I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  Now … here’s the rub: my Time engraving also had three figures who had emerged from Temple Coffee House, directing their fire hoses not at the conflagration but at the noble (but unperturbed) king.

  One of the three was Earl Temple, Pitt’s brother-in-law. The other two were portrayed as hacks, the lowest of the low of writers – one was Wilkes and the other, portrayed in his surplice, was the Reverend (for he was that as well) Charles Churchill.

  The reaction came swiftly enough, in a letter from Wilkes. My Time print, he wrote, was ‘not only unfriendly in the highest degree but injudicious.’ However, not content with threatening me, Wilkes proceeded to lecture me, talking down to me as if I were a child: ‘Such a pencil,’ that’s my pencil, by the way, ‘ought to be universal and moral, speak to all ages and to all nations, not to be dipt in the dirt of the faction of a day …’ Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah.

  There was then a pause in events, which I discovered later was because Wilkes was engrossed in his duties guarding French prisoners as a colonel of the Buckinghamshire Militia. Meanwhile the toad-eater was recovering from the pox and destitution; the latter caused by his wife, who enterprisingly took most of his money with her when she left, the former by the many other women who had caused his wife to leave in the first place.

  But when the two of them were ready, they unleashed on me the seventeenth issue of the North Briton, which was the first time, as many have observed, that an entire issue of a magazine was devoted solely to the destruction of a single human being.

  Me.

  I first heard of this dreadful magazine, issued on Saturday 25 September 1762, at the Beafsteak Club, one of the many clubs both Wilkes and I were members of, though he mixed more with the molly young men and I with the older members. Naturally, the first I heard was the tocsin laughter. They were not even reading it in the dining room of the club. They knew its barbs and jibes by heart.

  ‘House painter to the court’ was one jibe I overheard being whispered behind hands. Then there was my ‘insufferable vanity’, my ‘rancour’, ‘malevolence’, ‘envy’, ‘relentless gall’. On and on it went. I fled the club, made my way home as fast as my aching bones would carry me, and sent George Wells out to purchase a copy of the dread magazine.

  I waited in my studio, trying to work on my retouching of the goblet in my Sigismunda painting, yet unable to. Finally George appeared, his expressive face pale, contorted with pity and a desire to soothe, which wounded by the very intensity of its will to heal.

  ‘Mr Hogarth, sir …’

  The good George held the magazine close, as if considering withholding it from me. I snatched it from him more forcefully than I had intended. As I did so, I had a rare moment of clarity as to political issues and the affairs of men:

  For some time now, Wilkes’ self-interested attacks on Bute had caused him to be seen as a champion of liberty. Wilkes cared no more for liberty than I for a stranger’s stool, yet these attacks on me would be cloaked in that garb. I was to be destroyed, so it would appear, not from Wilkes’s unfathomable evil, but in a just cause. Liberty. Oh, why do we mortals misperceive each other so? Why cannot we properly see?

  I sent George away. I tore at the magazine which had been written, designed and printed to destroy me. And there it was. On page one I was accused of copying one of the many prints which had copied me. It was called John Bull’s House Set in Flames and showed Pitt and Charles Churchill putting out a fire in St James’s palace started by Bute.

  I was accused of ridiculing those better than myself: ‘What wonder then that some of the most respectable characters of the age become the objects of his ridicule?’ And insults, insults. ‘Gain and vanity have steered his little bark through life.’

  My little bark? Yes, I am a small man, am I not? And never smaller than now. A small man who has always kept pug dogs. Pug Hogarth. Bark, meaning a little ship, and bark, the noise of a dog. How very clever. How very clever, Mr Wilkes. Or was that particular jibe from the pen of the toad-eater, the catamite Churchill?

  My breath was coming in retching gasps. And I had not even read the worst of the poison print.

  Somehow, I knew it. I knew it before I read it. And there it was, in Wilkes’s vile journal. The attack on Sigismunda. My Sigismunda’s expression was so ridiculous it could only have come from ‘his own wife in an agony of passion; but of what passion no connoisseur could guess.’

  I vomited on the floor of the studio, spattering my breeches. They were mocking Jane. They were mocking … they were saying I had shown my Jane in … I stared at Sigismunda. They had destroyed her forever for me.

  THEY WERE SAYING I HAD PAINTED JANE COMING. THEY WERE SAYING I HAD PAINTED HER IN OESTRUS, LIKE A RUTTING EWE OR COW. OH, MY GOD!

  I took measures, naturally I did. At one wild time I took a hackney to Wilkes’s house at St John’s Gate, not far from my boyhood home. I was aware of the ridiculous figure I cut as I stood, bent and stooped, on his threshold. No doubt I looked as mad as they said I was, even as I rang his bell. Old, sick, mad man.

  The wait was long. My feeble fluttering heart began to wish there would be no reply. I certainly did not ring again. A languid footman in extravagant purple livery finally opened the door.

  ‘I wish to speak to Mr … to your master.’ There! I could not even bring forth the devil’s name.

  He looked down at me. I had come in my indoor garb: my red cap, old worn breeches. I may even have had my smock on still. Oh, where was the proud popinjay of my youth, swaggering with his sword?

  ‘Do you have an appointment, sir?’

  He wasn’t letting me in. Was there to be no end to my shame on this earth? ‘No, I am … I am … I am the painter …’

  ‘Mr Wilkes is away, at present, sir. He’s in Buckinghamshire.’

  Then he shut the door in my face.

