A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

1732

11 3/4” X 14 9/16” (H X W)

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Plate III is the last plate where Moll is overtly sexual. It has been seen by commentators as the beginning of the harlot’s swift decline. Shesgreen notes that Moll has been “discarded by the merchant,” rendered less marketable and is “forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane” (20). Although Moll’s standard of living has declined, and she is on the verge of imprisonment and ruin, signs of her power are still abundant in the scene. She is literally “on top” of her lover who lurks beneath the bed. (The cat betrays his presence.) He is a highwayman, a type she prefers (obvious from the picture of Macheath on her wall), and if she does not assist her lover in his crime, she benefits from his haul.

Much has been made of the witch’s hat and broom over Moll’s bed. Shesgreen notes that her low station has caused her to resort to serving “sexual deviants” and to practicing “black magic” (20). In Sex in Georgian England, Harvey writes that flagellation was not uncommon in the brothels of the period. If the birch twigs are for this purpose, Moll is interestingly dominant in these sadomasochistic affairs. Again, she retains control, maintaining her status as sexual aggressor.

The possibilities of witchcraft are fascinating as well. George Lynman Kittredge notes the English definition of a witch:

In considering the tenacity of the popular belief . . .the essence of witchcraft is maleficium. The hatred and terror which a witch evokes is due to her will and power to inflict bodily injury. . . . She is hunted down like a wolf because she is an enemy of mankind. (qtd. in Erickson 17).

Thus, the hat and broom become symbols of power, of a dark sexuality which is able to escape the patriarchal definitions of womanhood. Moll, as witch and whore, is no longer woman. Robert Erickson cites Whores Rhetorick which delineates this reasoning, stating, “I must tell you a Whore is a Whore, but a Whore is not a Woman; as being obliged to relinquish all those frailties that render the Sex weak and contemptible” (35). This early text recognizes the connection between weaknesses and traditional definitions of womanhood, and also demonstrates that, to become powerful, women must transcend that womanhood. Moll, before her apprehension and death, does this. She creates herself, choosing her lovers for sex or money and maintaining the sexual upperhand in her relationships. Her power is a threat to English order; her tendency toward dark magic eludes the imperative for Christianity. This rejection of conventional religion is also realized in her picture of Dr. Sacheverel, a religious dissenter and her use of the Pastoral Letter for wrapping butter. Moll certainly cannot continue in this powerful state, and so, as victim still to Hogarth’s text, must die in despair and utter ruin.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)

Discarded by the merchant and her marketability reduced by disease, Moll is forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane and serve the population at large, even sexual deviants. Her principal lover is now a highwayman, James Dalton; his wig box rests on top of her crudely arranged canopy. In this breakfast scene, which exactly parallels the previous one, Moll rises at 11:45 A.M. to take her morning tea. Dressed a little less flamboyantly and looking considerably less vivacious, she dangles a watch taken from the previous night’s customer.

An ugly but practiced woman whose nose has been eaten away by disease has replaced her naïve servants. The bunter seems intended to serve as an example of the fate of those superannuated harlots who survive the mortal effects of syphilis. Moll’s bed, only partially visible in a discrete corner of her former apartment, now fills the room. The delicate silver teapot is replaced by a tin pot and the elegant table by a heavy, functional piece on which lie butter wrapped in a pastoral letter (“Pastoral Letter to”) and some eating utensils. Her crude vanity holds a jar of professional make-up, a broken piece of mirror, a gin bottle, a fine-comb, a chipped punchbowl, a broken stem glass and a liquor measure. A letter addressed, “To Md. Hackabout” lies in the vanity drawer. Beneath the table are ale measures and tobacco pipes.

The exotic monkey is replaced by a household cat that postures suggestively to indicate the girl’s occupation. The large, expensively framed pictures of the previous apartment are here reduced to four small works. Above her chair (which holds her work coat, a candle and a dish—used as a chamber pot) is a medallion of some saint. Above that hangs portraits of Moll’s idols, the roughish highwayman Mac(k)heath from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and “Dr. Sacheveral S.T.P.” (sanctae theologiae professor), a controversial divine of the period. Placed purposefully on top of these two portraits are a jar and two vials of “cures” for venereal disease.

Above the room’s broken windows hangs a cheap print portraying an angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac; it seems to warm of the girl’s impending and uninterceded fate at the hands of the law. Over Moll’s bed hangs a witch’s hat and bundle of birch rods, suggesting black magic. A wig hangs on the drape behind her bed. Through he apartment door come an arresting magistrate and his constables to apprehend Moll for prostitution. The leading figure, who fondles is mustache effetely, has been identified as Sir John Gonson, a type of the perennial harlot-prosecutors whose righteousness is only equaled by their compulsiveness (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

This is the only print in which Moll Hackabout looks directly at he artist and at us, sexy and slanty-eyed, poised on the edge of her shabby, curtained bed like a sitter for a portrait of sexy Court beauty by Lely. The stolen watch she dangles shows a quarter to twelve - approaching the hour of reckoning. In the full series of paintings, and the prints that followed them, Hogarth traced the 'before' and 'after' of this moment (200-201).

Too greedy, too flighty--as her masquerade mask shows - Moll slips to Drury Lane status, with a fat noseless bunter instead of a chic black slave, a stray cat raising its neat hindquarters instead of an exotic monkey, a cracked punchbowl and vials of ointment instead of a silver tray of tea. This is the point other second fall, from whoring to crime, as she swings the stolen watch from her fingers. And this, too, is the moment other legal fall--it is not a bold young lover, but the unmistakably creepy Justice Gonson who steps thoughtfully through the door, finger to lips, followed by the watchmen with their wooden staves (202-203).

In . . . Moll's Drury Lane garret, the critiques of justice reach into the present. Moll has an Old Testament print of Abraham striking Isaac, but there will be no divine hand to stay her fate. She is a witch, her masquerade hat suggests, who will be hunted and burned. The whippings she gave to men with her little broom will now be turned on her. Her other decorations show that she is hopelessly romantic, a Polly Peachum with High Church, Jacobite airs. She has John Dalton's wig-box above her bed and a pin-up of Macheath on the wall but she also has a portrait of Dr Sacheverell, whose inflammatory sermons had caused riots, and a little oval icon of the Virgin - and she wraps her butter in one of Gibson's 'Pastoral Letters'. Beyond these visual quotations, the formal composition of some scenes exploited analogies with great religious art--with the Visitation in the first plate or the Annunciation in the third, with Gonson as a dark anti-archangel. The references are there; indeed Hogarth made them as obvious as possible, but (as with the parodic nativity of the rabbits in the Cunicularii), he suggested that life itself, in all its absurdity and pathos, can be as powerful as any hallowed religious mystery. Moll is no Virgin Mary--although her initial is the undeciphered 'M’. She is a flesh-and-blood woman, who suffers not from the will of God but from her own ambition, men's appetites and the cruelty of the Law.

From the key third scene, where Gonson treads heavily across the boards, his finger to his lips, the curve of Moll's life moves inexorably down (204-205).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

The Harlot’s young lover has cost her an easy life with her Jewish "protector"; she is now on the streets. Her two breakfasts are contrasted in the two prints: the silver tea kettle, the gilt pictures, and decorated toilet of the earlier plate are recalled by the tin pot, the tacked-up prints, and the broken mirror and punch bowl. Moll still wears the remains of her rich attire. Her masquerade costume, the hat hanging at the head of her bed, is now that of a witch. Next to the hat is a birch rod, perhaps her broomstick, more probably (as Stephens suggests, BM Sat.) used to satisfy flagellants. The wig box atop the tester suggests a parody of the crown that appeared on the beds of the nobility.

The box is labeled "James Dalton his Wigg box": Dalton was a robber famous for his boldness. As a boy he rode to his fathers execution sitting between his legs; his adventures extended from locking the Bloomsbury watch into their own watch house to seizing a ship on which he was being transported; he even attempted to rob the Queen but stopped the wrong coach. This romantic figure was executed at Tyburn on May 11, 1730, for highway robbery (see A History of Executions, 1730, No. 3, p.81).

The pewter measure on the floor at the right, inscribed "James Dea[con?] in Drury Lane," shows that the Harlot is now living in a disreputable neighborhood. A man's full-bottomed wig hangs against the back bed curtain, and she is examining a watch (which indicates 11:45), presumably stolen from her lover of the night before, perhaps the owner of the wig. Her noseless servant (cf. the fashionable maid in Pl. 2) pours her tea. The paper used to hold the butter is a "Pastoral Letter to . . ." issued by the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1669- 1748). As a keeper of the public morals he had petitioned the King for the abolition of masquerades; and this may partly explain the use to which his Pastoral Letter is put by the Harlot. But his Pastoral Letters directed against the Deists were the object of much satiric wit, and Gib-son himself was ridiculed as "Codex" (see Cat. No. 285, below, Tartuffe's Banquet, and N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Oxford, 1926).

The second table holds a cracked punch bowl, in recent use, with lemon peel and a ladle; around it are clustered a piece of a mirror, a comb, a small pewter measure for spirits, a spirit glass (overturned and without a foot), a pot of pomatum, and a covered dish (a gin bottle in the third state). A note protrudes from the drawer of the table, showing "To Md Hackabout."

The pin-up portraits beneath her window illustrate her false ideals: "Capt Macheath" of The Beggar's Opera and the notorious Tory divine "Dr' Sacheveral S.T.P." ("sanctae theologiae professor"). As one contemporary commented, "their Merits like, and with like Honours crown'd" (BM Sat. 2064). Macheath was reprieved and returned in triumph to his wives, and Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724), having been impeached and found guilty of inflammatory antigovernment (i.e. anti- Whig) sermons (1709), went on to lucrative livings at Selattyn (1710) and St. Andrew's, Holborn (1713).

The cat playing at the Harlot's feet characterizes her innocence, her love of pleasure, her silliness. And at this moment in through the door comes retribution: bailiffs led by Sir John Gonson (d. 1756), a London magistrate noted for his vigorous apprehension of prostitutes. Gonson's portrait, immediately recognized, contributed to the success of Hogarth's series. A clerk of the Treasury told Hogarth's friend William Huggins that the print was brought to a meeting of the Board of Treasury, and the lords were so taken with the likeness of Gonson that "from the Treasury each lord repaired to the print-shop for a copy of it, and Hogarth rose completely into fame" (Biog. Anecd., 1782, pp. 26-29). The Grub-street Journal (Jan. 8, 1730) comments on Gonson's energetic charges to juries; and T. Gilbert's satire, A View of the Town in 7735, includes the line, "As Harlots startle at a Gonson's name" (cited Gen. Works, i, 57). His attendants carry staves, and one also holds a long cane, used for inflicting stripes.

