for rape. Moreover, the same issue of the Grub-street Journal that mentions Kate Hackabout gives [in the next column] an account of Charteris and his wife, who, having become "perfectly reconciled to each other," and his having "cashiered his trusty Jack and others of his evil agents,... are to be presented to their majesties one day this weeck." This ironic juxtaposition may have inspired Hogarth to bring the two together in his print.) Charteris' method of seduction was to post agents in innyards to spot newly-arrived girls from the country, and (like Richardson's Mr. B.) to employ the girl as a servant in his house (see Some Authentick Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch-------s, Rape-Master of Great Britain by an Impartial Hand, 1730). The attacks on him by satirists and moralists are legion; he appears as an exemplum in Pope's Essay on Man, 4, Moral Essays, 3, Epilogue to the Satires, 1, and imitations of Horace's Satire II.i, Epistle I.6, and Donne's Satire 2; and he is summed up unsympathetically in Dr. Arbuthnot’s "Epitaph" on him (Gentleman's Magazine, 2, W2 718). Indeed, when he died, two years after his last rape trial, the people of his neighborhood attacked the hearse, strewed it with refuse, tried to tear his body from the coffin, and threw the carcasses of dogs and cats into the tomb (144).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

Hogarth shows the girl just off the York Wagon, met by a bawd, with Colonel Charteris, and “trusty Jack” Gourly waiting in the background. All of these were easily recongnizable portraits (vol.1 250).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Uglow

Behind the bawd, with his hand suspiciously deep in his pocket, is Colonel Charteris, attended by a cringing Jack Gourlay. Gourlay's supplicating crossed hands mirror Moll's--both are 'bound' as servants to satisfy Charteris's needs (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Quennell

Alas, her helpful acquaintance is the “pious Needham”!—so called by contemporary satirists because she was reputed to be “very religious” according to her own lights, and constantly prayed that she might gain enough by her profession to leave it off in good time. Her prayer, as we know, was to remain unanswered: not far ahead loom the dreadful Sir John Gonson and the vindictive mob around the pillory. But, in the Progress, she continues to ply her trade; and an employer, more notorious even than herself is hovering in the background. Colonel Chartres, attended by his jackal, John Gourlay, a pimp whom, we are told, he “always kept about is person”, has just appeared in the doorway and looks on with a lickerish grin. Like Mother Needham, he had recently died—during the course of the previous year, at the age of sixty-two, having persevered (observed a satirical epitaph) “with an inflexible constancy and inimitable uniformity . . . in the practice of every human vice, excepting prodigality and hypocrisy”: he was exempted from the latter by his “matchless impudence”, from the former (we are told) by his “insatiable avarice”. Drummed out of his regiment for card-sharping, banished for the same reason from several European cities, he had become a money-lender at exorbitant rates and had thereby increased his substantial private fortune. His residence, the chroniclers add, was a “perpetual bawdy house”. Twice convicted of rape, he had twice been pardoned—on the second occasion, however, not without imprisonment in Newgate” and large financial penalties; and, when he died in Scotland in 1731, the legend of Francis Chartres had grown so dark and widespread that his funeral procession provoked a serious riot, his body was nearly torn from the coffin, and the indignant mob hurled “dead dogs &c. into the grave along with it”. At Hogarth’s bidding he rises again, a sly, shabby figure, escorted by his dapper pimp, prepared to step into the foreground once Mother Needham has secured her prey. He will provide Moll Hackabout’s introduction to the hazardous world of kept women (93-94).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Ireland

Coming out of the door of the inn we discover two men, one of whom is eagerly gloating on the devoted victim. This is a portrait, and said to be a strong resemblance of Colonel Francis Chartres.. From the inn she is taken to the house of the procuress, divested of her home-spun garb, dressed in the gayest style of the day, and the tender native hue of her complexion encrusted with paint and disguised by patches. She is then introduced to Colonel Chartres, and by artful flattery and liberal promises becomes intoxicated with the dreams of imaginary greatness A short time convinces her of how light a breath these promises were composed (102-103).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Dobson

