“How I want thee, hum’rous Hogart,
Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art”—
Now Swift wrote this in Ireland, at a distance from means of accuracy, and the “pleasant rogue’s” name was not likely to be found in a calendar of the nobility and gentry. If Bolingbroke or Pope had written to the dean about the rogue and his pleasantries, it is very probable that they might have spelt his name “Hogart,” “Hogard,” “Hoggert,” or “Hogarth.” You must remember that scores of the most distinguished characters of the eighteenth century were of my Lord Malmesbury’s opinion concerning orthography, that neither the great Duke of Marlborough, nay, nor his duchess, the terrible “old Sarah,” nay, nor Mrs. Masham, nay, nor Queen Anne herself, could spell, and that the young Pretender (in the Stuart papers) writes his father’s name thus: “Gems” for “James.” Again, Swift may have suppressed the “th” for mere rhythmical reasons; just as Pope, aux abois between dactyls and spondees, barbarized a name which undeniably before had been pronounced “Saint John” into “Sinjin.” But, on the other hand, Jonathan Swift was not so dizzy when he wrote the Legion Club to have lost one pin’s point of his marvellous memory; and he was too rich in rhymes to have resorted to the pusillanimous expedient of cutting off a letter. If ever a man lived who could have found an easy rhyme to “Hippopotamus,” it was the Dean of St. Patrick’s. I opine, therefore, that when Swift first heard of Hogarth—in the early days of George I.—he was really called “Hogart;” that such a name was carried by the dean with him to Dublin, and that the change to “Hogart” only took place when the great Drapier was dying “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Richard Hogart—whatever he called himself in the scholastic Latinity that converted “Saumaise” into “Salmasius,” and a Dutch logician, “Smygel” into “Smeglesius,”—was educated at St. Bees’ College, in Westmoreland; was too poor, it is thought, after his college course to take orders, and kept school for a time in his native county. His classical accomplishments were considerable. In the manuscript department of the British Museum are preserved some Latin letters by him; and he wrote besides a Latin-English dictionary, and a school-book entitled Grammar Disputatations, which has not attained the fame or immortality of the works of Cocker and Walkingame. It is stated that Richard Hogart was occasionally employed as a corrector of the press; an office then frequently discharged by trustworthy scholars quite extraneous to the recognized staff of the printing-office.
It is certain that, William and Mary reigning, Dominic Hogart came to London, and established himself as a schoolmaster, in Ship Court, Old Bailey. He had married, as it is the wont of poor schoolmasters to do, and his wife bare him two daughters and one son. The girls were Mary and Anne; and have only to be mentioned to pass out of this record:—Who cares about Joseph Mallard Turner’s nephews and nieces? The boy, William Hogarth, was born on the 10th of November, 1697, and stands in the parish register of St. Bartholomew the Great, as having been baptized, November the 28th.
You do not expect me to tell who nursed little chubby-baby Hogarth, whether he took to his pap kindly, and at what age he first evinced an affection for sweet-stuff? Making, however, a very early halt in his nonage, I am compelled to shake my head at a very pretty legend about him, and as prettily made into a picture, some years ago. According to this, little boy Hogarth was sent to a dame’s school, where he much vexed the good woman who boasted “unruly brats with birch to tame,” by a persistence in drawing caricatures on his slate. The picture represents him in sore disgrace, mounted on the stool of repentance, crowned with the asinine tiara of tribulation, holding in one hand the virgal rod of anguish, and in the other the slate which has brought him to this evil estate: a slate much bechalked with libellous representations of his dame. In the background is that Nemesis in a mob-cap, inflexible; around, an amphitheatre of children-spectators; the boys, as suits their boisterous character, jeering and exultant; the girls, as beseems their softer nature, scared and terrified. A very pretty, naïve picture, but apocryphal, I fear. There were no slates in dame-schools in those days. The hornbook, Pellucid, with its Christ Cross Row, was the beginning of knowledge, as the “baleful twig” that “frayed” the brats was the end thereof. If little boy Hogarth had been born at Kirby Thore, I would have admitted the dame-school theory in an instant; but it is far more feasible that he learnt his hornbook at his mother’s knee, and in due time was promoted to a bench in the school his father taught, and an impartial share in the stripes which the good pedagogue distributed. Nor need Dominie Hogart have been by any means a cruel pedagogue. In none of his pictures does Hogarth display any rancour against scholastic discipline (what school-scenes that pencil might have drawn!), and it generally happens that he who has suffered much in the flesh as a boy, will have a fling at the rod and the ferule when he is a man; even if he have had Orbilius for his father. And be it kept in mind, that, although the awful Busby, who called the birch “his sieve,” through which the cleverest boys must pass, and who of the Bench of Bishops taught sixteen mitred ones, was but just dead. Mr. John Locke was then also publishing his admirable treatise on Education, a treatise that enjoins and inculcates tenderness and mercy to children.