At the left, above the Harlot's window, is a print (after Titian) of the angel staying Abraham's hand as he is about to sacrifice Isaac, which may reflect on Gonson's rigorous attack on Moll. The two medicine bottles and an ointment pot above the portrait of Dr. Sacheverell suggest that other consequences are on the way: she is already suffering from the occupational disease that kills her in the fifth plate (144-145).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

A thief named James Dalton, whose wig box appears atop the Harlot’s bed in the third picture, is the first character in this strange history to come before the public eye. Dalton was a robber with a long, checkered career that was drawing to a close at the beginning of 1730. In December 1729 he attempted to rob the great Mr. Mead in his coach, but failed and was captured. His trial was put off till the next Seesions, by which time, the Craftsman noted, other charges may have been collected against him. In January of 1730, “The noted James Dalton being brought before the Court, to take his Trial, a Woman unknown took and Opportunity to throw a Bottle at his Head, which cut him very much, and caused such a Confusion among the Crowd, that two Fellons found Means to escape.” This lady’s man was trued and found guilty of assaulting Dr. Mead with intent to rob him, but since he had stolen nothing his sentence was a mere three years and a fine of 40 marks and security for his good behavior for seven years. Meanwhile however, having squabbled with a fellow prisoner on 19 January and but him “in a desperate Manner with a Knife,” he was to appear before the next Quarter Sessions. The Daily Post adds that “He behaved himself before the Court with uncommon Insolence and Impudence.” Other crimes from the past were being dredged up, and on 23 February he was indicted for robbing a person in the street of a waistcoat and 25 India handkerchiefs, and his fate was sealed. . . . Dalton was executed on 12 May appearing “very resolute and undaunted,” drinking “part of two Pots of Beer at the Place of Execution,” and “utterly denying his guilt” (vol.. 1 240-244).

The Harlot’s name appears on a letter in the open drawer in the third scene “Md. Hackabout,” and on her coffin in the final scene “M. Hackabout.” The M” was extended to “Moll” in the title of the pamphlet, The Harlot’s Progress or the Humours of Drury Lane (1732), with no authority. “Md.” is probably meant to stand for Madam; M could stand for Mary or Moll. Hackabout was, of course, a good generalizing name for a harlot, as well as a name familiar to Hogarth’s readers. So he puts a girl named Hackabout in her shabby room, with James Dalton’s wig box above her head and portraits on her wall of Captain Macheath, the robber who talked like a gentleman and got off scot-free, and Dr. Sacheverell, the gentleman who toppled a ministry with an incendiary sermon and lived very well thereafter. (A writer in the Free Briton demanded as late as 15 July 1731: “Why was Sacheverrel distinguished with a royal presentation, and why was the Parliament dissolved that condemned him?”) And—the element that was not in the original drawing—through the door of at the rear stalks Gonson and the other justices of the peace for the City and Liberty of Westminster (vol. 249-250).

The Harlot’s initiation and her apprehension by justices are of course obvious and conventional scenes. Hogarth could have built the scene in the inn-yard on Steele’s Spectator No. 266 or on descriptions in Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1672) or any number of fictional sources. But only through the particular events and characters whose faces and names he used did his theme germinate and express itself (vol. 1 250).

Thus the Harlot suffers from lack of attention by supposedly humanitarian professional men. . . . Bishop Gibson is alluded to again [see Plate 1] in the third plate, where the Harlot uses one of his Pastoral Letters as a dish for her butter. His first Pastoral Letter had been issued in 1729, his second in April 1730, and his third in May 1731: all three were attacks on the Deists. The letters were satirized by many in those years as another sign of “Dr. Codex’s” pomposity and self-esteem; but Hogarth evidently intends also to parallel the clergyman who does not help the Harlot in her moment of need and the Bishop (whom the clergyman is soliciting), who, spending his time writing about Deists, gives his flock as little help (vol. 1 253).

The contrast between Plates 2 and 3 is instructive: the same serving of tea, the same elegant dress, the same situation, transferred from a setting of comfort to one of squalor. The point of contrast I take to be the Harlot’s “air”—the inappropriateness of her dress, of her being served in bed by her parody of a servant, in these grim surroundings, with her penny portraits and Old Testament engraving hanging on her wall in a sad parody of the Jew’s art collection. What Hogarth is showing is a girl from the country (her essential innocent or ignorantia is suggested by the parallel with the cat playing at her feet) who comes to the city with the delusion that she wants to be a lady—a great lady. By the second plate she is a great lady in the sense that that some great ladies dress well, are kept, and take lovers. In the third she is keeping up appearances, though she had some somewhat down in the world, and there is the suggestion of what is to follow in the servant woman’s diseased nose, the medicine bottles on the sill, and the magistrate Gonson softly entering at the rear with his helpers. The world of consequences, already poised in that proleptic first plate in the ominous figures of the corruptors, the dead goose, the falling buckets, and even the constricting verticals of the buildings around her, has now begun to close in. But there is another parallel, between Gonson and his assistants emerging from their doorway and Charteris and his pimp emerging from theirs. Hogarth’s comment on the Harlot’s plight, recalling the picture of Uzzah in the preceding plate, can be sensed in the other picture she keeps on her wall: Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac—as the magistrate approaches—and God’s angel staying his hand. Even the face that emerges from the knot in the bed curtain seems to cry out a warning (vol. 1 257).

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. . . . In Plate 3 the Harlot and her bunter are in the foreground; in the background, approaching but not yet there, the magistrates; and on the wall Abraham about to slay Isaac. . . . 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 3 uses the composition of the van der Weyden Annunciation, with Mary framed by a tester bed and the angel coming at her from the other side of the picture. Even the Harlot’s Pastoral Letter reminds one that the Annunciate always carried a prayerbook. The sequence of the Life, of course, is disregarded; only The Annunication—with Mary the Harlot and the angel Justice Gonson—carries ironic overtones with any insistence (and one recalls that the Harlot’s name was changed from Kate or Jen to M. Hackabout (vol. 1 270).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

At this point, the chart of Moll’s progress sweeps downhill in a sudden curve. Rich men are not to be affronted: they value their comfort and self-conceit yet more highly than they esteem their pleasures. Seductive fencing masters [see Plate II] may prove fly-by-night friends; and Mol re-emerges, no longer the well-kept and widely fashionable courtesan, but a prostitute who lodges in a dilapidated garret above Drury Lane, with an uncurtained window, a broken-down bed and a single antiquated rush-bottomed chair. Hogarth’s third plate seems to incorporate the design from which he evolved the entire series—that of a young harlot “just arising about noon out of bed” and beginning her bohemian breakfast. The “bunter” charwoman, who has lost the end of her nose, is preparing a slovenly dish of tea; and Moll, who looks coarsened but cheerful, is exhibiting a stolen watch. A punch-bowl on the gate-legged table, tankards and pipes on the uncarpeted floor, are accompanied by ominous medicine-bottles upon the narrow window-sill. Two prints pinned to the plaster wall depict the highwayman-hero of The Beggar’s Opera and Dr. Sacheverell, turbulent champion of the English High Church. A witch’s birch-broom and hat—Molll still frequents the popular masquerades—dangle at her bedshead.

To the stage-setting of a prostitutes levée—attended, although she has not yet turned to confront him, by a terrible uninvited guest—Hogarth has made one addition of which only he, and perhaps members of his family, would have recognised the full satitical value. The pat of butter, bought for her breakfast, has come from the dairyman’s shop wrapped in a crumpled waste sheet. It is the front page of a Pastoral Letter, recently issued by the Bishop of London; and Dr. Gibson [a moralist who had petitioned to the King for the abolition of masquerades], when a poor young scholar, had traveled to the metropolis in Richard Hogarth’s company, but seems subsequently to have joined the ranks of those unfeeling “great men” from whom the schoolmaster expected help and encouragement, and whose unredeemed promises were thought to have embittered his last years. Meanwhile, as the bunter is brewing tea, and Moll is considering the watch spirited out of the pocket of last night’s drunken client, an avenging figure stands poised on the threshold, closely supported by a troop of constables and tipstaves. Sir John Gonson is in search of victims, carrying the terror of his name into the very heart of Old Drury. Like his Mother Needham and his Colonel Chartres, Hogarth’s Gonson was an exact portrait; and, although the series was generally popular, the third plate, with its representation of the harlot-hunting magistrate, elicited particularly loud applause. The Lords of the Treasury themselves, who did not share either Sir John’s puritanical zeal or his moral prejudices, were said to have been so anxious to acquire the print, that, in order that they might lose no time, they cut short the day’s business and abandoned their official posts (96-97).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

The picture the Harlot hangs on her own wall (in imitation of her late keeper) above the portraits of Macheath and Sacheverell demonstrates the process by which spiritual autobiography becomes drama. This is a print of the angel staying the hand of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Harlot, who associated herself with Macheath and Sacheverell, criminals who were reprieved and lived happily ever after, sees the biblical scene as a comforting promise of mercy and reprieve for herself. The hand of the avenging father is stayed by divine intervention. But there is also the whore-hunting magistrate who has come to arrest her, and he associated himself not with Isaac but with Abraham. And the print is also, of course, an address to the audience, whose response is different from the Harlot’s and perhaps parallel to the screaming admonitory choric face made by the knot in the Harlot’s bed curtain: mercy, we tend to read, is better than rigorous Old Testament justice. My point is that once an object is interpreted in different ways by different characters, those characters have moved from the function of mere “others” (or objects) to subjects in their own right, with the capability of symbolizing their own “others.” Defoe characters see the world outside as threat or providence, but for the Harlot and Rake the people around them are not only projections but real threats (120-121).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

