A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

1735

12 3/8” X 15 1/4" (H X W)

Etched and Engraved by Hogarth after his painting.

View the full resolution plate here.

The series ends with Rakewell in Bedlam, insane and on display for the visiting curiosity seekers. Here, the consequences of Rakewell's behavior are painfully apparent. The future of knowledge is at stake, as Shesgreen notes: "Science has claimed two victims ... the fellow peering at the ceiling ... is an astronomer. Behind him the fellow who has drawn the ship ... is attempting to discover a scheme for calculating longitude" (35). This figure is also notable, as he has drawn yet another globe, adding macrocosmic import to the actions here. Religion is mocked by the Pope-like figure on the stairs and the fanatic praying in his cell. Most disturbing is the regal figure, with crown and sceptre, either, as Shesgreen believes "urinating" or, even masturbating (35). The ejaculatory spilling of the bowl in the foreground echoes this and recalls the clergyman's similar accident in The Harlot's Progress. Here, without the added humor of the other series, we see symbols of the unnatural, overindulgent and infertile sexuality dangerous to the future of the Empire. To underscore the timeliness of the events, Hogarth has placed a mad- looking coin of Britannia in the plate, inscribed with a year, showing, as Shesgreen notes, that in "1763 Hogarth questioned the sanity of the British nation" (35). Furthermore, even Lichtenberg sees the world of Bedlam as a "little Republic." He recalls a contemporary tale:

These events occur despite the self-sacrificial actions of Sarah Young who Paulson calls the "Good Samaritan" figure (Popular 163); she labors in vain, though because it appears that some souls are truly damned. In this age of sexual excess, asks Hogarth, is England's one?

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)

The rake’s life of excesses has finally driven him completely mad. Committed to Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), he is being chained to prevent him from injuring himself (the patch under his breast suggests he may have knifed himself). Half-naked, grinning and tearing his flesh fiercely, he is attended to the end only by the weeping Sarah Young. Two men retrain him, through one is more interested in Sarah than in the patient.

In the hospital science has claimed two victims. The fellow peering at the ceiling through a roll of paper which he imagines to be a telescope is an astronomer. Behind him the fellow who has drawn the ship, mortar and shot, earth, moon and various geometric patterns is attempting to discover a scheme for calculating longitude. Religion has two adherents here. The man in the first cell sitting on straw chained to a rock is a fanatic; he keeps a crucifix and icons of three saints (“St. Lawrance, St. Athanatius [C]lemen[t]”) beside him. His body is contorted in prayer and his adoring face is screwed up in the likeness of a wild animal. The person on the stairs with the cone-shaped hat and the triple cross who seems to sing imagines himself the pope.

In cell 55 is a naked man with a crown of straw and a stick as scepter believes he is a king. He urinates. Two elegantly dressed court ladies, come in curiosity not in charity as Sarah has, smile at his exposed condition. In front of them a wretchedly dressed tailor with a wig of straw, patterns on his hat and tape in his hands, gestures vacantly. To his right a mad musician with sheet music on his head saws a violin with a stick; his fingers are covered with rings. Beside him sits a figure who suffers from depression over the loss of his love; he has carved her name (“Charming Betty Careless”)* on the banister and wears her picture. The collar around his neck suggests he has attempted to hang himself.

On the wall stands the image of a halfpenny portraying Britannia with her hair flying madly behind her. It is chained to cell 54. Added in late revision of the plate, it suggests that in 1763 Hogarth questioned the sanity of the British nation.

* Charming Betty Careless was the name of the particularly beautiful and well-known prostitute of the period (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

CAPTION:

The scene is a madhouse, probably Bedlam (Bethlehem Hospital) where pauper madmen were lodged. Rakewell has apparently just had a fit; a patch may designate an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life; the ubiquitous Sarah Young is comforting him and an attendant is fastening manacles on his ankles. A wooden bowl and basin of gruel are on the floor nearby.

The doors are numbered "54," "55," and "50." Inside "54" is a religious fanatic with medallions inscribed "[C]lemen[t],” “St. Athanatius,” and “St. Lawrance" on his wall and a wooden cross, the object of his adoration. In "55" is a secular equivalent, a mad with pride: he wears a straw crown, holds a broken stick for scepter, and unconcernedly urinates straight ahead. Between the two doors is a lunatic writing on the wall, calculating the longitude. To his left is a diagram of the earth with meridians and arcs with “North Pole” at one end, “Antarctic Circle” at the other, and “Longitude” at the side. Other diagrams show a ship, a crescent moon, and "LE," which may stand for the dramatist Nathaniel Lee (1653?-1692), who went mad in 1684 and was confined in Bedlam till 1689. The mortar discharging a bomb refers to a plan proposed by William Whiston (1667-1752) for discovering the longitude (Gen. Works, 2, 126). The globe (and in the second state, the symbol of Britain) is connected with the religious fanatics door by a chain drawn on the wall.

In front of the man figuring the longitude is a mad astronomer observing the stars through a roll of paper, and a mad tailor. Tailors proverbially went mad with pride (cf. Swift's Tale of a Tub, 1704, Sect. II); this one is playing with his tape measure, while wearing a hat sewn with patterns and a wig of straw. The group around the stairs at the right comprises a mad musician, a man who fancies himself the Pope and a melancholy lover with a picture of a woman and a band of straw around his neck. The carving on the stair rail is probably the lover’s: “Charming Betty Careless,” the name of a contemporary prostitute (see Marriage à la Mode, Pl.3; she is also referred to in Fielding’s Amelia, Bk. I, Chap. 6). Two other inscriptions are carved on the newel post: “S H” (the “S” reversed) and, barely discernible. “Æ.” See Gentleman's Magazine, 53, Pt. 1 (1783), 318.

The two young women standing between rooms 55 and 50, the “sane” come to view the "insane," introduce the common satiric analogy between the Madhouse and the outside world. Bedlam was a popular holiday resort of Londoners in the mid-eighteenth century. One holds up her fan to avoid seeing the man in 55 urinating, while her friend (or servant) points in that direction. This scene stimulated Swift’s invocation of Hogarth in his own description of a madhouse in “The Legion Club" (1736).

The figures of Rakewell and the religious fanatic in Cell 54 are meant to recall Caius Gabriel Gibber's statues of melancholy and raving madness, at that time over the portal of Bedlam. "[Colley] Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers," as Pope called them (Dunciad, Bk. I, 1. 32), are now in the Guildhall Museum, London. The pose of Rakewell's head and left arm, however, may have been based on Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder's etching. The Painter torn between Olympus and Everyday Life (a drawing dated 1577 is reproduced in F. Wurtenberger, Mannerism, London, 1963, p. 160). Hogarth's idea and composition in Pl. 7 bear a general resemblance to Gheeraerts' design (169-170).

[Sarah Young’s] presence in Bedlam—Tom’s final scene—may have been the cause of his fit. A least this is one part of her effect; she is oppressive and sticky, and she appears in five of the eight plates. She is doubtless an ideal of loyalty and love, but Hogarth cannot refrain from making a comment about such goodness as it affects the malefactor: she is part of the Rake’s intolerable burden which he has brought upon himself (44).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

The eighth and last scene shows the interior of Bedlam, the great receptacle for pauper lunatics just beyond the City wall. A noble building with mansard roofs, completed to the design of Robert Hooke in the year 1676, its entrance-gate adorned with “admirable statues”, representing “Melancholy” and “Raving Madness”, by Caius Gabriel Cibber [father of Colley Cobber, the actor and dramatist], Bedlam looked out over the “spacious and agreeable” walks of the large open space named Moorfields. For more than a century the hospital was a popular resort for London sightseers. No age, no period of civilisation, if we examine its practices at close range, will prove to have been completely callous. But areas of sensitiveness change; and the Augustan age was oddly insensitive in the attitude that it adopted towards many forms of human suffering. Its apparent callousness was an admission of helplessness. Just as infant-mortality was unavoidable, the majority of lunatics were totally incurable. Apart from restraint and confinement, repeated bleedings and strenuous purgings, no treatment had yet been devised to combat the hidden disorders of the mind; and no attempt was therefore made either to disguise the lunatic’s condition or to segregate him in a world of his own. Not until 1770 did it occur to physicians that the constant influx of inquisitive sightseers “tended to disturb the tranquility of the patients”: and, meanwhile, several generations of distinguished men and women had inspected and admired the building, and marveled at the strange humours displayed by the inhabitants. Even Cowper, tendrest of creatures, and one who had himself passed through the valley of the shadow of madness, admits that he has been there. “In those days (he writes to Newton, after the hospital had shut its doors) when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of the holiday ramblers I have been a visitor . . . Though a boy, I was altogether not insensible of the misery of the poor captives . . . But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.” Johnson and Boswell, both introspective and neurotic characters, frequently haunted by the fear of madness, visited Bedlam as late as 1775; and Boswell merely observes that the visit went off without mishap, but that “the general contemplation of insanity was very affecting”. Incidentally, its “indiscriminate admission of visitants” increased the revenues of the hospital by “at least ₤400 a year . . .”

