Читать книгу William Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 14

Table of Contents

This being our period, and this a rough sketch of the general conditions of the country, let us return to London and consider it as it was when William Hogarth set up in business there.

Leicester Fields and Covent Garden formed the centre of London's intellectual life, so that it was in the very heart of the artistic metropolis that the young engraver served his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble.

Setting out from this favoured district, our 'ambulator' could proceed eastward to the City proper, by way of Lincoln's Inn and Fleet Street; beyond the confines of Roman London and the Tower a long row of houses lined the river bank to Wapping, Rotherhithe and the Docks, with Bow inhabited by porcelain-workers and scarlet-dyers. Northwards from Leicester Fields was the fashionable district of Soho, St. Giles's and Bloomsbury, which ended abruptly in the three-sided Queen Square, left open on the fourth side for the sake of the rustic view towards the heights of Hampstead and Highgate.

Gray's Inn, Smithfield, and as far as Moorfields, were a densely populated district, west from Covent Garden were Piccadilly, the smart mansions of Saint James's Square and the valley where the Tyburn brook flowed from the village of Marylebone to the Thames at Westminster, which city was reached southwards from Leicester Fields by way of Charing Cross and Whitehall. Westminster straggled out in riverside houses, flanked by marshy fields, nearly as far as the village of Chelsea.

On the Surrey side of the Thames was the city of Southwark, which spread into a rough, unpoliced district—the remains of old Alsatia or thieves' Paradise (which lost the rights of sanctuary in the reign of William III)—and stretched inland to Saint George's Fields, across Lambeth Marsh, toward Rotherhithe in one direction, toward the market-gardens of Battersea, where Lord Bolingbroke lived in retirement, in the other.

If we make, with our 'ambulator,' who is a gentleman of leisure, a close inspection of these districts, we shall have a clear idea of the scenes amid which William Hogarth lived for nearly seventy years and which formed the material of his art.