Hogarth Online | Production

Hogarth Online: From Concept to Reality

Why Hogarth?

One of my very first classes in graduate school was a course devoted to William Blake. There I discovered something that is abundantly obvious to Blake scholars but was completely novel to me: the centrality of the engravings to the overall purpose and meaning of Blake’s art. Of course, I had seen some of the plates from the Songs but had considered them only as supplementary to the poems. Never had I considered the visual element an essential component of the literary one, and one without which Blake’s message cannot be understood. This often unholy union of text and image is fascinating, creating many valuable teaching moments as my students ponder the seeming smile on the face of Blake’s tiger while contemplating the beautiful ferocity of “The Tyger.” Indeed, these moments where visual art and the written word intersect have proven to be the most effective in provoking students to consider what comprises a “text” and to challenge their assumptions about how one “reads” a narrative.

The intersection of literature with the visual arts becomes even more interesting when there are few or no words to accompany the pictures—the situation one encounters when dealing with William Hogarth. It was through Blake that I was directed to the engravings of Hogarth. Although critics such as Karl Kroeber (in British Romantic Art), contrast the Romanticism of Blake with the Realism of someone like Hogarth, the two are closer to being kindred spirits that their widely diverging styles would immediately suggest. Both sought to redeem engraving from its reputation as reproductive and therefore inferior. Both wove social and political criticism into their works. Both merged the visual and the literary—though Blake sometimes produced engravings without much illustration, just as Hogarth presented pictures without accompanying text. Most importantly, both coax one out of the passivity of reading into the active search for meaning. Hogarth’s flurry of commentators often disagree and sometimes neglect details—leaving students and scholars alike to ponder his never-accidental placement of objects and characters. Thus, with this interest in demonstrating the literary qualities and the narrative technique often apparent in the visual media, it seemed natural to move from a study of Blake into a focus on Hogarth. Such qualities are the reason why just as many scholars of literature are interested in Hogarth as are art historians.

Towards an Online Edition

To my surprise, my initial conference presentations on Hogarth invited not only comments about my specific papers but also just as many general concerns from teachers who wished to use Hogarth in their classrooms. Their trepidation focused on the large amount of background reading one must do to be “fluent” in Hogarth: a consideration of the plates themselves to determine points of discussion as well as a survey of what other commentators have observed. There was also the issue of getting the engravings into a form that was truly effective for in-class observation; slides or website image galleries are fine for looking at the plates or series as a whole but cannot be used for impromptu close-ups based on students’ desires to see an obscure background image. The only solution was for each instructor to “slice” smaller pieces from the larger plates using picture-editing software, but the process can be labor intensive and requires not only the software but also a certain degree of computer literacy.

I therefore surmised that it would be effective to provide all of these desired features in one place, either on a CD-ROM or a website, that could be a time-efficient, inexpensive (if not free) resource. There are currently websites for information on Hogarth aimed at a scholarly audience, including Georg Olms’s “The Site for Research on William Hogarth” (Georg Olm's Site), which presents an extensive annotated bibliography of research on the artist as well as links to numerous image galleries. The site is useful in providing information on both new publications and classic commentaries. Shaun Wourm’s wide-ranging “Hogarth’s Realm,” (Shaun Wourm's Site) features a near-complete image gallery and includes commentary on selected plates as well as articles about Hogarth’s life and times, book recommendations, a message board for questions, and suggestions for Hogarth-related stops when one tours London.

A CD-ROM of many of Hogarth’s engravings is also available from Graphic Type Limited, a British font and graphics company (Graphic Type Limited Site). The disc costs approximately £40 and includes brief commentaries on the plates and series, a booklet on “The Life and Times of William Hogarth” and scans of over one hundred plates in three different levels of quality: high resolution (600 dots per inch), medium resolution (300 dpi) and “screen” resolution (72 dpi). Billed as royalty-free, the images can be freely used in other projects.

Finally, a “low-tech” way of bringing Hogarth into the classroom is to have each student purchase Sean Shesgreen’s seminal and affordable The Engravings of Hogarth. However, the teacher who is using the plates as a one-day supplement or as brief graphic illustration of larger literary themes may be reluctant to add the work to a required book list. For example, the music history professor who confessed he would enjoy incorporating Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress into a discussion of Stravinsky’s opera would find Shesgreen’s book of limited use in his course.

All of these works are excellent at what they do, but none serves as the ideal resource for novice students and seasoned professors alike in an easily accessible and assimilable format. This edition, then, attempts to combine what is useful about all of the above resources and to provide something new: the ability to enlarge specific components of each plate to view commentary on very detailed elements. This online, annotated edition of many of Hogarth’s major engraving series provides the following:

In the initial phases of construction, I created a few sample plates to demonstrate at conferences; both the design of the pages and the available features met with substantial success. I have also used these sample plates to introduce students in my World Literature survey classes to Hogarth’s work as well as to the concept of “reading” a work of visual art.

