“Ora,” writes an appreciative Venetian biographer of Hogarth, “conduce una bella dalla barca in cui nacque ad un albergo di Londra, da un magnifico palazzo in un lupanare, dal lupanare in prigione, dalla prigione all’ ospitale, dall’ ospitale alla fossa.” This is the tersest summary I know. The Venetian loses not a word. From the cottage where she was born to an inn; from an inn to a palace; thence to a bagnio, thence to prison, thence to a sick-room, thence to the grave. This is the history of Kate Hackabout.
Each tableau in the Harlot’s Progress is complete in itself; but there is a “solution of continuity”—the progression is not consecutive. More than once a hiatus occurs. Thus, it is Mother Needham, the horrible procuress, who first accosts the innocent country girl in the inn-yard; and it is the infamous Colonel Charteris who is leering at her. The magnificent “palazzo” belongs, however, to a Jew financier; and after the disturbance of the table kicked over, and the gallant behind the door, we can understand how she sinks into the mistress of James Dalton the highwayman. But how comes she to be dressed in brocade and silver when she is beating hemp in Bridewell? The Grub Street Journal tells us that the real Hackabout was so attired when by the fiat of nine justices she was committed to penitential fibre-thumping; but the pictorial Kate in the preceding tableau, sitting under the bed-tester with the stolen watch in her hand, is in very mean and shabby attire. Do people put on their best clothes to go to the House of Correction in? or, again, when being captured—Sir John Gonson allowed her to dress herself, discreetly waiting outside the door meanwhile—did she don her last unpawned brocaded kirtle and her showiest lappets, in order to captivate the nine stern justices withal? The fall to the garret, after her release from prison, I can well understand. Some years have elapsed. She has a ragged little wretch of a boy who toasts a scrap of bacon before the fire, while the quacks squabble about the symptoms of her malady, and the attendant harridan rifles her trunk—it is the same old trunk with her initials in brass nails on it that we see in the yard of the Bell Inn, Wood Street, in Scene the First?—of its vestiges of finery. The ragged boy is, perchance, James Dalton, the highwayman’s son, long since translated to Tyburnia. The real Hackabout’s brother was indeed hanged with much completeness. But I can’t at all understand how in the next tableau this poor creature, when her woes are all ended, has a handsome and even pretentious funeral, moribund, as we saw her, in her dismal garret but just before. Had Fortune cast one fitful ray on her as she sank into the cold dark house? Had a bag of guineas been cast to jingle on her hearse? She was a clergyman’s daughter, it seems. Had the broken-hearted old curate in the country sent up sufficient money to bury his daughter with decency? Had the sisterhood of the Hundreds of Drury themselves subscribed for the enlargement of obsequies which might excuse an orgy? There is plenty of money from somewhere in this death-scene, to a certainty. The boy who sits at the coffin foot, winding the string round his top, has a new suit of mourning, and a laced hat. That glowering undertaker has been liberally paid to provide gloves and scarves; the clergyman—I hope he’s only a Fleet chaplain—has evidently been well entertained; there is a whole Jordan of gin flowing: gin on the coffin-lid; gin on the floor; and on the wall there is even an “achievement of arms,” the dead woman’s scutcheon.
On every scene in the Harlot’s Progress a lengthy essay might be written. Well, is not every stone in this city full of sermons? Are there no essays to be written on the Kate Hackabouts who are living, and who die around us every day? Better for the nonce to close that dreary coffin, wish that we were that unconscious child who is sitting at the feet of Death, and preparing to spin his pegtop amid the shadows of all this wretchedness and all this vice.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Richardson, senior, was a pupil of Charles the Second’s Riley. He was born in 1666, was apprenticed to a scrivener, and at twenty turned painter. In 1734, he edited an edition of Paradise Lost, with notes. He was not a highly educated man, but had given his son a university training; and, once letting fall the unfortunate expression, that “he looked at classical literature through his son,” remorseless Hogarth drew Richardson, junior, impaled with a telescope, the sire peeping through at a copy of Virgil. But Richardson seems to have been an honest, kindly-hearted man; and William Hogarth, as in every case where he had not a downright rogue to deal with, repented of his severity, cancelled the copies of his squib, and destroyed the plate. Richardson was quite a Don in the Art world. He died in 1745, and two years afterwards his collections were sold. The sale lasted eighteen days. The drawings fetched 2,060l.; the pictures, 700l. Richardson’s son, to all appearances, might have served very well as a sample of those monstrous jackasses that the South Sea Bubbler proposed to import from Spain. He declared himself “a connoisseur, and nothing but a connoisseur,” and babbled and scribbled much balderdash in Italianized English. He was not alone. Pope even proposed to found a science of “picture tasting,” and to call it “connoissance.” In our days the science has been christened “fudge.” I have seen the portrait of Richardson the elder, in whose features some one has said that “the good sense of the nation is characterized;” but if this dictum be true, the most sensible-looking man in England must have been a foolish, fat scullion.