Other details emerge from contemporary records—the wooden bowls in which the lunatics were served with “their appointed messes”: the knavery of nurses and attendants who, on Sundays, put aside a good part of the patients’ food for the benefit of their “ancient relations and most intimate friends who are to come and visit them in the afternoon”: and the oppressive horror of hot, still nights when the noise of the maniacs within their prison, “rattling their chains and making terrible out-cry”, echoed across Moorfields. To this hideous refuge—the old, unreformed Bedlam of shackles and straw and wooden bowls—our broken Rake has at last descended. Sarah Young, who has as usual reappeared, weeps over him, but weeps in vain: Tom has sunk into utter oblivion, fettered and nearly naked, writing on the hospital floor. For the figure of the Rake himself and that of the religious enthusiast, crouched in an adjacent cell, Hogarth had taken suggestions from Cibber’s pair of statues. Their companions were probably drawn from life—the unclothed monarch, whom a fashionable visitor is studying through the sticks of her fan, the star-gazer, the musician, the ineffably pontifical and euphoric pope. An element of contemporary satire is provided by a crazy theorist, who illustrates on the dirty plaster wall a scheme then being seriously discussed by the devotees of Natural Science—“Whiston’s proposed method of discovering the Longtitude, by the firing of bombs.” Finally, seated at the bottom of the sairs, is an object-lesson in the perils of love. There Hogarth has inserted a portrait of William Ellis, who was believed to have run mad as a direct result of his passion for a youthful strumpet. He has inscribed her name of the balustrade “Charming Betty Careless”: a young woman, celebrated alike for the sweetness and innocence of her face and the outrageous lubricity of her conduct, who is also mentioned in Amelia. He had happened, during his youth, writes Fielding, “to sit behind two ladies in a side-box at a play, where, in the balcony on the opposite side, was placed the inimitable Betty Careless . . . One of the ladies, I remember, said to the other—‘Did you ever see anything look so modest and so innocent as that girl over the way?’ Yet . . . I myself . . . had a few mornings before seen that very identical picture of all those engaging qualities in bed with a rake at a bagnio, smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenity, and swearing and cursing with all the impudence and impiety of the lowest and most abandoned trull of a soldier”. Blind and deaf to the riot that surrounds him, William Ellis, in rigid abstraction, sits mourning over his lost beloved (133-136).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

“Last scene of all,--which ends this strange eventful history!”

But in this scene, dreary and horrid as are its accompaniments, he is attended by the faithful and kind-hearted female whom he so basely betrayed. In the first plate we see him refuse her his promised hand. In the fourth she releases him from the happy fangs of a bailiff; she is present at his marriage. In the hope of relieving his distress, she follows him to a prison. Wishing to soothe his misery and alleviate his woe, she here attends him in a madhouse! What a return for deceit and destruction!

The Reverend Mr. Gilpin, in his elucidation of these eight prints, asserts that “this thought is rather unnatural, and the moral certainly culpable.” With the utmost deference for his critical abilities, I must entertain a different opinion. We have had many similar examples of female attachment. If it be culpable to forgive those which are in bonds, to forgive those which are in prison, and to comfort those which are in affliction, what meaning have the divine precepts of our holy religion?

The female mind is naturally credulous, affectionate, and—in its attachments—ardent. If, in her peculiar situation, her assiduities must be deemed in any degree culpable, let us remember that this is but a frail vessel of refined clay. When the awful record of her errors is unrolled, may that sigh which was breathed for the misery of a fellow-mortal waft away the scroll, and the tears which flowed for the calamities of others float the memorial down a stream of oblivion!

On the errors of women, let us looks with the allowance and humanity of men. Enchanting woman! thou balm of life! soother of sorrow! solace of the soul! how dost thou lessen the load of human misery, and lead the wretched into the valley of delight! Without thee, how heavily would man drag through a dreary world; but if the white hand of a fascinating female be twined around his arm, how joyous, how lightly does he trip along the path!

That warm and tender friend, who in the most trying situations retains her enthusiastic fondness, and in every change of fortune preserves unabated love, ought to be embraces as the first bension of heaven, the completion of earthly happiness! Let man but draw such a prize in the lottery of life, and glide down the stream of existence with such a partner, and neither the cold averted eye of a summer friend, nor the frowns, of and adverse fortune, should ever produce a pang or excite a murmur. But enough,--let not the chaste feelings of blushing innocence be wounded by this rhapsody, or for a moment suppose that the episode, or effusion, or e’en whatever she pleases, is intended as a vindication of female folly; in good truth it is not. The writer would not wish it delivered to the cold-fingered portress of Diana’s temple, but it may be laid upon that altar which is sacred to Friendship, to Hymen, to Love.—There we will leave it, and return to the plate before us. A gentleman (The Reverend Mr. Gilpin) from whom I have once or two reluctantly presumed to differ, says that “the drawing of the principal figure is a more accurate piece of anatomy than we commonly find in the works of this master.” The observation is perfectly just, but the inaccuracies of Mr. Hogarth did not arise from inability, but from his inattention. He says further, that “the expression of the principal figure is rather unmeaning.” The late and ever to be lamented Mr. Mortimer, whose wonderful abilities as an artist were only equalled by his amiable and kind-hearted virtues as a man,--the late Mr. Mortimer, of whom I can never think without a sign of regard and regret, thought very differently. He was once requested to delineate several of the passions as they are personified by Mr. Gray. One of the subjects proposed was,--“Moody madness laughing wild, amid severe woe.” The instant this line was read to him, he opened a portfolio and took out the eighth plate of the “Rake’s Progress,” and pointing to the principal figure, exclaimed, “Sir, if I had never seen this print, I should say it was not possible to paint these contending passions in the same countenance Having seen this, which exactly displays Mr. Gray’s idea, I dare not attempt it. I could only make a correct copy; for the alteration of a single line would be a departure from the character.”

The reclining figure, with the cross leaning near him, is in a high degree terrific (It is designed from one of the two figures at the gate of this hospital in Moorfields, which Mr. Pope, with more malignity than truth calls “Cibber’s brainless brothers.” The sculptor was Mr. Cibber’s father.).

In the cell are the portraits of three saints, whose systems were built on the necessity of the propagating the religion of mercy by the sword and the wheel.

Near him are two astronomers, one with a paper rolled up to imitate a telescope, gazing at the roof, in the idea that this is “The spacious canopy of heaven, fretted with golden fires.” The other, delineating the firing off a bomb and a ship moored at a distance, is an immediate ridicule of Whiston’s project for the discovery of the longitude,--an object which at this time engaged the attention of the philosophical world, and in the fruitless search after which many a feeble head hath become mad, north and north-west!

The opposite group form a whimsical trio. A mad musician, a counterfeit presentment of St. Peter, and a poor gentleman, with his hands clasped together, that appears by the inscription of “Charming Betty Careless,” which he has chalked upon a board, to be “Craz’d with care, and cross’d by hopeless love.” He is absorbed in thought, and his whole soul so engrossed by the charms of his Dulcinea, that neither the discordant sounds of the fiddler, whose trembling string “Grate harshly on the nerve auricular,” nor the roar of the pope, who is furiously denouncing destruction on all heretics, nor the ear-piercing noise of a barking cur, can awake him from his reverie.

A crazy tailor and a mimic monarch complete this congregation of calamity.

Two women, impelled by a most unaccountable curiosity, are walking in the background. Devoid of that delicacy which gives beauty new attractions, they forget that an eagerness to witness woe which they cannot alleviate, gives strong indication of an hardened and unfeeling heart.

The halfpenny stuck against a wall, and dated 1763, was inserted by Mr. Hogarth the year before his death, and is designed to intimate that Britannia was then mad. This is one of the few instances wherein he has called in the aid of allegory, but his allegory was always seasoned with wit.