We here see this child of misfortune fallen from her high estate! Her magnificent apartment is quitted for a dreary lodging in the purlieus of Drury Lane: she is at breakfast, and ever object exhibits marks of the wretched penury; her silver tea-kettle is changed for a tin-pot, and her highly-decorated toilet gives place to and old leaf-table, strewed with the relics of the last night’s revel, and ornamented with a broken looking-glass. Around the room are scattered tobacco-piped, gin measures, and pewter pots,--emblems of the habits of life into which she is initiated, and the company which she now keeps: this is further intimated by the wig-box of James Dalton, a notorious street-robber, who was afterwards executed. In her hand she displays a watch, which might be either presented to her, or stolen from her last night’s gallant. By the nostrums which ornament the broken window, we see that poverty is not the only evil. The dreary and comfortless appearance of every object in the wretched receptacle, the bit of butter on a piece of paper (This paper is a pastoral letter from Gibson Bishop of London, and intimates that the writings of grave prelates were sometimes to be found in chandlers’ shops, as they are unto this day.), the candle in a bottle, the basin upon a chair, the punch-bowl and comb upon the table, and the tobacco-pipes, etc. strewed upon the unswept floor, give an admirable picture of the style in which this pride of Drury Lane ate her matin meal. The pictures which ornament the room are, Abraham offering up Isaac, and a portrait of the Virgin Mary; Dr. Sacheverell (Following the Doctor’s name are the letters S.T.P., sanctæ theologiæ professor. A fellow not knowing the import of these dignifying capitals, well enough translated them SAUCY TROUBLESOME PUPPY.) and Macheath the highwayman are companion prints. There is some whimsicality in placing the two ladies under a canopy, formed by the unnailed valance of the bed and characteristically crowned by the wig-box of a highwayman.

A magistrate (Sir John Gonson, a justice of peace, very active in the suppression of brothels. In a view of the town in 1735, by T. Gilbert—Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, are the following lines:--‘Though laws severe to punish crimes were made,/ What honest man is of these laws afraid?/ All felons against judges will exclaim,/ As harlots tremble at Gonson’s name.’ Pope has noticed him in his Imitation of Donne and Loveling the a very elegant Latin Ode. Thus, between the poets and the painter, the name of this harlot-hunting justice is transmitted to posterity. He died on the 9th of January 1765.) cautiously entering the room with his attendant constables, commits her an house of correction, where out legislators wisely suppose, that being confined to the improving conversation of her associated in vice, must have a powerful tendency towards the reformation of her manners! (109-111).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)

The magistrate who enters the room in Plate III, is Sir John Gonson, a well-known “harlot-hunting justice;” the wig-box in the same plate is that of James Dalton, a highwayman who had been hanged at Tyburn in 1730 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3

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

Molly is falling—falling faster and faster! This is only the third station in her journey out of the six which our artist has represented, and two-thirds of the journey are already over. After the second station, there were still some Summer by-ways with agreeable meanderings, though of course not for every equipage. The Chronique Scandaleuse speaks of women, even wives, who started out like that and yet arrived quite safely! Only the Chronique Scandaleuse?—Oh! the venerable annals of history itself, and not very far back, tell of Vice-Queens who set out from this post house for the last station.

But here all is lost! She has, as Basedow once said of himself jokingly and in a manner of speaking, arrived at her destination in earnest and married herself to the public. She appears here as the central figure in a small establishment of the third rank, for the quenching of hearts aflame. How low she has fallen! Fuimus, everywhere!

In other pictures, we left the description of the furnishings to the end. They were of secondary importance. It was the human figures who explained the significance of the furniture. Here it is the furniture which has to illuminate the human beings. A young female body, not without charms, is soon adorned. What does not grace it will be graced by it, and what may be lacking here or there in person or attire will not be noticed by young people of the opposite sex, or it can easily be made good by something of which another part has been deprived, and which it is perfectly willing to do without in majoram gloriam of the whole. In this way such a creature can go far, always patching up the visible garment at the expense of the invisible, and the decay in beauty at the expense of honesty, until the whole, patched and repatched for the last time, attains its resurrection after a brief death, and what decayed as Hackabout rises again as Mother Needham. But for the lodging and its furniture, patching up is not so easy in London where money is so cheap and, consequently, everything else so terribly expensive; nor is it so necessary. For when someone goes out into the street from a room like that, he will no longer remember what it looked like, and the eyes coming in from the street will certainly have some degree of blindness and intoxication.

The scene is Drury Lane, as we can tell from the Pewter jar which stands on the ground in the right-hand comer. The little room must be rather high up, for to see so much sky through the door as we see here would be possible in Drury Lane only in the vicinity of the chimney stacks. This is also indicated by the windows opposite where no light enters even through the sections where the glass is missing, and where they have ad interim replaced the glass by mere air. The light comes mainly from the side from which we are looking and Hogarth leaves it to our architectonic intuition to imagine the hole through which it might come. What a transformation! Here, too, tea is being drunk, but in what style? Were it not for the cups and the teapot, one would almost expect to see shoes being repaired here! The silver table with its delicate legs is gone, and in its place is another with a pair of legs that could support an ox. Evidently the service it is now performing is not the only one it has to do. To judge from its strong and somewhat thick-set shape, it seems likely that it is sometimes used for pounding meat on, or even as a stand for the washtub, or for tired guests who cannot find accommodation elsewhere. The same little foot and the same knee which overturned the silver table are again in evidence, but no longer for the purpose of upsetting the table; on the contrary the foot seems to find support on its structure. The silver teapot, too, has gone, yielding place to a miserable tin affair, just as the long-tailed monkey has been replaced by a long-tailed cat and the chamber-maid and negro by a hybrid creature who is a cross between a chamber-maid, a negress and a long-tailed monkey. On the little table we see only one cup and saucer, and an odd cup, probably containing sugar, a small loaf of bread, a knife and a little butter for which a literary production has provided the plate. For the sheet of paper on which it lies is part of the Pastoral Letter of Bishop Gibson, Bishop of London, which that honest man had with the best intentions despatched to his parishioners. It is said that despite the address clearly written on them, they did not reach their destination until the grocers co-operated and undertook the delivery.

Beside the bed stands a miserable cane chair, the only one in the room however, if the little table has to serve for breakfast or washing. The chair now in its turn is serving as a sort of table and carries a bottle which has been elevated to the rank of a candlestick, and a soup plate which last night was so far degraded that from now on it could only serve with honour under the bed. Over the chairback she has thrown her last night's jacket, probably of red material with imitation gold trimmings, which would look splendid especially by the light of a street lamp of the fourth magnitude, inducing curiosity and fancies. When a garment like that is on show, Londoners of all ranks will be caught in the snare like larks in reflected sunlight.

Opposite this chair, near the empty porter mugs, stands the toilet table, also on elephant rather than goat legs. It is really a gate-legged table which, like everything else in this room, performs multiple service. Against a punch bowl with an indenture which is newer than the bowl leans a triangular fragment of a mirror, which is newer than the whole. Neither the cut-out nor the cut-off portions are the work of art, but of chance. In front of the mirror there lies here too an ivory weapon! for waging war against bites from outside; against those from inside from which people might sometimes suffer here, there stands the armoury next to the mirror—a little brandy glass and a brandy measure. The former, we observe, has also by chance suffered a terrible amputation whereby it is forced to stand upon its head when empty, and to let itself be held up when full. It is usually just the opposite with the men whom it serves and who do homage to it. The other objects standing there are apparently cosmetic paraphernalia intended to transform, for a little while, into deceptive wax fruit the face decayed too soon, which in Yorkshire would no doubt have remained a sound and natural fruit. A little note, to 'Md. Hackabout', peeps out of the drawer, evidently a little love sigh which vents itself in writing.

On the back wall next to the door we see a length of string with loops from which to hang anything and everything, but from which nothing at all is hanging at present. It appears to be the wardrobe. Also a fuimus. Perhaps its previous contents have been taken in custody by the pawn- broker, or have been distributed all over the room, or else it serves for hanging up temporarily what was only borrowed for the moment.

So much for the furnishings as far as they throw light upon the economic circumstances of the lady. Everything else which is standing there, or lying about or hanging up, serves to interpret other circumstances which touch our heroine one degree closer, and their meaning is therefore best explained together with the history of the dramatis personae themselves, which we fear we have already withheld too long for our readers' curiosity.

It is a quarter to twelve in the morning according to the sun, but since breakfast is only just being served, it is still very early, about seven o'clock according to the fashionable time they keep here. Our heroine has roused herself and is supporting herself somewhat wearily and heavily upon her right arm; in her left hand she dangles a watch at the end of a ribbon, her head in a listening attitude. Evidently the watch is a repeater and is striking the hour. The hour? Alas! it is nothing but a meaningless 'eleven'. What help are all the repeater watches in the world to you? A pair of repeater ears through which the warning of your honest father would again resound in your soul would be of infinitely more value. But listen —the hour has struck! Much is lost, but not yet everything. Justice is awake and holds back the final stroke which already hovers over your head. The door opens and Sir John Gonson with his retinue enters the room and our heroine is arrested. Evidently the watch is a small item of booty from last night, and the loser has perhaps complained to the authorities. The charming creature whose upper half appears to be supported by a rag-heap of petticoats is evidently the president of the establishment. Her nose seems to have suffered, whether in an affair of the heart through internal inflammation, or in an affaire d'honneur, where she assisted with eyes and teeth, we do not know. At this point we must ask our readers to shed a few tears on behalf of a poor devil who has given them much pleasure, but who now is no longer: the gay, droll, latinizing Partridge in Fielding's Tom Jones. For as Fielding himself assures us, the notorious better half of that martyr was the very spit of this turbot! But let us avert our eyes from thy boundless suffering, poor devil, for I seem to hear thee whisper thy favourite refrain with which thou didst crown so many reflections, and which thou didst ever find apt since thou didst not understand it:

We proceed to the remaining ornaments on the Plate, which will now be better understood. At the head of the bed, or rather of the recess under which the bed frame stands, there hovers between canopy and earth a comet with a terrific tail—the broom of education—the birch. We have been rather slow to mention it although among all the inanimate objects on the Plate this is usually the first, after the watch, that is, to attract the eye of the spectator. We have called it terrible, but merely in accordance with linguistic custom; for these comets on the firmament of morals do just as little harm to that system as those in the sky to the system of the physical world. Just as Newton has assumed that the latter might perhaps with their tails fan an invigorating atmosphere into the system, so it might not only be supposed but could be geometrically demonstrated that the former actually sweep a great deal of evil out of the world with theirs. If, however, we see them not as birches but merely as bundles of faggots, then their use is really limitless; one might well ask, for example, what would become of the rushing stream of instruction and learning which in school pours through both our ears, if they were not in due course to build a dam at the other end out of such faggots to prevent its escaping there helter-skelter. But how does the pedagogic faggot or rod of philanthropy come to be here, and just on the head-board of the bed? The problem, I must admit, is really not an easy one. I wish it were even more difficult, or so difficult that it simply could not be solved. Oh! that sort of problem makes the most wonderful material for authors who are paid by the page, like bricklayers by the cubic foot. But alas! the problem is not an easy one, and that is just what makes it so difficult. However, we will try. A small introduction to start with. For the first time in the work of our artist we are here at a point to which we shall often have to return, and twice in this series of pictures alone. It is namely the point where morals themselves prohibit moralizing, and the most eloquent interpretation grows dumb or at least pretends to be dumb and makes only signs to the passer-by, or if it is ultimately compelled to speak, will say nothing more than 'I am dumb".