Assembling the Edition

Blithely ignoring warnings about its time-consuming nature as well as caveats about the lack of closure involved in any web project, I began this online edition by pondering which engravings would be the focus of the initial version. A Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode were immediate and obvious choices because of their centrality among Hogarth’s works. The wealth of commentary on these three series is astoundingly comprehensive. Furthermore, the two progresses provide interesting contrast, and Marriage continues Hogarth’s mixture of personal tragedy mixed with social indictment.

The other inclusions required a bit more contemplation. Ultimately, I selected The Four Times of the Day because of its important themes: the frigid loneliness of hypocritical piety in “Morning”; the need for a happy medium between lewd public groping and stolid affectation in “Noon”; the warning of the emasculation and feminization of British men in “Evening”; and the reminder that leaders must provide a proper example in “Night.” I also selected The Four Stages of Cruelty not only because it is Hogarth’s most graphic series, but it is also the one that carries his most harshly delivered social criticism. Tom Nero progresses from torturing animals to murdering his pregnant mistress in scenes that grow increasingly brutal in their depictions of violence, but the most horrifying scene is the state-sanctioned cruelty administered to Tom in an impassive impartation of “revenge” presided over by an insensitive, detached and frighteningly omnipotent figure. Hogarth’s startling conclusion is again a warning about the necessity for British leaders to practice the virtues expected of the British populace; he reveals that Tom Nero is merely the product of a government that, while decrying crime, permits the execution and dismemberment of its own citizens.

“Before” and “After” and “Beer Street” and “Gin Lane” are both two-plate series that reveal a study of opposites. “Before” and “After” use humor to show a lustful, Rochester-reading girl who is too eager “Before,” and is rejected by her departing lover “After,” their tryst. The plates toy with stereotypes—the pretending innocence of the girl is belied by the fact that novels and bawdy poems have replaced more “proper” volumes on piety. The gentleman appears stupefied and spent after their encounter and departs dumbstruck, despite the post-coital clinging of his lover who now wishes to cuddle. Although these plates are largely overlooked by commentators, I included them as testaments to the persistence of the jokes about the divergent behavior of the sexes in the bedroom.

“Beer Street” portrays the beer- and beef-loving British citizens as plump, prosperous and politically astute. Building projects are underway (only the pawnshop is in disrepair), and the scene is comfortably middle class. To contrast, “Gin Lane” shows the danger of that particular vice: children are neglected, even killed, while workers sell the tools of their trade to obtain more gin. The two plates do more than praise middle class virtues while exposing lower-class vice, but critics disagree as to the ultimate message of the plates. Does Hogarth mean to satirize the laziness of the residents of Beer Street? Who is responsible for the degradation on Gin Lane? The popularity of these plates made them imperative for the collection, and the elusiveness of their message added to the necessity for their inclusion.

Ideally, other plates and series could be eventually added. Most particularly, I am eager to work on Industry and Idleness and An Analysis of Beauty, as I feel that these works are well deserving of attention.

After determining which plates would be the focus of this project, I then had to determine which commentaries would provide the best, most wide-ranging and comprehensive discussion of the plates. Ronald Paulson was an obvious choice; his vitally important work on Hogarth is consulted and cited by almost everyone who considers the artist’s work, from the undergraduate to the scholar. Furthermore, his observations of Hogarth’s often-complex allusions to other art—both to individual works and to particular movements—is unparalleled. Another easy decision was to include Sean Shesgreen—probably the most widely distributed current commentator. Shesgreen’s paperback edition of Hogarth’s engravings provides an excellent overview of and introduction to the plates.

Georg Lichtenberg’s extensive commentary, originally published in 1794-1835, has always been a personal favorite. Certainly the most verbose of the commentators, his meanderings through the plates have frequent nuggets of invaluable observation as well as bursts of irrepressible humor (One notable example is when he calls Marriage à la Mode’s Lord Squanderfield a “sick angora rabbit beside a hot lady hedgehog”—an epithet one rarely hears in the description of hedgehogs).

John Ireland and Reverend John Trusler provide additional commentary from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were also clear selections. The large amount of work on Hogarth in the twentieth century gave me a wealth of information from which to choose; my ultimate decisions rested on whether the work features extended discussion of a large number of plates. Journal articles tend to be too narrow in focus; most overviews, while frequently informative in their own right, are too generalized in their approach to specific engravings. Ultimately, I selected commentaries by Peter Quennell and Austin Dobson. Finally, I decided to include Jenny Uglow’s Hogarth: A Life and a World, a work that goes beyond its biographical focus to provide unique, astute and enlightening insights into the major engravings.

In addition to collecting the commentary of others, my other major task was to compose my own observations of the selected plates. Fortunately, I had been accumulating these interpretations through my preparation for years of conference presentations. Thus, many of these comments have also been audience tested, and, I have found that some of my readings are novel. One particular example, my assertion that the cat under Moll Hackabout’s bed in A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 3 is actually indicating the presence of Moll’s hiding lover, seems to be provoking new discussion about the plate and the implications of this particular elucidation in the overall themes manifested in the work. My purpose, then, is not to simply survey and condense the remarks of other commentators but also to step into the role of commentator myself.