Of the expression I have already spoken. The disposition of the figures is good. That group in which the usurper of St. Peter’s chair is the principal object, is well contrived. There is great simplicity and breadth in the background, and the light and perspective are judicious. “Protract not, curious ears, the mournful tale;/ But o’er the hapless group low drop Compassion’s veil” (153-159).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

In the Rake’s Progress (1735) the early scenes imply mythological analogues, the second plate connecting the Rake’s choice with Paris’ and the third a brothel scene with a Feast of the Gods or a Bacchanal; the final scene in Bedlam shows the Rake in the arms of Sarah Young, in the pose of a Pietà (vol. 1 271).

The topical and functional continue to mesh: while the ending in Bedlam follows directly from the donnée, and appears inevitable, it is probably no coincidence that in 1734-35 the governors in Bethlehem Hospital were soliciting subscriptions to pay off the debt for the new wing built for female incurables. The hospital’s historian writes of Hogarth: “I venture, therefore, to suggest that his ‘Bedlam’ picture represents something more than an inevitable episode in the progress of a rake from bad to worse; it looks as though it were also an endorsement of a subscription-book at that time being circulated through the city.” Hogarth’s picture is, however, more ambiguous in its attitude than such an endorsement would be.

He must have visited Bedlam many times, looking at Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues over the stone piers of the great gate, like Michelangelo’s Night and Morning: Raving Madness (or acute mania), chained, drawing in his breath and about to bellow forth his anger, and Melancholy Madness with a vacant expression. Hogarth’s epitome of Bedlam includes his versions of these statues and depicts the visitors as well: they offer the contrast that most impressed him in Bedlam. As he shows, gates of the open ironwork (erected in 1729) kept the most violent patients separate. Off the gallery on both stories opened the cells or bedrooms of the patients, provided with narrow, unglazed windows high up in the wall. These patients were locked in their cells, occasionally taken out in the years for air; some patients were allowed the “liberty of the gallery,” but in general these were reserved for the visitors, who amused themselves by looking into the cells. While this voyeurism was acceptable to mid-eighteenth century London, it was especially characteristic of the fashionable folk Rakewell emulated who now come to observe him.

All of the details work in this double way: as Hogarth reports, the mad were kept nearly naked to save clothes (it was cheap, and they might destroy clothing), and slept on straw which was easily cleared away; but these facts became symbols of Tom Rakewell’s reduction to nothingness and connect with a metaphor of apparel that runs through the series. Plate 1 begins with the tailor measuring him for a suit, with the portrait of the closely-muffled miser in the background. From the elegant dressing-down in 2, Rakewell descends to dishevelment in 3 and the elegant attire in which he is arrested in 4; from 6 to the end he is gradually stripped down to the bare forked animal he is in Bedlam—and significantly witnessed by two of the well-dressed denizens of the society he entered in the first plate. At the same time, while tracing the typical descent from folly to vice, from prison to madness and bestiality, one should notice that the prisoners in the Fleet and the madmen incarcerated in Bedlam are implicitly compared with the fashion-mongers of the earlier plates, who are still free. The madhouse acts as a reflection on the society that has appeared in the earlier plates—people madder than any of the inmates are allowed to come in and observe them; and, as one critic has remarked, “surely the girl, still faithful to her betrayer, is the maddest creature in Bedlam” (vol. 1 326-327).

Some of the flaws of this long, ambitious series are epitomized in this striking final plate, which, in spite of its good qualities, reflects a difficulty of communication. Most commentators on the plate have recorded, based on what they see, that Rakewell is being chained after suffering a (perhaps suicidal) fit. Certain external evidence, however, argues for his death and the unlocking of the fetters, no longer needed: the line from the poetic inscription: “Behold Death grappling with Despair.” suggests that he is at least sinking into death, and the poster after a Pietà also implies death. The general gist of the progress also points to dying rather than struggle as intention; the map of the world set afire by the whore in Plate 3 prefigures the Rake’s being consumed not only by lust but by infection as well—part of the rake syndrome, and an obsessive consequence in Hogarth’s works (the Harlot too died of syphilis). Nevertheless, Hogarth has certainly put Rakewell in a peculiar posture: alluding to Cibber’s statue of Melancholy Madness in the figure, while ironically alluding to a Pietà in the group. The confusion is evident in Hogarth’s small revisions in the shoulders and even the head of the Rake, and in the hands of the warden; most strikingly, he changes the warden in the final state of the print (made many years later, in 1763) to a clergyman, as if he recognized the ambiguity (vol. 1 333).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

It is a question with Hogarth, however, whether we can say that eros is a perversion of caritas, or whether caritas is a sublimation of eros. Sarah Young is the Rake’s cast-off mistress, whose love—once thwarted—takes the form of charity; in plate 4 she saves him from the bailiffs with her “widow’s mite” in a gesture which resembles Christ’s in The Pool of Bethesda, and she is last seen administering to him (now himself burned out by syphilis, the end of eros) in Bedlam in a pose which recalls both pietas and Hogarth’s own Good Samaritan. In short, the meaning of his Christ and Good Samaritan is less the sum of a series of resemblances to works of art in the great tradition of European art than to his own recent engravings of A Rake’s Progress (163).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

In Bedlam, the most awful thing is hat this private horror is also a public spectacle. . . . On a hot Saturday in September a smart woman might yawn and wonder how to fill an empty afternoon—which would she choose? A visit to Southwark to see flying men fall—or a visit to the madhouse to peer though her fan at a mock king on a throne of straw, pissing in a corner? Bedlam, after all, was quite safe—the “dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold” were firmly manacled on the second floor, and the tourists could saunter confidently along the wide gallery among “inoffensive madmen”, peering at colourful lunatics in little side cells. These piquant visits could always be justified, as Steele said:

Hogarth’s scene was not a documentary but a symbolic presentation of the follies of the age; it cannot be used as literal evidence of what Bedlam was like. Yet is does have an imaginative reality, because Tom’s story is so powerfully dramatized. And Hogarth, too, was perfectly aware that although the verses below his print spoke of “Death grappling with Despair”, his picture was designed to “entertain”, to draw upon the avid shudder that made apprentices and flower-sellers look forward to Tyburn holidays or pulled crowds to see Sarah Malcolm in her coffin.

Bedlam, like the fairground, was often described as a theatre of delusions of grandeur (on one visit Steele spotted “five Duchesses, three Earls, two heathen Gods, and Emperor and a Prophet”). Hogarth constructed his scene on the lines of conventional satire by including a bevy of well-known madmen. Some believe they have great power: the straw-crowned king; the religious maniac with his medallions of saints and wooden cross; the man who thinks he is the Pope. Some claim profound knowledge: a blind astronomer plays wit a paper telescope and another man scrawls on the wall, by a diagram of the world from the “North Pole” to the “Antarctic Circle”/ His is calculating on the lines of William Whiston, the renegade Newtonian and Whig philosopher whose attempt to assess longitude at sea by firing mortars made him a choice butt of satire. Others think they are masters of art and fashion, like the mad musician, or the lord who fancies himself a tailor (an ironic reminder of the first scene, where the tailor made the man). Some are victims of love, like the brooding man who has scribbled “Charming Betty Careless” on the stair rails. This is William Ellis, unhinged by his passion for Betty Careless, a prostitute whose innocent-looking sweetness was famously at odds with her promiscuity, drinking, smoking, and trooper-like swearing.

