Читать книгу William Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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LONDON, in the early eighteenth century, comprised the ancient Roman capital, 'the city,' the old Borough of Southwark with a collegiate church, the City of Westminster with the seat of government and another great collegiate church, to which had once been attached a palace; it was surrounded by large, prosperous villages, interspersed with fields and seats of the nobility and gentry; some of these, such as Knightsbridge, Kensington, Paddington and Islington, were slowly being incorporated with the capital, while others, further afield, remained completely detached.

The straggling boundary of this London measured no more than a dozen miles, and the number of inhabitants was 'variously guessed at;' in 1739 the city proper was believed to contain 725,903 souls, some thirty years later a million people, it was supposed, inhabited London, Westminster and Southwark, if generous margins were allowed in the directions of Greenwich and Chelsea; in the absence, however, of any proper census of the population, no one could give with exactitude the number of Londoners; it was, at least, obvious that the city was grossly overcrowded and contained too large a proportion of the seven millions who—according to the same rough computation—inhabited the British Isles.

London was not only the home of the King, the seat of Parliament, a great Port, and one of the most considerable centres of the world's trade, it was the focus of the life of the country, the headquarters of art, of ambition, of learning, of enterprise, and also of luxury, folly, roguery and crime, the focus in a vivid and definite sense.

Bad roads and the extreme difficulty of transport, the dangers and discomforts of travel, isolated the capital in envied splendour and concentrated on the banks of the Thames between Chelsea and the Tower nearly all that was notable in every walk of life; there were few men who aspired to success who did not, sooner or later, make their way, often penniless and on foot, to London; there were few women, eager to exploit their charms, who did not try to find their market in London.

In the capital might be found whatever excitement, whatever novelty, whatever luxury the age afforded, and there might be caught those glimpses of the famous and the infamous, the royal Prince in his gilded coach, the criminal in the filthy pillory, that added zest and colour to life.

The country towns and villages were self-contained communities, where many lived and died contentedly; the manor houses sheltered generations of esquires, who never went further than the nearest country town; but peasants and country gentlemen alike thought with pride and awe of London, where, should they ever venture there, they were jeered at as boobies and Hodges by the smart Cockneys.

Some, however, came, and some stayed and contrived a livelihood out of the manifold activities of the capital.

Soon after King William had driven in state through packed streets of well-dressed people to give thanks for the Peace of Ryswyck in the huge, as yet unfinished, Cathedral of St. Paul's, one of these country adventurers, Richard Hogarth, a hedgerow schoolmaster from Westmorland, was living in Bartholomew's Close.

He had not met with much success in London; the classes he held in Ship Court, Old Bailey, were not sufficiently profitable even for a meagre livelihood, and the poor scholar eked out his means by writing Latin Dictionaries and Grammars and by correcting proof-sheets for the booksellers.

In his modest home was born, November 10th, 1697, his only son, William, named after the King; two daughters, also loyally named after the sister Queens, Mary and Ann, completed the little family that Mr. Hogarth found such difficulty in maintaining in decency. Not only was his classical learning an ill-paid commodity, but he found it far from easy to obtain his dues from the printers for whom he worked. He was, however, of robust, prudent, hard-working North-country yeoman-stock, and, despite all handicaps, he contrived to set up his daughters in a haberdasher's shop in Smithfield, and to apprentice his son, who had shown an inordinate liking for drawing, to Mr. Ellis Gamble, a silversmith, who resided at the Sign of the Golden Angel, Cranbourn Street, in the modish locality of Leicester Fields.

The boy had been taken from school because he covered his copy-books with ornaments, but he soon fretted at the drudgery of engraving heraldic designs on silver plate, and by the time he was twenty years old and out of his indentures he was looking about for some way of escape from a career as an engraver of silversmith's work.

He was full of zest for life and impatient of laborious toil, so set aside, as too difficult, his first plan of becoming a copper-plate engraver—a profession demanding the most delicate technical skill. Nor did the prospect of being a mere copyist appeal to him; he had already filled notebooks with jottings of odd characters and incidents that had taken his fancy and he believed that continued practice of this kind would give him all the proficiency that he required in his art, without the necessity of resorting to that long drudgery which was usually considered essential to success in any branch of graphic art.

In the spring of 1720 William Hogarth engraved two show-cards, one for himself, one for his sisters.

He was prepared to work for booksellers, printers, to produce book plates, shop cards, lottery and entertainment tickets, lids of snuff boxes—indeed to undertake any branch of hack copper-plate engraving whereby he could earn his living.

His own card was conventional in design, but competent in execution; two figures, two putti and two swags of fruit and flowers, all in the neo-classic style, enclosed the enscrolled name W. Hogarth; underneath, on a tablet surrounded by a heavy ornamentation, was the date, April, 1720.

The Misses Hogarth's pretensions were even more modest; they announced that they sold dimities, suits of fustian, ticken and holland, ready-made frocks, flannel waistcoats and 'drawers for Bluecoat boys.'

Mr. Richard Hogarth's children were thus provided for in the humblest walks of commerce; the son had early discovered from his father's example the financial uselessness of 'classical qualifications' and was resolved to make his way by more practical means, and there were no pretensions about the daughters, jolly, sensible girls, with round faces and dark eyes.

The family came, as far as can be known, of pure English stock, free from any admixture of Latin or Celt; they were good-humoured, pugnacious, honest, cheerful, full of common sense and resource, hard-working but fond of decent pleasures and simple fun; William's uncle, Thomas Hogarth (Hogart—Hog garth, swine herd), was a noted wit and comic poet in his native place, Troutbeck, near Windermere, which he never left; he produced 'a mass of poetry,' or rather satirical verse, most of which was rather too lively for general circulation.

William had this same gift of satiric comedy, a quick eye for the absurd, a quick pencil to note it down, a zest for 'shows' from Punch and Judy to a Drury-Lane tragedy, a gift for mimicry, an insatiable curiosity as to the scene in which he found himself.

He was a little, thick-set fellow, fond of fine clothes, clean, neat, plain, with a snub nose and commonplace features, inclined to strut, ready to quarrel, but just, affectionate, a friend to animals, scrupulous in 'paying his way,' industrious, despite a love of leisure and amusement, and fiercely patriotic.

His stock, like his qualities, was plebeian, but he was by no means boorish or rough; to native shrewdness he added Cockney sharpness, the polish the town quickly gives to country wits, and he had been at school long enough to save himself from the charge of illiteracy, while from his father he had received sufficient tincture of classical learning to enable him to understand and use a Latin tag at need, though his spelling of his own language always remained erratic.

Of general culture he had none and his reading had been limited to a few of the most easily accessible English books, such as Gulliver's Travels, Mother Bunch, Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights, but he had been well-disciplined by a long apprenticeship to a difficult craft and his mind was alert and lively enough to find a continual zestful delight in the scene about him; this scene was London and it changed little during the sixty-seven years that William Hogarth lived amid it, nor did he, save for the briefest periods, ever leave the city where he was born.

While, then, the cheerful, pug-nosed ex-apprentice is setting up in business to earn an honest living as a modest copper-plate engraver, while his two young sisters are bustling among their lacets and tapes, their flannels and cambrics, let us, in the manner of the leisured 'ambulator' of the period, survey this scene; without some close acquaintance with it we shall not be able to understand either William Hogarth or his work.