Both my interpretations and those of my chosen commentators had to then be placed into documents compatible with hypertext mark-up language (HTML) format. While my own discussion of the plates could be culled from existing files or created from scratch, the acquisition of the other commentaries proved more difficult than I had initially expected. At first, I believed that scanning the texts into Rich Text Format or Microsoft Word files for editing would be the most simple and effortless route. However, I greatly underestimated the amount of proofreading required due to the inadequacies of Optical Character Recognition in accurately capturing the text of older books with unfamiliar typefaces. Early efforts yielded numerous errors and formatting problems. Other books were in such delicate condition that scanning was rendered difficult, if not impossible. I ultimately determined that manually entering much of the text myself would allow me to check the accuracy as I progressed and to preserve the crumbling pages of some of the volumes. Furthermore, I would have the opportunity to review carefully the specific content of the material in preparation for what particulars would be imported into the text components of the enlargements (or “slices”) of specific details in the plates. I progressed very slowly through this labor-intensive part of the project.

With the majority of the text in place, it was time to turn my attention to acquiring the images. For the best results, the plates had to be saved in two resolutions: a high-resolution (600 dpi) version used for enlargements and a lower resolution that would load quickly for the screen shots. I had scanned many of the plates and imported them into Microsoft PowerPoint slides for previous conference presentations, but I found that most of these images were not clear enough for use in this project. Experimenting with many sources for the images (glossy pictures, reductions of large versions of the plates and enlargements of smaller versions of the plates among them), I found it fairly simple to obtain a useable screen version but quite difficult to acquire images that would produce clear enough detail for several of the enlargements of particulars from the plates. In fact, in the Beta version of this site, image quality was an immediate and pressing concern. I was finally able to resolve many of the issues of image clarity by purchasing and using the CD-ROM version of Hogarth’s engravings (referenced above). I also found that the photo editor made a distinct difference in the quality of the images; using a web graphics editor like Macromedia’s Fireworks produced the sharpest, clearest representations.

Having obtained all of the raw materials, I could now enjoy the wizardry of combining them into an effective, easily navigated teaching and research tool. When considering the overall format of the pages, several imperatives immediately sprung to mind: I definitely wanted an always-present navigation bar on the screen so users could easily return from whence they came without having to weave through a maze of “back paging.” Another important concern was how the information would be presented. I considered it a priority to provide users with a text-only page as an overview of the entire plate. Another detail was to provide “thumbnail” version of each plate for users for whom words such as “A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 5” do not conjure up an immediate image of the engraving. “Bookmarks” were also created on each page so one can quickly find the work of any particular commentator without having to scroll through the entire text. My comments on the plate had to be made distinct from the observations of the other commentators, so a rule bar was employed to separate the two. In the revised edition of the site, I further distinguished my comments by placing them in different font.

One of the main features of the site, and one of the reasons I undertook this project, is the ability to provide one with comments about specific details in each plate. The method by which this could be accomplished was not immediately obvious, but after much deliberation, I decided to imbed links within the screen shots that would direct the user to other pages featuring an enlarged image of the particular detail and its accompanying commentary. This decision proved to be time consuming, as a web page had to be created for each detail I planned to discuss. Of the thirty-two plates chosen, each averaged about ten “slices,” yielding over 350 web pages associated with the project. I quickly discovered that any small change I made to font or image size had to be made 350 times. The web pages were built using a combination of Microsoft Word’s web editing functions for the textual elements and Dreamweaver for the overall structure and design.

Next, I considered it an aesthetic necessity to make it abundantly clear on the full-plate screen shots which elements could be clicked on for further, more focused, examination and discussion. The best, most appealing method was to create a “mouse-over” effect using Fireworks. Each screen shot had to be copied and pasted behind the original. The saturation level of the copy was then adjusted as desired. Slices were then made on the original picture that, when moused over, revealed the red-tinted copy. Typically, it is impossible to tell that the saturated image is actually a distinct copy of the original rather than the phenomenon of the original itself turning red. However, as I discovered through a few missteps, if the images are not perfectly aligned, the mouse will reveal a picture quite different than the one on screen!

Finally, I reexamined the commentaries to find discussion of the specific details I had selected and added those to the appropriate pages. The addition of a detailed works cited page completed this phase of the project. Already, though, I am contemplating future features for upgrades, including a site-wide search mechanism. Certainly, those who warned me about the lack of closure in a web-based environment were correct. Fortunately, the medium also makes adjustments relatively simple in ways that additions to text-based projects never are.

My hope for Hogarth Online is that it makes significant contributions to the emerging field of humanities computing, to eighteenth-century studies and to scholarship on Hogarth. I also anticipate that the works of this inimitable engraver will be more readily brought into classrooms where his work will be more easily examined and understood. By removing the barrier of extensive advance preparation, I wish to inspire teachers who are not art historians or even scholars of the eighteenth century to employ the invaluable glimpses Hogarth provides into his era and its concerns. For those with research interests, the overview of the major commentaries and the links showing relationships between plates and series will, I hope, prompt further investigation into the artist and his work.

Moving Into the Future: March 2019

The site is being modernized, but you can view the old site with this link. It will open in a separate tab. Be aware that this version may not be compatible with some mobile devices.