Philosophers have observed long ago that blindness is partial death, and indeed Nature seems to subscribe to that opinion, which is not always so with the remarks of philosophers. But I doubt whether against any evil in this vale of misery there are more remedies than against the inability to see. If the sun will not come out, all right, we can put the light on. That is only a small thing. If cataract shuts the window, again no harm; the ophthalmic surgeon will open it again. If a man becomes myopic, and sees no more of the Universe than the tip of his own nose, or if he becomes a Presbyterian (or should I say presbytopic?) and sees the church steeple clearly but not his neighbour who stands before him, the whole matter can be put right with twelve shillings paid to the optician. With the help of that great Triple Alliance, candle-maker, ophthalmic surgeon, and spectacle maker, man has successfully fought absolute as well as relative blindness, defensively at least, so that its encroachment which may still take place here and there is hardly noticeable. Indeed, we have even taken the offensive, and there is hope one day of seeing the mote in a brother's eye as far away as the moon. Is it not queer with vision? Have we not already a sort of telegraphy with the moon so that by exact calculation we can find out, in one and a half seconds, when a monte nuovo has emerged up there, or a Lissabon or Messina come to an end? But alas! if only there were a telegraph for the remaining five senses, too! But with these it is rather a sad story! There the Presbyterian grows more and more myopic; long sight becomes short sight, and soon ends in complete blindness. Oh, that someone could kindle a light in that quarter or operate for cataract or make a pair of spectacles! Oh! that would be the alchemist's stone, I mean of old age, without which no wisdom is possible. It has been tried a thousand times, but with what success? But we were speaking I believe of the educational birch at the bed-head. Is this then a pair of spectacles—for Presbyterians? To tell the truth, I am not quite sure myself; I only know this, that if it is such a thing, it will not be worn on the nose. I think I have done my duty now, in having commented on a ticklish passage in my author at such length that I do not understand myself any more, and that is all an honest commentator can do. What, however, this locus lacks in clarification, we promise our readers to make good tenfold in other places where it might not be half so necessary, and this again is all an honest commentator can do.

On the canopy of the bed, as if it were quite at home there, lies the wig-box of a notorious street robber, James Dalton. If it is not already a legacy, it will surely become one soon since the fellow was hanged about that time. How low our heroine has fallen! Street robbers are criminals of the third rank, altogether without professional honour. In a nation of highwaymen, who count their ancestors right back to Alexander, they would just be hanged. To his honour and the girl's we will assume that he was no sly pickpocket but that he robbed honestly and took risks, heart against heart, or at least pistol or knife against cudgel; but still only as a foot-pad and not on horseback. The horse elevates and ennobles even rogues—in England. It has been said that the robber who sticks to the ground is something of a Yahoo, while the one on horseback is always a bit of a Houyhnhnm. It is no trifle that Dalton has entrusted there to the girl. Wigs of every condition, form and hue are important items in a robber's inventory. He might change his appearance, like the hares and partridges of some regions, who in summertime look like ploughed land or stubble fields, and in winter like snow. Or if he has plundered in one wig as a caterpillar, he may change through another into a chrysalis, and in a third he may evade the arm of justice as a butterfly. It is on record that some rascals before being brought to their Examination and Promotion have in the course of eight days made the round of all Four Faculties with their wigs. In the end, of course, these masks of the back of the head become witnesses against the head itself, and this renders the pawn on the canopy here still more important.

On the wall there hangs in effigie Mac Heath, one of the greatest men in his profession. His name is sometimes spelled M'Heath with M in front, whereas many of his kind had the M behind. Even the famous Gay counted it an honour to have become the Curtius to that Macedonian of the heath. At his death a monument was erected in his honour, but curiously enough without a pedestal. Its support came from above, evidently because his M stood in front of his name. Moreover he did not hang there in marble or bronze, but in order to save the expense of a sculptor or iron-founder, and also to obtain the greatest possible likeness, the man was used in persona. Never have I wished for more space than here. There is so much to say. But only a brief outline can be given. We have statuas pedestres and equestres, just as we have foot-pads and highwaymen. But it seems to me that in the classification of statues in this world, an important type has been left out, which neither Greece nor Rome has reckoned with, and which seems to have been left to our time; that is, the Statua pensilis. A small contradictio in adjecto between standing and hanging will, I hope, be disregarded by the critic; it is only a grammatical contradiction, and in the usual run of our statues we have more occasion to swallow contradictions that go much deeper. I cannot see why people who have, cum grano salts, served the human race should not be suspended in bronze and by chains of bronze, with a hymn book in hand, and even on a gallows of bronze in the backyard of the Pantheon for instance. Should perhaps the secret foundries of Meudon go in for that sort of thing? They could always work in advance. For it would be an easy matter for French wit and French artistry to create a monument with movable limbs so that it could be erected in the wind month (Ventose), and in the heat month (Fervidor) hang suspended in the backyard of the Pantheon.

Next the M'Heath hangs another man with S.T.P. after his name, meaning Sanctae Theologiae Professor, Dr Sacheverel. It is a very good thing for an interpreter of these Plates that the name Sacheverel undoes ten times over what the letters S.T.P. may for a short time have bestowed on him. He disported himself upon the highway to Heaven just like his counterpart on the road from London to Oxford. Hogarth deserves praise for stringing him up like that. The trial of that fanatic has been compared in some German newspapers recently to that of the cobbler Hardy. To whose credit I hardly know. The uproar which accompanied the trials had, of course, some similarity. Equality of that sort is easy to establish in London. Tumult in the depths is there always the effect of movement from above, whatever the movement may be. Dr Sacheverel and Hardy both caused a commotion, but, it seems to me, with the important difference that people considered that caused by the Doctor as too high, and that by the cobbler as perhaps too low. Dr Sacheverel was one of the Watchers of Zion of whom Lessing has said that whenever they see some- thing glimmer in the dark they immediately cry 'fire!' without first making sure whether it might not be only a little streak of the Northern Lights. But, strictly speaking, the Doctor lit his pipe in a place and at a time when he ought not to have done so. He proceeded so incautiously that, in the end, Zion and the City very nearly suffered the damage which the Doctor had been paid to prevent. Sacheverel was an extremely Tory- minded preacher at a time (1709) when the Government, as is well known, was Whig. But it seemed to him, and that was his little pipe, as if all dissenters were not only tolerated, but favoured. After some strong pulls at the pipe in the dark, and being perhaps a little giddy or otherwise not quite himself, he fancied he smelt the flame licking towards Zion and shouted for help. He preached, not in a small chapel, but in Saint Paul's Cathedral itself, on the words of the Apostle about the danger of false brethren; attacked the Ministry and its laws, not even in allegories but with outspoken words in the most violent manner; referred in the pulpit to the then Lord Chancellor under the name of Volpone, and commanded the people to put on the armour and the sword of God, and to rise against the false brethren. The day chosen by that true brother for his sermon was the 5th of November. As is well known, this is the anniversary not only of the Gunpowder Plot, but also of the famous landing which brought about the Bloodless Revolution.

It is also known how on that day the protestant heresy of the London crowd, having rested quietly on the yeast the whole year through, starts to ferment, just like some wines when the vine begins to blossom anew. In the name of the Gospel, sacred fires are kindled in the streets, and the Pope is burned in effigy as a warning to false brethren. Sacheverel's sermon had the effect that not only window frames, shop windows, cellar doors, booths and similar inflammable material were brought to feed the fire, but also the church pews of the false brethren, and almost the false brethren themselves. Wasn't that terrible? But surely, some reader will perhaps join me in asking, there must have been a fire hose near at hand to direct upon the mouth, from which that glowing sulphur was issuing, an arm-thick jet of water, and consecrate the head with a baptism of water? Perhaps the people at the sight of such a contest of the elements might have put on the garment of mirth and the mien of mockery and the whole matter would have been extinguished. But alas! it did not end like that. The Lord Mayor at that time, probably also a sulphur-saint, had the righteous one's sermon printed, and now there was fire everywhere; it was extolled to Heaven by his followers. The wiser heads in Parliament advised against making the matter more important than it really was by drawing attention to it, but in vain. Sacheverel was arraigned before the Bar of the House of Lords as a major law-breaker. That was just what he wanted. Things grew worse and worse; his carriage was escorted daily by a huge crowd of jubilant people on its way from Westminster Hall to Temple Bar. The houses of the dissentient commu- nity were looted, chapels hitherto tolerated were pulled down, and even the houses of the Lord Chancellor Lord Wharton, and the Bishop of Sarum, were threatened with destruction. And what was the final outcome of all this tumult? Sacheverel was found guilty of a misdemeanour, which means anything between a crime deserving capital punishment, and nothing at all, and on which English Courts make no definite pronouncement. Had the Doctor stolen a seal he would have been hanged. As it was, however, he was suspended from preaching for three whole years, and his Opus was publicly burned. Was it all over now? Far from it. The affair spread higher and higher, farther and farther, and, one must admit, from now on with good reason. The trivial punishment was regarded as the equivalent of a discharge, just a face-saving device, and the culprit, while still alive, was regarded thenceforth as a saint and a martyr at the same time. In his honour England blazed at night from one end to the other with sacrificial fires and sacrificial illuminations. Now the martyr began to enjoy his position with a vengeance. He drove in triumph through the land. The University of Oxford came to greet him with pomp and a ceremonial procession, and they caroused all day long for the sake of the Gospel. A large part of the English aristocracy entertained him with magnificence and pious debauchery, and the municipal magistrates came to meet him with music, mounted soldiery and in pontificalibus. The bushes by the wayside where he passed were decorated with garlands, while pennants and flags fluttered from the steeples, and the whole air rever- berated with 'Sacheverel and the Church'. That is how things stood then. Posterity, we see, has revised the case and quashed the sentence, and Hogarth who, when it came to the execution of sinners whose neck was too strong for ordinary justice, possessed an inimitable strength, has here hanged the saint next to MacHeath. Sic pagina jungit amicos. And the MacHeaths and the Daltons are indeed said to have played a major part in Sacheverel's transfiguration. While he sowed his spiritual blessing, they carried the necessary agricultural tools with which to till the ground in a temporal way, if need be, should it prove too stubborn to receive it.