In all these cases, the gulfs between illusion and reality have driven men mad. If A Rake’s Progress is about the ruin of the prodigal, or about the curse on a father who starves his child of love, it is also about making life into a work of art, a lesson in the fearful lure of the imagination:

In real life, all these men had been somebody. Now they are nobody. But all except Tom are still great in their own mad minds—gods, kings, mighty lovers. Tom has no role. He lies naked on the floor, stripped of clothes and reason, echoing Cibber’s huge statue of Melancholy Madness on the hospital’s gatepost. The path in his breast hints he has tried to stab himself, an event so common in Britain that the French used se suicider as a conscious Anglicism. Foreigners were aghast at the national epidemic of “self-murder”:

Tom’s statuesque madness embodies the despair of his country, “the Englishman’s disease”. It displays the wages of sin, suggesting the dark violence of advanced syphilis. It illustrates the vicissitudes of fate, “the Reverses of Fortune”. Yet he remains a man, rousing human emotions: Sarah still loves him; the surgeon looks down on with pity; even the turnkey shows compassion as he loosens the manacle on his bony leg. And in his extremity, Tom the piteous individual is almost a type of Christ, suffering for all. In the painting, where he wears a loincloth rather than breeches and Sarah mourns him like a Magdalen, the composition resembles a Deposition from the Cross. Such agony, as Hoadly’s verses say, makes one doubt the mercy of Heaven; in A Rake’s Progress, Hogarth puts the mystery of sacrifice firmly back on earth, among grubby, failed people who buy clothes, catch flies, drink gruel. . . . Tom Rakewell is both a dreaming miser’s son and a version of Everyman, embodying the follies (and genuine madness) of mankind. The final image of Bedlam prompted Swift, in Ireland, to imagine Hogarth as his ally in “The Legion Club”, when he railed against the “insanity” of the Irish parliament:

Such recognition from his hero—one of the three writers always included in his pantheon, with Shakespeare and Milton—validated Hogarth’s aim. But us was the way he drew “all the soul” in the face of Tom Rakewell that raised his art about caricature. There was beauty as well as bittnerness (255-259).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)

The next scene is in the Fleet; the last in Bedlam. . . . he is an incurable maniac, fettered and dangerous, who tears at himself with the heartrending laugh of the insane (43).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8

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

After his manifold sufferings at Pontac's, White's, in Mary-le-bone(!) and in the Fleet, our hero is here at last laid to rest. The scene is a sepultura inter vivos, more properly a burial among the civic dead; here in Bedlam, the London Lunatic Asylum, he is put in chains. No doubt the great fall was caused for the most part by the last heavy attack upon his conscience, carried out from the bed-and-board side. His physique might have withstood it, but his mind, which was never his strongest part, succumbed in the end. It was surmised earlier that Rakewell might perhaps settle outside England. This is now his établissement. Still in his own country then? That I would not venture to decide. Our philosophy still knows far too little about the real abode of the civiliter deceased. What after their departure are still called 'they', are indeed no more than pictures which they leave behind—to be erected as tombstones over the grave of their reason. Tombstones? Merciful Heavens! What comparisons do not spring to mind between the eloquent marble raised over the ashes of the masterpiece of creation, and the filthy, numbered stables here where his image, in greater likeness than on those marble stones, chained and lying on rotten straw, tells the passer-by still more eloquently how much lies buried there! But this is not the place for such reflections. They would put the reader out of humour for the rest of the story, if they have not already done so for the commentator, who could not entirely dispense with them.

He hopes therefore that he will be readily forgiven if he merely touches on some of the terrible scenes which are here enacted. They do not call for any explanation, nor are they compatible with one.

Rakewell lies in the foreground here, naked for the most part, while a man is putting him in chains. The reason for it is that Rakewell is sinking still deeper. In the Microcosmos where he lives now, affairs are ordered very much as they are in the extended Macro-Bedlam, the world itself; not all the madmen are chained, and even the chains have their degrees. Through the long corridor, the catacomb, which we see here, the more harmless are free to walk about, at least as far as the big grating, behind which lives another class, or sect as it is called in ordinary life, having other principles, not in agreement with those on this side of the iron bars; only those of a still lower and more dangerous degree are buried in the numbered cells. Evidently Rakewell had such freedom to start with, but misused it. He began to adopt other principles and, in a mood which we might call exuberant, has given himself a dangerous stab in the region of the heart. He no longer fitted into that little Republic and now is about to be incorporated into another. It is that moment of promotion which our artist has chosen here. The expression of suffering is indescribable, and it is hard to understand how a man like Gilpin, who otherwise does justice to the drawing, could have found that face empty. Mr Ireland fully appreciates our artist. The late Mr Mortimer, a person of the greatest artistic talent, was, as Ireland relates, once asked to draw some of the Passions as Gray presents them successively in his poem, 'Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College'. Among them was

Instantly Mr Mortimer drew from his portfolio the eighth Plate of Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress'. 'Here,' said he, pointing to the central figure, 'is everything together. Had I not seen that head I should hardly have thought it possible to express so many contending emotions in one and the same face. I could do nothing but copy it; every stroke that differed from it would represent a deviation from the character.' So much for what has been called the emptiness of that head.

Behind him kneels again Sarah Young, sympathizing with his suffering. Mr Gilpin finds this trait unnatural and the moral reprehensible. To be sure! It would perhaps have been better if after Rakewell's marriage the girl had not appeared again. I too thought so once, and Mr Gilpin, as a clergyman, is doubly deserving of forgiveness. But the notion is and remains more readily thought than experienced; it is a good instance of conduct for those who like to live by examples yet do not always have one handy. But the heart, the heart—has its own rules. True love, especially in the heart of a gentle woman but of strong feeling, can only be extinguished, if it can ever be extinguished, which I rather doubt, by a very great lapse of time, whatever else its fate may be. If this is so, is there anything unnatural here? It would be little to the honour of human nature if such love were unnatural. But what of the reprehensible aspect? This too clearly lies only in the breaking of frigid rules of conduct, of which the heart knows nothing. It would be a wicked world in which trespassing of this sort did not happen occasionally. But, of course, a still wickeder one if a sly imitation of such honourable trespassing were to find just that forgiveness or even pity to which only the original could lay claim. In this way, alas! art has made it almost hazardous for man to be natural Besides, we must remember here that Sarah Young, a good-natured, simple creature, is not of that social standing where early enough a girl is taught a certain semblance of virtue, which stands to its true exercise in the relation of smartness on parade to courage and bravery in the field. The whole value of the former (and indeed it is very valuable) rests ultimately upon the possibility of giving support to the latter, or here and there compensating praeter propter for the lack of it. Without that possibility it would all be hollow machinery. If Mr Gilpin had once preached before such people on the text, 'I was sick and in prison and ye have not visited me', how would he have judged, and have had to judge a female member of his congregation who after the sermon would have been so incautious with her heart as to enter the Fleet and Bedlam like Sarah Young, without any hope of earthly reward? The answer, I think, is quite simple. One of the warders, who of course may not quite realize their relationship, seems to be touched by the girl's suffering. He tries to avert her face from Rakewell in a way that does honour to his feeling. It is pleasing to see that the man's hands, despite the hard use for which they are paid, have not unlearned such behaviour.

Of the cells, we see here only those numbered 54, 55 and 56. Number 56 is shut. We shall glance for a moment into the two open ones, and then shut them too. In number 54 lies raving religious mania, and in number 55 exaltation building castles in the air. The scenes are very accurately visualized and carried out with almost terrible realism. If 56 had contained unhappy love, then the three cells would be just those which are in greatest demand in lunatic asylums. A glance thrown into those sad comers renders all description superfluous; and for their consideration philosophy is in everybody's hands; therefore only a few words of perhaps needful explanation.

Hogarth has given to the saint in natura, No. 54, three more in effigie for company, Saint Laurence, Saint Athanasius, and Saint Clement. The idea is rather crude. Whether some special traits in the lives of these men could justify such treatment, I do not know. People like us, though we read legenda, rarely read Legendas. If, however, as we are almost led to believe, the mockery was aimed at the saints of that Church in general, then the question arises whether it would not perhaps be advisable to assign to a protestantism of that kind the vacant place next to St Laurence, till the matter was settled. The good sun has, as we see, risen also above that cell and that crucifix, and we shall follow its example.

In No. 55, upon a throne of straw, and crowned with straw by his own hands, sits the political maniac. Everything around him is light, only the sceptre has full oriental weight. Before the cell stand a couple of girls in rich, pretty silks. Are they perhaps ladies of the Court? They are just being received in audience, and at the same time receive from a distance a benediction which they accept with much better grace than was intended. Each clings to the other, and through that support finds the strength to look at what by herself she would not even have dared to imagine. But seriously, what are the ladies doing here? Do they want to stay perhaps? Or like Sarah Young to clothe the naked? or merely to look at the naked and behave charmingly as if they did not see them? The girls must have great freedom, to be sure, if they can lose themselves to this extent, and much ill-breeding if they forget themselves so much. That is why Hogarth placed them in his masterly way right in the midst of those who are allowed to walk about freely. Papa and Mamma do not know a word about it; of this Papas and Mammas should take note.