Ship Court, Old Bailey, is on the west side of that ominous thoroughfare, and a few doors from Ludgate Hill. By a very curious coincidence, the house No. 67, Old Bailey, corner of Ship Court, was occupied, about forty years ago, by a certain William Hone, an odd, quaint, restless man, but marvellously bustling and energetic: a man not to be “put down” by any magnates, civic, Westmonasterian, or otherwise; and who, at 67, had a little shop, where he sold prints and pamphlets, so very radical in their tendencies as to be occasionally seditious, and open to some slight accusation of ribaldry and scurrility. Here did Hone publish, in 1817, those ribald parodies of the Litany and Catechism for which he stood three trials before the then Lord Ellenborough, who vehemently assumed the part of public prosecutor (staining his ermine by that act), and tried his utmost to have Hone cast, but in vain. As to William Hone, the man drifted at last, tired, and I hope ashamed, out of sedition and sculduddry, and, so far as his literary undertakings went, made a good end of it. To him we owe those capital table-books, every-day books, and year-books, full of anecdote, quaint research, and folk-lore, which have amused and instructed so many thousands, and have done such excellent service to the book-making craft. Be you sure that I have Mr. Hone’s books for the table, day and year, before me, as I write, and shall have them these few months to come. Without such aids; without Mr. Cunningham’s Handbook and Mr. Timbs’ Curiosities of London; without Walpole, Cibber, and “Rainy-day Smith;” without Ned Ward and Tom Brown; without the Somers Tracts and the Sessions Papers; without King and Nicholls’ anecdotes and the lives of Nollekens and Northcote; without a set of the British Essayists, from Addison to Hawkesworth; without the great Grub-street Journal and the Daily Courant; without Gay’s Trivia and Garth’s Dispensary; without Aubrey, Evelyn, and Luttrell’s diaries; without the London Gazette and Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman; without Swift’s Journal to Stella, and Vertue and Faithorne’s maps, and Wilkinson, Strype, Maitland, Malcolm, Gwynn, and the great Crowle Pennant; with plenty of small deer in the way of tracts, broadsides, and selections from the bookstall-keepers’ sweepings and the cheesemongers’ rejected addresses; without these modest materials, how is this humble picture to be painted?
After this little glance behind the scenes of a book-maker’s workshop, you will be wondering, I dare say, as to what was the curious coincidence I spoke of in connection with William Hone’s sojourn in Ship Court, Old Bailey. Simply this. Three years after his Litany escapades, the restless man went tooth and nail into the crapulous controversy between George IV. and his unhappy wife; who, though undoubtedly no better than she should be, was undoubtedly used much worse than she or any other woman, not a Messalina or a Frédégonde, should have been. From Hone’s shop issued those merry, rascally libels against the fat potentate late of Carlton House, and which, under the titles of “The Green Bag,” “Doctor Slop,” the “House that Jack built,” and the like, brought such shame and ridicule upon the vain, gross old man, that all Mr. Theodore Hook’s counter-scurrilities in the high Tory John Bull could not alleviate or wipe away the stains thereof. Ah! it was a nice time—a jocund, Christian time. Reformers calling their king “knave, tyrant, and debauchee;” loyalists screaming “hussey,” and worse names, after their queen. That was in the time of the Consul Unmanlius I should think. Hone’s clever rascalities sold enormously, especially among the aristocracy of the “Opposition.” But Mr. Hone’s disloyal facetiæ from Ship Court were relieved and atoned for by the illustrations, engraved from drawings executed with quite an astonishing power of graphic delineation and acuteness of humour, by a then very young artist named George Cruikshank: a gentleman whose earliest toys, I believe, had been a strip of copper and an etching-needle; who has, since those wild days of ’21, achieved hundreds of successes more brilliant, but not more notorious, than those he won by working for restless Mr. Hone; and whom I am proud to speak of here, with Hogarth’s name at the head of my sheet, now that he, our George, is old, and honoured, and famous. Do I attach too much importance to the works of these twin geniuses, I wonder, because I love the style of art in which they have excelled with a secret craving devotion, and because I have vainly striven to excel in it myself? Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of Homer and Milton in re the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, and say of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial humorist our country has seen only because he is not the first? At any rate, you will grant the coincidence—won’t you?—between the lad George Cruikshank and little boy Hogarth, toddling about Ship Court and perchance scrawling caricatures on the walls, exaggerating in rollicking chalk (I allow him as many brick walls as you like, but no slates) the Slawkenbergian nose of William the Deliverer, or adding abnormal curls to the vast wig of the detested clerical statesman, Burnet.