There are two more pictures hanging on the same wall. Immediately below MacHeath a little half-length portrait with a halo and, above the uneven windows, Isaac's sacrifice. The interpreters, if they mention the first at all, simply say it is the Virgin Mary. This is, however, to say the least, a very poor idea of theirs. For one thing, the figure is obviously of the male sex, and that puts an end to their interpretation. But even if it were not so, the idea in itself is somewhat repellent to a certain sentiment which Hogarth, despite his roguery, never offends as far as I know. Nor would it be a good sign in him. Of course, here or there in the Christian world the image of that holy figure may be hung in some private temple wherein God is served as badly as in this one. But such an explanation is much too far-fetched, and one's immediate revulsion would blunt all feeling for the feeble attraction of such a commonplace joke. In a word, it is not true. The thing is surely a Calendar Saint. Think only of their number, 365. In that considerable flock, should there not have been a single mangy specimen like Sacheverel or MacHeath? About Isaac's sacrifice the interpreters either say nothing at all, or something which is just about as valuable. This is the interpreter's way with tricky passages. Apparently the picture is a relic from the Portuguese establishment and what we said earlier quite ingenuously contains perhaps the best explanation. It is really there that the girl's history takes a turn which, for one in her position, could still be called fortunate. The sword that was raised above her is halted, and the place where Isaac was to be sacrificed merely signified: the Lord sees. What more? Hogarth evidently did not see very deeply here, and thought merely of salvation from violent death, or of withholding a blow from the sword of strict justice in special cases through the intervention of a higher grace endowed with the power to do this. That is how thousands who see nothing deeper in it understand the story of Isaac. Had Hogarth been also a philologist and a divine, the explanation would of course have been forced. But is this not often true of Bible interpretations by people who are everything that Hogarth was not? How much more readily then should we not forgive in a Christian way a man from whose character a little light-hearted frivolousness cannot be completely explained away.

Having examined the main features of this remarkable Plate, we shall now with a few strokes of the pen gather together what here and there has so far escaped our attention.

Just above the man with the clerical collar stand a couple of medicine bottles with their doctor's frills, looking out of the window through which hardly anybody ever looks in, and on the other side, if I am not mistaken, stands an ointment jar. Good, since it stands there it is our duty to let it stand. It rings a bell already and needs no further interpretation.

The cat! It is supposed to be after a mouse that has just escaped, a sign of the poverty and dirt in that apartment. Rats and mice rarely go begging from well-to-do people, and in this, I think, they are not far wrong. But the cat's posture is not that of an animal stealthily stalking with intent to pounce. So we shall leave that where it is, too. On the back curtain of the bed there still hangs a winged head-gear from the previous evening, having evidently escaped there in haste during the attack, so that the pleats should not be crumpled. The hat seems to have escaped before that and while the parties were still upright. Now a few words about the knot in the bed curtain. Mr Ireland sees a face in it, and even a resemblance to the Mother Superior, the Turbot. I have so little against this hypothesis that I even find that Mr Ireland has seldom seen with such Hogarthian eyes as here. It certainly is not out of keeping with Hogarth's character as poet and artist to give the knot in a curtain around the altar of Venus Pandemos the form of a miserable face which, with averted eyes, weeps for the sacrifices which are offered up there. The knot appears to be tied with care and certainly not without meaning; apparently to admit the necessary light and also allow free falling space for the comet when it approaches the sun. Whether in addition the face resembles that of the High Priestess, the Turbot, we shall not decide, but we cannot help winding up at this juncture with an incidental observation about the golden rule: Ne quid nimis. It is true we have to deal here with a very whimsical and original humorist, but this should not make us ruin our own healthy eyesight, nor should we believe we see things in the picture which in fact only exist this side of the tip of our own noses. This is reminiscent of our modern prophetesses who with the point of a needle trace out Mamselle's for- tune from the coffee grounds in her cup, and hold forth something like this: 'Do you see, my charming young lady, the little circle here; it is as clear as can be, it is a carriage wheel; and these little dots here, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, those are the footsteps of—wait a moment my dear child— yes, that's right, of six horses. Oh, would you breathe on it once more? Now, do you see? That's clearly a star. Count the points yourself. So my dear young lady, a carriage and six, and a star as well, and now this here, ah! what could that be!' ... but ne quid nimis. This, however, is not an attack upon the small sallies of wit, be they true or assumed, which a commentator allows himself, obviously at his own expense. These are the stamped property of the commentator, which we may or may not accept. What concerns me here is only the deeply sensed meaning of the whole. The meaning of the whole Hogarth has never concealed; he could have done so only to his own disadvantage. His general aim is apparent at the first glance, and this is essential. Without it, a work of art of this kind cannot succeed. Once, however, that meaning is established, the desire to elucidate small subordinate obscurities will increase the pleasure of the onlooker, which would be completely destroyed by obscurity in the whole. We should throw the picture away. Thus the picture of the Strolling Actresses is simply a representation of the disorder and ridiculous contrasts which must necessarily arise when strolling actresses are dressing in a small room; to make the contrast still more striking, he chooses an opera about the gods, in which, in the theatre, Diana hunts the stag, and behind the scenes, the stag often chases Diana. To present that disorder as a whole in a single picture was the richest possible subject for the talent of our artist. Here his genius was at home. Had he been compelled to have his wings clipped in accordance with some conventional rule or particular theme, he certainly would not have risen from the earth. This, for instance, very likely happened to him in the Hudibras pictures. Whoever, therefore, looks for a plan in that Plate and a particular mythological play, certainly does not know Hogarth's genius too well. It would, of course, have been more in accordance with the Proclamation of Aesthetics if he had, despite all his self-assurance and confidence in his inner strength, subordinated himself to the contract which crude barbarity must necessarily conclude with refined humanity if it wishes to sell its wares in our philosophical markets. But that he could not do; he could only produce the shape, we others might do the finer work. To give just one example: this very picture of the Actresses has been interpreted, confidently and with an air of superiority, as representing the love affair between Diana and Endymion. One of my friends has countered that ridiculous explanation not only with the attitude but with the confidence of true superiority, by an interpretation of the same picture which I should have liked to relate here in full. He has explained it by reference to the French Revolution, and with a wittiness which is immensely superior to that other trivial invention. I can only briefly outline it here. But I, as well as my friend, are compelled to suppress some of the strongest touches because of feelings of a higher kind which persuade us that a joke like that, expressed in public, could easily be misunderstood, since it concerns persons who have a right to our compassion, the more so the less we know today what our own fate may be tomorrow. Thus the two devils at the altar with the bass viol and the head of the Medusa, which turns everything around it to stone, are, it seems to me, self-evident—luce meridiana clarius. The lost overseas trade is excellently expressed by the waves which have been thrown into a corner. Cats are turning the globe without knowing what they are doing! Bishops' mitres become receptacles for comedy texts Jewels made of leaves fill a maltster's hamper. This could be nothing else but assignats for jewellery, and that tremendous wealth is threatened with destruction by a burning tallow candle. There is sans-culotterie everywhere here; even the one pair of trousers lies abandoned. A furious cat has its tail cut off; does that not mean Robespierre's tail? The threshing flail, symbolizing agriculture, lies in the corner. The empty trunks are as clear as can be. A sea-goddess from the West Indies presents a sans-culotte with her last remnant of rum, and both of them are crying She herself is thrown up on dry land. The monkey who plays his tricks with the helmet, possibly of Pallas, cannot be misunderstood. Also the search for garments in the clouds has its meaning. So it goes on through the whole picture, and the assembly in which all this takes place is entitled:

and so on (25-39).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

View this detail in copper here.

James Dalton is Moll’s new lover. His wig box appears on top of her bed. Dalton was a real highwayman who was hanged for his crimes.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Shesgreen

Her principal lover is now a highwayman, James Dalton; his wig box rests on top of her crudely arranged canopy (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The wig box atop the tester suggests a parody of the crown that appeared on the beds of the nobility. The box is labeled "James Dalton his Wigg box": Dalton was a robber famous for his boldness. As a boy he rode to his fathers execution sitting between his legs; his adventures extended from locking the Bloomsbury watch into their own watch house to seizing a ship on which he was being transported; he even attempted to rob the Queen but stopped the wrong coach. This romantic figure was executed at Tyburn on May 11, 1730, for highway robbery (see A History of Executions, 1730, No. 3, p.81) (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

A thief named James Dalton, whose wig box appears atop the Harlot’s bed in the third picture, is the first character in this strange history to come before the public eye. Dalton was a robber with a long, checkered career that was drawing to a close at the beginning of 1730. In December 1729 he attempted to rob the great Mr. Mead in his coach, but failed and was captured. His trial was put off till the next Seesions, by which time, the Craftsman noted, other charges may have been collected against him. In January of 1730, “The noted James Dalton being brought before the Court, to take his Trial, a Woman unknown took and Opportunity to throw a Bottle at his Head, which cut him very much, and caused such a Confusion among the Crowd, that two Fellons found Means to escape.” This lady’s man was trued and found guilty of assaulting Dr. Mead with intent to rob him, but since he had stolen nothing his sentence was a mere three years and a fine of 40 marks and security for his good behavior for seven years. Meanwhile however, having squabbled with a fellow prisoner on 19 January and but him “in a desperate Manner with a Knife,” he was to appear before the next Quarter Sessions. The Daily Post adds that “He behaved himself before the Court with uncommon Insolence and Impudence.” Other crimes from the past were being dredged up, and on 23 February he was indicted for robbing a person in the street of a waistcoat and 25 India handkerchiefs, and his fate was sealed. . . . Dalton was executed on 12 May appearing “very resolute and undaunted,” drinking “part of two Pots of Beer at the Place of Execution,” and “utterly denying his guilt” (vol. 1 240-244).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Lichtenberg