What is usually permitted to the dead in the churchyards proper only at night-time, those buried here are allowed, under certain conditions, by day as well, that is, the liberty to rise from their graves and walk. Only they must not overdo it, or, as was mentioned already, they will be put in chains, just as the others, if they do not listen to reason, are packed into sacks and thrown into the Rhine. Of these daylight spectres Hogarth gives us here, not counting the two damsels, only six. Rather few to be sure for such a ghost-seer and painter. We could hardly forgive him, had he not in his other works abundantly made good that omission, and drawn many a Bedlamite in partibus, or those who should more properly have been here.

On the stairs to the left hovers a sort of trio, almost like a Bedlam version of Faith, Hope and Charity. They seem to belong together and yet these three heads could well be farther away from one another than any three fixed stars, forming just such a triangle. Everything is mere appearance. Each is a world to himself and none provides light for the others, and none eclipses the other; each has its own light. If there is anyone who does not yet know that it is the head which makes the world and not the world which makes the head, he should look here. Merciful Heaven, what is man? Or rather what is the world? 'But are you aware that you are sitting in a lunatic asylum?' asked a man once in exasperation of a maniac whom he wanted to convert, upon which the latter looked at him with the greatest composure and retorted, 'But are you sure that you are not living in one?' The stranger pondered this and was silent, the maniac was silent too, but probably his capacity for pondering had vanished long ago. What became of him afterwards is not known. The stranger, however, after he had stepped out of the asylum into the world again, is said to have realized that there was between the two worlds, instead of a sharp dividing line, a sort of no-man's-land, and to have been on his guard all his life from then on against a philosophy which properly belongs only to the neutrality strip.

Faith here with his triple cross and simple crown (thus Hogarth expresses himself when he wants to indicate the Triple Crown and simple cross) sings his mass with his little bleating mouth in such a way that not a syllable of it is heard in the neighbouring systems. Hope with the music book upon his head continues fiddling, and melancholy love with his heavy theme hanging on his breast from a little ribbon continues to dream a lamento. The dog is barking at him, just as at other times it barks at the patron saint of the house, the moon, and he heeds it just as little as the moon. The stalks of straw with which madness is so fond of crowning itself form here a rope round his neck, perhaps as a first, merely poetical attempt to crown love at last. A mouth with such a look will not easily speak again; though the folded hands have this very day carved the precious name on the tree which has descended from a glade to serve here as banisters: 'Charming Betty Careless.' Of course it is sad! But how in all the world did such a mouth, such a forehead, and such a disposition to hollow-eyedness come in touch with Betty Careless? and the old shepherd with such a love at all? The violinist's idea to put the music book over his head so as to give the appearance of a music-stand is quite in keeping with Bedlam, and certainly provides a touch of originality. Whereas the multitude of rings on his fingers belongs among the fashions which Bedlam shares with the rest of the world, and are nothing unusual.

The wall between numbers fifty-four and fifty-five has a rather encyclopaedic appearance, at least in comparison with the cells: a three-masted ship, a crescent moon, a projection of the globe with the Antarctic circle still vacant but having most of the remainder covered by Britannia, more precisely by an English halfpenny hanging from a chain; a bomb-shell which is projected beyond all these projections, the lower part of which looking rather like a compass, and the upper part like geometrical hyphens. All this, with the exception of the medal which, as we shall hear, was daubed on it twenty-eight years later by a notorious rogue, seem to be the work of the thinker who with charcoal in hand is still occupied in prolonging one of the strokes, which, if he goes on like that, will soon reach the door of number fifty-five. Just in front of his nose we read the word 'longitude'. This is really the name of a certain charming Betty of another sort whose luckless lovers, alas! haunt the walls of Bedlam to this very day. The good lady demanded from her suitors neither wealth nor beauty nor possessions; there was just as little mention of family trees as of acres, and least of all youth. To possess her and her gold she merely demanded the solution of a puzzle. The affair caused an incredible sensation, and the result was for many the most melancholy in the world. Some who only wished to possess the lady proved tolerably lucky; others who wooed her only for the sake other money puzzled themselves silly, entangled themselves in ropes and strokes and calculation and tricks, which in the end they themselves no longer understood, and so not uncommonly ended their lives in Bedlam. The strokes which our man is making here are of that sort, and the shells which he causes to be thrown all aim at the acquisition of that Charming Longitude. The old man behind him too, who is peering through the rolled-up astronomical chart, is not really looking at the sky, but towards that same beauty, and is the rival of the bombadier. In front of him, a tailor squats upon his heels with the pattern card upon his head, like the violinist with his music book. He is almost bursting with laughter over the vain efforts of the two longitude-seekers, and his mockery is aimed especially at the old man with the scroll. 'Fool,' he seems to say, 'look, like this you must cut your paper and hold it if you want to measure length; that is how I find my longitudes, and compared with them yours are mere child's play.' Nor is he so far out, since the old man's methods for discovering longitudes are of just as little use to geography as to the art of tailoring. That one fool laughs at another is, of course, silly enough, but not uncommon, either within or without the lunatic asylum, but there is something more to it here. It is said that at that time there was in fact a tailor in Bedlam who believed that to cut out a garment for the master- piece of creation, which would fit the beautiful form as the beautiful form fitted the beautiful soul, was not only one of the most important occupations for a rational person, but also immeasurably more difficult than, say. Sir Isaac Newton's unprofitable arts. That is why the poor devil is here. The punishment is hard, especially for a tailor, a creature who as a reward for 'making' men, in zona temperata at least, is made fun of at every opportunity by these very people, in the manner of barbarians from the zona torrida, who have neither morals nor tailors. The medal on the wall is, as mentioned above, the reverse of an English halfpenny. It represents a seated Britannia with somewhat dishevelled hair, and bears the date 1763. If one looks a little more closely, one notices a chain which passes from under the medal on the right towards number fifty-four. There would have been more room for the chain above it. But a medal with the chain above would hang from the chain, and in England the words ‘hang’ and 'chain', even if used of medals, readily remind one of more important things than orders and child's play. Hogarth thus meant to say: in the year 1763 Britannia was, or deserved to be, in chains in Bedlam. The Glorious Peace concluded at that time seemed, to some, much too peaceful; it should have been much more bellicose, they thought, and would then have been still more glorious. Britannia could have done better, said one; she ought to have been cleverer, said another; she deserves to be in a lunatic asylum, said Hogarth. Ecce Signum. There stands the blasphemy, and in a language, besides, which the whole world can understand, and in a Plate which the whole world will buy. Nay, what makes the crime still worse and qualifies the author if not for the block, at least to be an inmate of the Bastille for life, is that it was not a youthful escapade of his. A year before his death, in the sixty-fifth year of his life when he ought to have known better, and after that Plate had already existed for twenty-eight years, he arranged for Britannia to have a place on it. Still worse, he advertised the fact that he had only put her here in the year 1763, whereas the Plate dates from 1735. Thereby the rascal seems in addition to indicate that he dreaded far more to be accorded by posterity the venerable epithet of a new prophet, than that of a traitor by his contemporaries. That was very wicked. But are we looking at it properly? Is that really so? In such cases experience may help. What did wise Britannia do when she learnt of it? She did what might be a fair rule for every less wise and less experienced Patria. The wise and good mother smiled at the idea of a beloved child whose heart she knew, and she forgave. Thus to learn to know hearts and how to deserve their homage, that would be the thing; wit is but a feather.

The painter of satires could learn something new from this Plate. The idea of adapting engravings to the times, through additions, is excellent, and deserves imitation. Although, in our popular engravings, we already find traces of that method, for instance in the 'Game of Goose' where the version of 1756 bears little resemblance to that of 1796. We find there different customs, different inns and different geese. Oh! my good Hogarth. Had you looked into the last decade of your century, not a wall and not even the ceiling here would have remained empty! A Princess Europa who, in 1792, mense Fervidor, is about to elope with a bull for the second time; what a subject for that little space between numbers fifty-five and fifty-six! And for a ceiling fresco. Brothers with his brethren on clouds of visible darkness kneeling and prophesying calamity and the Millennium.

The meaning of the little chapel carved on the post near the stairs with the letters H.S. on it, I do not understand, nor the L.E. on the wall next to number fifty-five. That syllable would be pronounced by an Englishman as Lee, and might remind one of Lee, the unhappy poet, who for some time, as we know, occupied one of these cells. The letters, however, are open to other interpretations, but I shall not venture any further. The elucidation of dark passages in the works of philosophers at liberty is already slightly disagreeable, and becomes twice as unpleasant with the opera of those who lie in chains, if only on account of the very doubtful credit which would be accorded to an interpreter who possessed the happy facility of succeeding in this.