The man at the door and the elderly woman in Plate I., undoubtedly represented in infamous Colonel Francis Charteris and the equally famous Mother Needham, the latter of whom died after exposure in the pillory in 1731 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Charteris

Lichtenberg

The man who stands here with one foot in the courtyard and the other still in the doorway, with the left hand resting on a stick, and the right engaged in some private business, is the notorious Colonel Charters. Those who know how readily Hogarth could hit off a face and figure must be gratified to see preserved upon this Plate the physiognomy and form of one of the greatest scoundrels the stylus has ever rendered immortal. Two of the actors in our drama die on the gallows, but that man is not one of them, though he deserved it just as much. He only escaped hanging because in addition to the numerous fraudulent practices which lead to the gallows, in all of which he was a past master, he had been clever enough to study that one by which the gallows themselves are deprived of their due. Never, perhaps, had the gallows been so cheated as on the day when that beast died in his bed. For those of our readers who are familiar with Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and in general with the English classical writers of that time, or who have found pleasure in studying the spirit and character of that nation great even in its monstrosities, as they annually come before its Criminal Courts, we are not recording anything new here. Felon, scoundrel, whoremonger, are so many descriptions of Colonel Charters. Pope, to put it in a nutshell, once spoke of 'Charters and the Devil'. Charters and the Devil. That sounds almost like a Trading Company. They had indeed a sort of traffic with one another just as the French Charters has nowadays with those hotter regions. And it would not, I think, have shamed the Devil to sign some of his newest bills on Nantes and Bordeaux with 'Charters, Bros. & Co.'

Now to a more detailed description of the creature. We shall begin with Pope's own note on the passage we mentioned; in cold-blooded prose.

Francis Charters, a man infamous for all manner of vices. When he was an ensign in the army he was drummed out of the regiment for a cheat; he was next banished Brussels and drummed out of Ghent on the same account. After a hundred tricks at the gaming tables he took to lending money at exorbitant interest and on great penalties, accumulating premium, interest, and capital into a new capital, and seizing to a minute when the payments became due; in a word, by a constant attention to the vices, wants and follies of mankind, he acquired an immense fortune. His house was a perpetual bawdy-house. He was twice condemned for rapes, and pardoned; but the last time not without imprisonment in Newgate, and large confiscations. He died in Scotland in 1731, aged 62. The populace at his funeral raised a great riot, almost tore the body out of the coffin, and cast dead dogs, etc., into the grave along with it.

The following Epitaph contains his character very justly drawn by Dr Arbuthnot:

Now that is what I call an epitaph. Sit tibi terra levis, Charters, with thy dead dogs!

There is some drumming here, it is true. If, however, we consider the high and solid character of Dr Arbuthnot, the certificate loses through its poetic form nothing of its force and has the weight of prose.

Why do we never read such epitaphs in churchyards? Indeed, when we walk through a churchyard and read the stone receipts which our common mother draws up in exchange for the nailed-up boxes deposited with her, one cannot help thinking that she must either be a very rich and kindly mother who intends one day to make good the defects out of her own means, or a very foolish one who lets herself be taken in quite lamentably by some of those bereaved families. I must confess that when I read the inscriptions on tombstones I am often at a loss to know which is really the side of glory. For there could surely be no happier world than one where the graves gave up without the smallest rebate everything which according to the tombstone inscriptions they had received; or one in which all those who escaped hanging really were such paragons as are said to have been delivered here.