On the canopy of the bed, as if it were quite at home there, lies the wig-box of a notorious street robber, James Dalton. If it is not already a legacy, it will surely become one soon since the fellow was hanged about that time. How low our heroine has fallen! Street robbers are criminals of the third rank, altogether without professional honour. In a nation of highwaymen, who count their ancestors right back to Alexander, they would just be hanged. To his honour and the girl's we will assume that he was no sly pickpocket but that he robbed honestly and took risks, heart against heart, or at least pistol or knife against cudgel; but still only as a foot-pad and not on horseback. The horse elevates and ennobles even rogues—in England. It has been said that the robber who sticks to the ground is something of a Yahoo, while the one on horseback is always a bit of a Houyhnhnm. It is no trifle that Dalton has entrusted there to the girl. Wigs of every condition, form and hue are important items in a robber's inventory. He might change his appearance, like the hares and partridges of some regions, who in summertime look like ploughed land or stubble fields, and in winter like snow. Or if he has plundered in one wig as a caterpillar, he may change through another into a chrysalis, and in a third he may evade the arm of justice as a butterfly. It is on record that some rascals before being brought to their Examination and Promotion have in the course of eight days made the round of all Four Faculties with their wigs. In the end, of course, these masks of the back of the head become witnesses against the head itself, and this renders the pawn on the canopy here still more important (31-32).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Quennell

A real highwayman, James Dalton, executed at Tyburn in 1730, has left behind his wig-box, now store away, half out of sight, between the tester and the ceiling (96).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Ireland

Around the room are scattered tobacco-piped, gin measures, and pewter pots,--emblems of the habits of life into which she is initiated, and the company which she now keeps: this is further intimated by the wig-box of James Dalton, a notorious street-robber, who was afterwards executed (109).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Box

Dobson

The magistrate who enters the room in Plate III, is Sir John Gonson, a well-known “harlot-hunting justice;” the wig-box in the same plate is that of James Dalton, a highwayman who had been hanged at Tyburn in 1730 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Cat

View this detail in copper here.

Other commentators comment on the playfulness of the animal, but it is more likely that the cat betrays the presence of Dalton, who hides under the bed leaving Moll to take the brunt of the impending justice. This cat, indeed, smells a rat.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Cat

Shesgreen

The exotic monkey is replaced by a household cat that postures suggestively to indicate the girl’s occupation (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Cat

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The cat playing at the Harlot's feet characterizes her innocence, her love of pleasure, her silliness (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Cat

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

What Hogarth is showing is a girl from the country (her essential innocent or ignorantia is suggested by the parallel with the cat playing at her feet) who comes to the city with the delusion that she wants to be a lady—a great lady (vol. 1 257).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Cat

Lichtenberg

The silver teapot, too, has gone, yielding place to a miserable tin affair, just as the long-tailed monkey has been replaced by a long-tailed cat and the chamber-maid and negro by a hybrid creature who is a cross between a chamber-maid, a negress and a long-tailed monkey (26)

The cat! It is supposed to be after a mouse that has just escaped, a sign of the poverty and dirt in that apartment. Rats and mice rarely go begging from well-to-do people, and in this, I think, they are not far wrong. But the cat's posture is not that of an animal stealthily stalking with intent to pounce (37).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

View this detail in copper here.

Much has been made of the witch’s hat and broom over Moll’s bed. Shesgreen notes that her low station has caused her to resort to serving “sexual deviants” and to practicing “black magic” (20). In Sex in Georgian England, Harvey writes that flagellation was not uncommon in the brothels of the period. If the birch twigs are for this purpose, Moll is interestingly dominant in these sadomasochistic affairs. Again, she retains control, maintaining her status as sexual aggressor.

The possibilities of witchcraft are fascinating as well. George Lynman Kittredge notes the English definition of a witch:

In considering the tenacity of the popular belief . . .the essence of witchcraft is maleficium. The hatred and terror which a witch evokes is due to her will and power to inflict bodily injury. . . . She is hunted down like a wolf because she is an enemy of mankind” (qtd. in Erickson 17).

Thus, the hat and broom become symbols of power, of a dark sexuality which is able to escape the patriarchal definitions of womanhood. Moll, as witch and whore, is no longer woman. Robert Erickson cites Whores Rhetorick which delineates this reasoning, stating, “I must tell you a Whore is a Whore, but a Whore is not a Woman; as being obliged to relinquish all those frailties that render the Sex weak and contemptible” (35). This early text recognizes the connection between weaknesses and traditional definitions of womanhood, and also demonstrates that, to become powerful, women must transcend that womanhood. Moll, before her apprehension and death, does this. She creates herself, choosing her lovers for sex or money and maintaining the sexual upperhand in her relationships. Her power is a threat to English order; her tendency toward dark magic eludes the imperative for Christianity. This rejection of conventional religion is also realized in her picture of Dr. Sacheverel, a religious dissenter and her use of the Pastoral Letter for wrapping butter. Moll certainly cannot continue in this powerful state, and so, as victim still to Hogarth’s text, must die in despair and utter ruin.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

Shesgreen

Over Moll’s bed hangs a witch’s hat and bundle of birch rods, suggesting black magic (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

Uglow

She is a witch, her masquerade hat suggests, who will be hunted and burned. The whippings she gave to men with her little broom will now be turned on her (204).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

Her masquerade costume, the hat hanging at the head of her bed, is now that of a witch. Next to the hat is a birch rod, perhaps her broomstick, more probably (as Stephens suggests, BM Sat.) used to satisfy flagellants (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

Quennell

A witch’s birch-broom and hat—Molll still frequents the popular masquerades—dangle at her bedshead (96).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Hat and Twigs

Lichtenberg

At the head of the bed, or rather of the recess under which the bed frame stands, there hovers between canopy and earth a comet with a terrific tail—the broom of education—the birch. We have been rather slow to mention it although among all the inanimate objects on the Plate this is usually the first, after the watch, that is, to attract the eye of the spectator. We have called it terrible, but merely in accordance with linguistic custom; for these comets on the firmament of morals do just as little harm to that system as those in the sky to the system of the physical world. Just as Newton has assumed that the latter might perhaps with their tails fan an invigorating atmosphere into the system, so it might not only be supposed but could be geometrically demonstrated that the former actually sweep a great deal of evil out of the world with theirs. If, however, we see them not as birches but merely as bundles of faggots, then their use is really limitless; one might well ask, for example, what would become of the rushing stream of instruction and learning which in school pours through both our ears, if they were not in due course to build a dam at the other end out of such faggots to prevent its escaping there helter-skelter. But how does the pedagogic faggot or rod of philanthropy come to be here, and just on the head-board of the bed? The problem, I must admit, is really not an easy one. I wish it were even more difficult, or so difficult that it simply could not be solved. Oh! that sort of problem makes the most wonderful material for authors who are paid by the page, like bricklayers by the cubic foot. But alas! the problem is not an easy one, and that is just what makes it so difficult. However, we will try. A small introduction to start with. For the first time in the work of our artist we are here at a point to which we shall often have to return, and twice in this series of pictures alone. It is namely the point where morals themselves prohibit moralizing, and the most eloquent interpretation grows dumb or at least pretends to be dumb and makes only signs to the passer-by, or if it is ultimately compelled to speak, will say nothing more than 'I am dumb" (29-30)..

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Jacket

View this detail in copper here.

A jacket, possibly Dalton’s, hangs by the bed. If the clothing belongs to her lover, it is unlikely he would leave without it—thus adding evidence to the theory that Dalton hides under the bed, as indicated by the posture of the cat.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Jacket

Lichtenberg

Over the chairback she has thrown her last night's jacket, probably of red material with imitation gold trimmings, which would look splendid especially by the light of a street lamp of the fourth magnitude, inducing curiosity and fancies. When a garment like that is on show, Londoners of all ranks will be caught in the snare like larks in reflected sunlight (27).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Maid

View this detail in copper here.

Moll’s servant pours her tea. She will be the one constant in Moll’s downfall, hinting that the varying cast of lovers who all ultimately desert Moll are yet more examples of men who fail her. This most unlikely of characters is the most loyal, inverting popular perception of the possibilities of “virtue.”

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Maid

Shesgreen

An ugly but practiced woman whose nose has been eaten away by disease has replaced her naïve servants. The bunter seems intended to serve as an example of the fate of those superannuated harlots who survive the mortal effects of syphilis (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Maid

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

Her noseless servant (cf. the fashionable maid in Pl. 2) pours her tea (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Maid

Quennell

The “bunter” charwoman, who has lost the end of her nose, is preparing a slovenly dish of tea (96).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

View this detail in copper here.

