Andrew Pink, Independent Scholar, London, UK

[JRFF 3.1 (2012) 132–133] ISSN (print) 1757–2460 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/JRFF.v3i1.132 ISSN (online) 1757–2479

Book Review

SOULIER-DETIS, Elisabeth, Guess at the Rest: Cracking the Hogarth Code (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 240 pp., ₤28.25, Pbk, ISBN: 9780718892159.

Reviewed by: Andrew Pink, Independent Scholar, London, UK. Email: [email protected]

The fame of the artist (and freemason) William Hogarth (1697–1764) rests on a variety of works that include engravings, painted portraits and conversation pieces, and in particular his six narrative series of ’modern moral subjects’, four of which concern us here. These make biting satirical observations on the corruption of innocence by the follies of a world plagued by the seven deadly sins. Hogarth’s visual style in these works, although complex, is clearly topical and—herein lies the satire—journalistic. But the force of the satire and its pleasure can only be felt by lifting the metaphorical veil on Hogarth’s sophisticated repertoire of symbols, allusions and gestures, demanding a well-informed knowledge of biblical and classical references, political history, heraldry, and stock-in-trade figures. Elisabeth Soulier-Detis has now boldly set out to show that this sophisticated repertoire is also suffused with a masonic iconography hitherto unobserved by previous generations of scholars. In each of the four chapters she explores a different masonic theme based on a ‘modern moral subject’: 1. The Progress of Early British Masonry—A Harlot’s Progress (April 1732); 2. The Path to Unity between ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’—The Rake’s Progress (June 1735); 3. The Union of Mercury and Sulphur— Marriage-à-la-mode (June 1745); and 4. Fake and Genuine Freemasonry—Industry and Idleness (October 1747). Separate treatment is not given to the remaining two ‘modern moral subjects’ The Four Times of Day (1736) and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). The author is no newcomer to the period, having recently retired as a professor of eighteenth-century British literature at Paul Valéry University, Montpelier, but while she demonstrates considerable power of imagination she fails to provide her readers with a convincing historical-masonic narrative because all too often factual details are flawed. Within the constraints of this short review we can only skim the surface of the problem. The underlying premise of the book is that English freemasonry in Hogarth’s time was a closed world, this despite the many contemporary books, pamphlets and newspapers attesting to a more open one. Hogarth himself openly critiqued freemasonry when he wanted to, for example, his ‘Night’ in Four Times of Day and The Mystery of Freemasonry Brought to Light by the Gormogons, and yet the author believes that Hogarth preferred to refer to freemasonry in ‘an allusive manner only, the audience being that of his brethren’ (p. 29). She mistakenly believes that the familiar rivalry between Ancient and Modern freemasonry was underway in the 1730s (p.71) some years before the so-called Ancient freemasons came into being (c.1750). In discussing A Harlot’s Progress we are told that the central figure of Mary Hackabout is to be seen not only as Britannia degraded by Prime Minister Walpole, but also that she incarnates ‘freemasonry and its tribulations in England from 1717–1732’ (p. 31).

To say that in Hogarth’s day a feminine figure was well-understood to represent freemasonry is dubious in any case, but the author anachronistically supports this view with the historically disconnected evidence of a female figure printed on a ticket for a ball held at Freemasons Hall in 1780. The figure is in fact a generic image of eighteenth-century, neo-classical female gentility, the ticket is for ‘Mr King’s Ball’, and unrelated to freemasonry; Freemasons Hall was often hired out for respectable public entertainments. As for the notion that the period 1717–32 was a time of tribulation for English freemasonry, rather, it was a time of ascendancy—evident from the rapid spread of lodges, the wide range of masonic activities, and the membership of sizeable numbers of elite Whig loyalists all eagerly reported in the national press on an almost weekly basis. Elsewhere we read that Hogarth ‘was appointed Grand Stewart [should be Steward] for the years 1734 and 1735’ (p.16), when he was appointed in 1734 to serve for 1735. Also, ‘After 1736, every year on November 11th, the Feast Day of St Andrew, the Great [should be Grand] Master chose his successor’ (p. 132), whereas successive editions of Anderson’s Constitutions show that the appointment had no fixed date. In addition to these and many other inaccuracies, the book has been poorly edited as the following examples illustrate: extracts from the English-language Constitutions are inexplicably given in French (pp. 42; 82-83; 84–86); throughout the book there is a perplexing mix of footnote and in-line referencing; in many cases these references are incomplete so that, for example, the work of Sean Shesgreen referred to in the second chapter does not differentiate between any of his four works featured in the bibliography. The bibliography itself is not always reliable, as in the case of Marsha Schuchard’s doctoral thesis ‘Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuity of the Occult Traditions in English Literature’ given (p. 218) as 1936 rather than 1975, with the word Freemasonry omitted from the title, and associated with the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor rather than the University of Texas at Austin. Lastly, the indexing is extremely thin and also unreliable, for example, where Dermott (and not Dermott, L., or Dermott, Lawrence, as the house style would seem to require) is incorrectly indexed to p. 63 instead of p. 73. In short, the expert reader will be left frustrated by the inaccuracies and anachro- nisms in this book, while—perhaps most worrying—the inexpert reader will be left ill-informed.