So, not another word. It may be that I shall return to some Plates of this and the preceding series. Indeed, I shall have to come back to several of them. But to that eighth Plate—never again in my whole life. I cannot and will not deny that it has been a painful task for me. I know nothing with which to compare my feelings at the end of this Chapter but the indescribable sense of well-being which accompanied the first lungful of air which I drew when in October 1775 I emerged again after a short visit to that tomb into the open air of Moorfield (263-271).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Astronomer

The future of knowledge is at stake, as Shesgreen notes: "Science has claimed two victims ... the fellow peering at the ceiling ... is an astronomer” (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Astronomer

Shesgreen

In the hospital science has claimed two victims. The fellow peering at the ceiling through a roll of paper which he imagines to be a telescope is an astronomer (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Astronomer

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

In front of the man figuring the longitude is a mad astronomer observing the stars through a roll of paper (170).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Astronomer

Ireland

Near him are two astronomers, one with a paper rolled up to imitate a telescope, gazing at the roof, in the idea that this is “The spacious canopy of heaven, fretted with golden fires.” The other, delineating the firing off a bomb and a ship moored at a distance, is an immediate ridicule of Whiston’s project for the discovery of the longitude,--an object which at this time engaged the attention of the philosophical world, and in the fruitless search after which many a feeble head hath become mad, north and north-west! (157)

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Astronomer

Uglow

a blind astronomer plays wit a paper telescope (257).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

A very forlorn gentleman laments, driven insane by his love for a prostitute. He still wears his noose from a suicide attempt.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

Shesgreen

a figure who suffers from depression over the loss of his love; he has carved her name (“Charming Betty Careless”)* on the banister and wears her picture. The collar around his neck suggests he has attempted to hang himself (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

Quennell

Hogarth has inserted a portrait of William Ellis, who was believed to have run mad as a direct result of his passion for a youthful strumpet. He has inscribed her name of the balustrade “Charming Betty Careless”: a young woman, celebrated alike for the sweetness and innocence of her face and the outrageous lubricity of her conduct, who is also mentioned in Amelia. He had happened, during his youth, writes Fielding, “to sit behind two ladies in a side-box at a play, where, in the balcony on the opposite side, was placed the inimitable Betty Careless . . . One of the ladies, I remember, said to the other—‘Did you ever see anything look so modest and so innocent as that girl over the way?’ Yet . . . I myself . . . had a few mornings before seen that very identical picture of all those engaging qualities in bed with a rake at a bagnio, smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenity, and swearing and cursing with all the impudence and impiety of the lowest and most abandoned trull of a soldier”. Blind and deaf to the riot that surrounds him, William Ellis, in rigid abstraction, sits mourning over his lost beloved (136).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

Ireland

a poor gentleman, with his hands clasped together, that appears by the inscription of “Charming Betty Careless,” which he has chalked upon a board, to be “Craz’d with care, and cross’d by hopeless love.” He is absorbed in thought, and his whole soul so engrossed by the charms of his Dulcinea, that neither the discordant sounds of the fiddler, whose trembling string “Grate harshly on the nerve auricular,” nor the roar of the pope, who is furiously denouncing destruction on all heretics, nor the ear-piercing noise of a barking cur, can awake him from his reverie (157-158).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

Uglow

Some are victims of love, like the brooding man who has scribbled “Charming Betty Careless” on the stair rails. This is William Ellis, unhinged by his passion for Betty Careless, a prostitute whose innocent-looking sweetness was famously at odds with her promiscuity, drinking, smoking, and trooper-like swearing (257).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Depressed

Lichtenberg

melancholy love with his heavy theme hanging on his breast from a little ribbon continues to dream a lamento. The dog is barking at him, just as at other times it barks at the patron saint of the house, the moon, and he heeds it just as little as the moon. The stalks of straw with which madness is so fond of crowning itself form here a rope round his neck, perhaps as a first, merely poetical attempt to crown love at last. A mouth with such a look will not easily speak again; though the folded hands have this very day carved the precious name on the tree which has descended from a glade to serve here as banisters: 'Charming Betty Careless.' Of course it is sad! But how in all the world did such a mouth, such a forehead, and such a disposition to hollow-eyedness come in touch with Betty Careless? and the old shepherd with such a love at all? The violinist's idea to put the music book over his head so as to give the appearance of a music-stand is quite in keeping with Bedlam, and certainly provides a touch of originality. Whereas the multitude of rings on his fingers belongs among the fashions which Bedlam shares with the rest of the world, and are nothing unusual (267-268).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Dog

A dog, frequent symbol of sexuality and arousal, barks at the depressed gentleman who has tried to hang himself for the unrequited love of a prostitute.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Drawing

The future of knowledge is at stake, as Shesgreen notes: "Science has claimed two victims ... the fellow peering at the ceiling ... is an astronomer. Behind him the fellow who has drawn the ship ... is attempting to discover a scheme for calculating longitude" (35) This figure is also notable, as he has drawn yet another globe, adding macrocosmic import to the actions here.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Drawing

Shesgreen

The fellow peering at the ceiling through a roll of paper which he imagines to be a telescope is an astronomer. Behind him the fellow who has drawn the ship, mortar and shot, earth, moon and various geometric patterns is attempting to discover a scheme for calculating longitude (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Drawing

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

Between the two doors is a lunatic writing on the wall, calculating the longitude. To his left is a diagram of the earth with meridians and arcs with “North Pole” at one end, “Antarctic Circle” at the other, and “Longitude” at the side. Other diagrams show a ship, a crescent moon, and "LE," which may stand for the dramatist Nathaniel Lee (1653?-1692), who went mad in 1684 and was confined in Bedlam till 1689. The mortar discharging a bomb refers to a plan proposed by William Whiston (1667-1752) for discovering the longitude (Gen. Works, 2, 126). The globe (and in the second state, the symbol of Britain) is connected with the religious fanatics door by a chain drawn on the wall (170).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Drawing

Quennell

An element of contemporary satire is provided by a crazy theorist, who illustrates on the dirty plaster wall a scheme then being seriously discussed by the devotees of Natural Science—“Whiston’s proposed method of discovering the Longtitude, by the firing of bombs.” Finally, seated at the bottom of the sairs, is an object-lesson in the perils of love (136).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Drawing

Uglow

another man scrawls on the wall, by a diagram of the world from the “North Pole” to the “Antarctic Circle”/ His is calculating on the lines of William Whiston, the renegade Newtonian and Whig philosopher whose attempt to assess longitude at sea by firing mortars made him a choice butt of satire (257).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: King

Most disturbing is the regal figure, with crown and sceptre, either, as Shesgreen believes "urinating" or, even masturbating. The ejaculatory spilling of the bowl in the foreground echoes this and recalls the clergyman's similar accident in The Harlot's Progress. Here, without the added humor of the other series, we see symbols of the unnatural, overindulgent and infertile sexuality dangerous to the future of the Empire.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: King

Shesgreen

In cell 55 is a naked man with a crown of straw and a stick as scepter believes he is a king. He urinates (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: King

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

a mad with pride: he wears a straw crown, holds a broken stick for scepter, and unconcernedly urinates straight ahead (170).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: King

Lichtenberg

In No. 55, upon a throne of straw, and crowned with straw by his own hands, sits the political maniac. Everything around him is light, only the sceptre has full oriental weight. Before the cell stand a couple of girls in rich, pretty silks. Are they perhaps ladies of the Court? They are just being received in audience, and at the same time receive from a distance a benediction which they accept with much better grace than was intended. Each clings to the other, and through that support finds the strength to look at what by herself she would not even have dared to imagine. But seriously, what are the ladies doing here? Do they want to stay perhaps? Or like Sarah Young to clothe the naked? or merely to look at the naked and behave charmingly as if they did not see them? The girls must have great freedom, to be sure, if they can lose themselves to this extent, and much ill-breeding if they forget themselves so much. That is why Hogarth placed them in his masterly way right in the midst of those who are allowed to walk about freely. Papa and Mamma do not know a word about it; of this Papas and Mammas should take note (266).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

The series ends with Rakewell in Bedlam, insane and on display for the visiting curiosity seekers. Here, the consequences of Rakewell's behavior are painfully apparent.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Shesgreen

The rake’s life of excesses has finally driven him completely mad. Committed to Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), he is being chained to prevent him from injuring himself (the patch under his breast suggests he may have knifed himself). Half-naked, grinning and tearing his flesh fiercely, he is attended to the end only by the weeping Sarah Young. Two men retrain him, through one is more interested in Sarah than in the patient (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

Rakewell has apparently just had a fit; a patch may designate an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life; the ubiquitous Sarah Young is comforting him and an attendant is fastening manacles on his ankles (169).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Quennell

For the figure of the Rake himself and that of the religious enthusiast, crouched in an adjacent cell, Hogarth had taken suggestions from Cibber’s pair of statues (135).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Paulson, His Life, Art and Times

the mad were kept nearly naked to save clothes (it was cheap, and they might destroy clothing), and slept on straw which was easily cleared away; but these facts became symbols of Tom Rakewell’s reduction to nothingness and connect with a metaphor of apparel that runs through the series. Plate 1 begins with the tailor measuring him for a suit, with the portrait of the closely-muffled miser in the background. From the elegant dressing-down in 2, Rakewell descends to dishevelment in 3 and the elegant attire in which he is arrested in 4; from 6 to the end he is gradually stripped down to the bare forked animal he is in Bedlam (vol. 1 327).