Moll continues to be failed by men in authority. John Gonson and the watch arrest her for her crimes, bursting unannounced into her private rooms.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Shesgreen

Through he apartment door come an arresting magistrate and his constables to apprehend Moll for prostitution. The leading figure, who fondles is mustache effetely, has been identified as Sir John Gonson, a type of the perennial harlot-prosecutors whose righteousness is only equaled by their compulsiveness (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

at this moment in through the door comes retribution: bailiffs led by Sir John Gonson (d. 1756), a London magistrate noted for his vigorous apprehension of prostitutes. Gonson's portrait, immediately recognized, contributed to the success of Hogarth's series. A clerk of the Treasury told Hogarth's friend William Huggins that the print was brought to a meeting of the Board of Treasury, and the lords were so taken with the likeness of Gonson that "from the Treasury each lord repaired to the print-shop for a copy of it, and Hogarth rose completely into fame" (Biog. Anecd., 1782, pp. 26-29). The Grub-street Journal (Jan. 8, 1730) comments on Gonson's energetic charges to juries; and T. Gilbert's satire, A View of the Town in 7735, includes the line, "As Harlots startle at a Gonson's name" (cited Gen. Works, i, 57). His attendants carry staves, and one also holds a long cane, used for inflicting stripes (146-147).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Quennell

an avenging figure stands poised on the threshold, closely supported by a troop of constables and tipstaves. Sir John Gonson is in search of victims, carrying the terror of his name into the very heart of Old Drury. Like his Mother Needham and his Colonel Chartres, Hogarth’s Gonson was an exact portrait; and, although the series was generally popular, the third plate, with its representation of the harlot-hunting magistrate, elicited particularly loud applause. The Lords of the Treasury themselves, who did not share either Sir John’s puritanical zeal or his moral prejudices, were said to have been so anxious to acquire the print, that, in order that they might lose no time, they cut short the day’s business and abandoned their official posts (97).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Ireland

A magistrate (Sir John Gonson, a justice of peace, very active in the suppression of brothels. In a view of the town in 1735, by T. Gilbert—Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, are the following lines:--‘Though laws severe to punish crimes were made,/ What honest man is of these laws afraid?/ All felons against judges will exclaim,/ As harlots tremble at Gonson’s name.’ Pope has noticed him in his Imitation of Donne and Loveling the a very elegant Latin Ode. Thus, between the poets and the painter, the name of this harlot-hunting justice is transmitted to posterity. He died on the 9th of January 1765.) cautiously entering the room with his attendant constables, commits her an house of correction, where out legislators wisely suppose, that being confined to the improving conversation of her associated in vice, must have a powerful tendency towards the reformation of her manners! (111).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Dobson

The magistrate who enters the room in Plate III, is Sir John Gonson, a well-known “harlot-hunting justice;” the wig-box in the same plate is that of James Dalton, a highwayman who had been hanged at Tyburn in 1730 (35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Arrest

Lichtenberg

Evidently the watch is a repeater and is striking the hour. The hour? Alas! it is nothing but a meaningless 'eleven'. What help are all the repeater watches in the world to you? A pair of repeater ears through which the warning of your honest father would again resound in your soul would be of infinitely more value. But listen —the hour has struck! Much is lost, but not yet everything. Justice is awake and holds back the final stroke which already hovers over your head. The door opens and Sir John Gonson with his retinue enters the room and our heroine is arrested. Evidently the watch is a small item of booty from last night, and the loser has perhaps complained to the authorities (28).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

View this detail in copper here.

Plate III is the last plate where Moll is overtly sexual. It has been seen by commentators as the beginning of the harlot’s swift decline. Shesgreen notes that Moll has been “discarded by the merchant,” rendered less marketable and is “forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane” (20). Although Moll’s standard of living has declined, and she is on the verge of imprisonment and ruin, signs of her power are still abundant in the scene. She is literally “on top” of her lover who lurks beneath the bed. (The cat betrays his presence.) He is a highwayman, a type she prefers (obvious from the picture of Macheath on her wall), and if she does not assist her lover in his crime, she benefits from his haul. She glances out of the plate, teasing the viewer with her gaze. After her death, her legacy continues in the lustful funeral-goer who has the exact same look.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Shesgreen

Discarded by the merchant and her marketability reduced by disease, Moll is forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane and serve the population at large, even sexual deviants. Her principal lover is now a highwayman, James Dalton; his wig box rests on top of her crudely arranged canopy. In this breakfast scene, which exactly parallels the previous one, Moll rises at 11:45 A.M. to take her morning tea. Dressed a little less flamboyantly and looking considerably less vivacious, she dangles a watch taken from the previous night’s customer (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Uglow

This is the only print in which Moll Hackabout looks directly at he artist and at us, sexy and slanty-eyed, poised on the edge of her shabby, curtained bed like a sitter for a portrait of sexy Court beauty by Lely. The stolen watch she dangles shows a quarter to twelve - approaching the hour of reckoning. In the full series of paintings, and the prints that followed them, Hogarth traced the 'before' and 'after' of this moment. This is the point other second fall, from whoring to crime, as she swings the stolen watch from her fingers (200-201).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The Harlot’s handsome young lover has cost her an easy life with her Jewish "protector"; she is now on the streets. Her two breakfasts are contrasted in the two prints: the silver tea kettle, the gilt pictures, and decorated toilet of the earlier plate are recalled by the tin pot, the tacked-up prints, and the broken mirror and punch bowl. Moll still wears the remains of her rich attire. Her masquerade costume, the hat hanging at the head of her bed, is now that of a witch. Next to the hat is a birch rod, perhaps her broomstick, more probably (as Stephens suggests, BM Sat.) used to satisfy flagellants. The wig box atop the tester suggests a parody of the crown that appeared on the beds of the nobility (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

What Hogarth is showing is a girl from the country (her essential innocent or ignorantia is suggested by the parallel with the cat playing at her feet) who comes to the city with the delusion that she wants to be a lady—a great lady. By the second plate she is a great lady in the sense that that some great ladies dress well, are kept, and take lovers. In the third she is keeping up appearances, though she had some somewhat down in the world, and there is the suggestion of what is to follow in the servant woman’s diseased nose, the medicine bottles on the sill, and the magistrate Gonson softly entering at the rear with his helpers. The world of consequences, already poised in that proleptic first plate in the ominous figures of the corruptors, the dead goose, the falling buckets, and even the constricting verticals of the buildings around her, has now begun to close in. But there is another parallel, between Gonson and his assistants emerging from their doorway and Charteris and his pimp emerging from theirs. Hogarth’s comment on the Harlot’s plight, recalling the picture of Uzzah in the preceding plate, can be sensed in the other picture she keeps on her wall: Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac—as the magistrate approaches—and God’s angel staying his hand. Even the face that emerges from the knot in the bed curtain seems to cry out a warning (vol. 1 257).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Quennell

At this point, the chart of Moll’s progress sweeps downhill in a sudden curve. Rich men are not to be affronted: they value their comfort and self-conceit yet more highly than they esteem their pleasures. Seductive fencing masters [see Plate II] may prove fly-by-night friends; and Mol re-emerges, no longer the well-kept and widely fashionable courtesan, but a prostitute who lodges in a dilapidated garret above Drury Lane, with an uncurtained window, a broken-down bed and a single antiquated rush-bottomed chair. Hogarth’s third plate seems to incorporate the design from which he evolved the entire series—that of a young harlot “just arising about noon out of bed” and beginning her bohemian breakfast. Moll, who looks coarsened but cheerful, is exhibiting a stolen watch (96).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Ireland

In her hand she displays a watch, which might be either presented to her, or stolen from her last night’s gallant. By the nostrums which ornament the broken window, we see that poverty is not the only evil (109).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Moll

Lichtenberg

Molly is falling—falling faster and faster! This is only the third station in her journey out of the six which our artist has represented, and two-thirds of the journey are already over. After the second station, there were still some Summer by-ways with agreeable meanderings, though of course not for every equipage. The Chronique Scandaleuse speaks of women, even wives, who started out like that and yet arrived quite safely! Only the Chronique Scandaleuse?—Oh! the venerable annals of history itself, and not very far back, tell of Vice-Queens who set out from this post house for the last station.

But here all is lost! She has, as Basedow once said of himself jokingly and in a manner of speaking, arrived at her destination in earnest and married herself to the public. She appears here as the central figure in a small establishment of the third rank, for the quenching of hearts aflame. How low she has fallen! Fuimus, everywhere!

In other pictures, we left the description of the furnishings to the end. They were of secondary importance. It was the human figures who explained the significance of the furniture. Here it is the furniture which has to illuminate the human beings. A young female body, not without charms, is soon adorned. What does not grace it will be graced by it, and what may be lacking here or there in person or attire will not be noticed by young people of the opposite sex, or it can easily be made good by something of which another part has been deprived, and which it is perfectly willing to do without in majoram gloriam of the whole. In this way such a creature can go far, always patching up the visible garment at the expense of the invisible, and the decay in beauty at the expense of honesty, until the whole, patched and repatched for the last time, attains its resurrection after a brief death, and what decayed as Hackabout rises again as Mother Needham. But for the lodging and its furniture, patching up is not so easy in London where money is so cheap and, consequently, everything else so terribly expensive; nor is it so necessary. For when someone goes out into the street from a room like that, he will no longer remember what it looked like, and the eyes coming in from the street will certainly have some degree of blindness and intoxication (25-26).

Our heroine has roused herself and is supporting herself somewhat wearily and heavily upon her right arm; in her left hand she dangles a watch at the end of a ribbon, her head in a listening attitude (28).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

View this detail in copper here.

This rejection of conventional religion is also realized in her picture of Dr. Sacheverel, a religious dissenter and her use of the Pastoral Letter for wrapping butter. Moll certainly cannot continue in this powerful state, and so, as victim still to Hogarth’s text, must die in despair and utter ruin.