Now only a few lines more on behalf of the Tout comme chez nous: a few days after Charters' death the following touching article is said to have appeared on the back page of an Edinburgh newspaper among the writs of arrest issued for thieves, and the advertisements of new books and patent medicines which encourage the reader partly to catch and partly to be caught:

This Charters, with an income of 60,000 thalers, comes now to that dirty hovel simply to wait for the consignment of girls from Yorkshire. The fellow behind him is a certain John Gourlay, who usually accompanied Charters, especially when something was to be acquired for the household, a sort of blood-hound. About the lips of that noble pair there hovers an expression, not so much ingratiating as actually of savouring something, which has such an abominable effect that it might tempt the hand of any honest and honour-loving fellow to apply itself thereto in the form of a fist, and with accelerated motion, without any more ado. They have, however, no confidence in their own appearance when confronting innocence and have found it necessary to interpose between themselves and the poor inexperienced village girl a little object of attraction (9-13).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

View this detail in copper here.

John Gourlay

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The man in the doorway of the inn is Colonel Francis Charteris, or "Chartres," a name almost proverbial for vice, who had also died shortly before the appearance of A Harlot's Progress (Feb. 24, 1731/2). (Cf. the mezzotint portrait by G. White, 1730, BM. Sat. 1840.) The man behind him is "a Pimp, whom he always kept about his person" (J. Nichols, Biog. Anecd., 1782, p. i59); perhaps John Gourlay (called "Trusty Jack") or Anthony Henley. Charteris, by birth a gentleman, amassed a large fortune by gambling and lending back his winnings on the security of the loser's property; by this means and by clever speculation he collected a number of profitable estates. But his greatest fame was as a seducer or rapist of women. On one occasion a woman's rumor that her sister was in Charteris' house was sufficient to draw a mob clamoring for her release (she emerged, explaining that she did not wish to be released). Charteris went so far as to project a charity school for his natural children and draw up plans for alms houses for women who claimed he had ruined them. Age made his obsession more difficult, and at forty-six he was condemned to death for the rape of a girl he met m a country lane near Edinburgh; again in 1730, at fifty-five, he was condemned to death for luring a servant girl to his house and raping her. Both times his powerful friends and his fortune saved him, though at considerable expense. (As it happened, Francis Hackabout, Kate’s brother, was sentenced to hang at the same time and place that Charteris was sentenced a second time for rape. Moreover, the same issue of the Grub-street Journal that mentions Kate Hackabout gives [in the next column] an account of Charteris and his wife, who, having become "perfectly reconciled to each other," and his having "cashiered his trusty Jack and others of his evil agents,... are to be presented to their majesties one day this weeck." This ironic juxtaposition may have inspired Hogarth to bring the two together in his print.). Charteris' method of seduction was to post agents in innyards to spot newly-arrived girls from the country, and (like Richardson's Mr. B.) to employ the girl as a servant in his house (see Some Authentick Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch-------s, Rape-Master of Great Britain by an Impartial Hand, 1730). The attacks on him by satirists and moralists are legion; he appears as an exemplum in Pope's Essay on Man, 4, Moral Essays, 3, Epilogue to the Satires, 1, and imitations of Horace's Satire II.i, Epistle I.6, and Donne's Satire 2; and he is summed up unsympathetically in Dr. Arbuthnot’s "Epitaph" on him (Gentleman's Magazine, 2, W2 718). Indeed, when he died, two years after his last rape trial, the people of his neighborhood attacked the hearse, strewed it with refuse, tried to tear his body from the coffin, and threw the carcasses of dogs and cats into the tomb (144).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

Hogarth shows the girl just off the York Wagon, met by a bawd, with Colonel Charteris, and “trusty Jack” Gourly waiting in the background. All of these were easily recongnizable portraits (vol. 1 250).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

Uglow

Behind the bawd, with his hand suspiciously deep in his pocket, is Colonel Charteris, attended by a cringing Jack Gourlay. Gourlay's supplicating crossed hands mirror Moll's--both are 'bound' as servants to satisfy Charteris's needs (201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