Rakewell is being chained after suffering a (perhaps suicidal) fit. Certain external evidence, however, argues for his death and the unlocking of the fetters, no longer needed: the line from the poetic inscription: “Behold Death grappling with Despair.” suggests that he is at least sinking into death, and the poster after a Pietà also implies death. The general gist of the progress also points to dying rather than struggle as intention; the map of the world set afire by the whore in Plate 3 prefigures the Rake’s being consumed not only by lust but by infection as well—part of the rake syndrome, and an obsessive consequence in Hogarth’s works (the Harlot too died of syphilis). Nevertheless, Hogarth has certainly put Rakewell in a peculiar posture: alluding to Cibber’s statue of Melancholy Madness in the figure, while ironically alluding to a Pietà in the group. The confusion is evident in Hogarth’s small revisions in the shoulders and even the head of the Rake, and in the hands of the warden; most strikingly, he changes the warden in the final state of the print (made many years later, in 1763) to a clergyman, as if he recognized the ambiguity (vol. 1 333).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Uglow

all except Tom are still great in their own mad minds—gods, kings, mighty lovers. Tom has no role. He lies naked on the floor, stripped of clothes and reason, echoing Cibber’s huge statue of Melancholy Madness on the hospital’s gatepost. The path in his breast hints he has tried to stab himself, an event so common in Britain that the French used se suicider as a conscious Anglicism (257-258).

And in his extremity, Tom the piteous individual is almost a type of Christ, suffering for all. In the painting, where he wears a loincloth rather than breeches and Sarah mourns him like a Magdalen, the composition resembles a Deposition from the Cross. Such agony, as Hoadly’s verses say, makes one doubt the mercy of Heaven; in A Rake’s Progress, Hogarth puts the mystery of sacrifice firmly back on earth, among grubby, failed people who buy clothes, catch flies, drink gruel. . . . Tom Rakewell is both a dreaming miser’s son and a version of Everyman, embodying the follies (and genuine madness) of mankind (258).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Dobson

The next scene is in the Fleet; the last in Bedlam. . . . he is an incurable maniac, fettered and dangerous, who tears at himself with the heartrending laugh of the insane (43).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Rake

Lichtenberg

Rakewell lies in the foreground here, naked for the most part, while a man is putting him in chains. The reason for it is that Rakewell is sinking still deeper. In the Microcosmos where he lives now, affairs are ordered very much as they are in the extended Macro-Bedlam, the world itself; not all the madmen are chained, and even the chains have their degrees. Through the long corridor, the catacomb, which we see here, the more harmless are free to walk about, at least as far as the big grating, behind which lives another class, or sect as it is called in ordinary life, having other principles, not in agreement with those on this side of the iron bars; only those of a still lower and more dangerous degree are buried in the numbered cells. Evidently Rakewell had such freedom to start with, but misused it. He began to adopt other principles and, in a mood which we might call exuberant, has given himself a dangerous stab in the region of the heart. He no longer fitted into that little Republic and now is about to be incorporated into another. It is that moment of promotion which our artist has chosen here. The expression of suffering is indescribable, and it is hard to understand how a man like Gilpin, who otherwise does justice to the drawing, could have found that face empty. Mr Ireland fully appreciates our artist. The late Mr Mortimer, a person of the greatest artistic talent, was, as Ireland relates, once asked to draw some of the Passions as Gray presents them successively in his poem, 'Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College'. Among them was

Instantly Mr Mortimer drew from his portfolio the eighth Plate of Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress'. 'Here,' said he, pointing to the central figure, 'is everything together. Had I not seen that head I should hardly have thought it possible to express so many contending emotions in one and the same face. I could do nothing but copy it; every stroke that differed from it would represent a deviation from the character.' So much for what has been called the emptiness of that head (264).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Musician

A mad musician plays the violin, but the sheet music is serving as a hat.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Musician

Shesgreen

To his right a mad musician with sheet music on his head saws a violin with a stick; his fingers are covered with rings (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Musician

Lichtenberg

Hope with the music book upon his head continues fiddling (267).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Pope

Religious zeal is mocked by the Pope-like figure on the stairs and the fanatic praying in his cell.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Pope

Shesgreen

The person on the stairs with the cone-shaped hat and the triple cross who seems to sing imagines himself the pope (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Pope

Lichtenberg

Faith here with his triple cross and simple crown (thus Hogarth expresses himself when he wants to indicate the Triple Crown and simple cross) sings his mass with his little bleating mouth in such a way that not a syllable of it is heard in the neighbouring systems (267).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Religious

Religious fanaticismis mocked by the Pope-like figure on the stairs and the fanatic praying in his cell.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Religious

Shesgreen

The man in the first cell sitting on straw chained to a rock is a fanatic; he keeps a crucifix and icons of three saints (“St. Lawrance, St. Athanatius [C]lemen[t]”) beside him. His body is contorted in prayer and his adoring face is screwed up in the likeness of a wild animal (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Religious

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

Inside "54" is a religious fanatic with medallions inscribed "[C]lemen[t],” “St. Athanatius,” and “St. Lawrance" on his wall and a wooden cross, the object of his adoration (169-170).

The figures of Rakewell and the religious fanatic in Cell 54 are meant to recall Caius Gabriel Gibber's statues of melancholy and raving madness, at that time over the portal of Bedlam. "[Colley] Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers," as Pope called them (Dunciad, Bk. I, 1. 32), are now in the Guildhall Museum, London. The pose of Rakewell's head and left arm, however, may have been based on Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder's etching. The Painter torn between Olympus and Everyday Life (a drawing dated 1577 is reproduced in F. Wurtenberger, Mannerism, London, 1963, p. 160). Hogarth's idea and composition in Pl. 7 bear a general resemblance to Gheeraerts' design (170).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Religious

Lichtenberg

Hogarth has given to the saint in natura, No. 54, three more in effigie for company, Saint Laurence, Saint Athanasius, and Saint Clement. The idea is rather crude. Whether some special traits in the lives of these men could justify such treatment, I do not know. People like us, though we read legenda, rarely read Legendas. If, however, as we are almost led to believe, the mockery was aimed at the saints of that Church in general, then the question arises whether it would not perhaps be advisable to assign to a protestantism of that kind the vacant place next to St Laurence, till the matter was settled. The good sun has, as we see, risen also above that cell and that crucifix, and we shall follow its example (266).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

These events occur despite the self-sacrificial actions of Sarah Young who Paulson calls the "Good Samaritan" figure (Popular 163); she labors in vain, though because it appears that some souls are truly damned. In this age of sexual excess, asks Hogarth, is England's one?

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Shesgreen

is attended to the end only by the weeping Sarah Young (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

the ubiquitous Sarah Young is comforting him (171).

[Sarah Young’s] presence in Bedlam—Tom’s final scene—may have been the cause of his fit. A least this is one part of her effect; she is oppressive and sticky, and she appears in five of the eight plates. She is doubtless an ideal of loyalty and love, but Hogarth cannot refrain from making a comment about such goodness as it affects the malefactor: she is part of the Rake’s intolerable burden which he has brought upon himself (44).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Quennell

Sarah Young, who has as usual reappeared, weeps over him, but weeps in vain (135).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Ireland

But in this scene, dreary and horrid as are its accompaniments, he is attended by the faithful and kind-hearted female whom he so basely betrayed. In the first plate we see him refuse her his promised hand. In the fourth she releases him from the happy fangs of a bailiff; she is present at his marriage. In the hope of relieving his distress, she follows him to a prison. Wishing to soothe his misery and alleviate his woe, she here attends him in a madhouse! What a return for deceit and destruction!