We also see that she prefers bad boys—the other picture is of Macheath, a fictional version of the real highwayman she has now taken as a lover.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Shesgreen

The large, expensively framed pictures of the previous apartment are here reduced to four small works. Above her chair (which holds her work coat, a candle and a dish—used as a chamber pot) is a medallion of some saint. Above that hangs portraits of Moll’s idols, the roughish highwayman Mac(k)heath from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and “Dr. Sacheveral S.T.P.” (sanctae theologiae professor), a controversial divine of the period. Placed purposefully on top of these two portraits are a jar and two vials of “cures” for venereal disease (20).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Uglow

Her other decorations show that she is hopelessly romantic, a Polly Peachum with High Church, Jacobite airs. She has John Dalton's wig-box above her bed and a pin-up of Macheath on the wall but she also has a portrait of Dr Sacheverell, whose inflammatory sermons had caused riots, and a little oval icon of the Virgin (204).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The pin-up portraits beneath her window illustrate her false ideals: "Capt Macheath" of The Beggar's Opera and the notorious Tory divine "Dr' Sacheveral S.T.P." ("sanctae theologiae professor"). As one contemporary commented, "their Merits like, and with like Honours crown'd" (BM Sat. 2064). Macheath was reprieved and returned in triumph to his wives, and Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724), having been impeached and found guilty of inflammatory antigovernment (i.e. anti- Whig) sermons (1709), went on to lucrative livings at Selattyn (1710) and St. Andrew's, Holborn (1713) (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Quennell

Two prints pinned to the plaster wall depict the highwayman-hero of The Beggar’s Opera and Dr. Sacheverell, turbulent champion of the English High Church (96).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

The picture the Harlot hangs on her own wall (in imitation of her late keeper) above the portraits of Macheath and Sacheverell demonstrates the process by which spiritual autobiography becomes drama. This is a print of the angel staying the hand of Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Harlot, who associated herself with Macheath and Sacheverell, criminals who were reprieved and lived happily ever after, sees the biblical scene as a comforting promise of mercy and reprieve for herself. The hand of the avenging father is stayed by divine intervention (120).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Ireland

The pictures which ornament the room are, Abraham offering up Isaac, and a portrait of the Virgin Mary; Dr. Sacheverell (Following the Doctor’s name are the letters S.T.P., sanctæ theologiæ professor. A fellow not knowing the import of these dignifying capitals, well enough translated them SAUCY TROUBLESOME PUPPY.) and Macheath the highwayman are companion prints. There is some whimsicality in placing the two ladies under a canopy, formed by the unnailed valance of the bed and characteristically crowned by the wig-box of a highwayman (110).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Pictures

Lichtenberg

On the wall there hangs in effigie Mac Heath, one of the greatest men in his profession. His name is sometimes spelled M'Heath with M in front, whereas many of his kind had the M behind. Even the famous Gay counted it an honour to have become the Curtius to that Macedonian of the heath. At his death a monument was erected in his honour, but curiously enough without a pedestal. Its support came from above, evidently because his M stood in front of his name. Moreover he did not hang there in marble or bronze, but in order to save the expense of a sculptor or iron-founder, and also to obtain the greatest possible likeness, the man was used in persona. Never have I wished for more space than here. There is so much to say. But only a brief outline can be given. We have statuas pedestres and equestres, just as we have foot-pads and highwaymen. But it seems to me that in the classification of statues in this world, an important type has been left out, which neither Greece nor Rome has reckoned with, and which seems to have been left to our time; that is, the Statua pensilis. A small contradictio in adjecto between standing and hanging will, I hope, be disregarded by the critic; it is only a grammatical contradiction, and in the usual run of our statues we have more occasion to swallow contradictions that go much deeper. I cannot see why people who have, cum grano salts, served the human race should not be suspended in bronze and by chains of bronze, with a hymn book in hand, and even on a gallows of bronze in the backyard of the Pantheon for instance. Should perhaps the secret foundries of Meudon go in for that sort of thing? They could always work in advance. For it would be an easy matter for French wit and French artistry to create a monument with movable limbs so that it could be erected in the wind month (Ventose), and in the heat month (Fervidor) hang suspended in the backyard of the Pantheon.

Next the M'Heath hangs another man with S.T.P. after his name, meaning Sanctae Theologiae Professor, Dr Sacheverel. It is a very good thing for an interpreter of these Plates that the name Sacheverel undoes ten times over what the letters S.T.P. may for a short time have bestowed on him. He disported himself upon the highway to Heaven just like his counterpart on the road from London to Oxford. Hogarth deserves praise for stringing him up like that. The trial of that fanatic has been compared in some German newspapers recently to that of the cobbler Hardy. To whose credit I hardly know. The uproar which accompanied the trials had, of course, some similarity. Equality of that sort is easy to establish in London. Tumult in the depths is there always the effect of movement from above, whatever the movement may be. Dr Sacheverel and Hardy both caused a commotion, but, it seems to me, with the important difference that people considered that caused by the Doctor as too high, and that by the cobbler as perhaps too low. Dr Sacheverel was one of the Watchers of Zion of whom Lessing has said that whenever they see some- thing glimmer in the dark they immediately cry 'fire!' without first making sure whether it might not be only a little streak of the Northern Lights. But, strictly speaking, the Doctor lit his pipe in a place and at a time when he ought not to have done so. He proceeded so incautiously that, in the end, Zion and the City very nearly suffered the damage which the Doctor had been paid to prevent. Sacheverel was an extremely Tory- minded preacher at a time (1709) when the Government, as is well known, was Whig. But it seemed to him, and that was his little pipe, as if all dissenters were not only tolerated, but favoured. After some strong pulls at the pipe in the dark, and being perhaps a little giddy or otherwise not quite himself, he fancied he smelt the flame licking towards Zion and shouted for help. He preached, not in a small chapel, but in Saint Paul's Cathedral itself, on the words of the Apostle about the danger of false brethren; attacked the Ministry and its laws, not even in allegories but with outspoken words in the most violent manner; referred in the pulpit to the then Lord Chancellor under the name of Volpone, and commanded the people to put on the armour and the sword of God, and to rise against the false brethren. The day chosen by that true brother for his sermon was the 5th of November. As is well known, this is the anniversary not only of the Gunpowder Plot, but also of the famous landing which brought about the Bloodless Revolution.

It is also known how on that day the protestant heresy of the London crowd, having rested quietly on the yeast the whole year through, starts to ferment, just like some wines when the vine begins to blossom anew. In the name of the Gospel, sacred fires are kindled in the streets, and the Pope is burned in effigy as a warning to false brethren. Sacheverel's sermon had the effect that not only window frames, shop windows, cellar doors, booths and similar inflammable material were brought to feed the fire, but also the church pews of the false brethren, and almost the false brethren themselves. Wasn't that terrible? But surely, some reader will perhaps join me in asking, there must have been a fire hose near at hand to direct upon the mouth, from which that glowing sulphur was issuing, an arm-thick jet of water, and consecrate the head with a baptism of water? Perhaps the people at the sight of such a contest of the elements might have put on the garment of mirth and the mien of mockery and the whole matter would have been extinguished. But alas! it did not end like that. The Lord Mayor at that time, probably also a sulphur-saint, had the righteous one's sermon printed, and now there was fire everywhere; it was extolled to Heaven by his followers. The wiser heads in Parliament advised against making the matter more important than it really was by drawing attention to it, but in vain. Sacheverel was arraigned before the Bar of the House of Lords as a major law-breaker. That was just what he wanted. Things grew worse and worse; his carriage was escorted daily by a huge crowd of jubilant people on its way from Westminster Hall to Temple Bar. The houses of the dissentient commu- nity were looted, chapels hitherto tolerated were pulled down, and even the houses of the Lord Chancellor Lord Wharton, and the Bishop of Sarum, were threatened with destruction. And what was the final outcome of all this tumult? Sacheverel was found guilty of a misdemeanour, which means anything between a crime deserving capital punishment, and nothing at all, and on which English Courts make no definite pronouncement. Had the Doctor stolen a seal he would have been hanged. As it was, however, he was suspended from preaching for three whole years, and his Opus was publicly burned. Was it all over now? Far from it. The affair spread higher and higher, farther and farther, and, one must admit, from now on with good reason. The trivial punishment was regarded as the equivalent of a discharge, just a face-saving device, and the culprit, while still alive, was regarded thenceforth as a saint and a martyr at the same time. In his honour England blazed at night from one end to the other with sacrificial fires and sacrificial illuminations. Now the martyr began to enjoy his position with a vengeance. He drove in triumph through the land. The University of Oxford came to greet him with pomp and a ceremonial procession, and they caroused all day long for the sake of the Gospel. A large part of the English aristocracy entertained him with magnificence and pious debauchery, and the municipal magistrates came to meet him with music, mounted soldiery and in pontificalibus. The bushes by the wayside where he passed were decorated with garlands, while pennants and flags fluttered from the steeples, and the whole air rever- berated with 'Sacheverel and the Church'. That is how things stood then. Posterity, we see, has revised the case and quashed the sentence, and Hogarth who, when it came to the execution of sinners whose neck was too strong for ordinary justice, possessed an inimitable strength, has here hanged the saint next to MacHeath. Sic pagina jungit amicos. And the MacHeaths and the Daltons are indeed said to have played a major part in Sacheverel's transfiguration. While he sowed his spiritual blessing, they carried the necessary agricultural tools with which to till the ground in a temporal way, if need be, should it prove too stubborn to receive it (32-35).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Table

View this detail in copper here.

This rejection of conventional religion is also realized in her picture of Dr. Sacheverel, a religious dissenter and her use of the Pastoral Letter for wrapping butter. Moll certainly cannot continue in this powerful state, and so, as victim still to Hogarth’s text, must die in despair and utter ruin.

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Table

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The paper used to hold the butter is a "Pastoral Letter to . . ." issued by the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1669- 1748). As a keeper of the public morals he had petitioned the King for the abolition of masquerades; and this may partly explain the use to which his Pastoral Letter is put by the Harlot. But his Pastoral Letters directed against the Deists were the object of much satiric wit, and Gib-son himself was ridiculed as "Codex" (see Cat. No. 285, below, Tartuffe's Banquet, and N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Oxford, 1926) (146).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Table

Quennell

Hogarth has made one addition of which only he, and perhaps members of his family, would have recognised the full satitical value. The pat of butter, bought for her breakfast, has come from the dairyman’s shop wrapped in a crumpled waste sheet. It is the front page of a Pastoral Letter, recently issued by the Bishop of London; and Dr. Gibson [a moralist who had petitioned to the King for the abolition of masquerades], when a poor young scholar, had traveled to the metropolis in Richard Hogarth’s company, but seems subsequently to have joined the ranks of those unfeeling “great men” from whom the schoolmaster expected help and encouragement, and whose unredeemed promises were thought to have embittered his last years (97).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Table

Ireland

The dreary and comfortless appearance of every object in the wretched receptacle, the bit of butter on a piece of paper (This paper is a pastoral letter from Gibson Bishop of London, and intimates that the writings of grave prelates were sometimes to be found in chandlers’ shops, as they are unto this day.) (110).

A Harlot's Progress: Plate 3: Table

Lichtenberg

On the little table we see only one cup and saucer, and an odd cup, probably containing sugar, a small loaf of bread, a knife and a little butter for which a literary production has provided the plate. For the sheet of paper on which it lies is part of the Pastoral Letter of Bishop Gibson, Bishop of London, which that honest man had with the best intentions despatched to his parishioners. It is said that despite the address clearly written on them, they did not reach their destination until the grocers co-operated and undertook the delivery (27).