The scene is a grimy London street, its residents a sprawling mass of drunken revellers, fighting, dying, pushing each other in wheelbarrows. In the foreground, an emaciated man lies across a bottom step, in his hand an empty glass. In the background, a couple desperately pawn their goods to fuel their habit, in front of them a dog and a man chew on the same bone. And in front of them all, a woman reaches inanely into her box of snuff, oblivious to the danger as her baby slips from her arms into the abyss.
The scene is not Old Street on a Sunday morning. The scene is, of course, William Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’, on exhibition as part of Tate Britain’s Hogarth, running until 29th April. Bringing together a wide survey of Hogarth’s work, many of which belong to private collectors, the exhibition is the most comprehensive in living memory, and has received an equally comprehensive amount of coverage in the media. Hogarth is celebrated, we say, because he was a modern before his time, because his is a unique and incisive portrait of a period of British history, and, specifically, mid 18th century London.

London, then as now, was a complex place. ‘Gin Street’ was printed at the height of the so-called gin craze’ of 1751, when one fourth of all shops in the parish of St. Giles in London sold the stuff, and de-regulated distilleries were popping up everywhere. Whig politicians had considered gin a pillar of British prosperity in trade, but Hogarth fell on the other side of the argument, and distributed his prints in support of the Gin Act. Gin was a hard liquor, a danger to the vulnerable classes, and should be controlled. Beer, on the other hand, was just great. ‘Beer, happy produce of our isle/ can sinewy strength impart…And warms the English generous Breast/ With Liberty and Love’ reads the accompanying text. As usual with Hogarth, all that was good in life could always be distilled down to its essential ‘Britishness’.
Which brings me to my first encounter with Hogarth, ‘The Gate of Calais’, otherwise known as ‘O The Roast Beef of Old England’, a work that acquired almost mythological proportions for the students of a certain history course I took in my first year. As the story goes, Hogarth had visited France in 1748, and, whilst sketching the British built drawbridge at Calais, which looms in the background of the work, he had been hauled to the governor in suspicion of seditious activities. He managed to secure his release, and on his return to London immediately set about venting his spleen. In the picture, only the British crest on the gate of Calais falls under the sun, and the prisoners of the French gaol scratch by in poverty and superstitious ignorance. Only the gluttonous Catholic monk, seen salivating over a slab of British beef, is enjoying himself.

Hogarth was an unashamed patriot, but he had a keen eye for injustice. It was for this reason that the French infuriated him: ‘a farcical pomp of war, parade of religion and very little business…in short poverty slavery and insolence’, he wrote in his diaries. But there were plenty of examples of these in his native England.

While his depiction of poverty might seem somewhat bawdy, even comical, to the modern observer, it was a sharp break from the conventional ‘prettified’ norm in European art. In a sense, the fact that Hogarth, an artist of some distinction and reputation, made the poor the focal point of much of his work is remarkable. Hogarth had an almost insatiable predilection for the grimy side of life, urban or rural, London or Continental. His chief concerns were, perhaps, fairly obvious ones, and easily understandable to a modern audience- substitute ‘gin’ for ‘drugs’ and ‘prostitution’ for, well, prostitution, and one begins to see a parallel to the moral panics of today. The French were a moral panic all on their own, and so if Hogarth was working today, I suspect it would be for the Daily Mail rather than the Guardian. But today, throwaway comment and analysis is all around us. It was not in Hogarth’s time, and for a large sector of the population, the popular engravings and pamphlets published widely by Hogarth and other artists were the only access to independent comment on social issues.

But I do not think that it was primarily to the common people that Hogarth wished to appeal, although he certainly did that, and he certainly entertained. The level of detail in his work is staggering, and meticulously arranged- nothing is left up to chance, everything is a reference. After a while, one feels that Hogarth is desperately trying to impress, if not you, then his contemporaries amongst the English Enlightenment. Even his portraits and ‘conversation pieces’, the least interesting works in the exhibition, were of notable writers or scientists, or groups of businessmen keen to celebrate their companionship, and not aristocrats. And although Hogarth was technically masterful as a draughtsman, engraver and painter, he still felt compelled to write his own tract on aesthetic matters in his 1753 published ‘Origins of Beauty’, also on display. His modestly stated intention to ‘Fix the fluctuating Ideas on Taste’ might seem a suitable target for a bit of Hogarthian satire, and indeed was when a contemporary Paul Sandby wrote a spoof version, describing him as a ‘pretentious charlatan’.

Pretentious or not, Hogarth deserves a look.