Little boy Hogarth is yet too young to see these things; but he may be at Gilbert Burnet’s turbulent funeral yet. First, we must get him out of the Old Bailey, where he dwells for a good dozen years at least. Dominie Hogarth has the school upstairs, where he drums Lilly’s Accidence, or perhaps his own Grammatical Disputations into his scholars. Of what order may these scholars have been? The gentry had long since left the Bailey; and you may start, perhaps, to be told that British Brahmins had ever inhabited that lowering precinct of the gallows, and parvyse of the press-room. Yet, in the Old Bailey stood Sydney House, a stately mansion built for the Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, and which they abandoned [circa 1660] for the genteeler locality of Leicester Fields. I don’t know what Sydney House could have been like, or by whom it was inhabited when Hogarth was a little boy; but it was to all likelihood in a tumbledown, desolate condition. In Pennant’s time it was a coachmaker’s shop. The keeper of Newgate may have had children, too, for schooling, but his corporation connections would probably have insured his boy’s admission to Christ’s Hospital, or to Paul’s, or Merchant Taylors’ School, for the keeper of Newgate was then a somebody; and it was by times his privilege to entertain the sheriffs with sack and sugar. Dominie Hogarth’s pupils must have been sons of substantial traders in the Bailey itself—where were many noted booksellers’ shops—or from the adjacent Ludgate, whilom Bowyers Hill, and from Fleet Street, or, perchance, Aldersgate Street; which, not then purely commercial or shopkeeping, was the site of many imposing mansions superbly decorated within, formerly the property of the nobility, but then (1697) occupied by stately Turkey and Levant merchants. And to the dominie’s may have come the offspring of the wealthy butchers of Newgate Market, whose rubicund meat-wives are libellously declared to have been in the habit of getting “over-taken by burnt sherry” by eight o’clock in the morning; and while in that jovial but prematurely matutinal condition, rivalling the flat-caps of the Dark House, Billingsgate, and the pease-pottage sellers of Baldwin’s Gardens—to say nothing of the cake and comfit purveyors to the Finsbury archers—in voluble and abusive eloquence. Bonny dames were these butchers’ wives; lusty, rotund, generous to the poor, loud, but cheery with their apprentices and journeymen, great (as now) in making fortunes for their beast-buying-and-killing husbands; radiant in gold-chains, earrings, and laced aprons, and tremendous at trades-feasts and civic junketings.
And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen years of the boy’s life, assume that he got satisfactorily through his teething, thrush, measles, and chicken-pox perils, and launch him comfortably, a chubby lad, in the midst of the period of which the ruthless Doctor Swift will write a history—the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne—and make up his little bundle for him, ready for his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver of Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields. He may have been sent out to nurse at Tottenham or Edmonton, or, may be, distant Ware, as children of his degree were wont to be sent out (Mr. John Locke’s Education, and Mr. Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor, passim). But, in good sooth, I am loth to turn over my William to the tender mercies of the eighteenth century and the Augustan age. I fear great “Anna” and her era, and for a double reason: first, that people know already so much about the reign of Queen Anne. No kindly book a’ bosom but can follow Sir Roger de Coverley and his tall silent friend the Spectator in their rambles; but has seen Swift walking across the park in mighty fear of the Mohocks; but has taken a dish of coffee at Miss Vanhomrigh’s; but has lounged in the elegant saloon, among the China monsters and the black boys, with Belinda or Sir Plume; but has accompanied Steele from coffee-house to coffee-house, and peeped over his shoulder while he scribbled those charming little billets to his wife; but has seen Queen Anne herself, the “stately lady in black velvet and diamonds,” who touched little Sam Johnson for the evil, and hung round his neck that broad piece of angel gold, which in its more earthly form of a guinea the poor doctor wanted so often and so badly at a subsequent stage of his career. The humorists and essayists of Queen Anne’s days have made them as crystal-clear to us as Grammont and Pepys made those of the Second Charles; and—there! bah! it is mock modesty to blink the truth because my pen happens to be enlisted under such a banner. I could have gone swaggeringly enough into all the minutiæ of Anne’s days, all the glories and meannesses of John Churchill, all the humours, and tyrannies, and quarrels of Pope, and Gay, and Harley, and St. John, if a book called Esmond had never been written. Yet finding myself in this cleft stick, between the historian who wrote of the state of manners at the close of the reign of Charles II., and the novelist, who has made the men and women of Queen Anne’s court and city and army live again, I feel slightly relieved. There is just one little niche left for me. Just three years to dwell upon, while little boy Hogarth is in his swaddling clothes, or is consorting with divers other little brats as diminutive as he, on the doorsteps or the pavement of Ship Court. Three years,—’97, ’98, ’99. Ah! laissez-moi pleurer ces années mortes. Let me linger over these three ignored years. They were a transition time. They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious bonfire that Charles’s roués and beauties lighted up—a shadow shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between their word-paintings, and those of the Spectator and Tatler, there seems a great black blank.