  Jane, my dear darling Jane, did her best to help me. Of course she did. She held me like a baby when I cried, which, I am afraid to say, I did more and more often. She made me broth when I took to my bed, where I spent something like half of my days.

  But they had spoiled even Jane for me, the villains – Wilkes and his toad-eater Churchill. When I looked at Jane I saw their vile, corrupt jibe; I saw Jane as Sigismunda in oestrus.

  Others, be they visitors or friends or just the people who while away one’s days, tried to help. I would admit few, not knowing anymore who came out of kindness and who to mock, laughing behind their hands.

  Hayman-adequate? Hudson? David Garrick? Daniel Lock? My God, even Reynolds tried to see me, but I gave orders he not be admitted. There were so many. I lost track of who was who. The pains in my body increased.

  Roubiliac came and held my hand, for I have always loved and revered him. Days later I heard he had died. I staggered from my sick bed to his funeral, where not one of my erstwhile friends, the artists, the one-time Old Slaughter group, even spoke to me. I was to be shunned, it seemed.

  The people who came to my bedside were the only ones I saw. I did not venture out to the clubs any more, or even to the streets, for fear of the laughter, the mockery, the ridicule.

  When my health improved a little, I tried to take small revenge on my tormentors. To my amazement, I found I could still draw. I produced an engraving of Wilkes looking even uglier than nature made him, with the cap of liberty as a dunce’s cap on a pole.

  And when Churchill wrote a poem about me, I retaliated with an engraving in which I scored out everything in my self-portrait, destroying myself with the burin to show what they had done to me, replacing it with Churchill as a drunken bear, with drooling mouth and drunken eyes. Wilkes was in it, as an ape, and the North Briton and …

  But in truth I knew Churchill had undone me, finished what Wilkes had started. Jane tried to stop me reading Churchill’s Epistle to William Hogarth. She forbade the servants to bring it to me. But eventually I left the house, for the first time in months, and purchased a copy. The vendor did not recognise the scrofulous old man who
bought the poem as the object of its venom.

  Charles Churchill’s poem about me was six hundred and thirty-eight lines long. Its stock of gall was darkened by the gonorrhoea which was ravaging him, though to be fair the same ailment was also ravaging me. It was the equivalent in verse to Wilkes’s issue of the North Briton in prose. I believe them to be, together and separately, the most hate-filled works of letters ever produced by human hand, if indeed the hands which produced them were human and not fiends from hell.

  My entire work as an artist was shrunk, mocked, condemned and damned:

  What but rank folly, for thy curse decreed,

  Could into satire’s barren path mislead.

  I was shamed by name, no cover names, however transparent, like Pope’s ‘Sporus’ for my friend John Hervey:

  HOGARTH – I take thee, candour, at thy word,

  Accept thy proffer’d terms, and will be heard;

  Thee I have heard with virulence declaim,

  Nothing retained of candour but the name.

  And, finally, Charles Churchill – you see I have no longer even the strength to use my insulting name for him – Charles Churchill, I say, demanded my death: a matter in which I fear it will not be long before I can give my enemies their satisfaction.

  HOGARTH stand forth – I dare thee to be tried

  In that great court, where conscience must preside.

  I have taken to my bed, with no particular wish to leave it. My appetite for food, with the whimsicality of appetites, has returned, and I partake regularly of steak and of coddled eggs.

  Jane is calm. She is with me all the time. She gives me what happy tidings she can, even telling me that people are saying my Rake was not destroyed in flames after all, but was saved. I do not believe it, but do not say so.

  ‘And Harlot?’

  She shakes her head, sadly, grey eyes on mine.

  ‘I was a great artist, was I not, my Jenny?’

  ‘You were and are that, Billy, my darling.’

  Jane accedes with touching willingness to my every wish. Sometimes my thoughts of women and their flesh return, sometimes even causing me to clutch and closet my drooping, withered member, not at all what it once was, in their memory.

  I must lay down this pen soon, together with my crayon, my burin, my brushes and my life. Jane tells me constantly that I am a great painter and I believe her. I look at her and suddenly I understand my life. She was my life, all that was good and happy about it. I should have understood that at the time.

  I cry out to her, my Jane, as she holds my hand. I sit bolt upright in bed, in my nightgown and cap.

  ‘If there is something else, I will find you!’

  She nods, tears in her eyes, but with that same serious calm she had about her when I first set eyes on her.

  If there is something else I will find you, my love. I promise you that.

  Author note

  This is a work of fiction, so some real events have been bent to the demands of the narrative: others omitted altogether, others invented.

  Naturally, I read the main authorities on Hogarth before writing this novel. These are David Bindman, Austin Dobson, Matthew Craske, Derek Jarrett, John Nicholls, Ronald Paulson, Sean Shesgreen and Jenny Uglow. I also read everything Hogarth himself had written.

  As far as the background to this fascinating period is concerned, I read widely, out of interest, and so it is impossible to mention all the books individually here. The only one I would single out is The A-Z of Georgian London (Introductory Notes by Ralph Hyde), London Topographical Society Publication No. 126 (1982).

  I started this novel out of love for the art of William Hogarth. I finished it with that love enhanced, and a great respect and fondness for the man who produced it.

  As I write, the only monument to Hogarth I know of is a small bust diagonally opposite the public toilets in Leicester Square. I hope readers of this novel will join me in hoping that England one day does better by a man who has a strong claim to be its national artist.

  Michael Dean, June 2012