[2] “J’ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j’ai publié ces lettres.”—J. J. Rousseau: La Nouvelle Héloise.
[3] Beautiful female faces in Hogarth’s plates and pictures. Among others, the bride-elect with handkerchief passed through her wedding-ring; the countess kneeling to her dying lord (in the Marriage); the charming wife mending the galligaskins in the Distressed Poet; the poor wretch whom the taskmaster is about to strike with a cane, in the Bridewell scene of the Rake’s Progress; the milkmaid, in the Enraged Musician; the blooming English girl (for she is no more an Egyptian than you or I) in “Pharaoh’s Daughter;” the pure soul who sympathizes with the mad spendthrift, in the Bedlam scene of the Rake’s Progress; the hooped belle who is chucking the little black boy under the chin, in the Taste in High Life—a priceless performance, and one that should be re-engraved in this age, as a satire against exaggerated crinoline. Lord Charlemont’s famous picture, Virtue in Danger, I have not seen.
[4] The damages and costs must have amounted to a round sum; but it is to me marvellous that in those days of legal chicanery the action should have been so brief, and so conclusively decided. Those were the days when, if you owed any one forty shillings, you were served with writs charging you with having committed a certain trespass, to wit at Brentford, being in the company of Job Doe (not always John Doe); with “that having no settled abode, you had been lurking and wandering about as a vagabond;” with that (this was in the Exchequer) “out of deep hatred and malice to the body politic, you had kept our sovereign lord the king from being seised of a certain sum, to wit, two millions of money, for which it was desirable to escheat the sum of forty shillings towards the use of our sovereign and suffering lord aforesaid.” In the declaration, it was set forth, that you had gone with sticks and staves, and assaulted and wounded divers people; and the damages were laid at 10,000l., of which the plaintiff was reasonable enough to claim only the moderate sum of forty shillings. The capias took you at once for any sum exceeding 2l., and you had to find and justify bail, if you did not wish to pine in a spunging-house, or rot in the Fleet. These were the days, not quite five thousand, and some of them not quite one hundred and fifty years ago, when criminal indictments were drawn in Latin, and Norman-French was an important part of legal education (see Pope and Swift’s Miscellanies, “Stradling versus Styles”), and prisoners were brought up on habeas laden with chains. See Layer’s case in the State Trials, Lord Campbell’s agreeable condensation in the Lives of the Chief Justices. Layer was a barrister, a man of birth and education, but was implicated in an abortive Jacobite plot. His chains were of such dreadful weight, that he could sleep only on his back. He was suffering from an internal complaint, and pathetically appealed to Pratt, C.J., who was suffering from a similar ailment, to order his irons to be taken off, were it only on the ground of common sympathy. The gentleman gaoler of the Tower, who stood by him on the floor of the court while he made this application, was humanely employed in holding up the captive’s fetters to ease him, partially, of his dreadful burden. Prisoner’s counsel urged that the indignity of chains was unknown to his “majesty’s prisoners in the Tower;” that the gentleman gaoler and the warders did not know how to set about the hangman’s office of shackling captives; that there were no fetters in the Tower beyond the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” and the Spanish Armada relics, and that they had been obliged to procure fetters from Newgate. But Pratt, C.J., was inexorable. He was a stanch Whig; and, so civilly, but sternly remanded the prisoner, all ironed as he was, to the Tower. Christopher Layer was soon afterwards put out of his misery by being hanged, drawn, and quartered; but he was much loved by the people, and his head had not been long on Temple Bar when it was carried off as a relic. It is almost impossible to realize this cool, civil, legal savagery, in the era so closely following Anna Augusta’s silver age. Sir Walter Scott was in evidently an analogous bewilderment of horror when he described the execution of Feargus McIvor: a fiction certainly, but with its dreadful parallels of reality in the doom of Colonel Townely, Jemmy Dawson, Dr. Cameron, and scores more unfortunate and misguided gentlemen who suffered the horrible sentence of the law of high treason at Carlisle, at Tyburn, or on Kennington Common.
[5] Hogarth painted a beautiful separate portrait of her—a loving, trustful face, and such lips—which has been engraved in mezzotint. I should properly have added it to my catalogue of the Hogarthian Beauties.
[6] A similar doubt—was it not by Lord Ellenborough?—has been expressed within our own times.