The Reverend Mr. Gilpin, in his elucidation of these eight prints, asserts that “this thought is rather unnatural, and the moral certainly culpable.” With the utmost deference for his critical abilities, I must entertain a different opinion. We have had many similar examples of female attachment. If it be culpable to forgive those which are in bonds, to forgive those which are in prison, and to comfort those which are in affliction, what meaning have the divine precepts of our holy religion?

The female mind is naturally credulous, affectionate, and—in its attachments—ardent. If, in her peculiar situation, her assiduities must be deemed in any degree culpable, let us remember that this is but a frail vessel of refined clay. When the awful record of her errors is unrolled, may that sigh which was breathed for the misery of a fellow-mortal waft away the scroll, and the tears which flowed for the calamities of others float the memorial down a stream of oblivion! (153-154).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

It is a question with Hogarth, however, whether we can say that eros is a perversion of caritas, or whether caritas is a sublimation of eros. Sarah Young is the Rake’s cast-off mistress, whose love—once thwarted—takes the form of charity; in plate 4 she saves him from the bailiffs with her “widow’s mite” in a gesture which resembles Christ’s in The Pool of Bethesda, and she is last seen administering to him (now himself burned out by syphilis, the end of eros) in Bedlam in a pose which recalls both pietas and Hogarth’s own Good Samaritan. In short, the meaning of his Christ and Good Samaritan is less the sum of a series of resemblances to works of art in the great tradition of European art than to his own recent engravings of A Rake’s Progress (163).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Sarah

Lichtenberg

Behind him kneels again Sarah Young, sympathizing with his suffering. Mr Gilpin finds this trait unnatural and the moral reprehensible. To be sure! It would perhaps have been better if after Rakewell's marriage the girl had not appeared again. I too thought so once, and Mr Gilpin, as a clergyman, is doubly deserving of forgiveness. But the notion is and remains more readily thought than experienced; it is a good instance of conduct for those who like to live by examples yet do not always have one handy. But the heart, the heart—has its own rules. True love, especially in the heart of a gentle woman but of strong feeling, can only be extinguished, if it can ever be extinguished, which I rather doubt, by a very great lapse of time, whatever else its fate may be. If this is so, is there anything unnatural here? It would be little to the honour of human nature if such love were unnatural. But what of the reprehensible aspect? This too clearly lies only in the breaking of frigid rules of conduct, of which the heart knows nothing. It would be a wicked world in which trespassing of this sort did not happen occasionally. But, of course, a still wickeder one if a sly imitation of such honourable trespassing were to find just that forgiveness or even pity to which only the original could lay claim. In this way, alas! art has made it almost hazardous for man to be natural Besides, we must remember here that Sarah Young, a good-natured, simple creature, is not of that social standing where early enough a girl is taught a certain semblance of virtue, which stands to its true exercise in the relation of smartness on parade to courage and bravery in the field. The whole value of the former (and indeed it is very valuable) rests ultimately upon the possibility of giving support to the latter, or here and there compensating praeter propter for the lack of it. Without that possibility it would all be hollow machinery. If Mr Gilpin had once preached before such people on the text, 'I was sick and in prison and ye have not visited me', how would he have judged, and have had to judge a female member of his congregation who after the sermon would have been so incautious with her heart as to enter the Fleet and Bedlam like Sarah Young, without any hope of earthly reward? The answer, I think, is quite simple. One of the warders, who of course may not quite realize their relationship, seems to be touched by the girl's suffering. He tries to avert her face from Rakewell in a way that does honour to his feeling. It is pleasing to see that the man's hands, despite the hard use for which they are paid, have not unlearned such behaviour (265).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tailor

A mad tailor appears, measuring tape in hand.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tailor

Shesgreen

In front of them a wretchedly dressed tailor with a wig of straw, patterns on his hat and tape in his hands, gestures vacantly (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tailor

Lichtenberg

In front of him, a tailor squats upon his heels with the pattern card upon his head. He is almost bursting with laughter over the vain efforts of the two longitude-seekers, and his mockery is aimed especially at the old man with the scroll. 'Fool,' he seems to say, 'look, like this you must cut your paper and hold it if you want to measure length; that is how I find my longitudes, and compared with them yours are mere child's play.' Nor is he so far out, since the old man's methods for discovering longitudes are of just as little use to geography as to the art of tailoring. That one fool laughs at another is, of course, silly enough, but not uncommon, either within or without the lunatic asylum, but there is something more to it here. It is said that at that time there was in fact a tailor in Bedlam who believed that to cut out a garment for the master- piece of creation, which would fit the beautiful form as the beautiful form fitted the beautiful soul, was not only one of the most important occupations for a rational person, but also immeasurably more difficult than, say. Sir Isaac Newton's unprofitable arts. That is why the poor devil is here (269).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Curiosity seekers visit Bedlam to “view the insane.” Uglow contrasts their cruel sense of superiority with Sarah’s true charity (258).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Shesgreen

Two elegantly dressed court ladies, come in curiosity not in charity as Sarah has, smile at his exposed condition (35).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The two young women standing between rooms 55 and 50, the “sane” come to view the "insane," introduce the common satiric analogy between the Madhouse and the outside world. Bedlam was a popular holiday resort of Londoners in the mid-eighteenth century. One holds up her fan to avoid seeing the man in 55 urinating, while her friend (or servant) points in that direction. This scene stimulated Swift’s invocation of Hogarth in his own description of a madhouse in “The Legion Club" (1736) (170).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Quennell

Not until 1770 did it occur to physicians that the constant influx of inquisitive sightseers “tended to disturb the tranquility of the patients”: and, meanwhile, several generations of distinguished men and women had inspected and admired the building, and marveled at the strange humours displayed by the inhabitants. Even Cowper, tendrest of creatures, and one who had himself passed through the valley of the shadow of madness, admits that he has been there. “In those days (he writes to Newton, after the hospital had shut its doors) when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of the holiday ramblers I have been a visitor . . . Though a boy, I was altogether not insensible of the misery of the poor captives . . . But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.” Johnson and Boswell, both introspective and neurotic characters, frequently haunted by the fear of madness, visited Bedlam as late as 1775; and Boswell merely observes that the visit went off without mishap, but that “the general contemplation of insanity was very affecting”. Incidentally, its “indiscriminate admission of visitants” increased the revenues of the hospital by “at least ₤400 a year . . .” (134-135).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Hogarth, His Life, Art and Times

Hogarth’s epitome of Bedlam includes his versions of these statues and depicts the visitors as well: they offer the contrast that most impressed him in Bedlam. As he shows, gates of the open ironwork (erected in 1729) kept the most violent patients separate. Off the gallery on both stories opened the cells or bedrooms of the patients, provided with narrow, unglazed windows high up in the wall. These patients were locked in their cells, occasionally taken out in the years for air; some patients were allowed the “liberty of the gallery,” but in general these were reserved for the visitors, who amused themselves by looking into the cells. While this voyeurism was acceptable to mid-eighteenth century London, it was especially characteristic of the fashionable folk Rakewell emulated who now come to observe him (vol. 1 327).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Uglow

On a hot Saturday in September a smart woman might yawn and wonder how to fill an empty afternoon—which would she choose? A visit to Southwark to see flying men fall—or a visit to the madhouse to peer though her fan at a mock king on a throne of straw, pissing in a corner? Bedlam, after all, was quite safe—the “dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold” were firmly manacled on the second floor, and the tourists could saunter confidently along the wide gallery among “inoffensive madmen”, peering at colourful lunatics in little side cells. These piquant visits could always be justified, as Steele said:

A Rake's Progress: Plate 8: Tourists

Lichtenberg

Before the cell stand a couple of girls in rich, pretty silks. Are they perhaps ladies of the Court? They are just being received in audience, and at the same time receive from a distance a benediction which they accept with much better grace than was intended. Each clings to the other, and through that support finds the strength to look at what by herself she would not even have dared to imagine. But seriously, what are the ladies doing here? Do they want to stay perhaps? Or like Sarah Young to clothe the naked? Or merely to look at the naked and behave charmingly as if they did not seee them? The girls must have great freedom, to be sure, if they can lose themselves to this extent, and much ill-breeding, if they forget themselves so much (266).