Quennell

Alas, her helpful acquaintance is the “pious Needham”!—so called by contemporary satirists because she was reputed to be “very religious” according to her own lights, and constantly prayed that she might gain enough by her profession to leave it off in good time. Her prayer, as we know, was to remain unanswered: not far ahead loom the dreadful Sir John Gonson and the vindictive mob around the pillory. But, in the Progress, she continues to ply her trade; and an employer, more notorious even than herself is hovering in the background. Colonel Chartres, attended by his jackal, John Gourlay, a pimp whom, we are told, he “always kept about is person”, has just appeared in the doorway and looks on with a lickerish grin. Like Mother Needham, he had recently died—during the course of the previous year, at the age of sixty-two, having persevered (observed a satirical epitaph) “with an inflexible constancy and inimitable uniformity . . . in the practice of every human vice, excepting prodigality and hypocrisy”: he was exempted from the latter by his “matchless impudence”, from the former (we are told) by his “insatiable avarice”. Drummed out of his regiment for card-sharping, banished for the same reason from several European cities, he had become a money-lender at exorbitant rates and had thereby increased his substantial private fortune. His residence, the chroniclers add, was a “perpetual bawdy house”. Twice convicted of rape, he had twice been pardoned—on the second occasion, however, not without imprisonment in Newgate” and large financial penalties; and, when he died in Scotland in 1731, the legend of Francis Chartres had grown so dark and widespread that his funeral procession provoked a serious riot, his body was nearly torn from the coffin, and the indignant mob hurled “dead dogs &c. into the grave along with it”. At Hogarth’s bidding he rises again, a sly, shabby figure, escorted by his dapper pimp, prepared to step into the foreground once Mother Needham has secured her prey. He will provide Moll Hackabout’s introduction to the hazardous world of kept women (93-94).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Gourlay

Ireland

Coming out of the door of the inn we discover two men, one of whom is eagerly gloating on the devoted victim. This is a portrait, and said to be a strong resemblance of Colonel Francis Chartres (The attendant represents John Gourlay, the Colonel’s favourite and confidant) (103-104).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Wagon

View this detail in copper here.

The York Wagon shows Moll is from the country and not aware of the corruption she will face in London.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Wagon

Shesgreen

Before the Bell Inn in Wood Street, Mary or Moll Hackabout, newly arrived in London, is caught between the aggressive agents of corrupt, who are set against the crumbling tavern wall, and the ordinary (and passive) middle-class people arranged around the solidly built home. Dressed in modestly designed clothes and bearing the scissors and pin cushion of a dressmaker, she has just alighted from the York wagon (18).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Wagon

Quennell

The drama opens in the City of London, where the York Waggon, favoured by travelers who cannot afford the stage-coach, has lately rolled into the squalid yard of the Bell posting-house in Wood Street. It was brought a young girl up from the depth of the country, protected only by her father, and old and absent-minded clergyman, who has followed the waggon on his ancient horse and is now anxiously scanning the superscription of a letter addressed to some influential prelate, while his mount snatches at the straw packing of a pyramid of pots and pans (92).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Wagon

Ireland

the heroine may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman who is reading the direction of a letter close to the York waggon, from which vehicle she has just alighted (102).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1: Wagon

Lichtenberg

Our heroine, the good, honest, village girl from Yorkshire, thus alights at the Bell Inn in London. The healthy, country flower is transplanted from its native soil into this boundless garden amidst fertilizers and insects in a thousand forms, unknown in Yorkshire; unfortunately, she just chances to light on one of the most infamous flower-beds for miles around. Before she has time to strike root, an insect (I mean here Her Ladyship with the dainty watch) fastens in its sting, which is to ruin her straight growth for ever, at least upon this earth. The explanation is as follows:

Hogarth makes the girl come from Yorkshire. Why from Yorkshire? The artist and writer for posterity makes no stroke without meaning. Yorkshire produces (I speak here as a statistician) the prettiest girls; that it breeds the finest horses is already well known. And a cart laden with the poorest, though by no means the plainest, of these creatures puts up every week at the Bell Inn in Wood Street, or at least calls there (8).