A Review of William Hogarth's Marriage ~ la Mode -with Particular Reference to Character and Setting by Robert L. S. Cowley VOLUME· I THE THESIS Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Dootor of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute May, 1977 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ANY IMAGES MISSING FROM THIS DIGITAL COpy HAVE BEEN EXCLUDED AT THE REQUEST OF THE UNIVERSITY SYNOPSIS The thesis has been prepared on the assumption that Hogarth's pioture series are essentially narrative works. They are oonsidered in the Introduotion in the light of reoent definitions of the narrative strip, a medium in whioh Hogarth was a oonsiderable innovator. The first six ~hapters oonsist of an analysis of each of the pic- tures in Marriage ~ la Mode. The analysis was undertaken as a means of exploring the nature of Hogarth's imagination and to disoover how ooherent a work the series is. There is an emphasis on oharaoterization and setting because Hogarth himself chose to isolate character as a feature in the subscription ticket to Marriage ~ la Mode. The figures aoquire their depth through their interaction with the setting. The interaction compensates for the laok of physical movement in Hogarth's picture narratives and is a source of much of his humour. A number of sections is concerned with relevant background information, such as the traditional rivalry between the cities of London and Westminster, and the medical details of the quaok doctor's laboratory. The ,seventh chapter is concerned with the literary allusion in Marriage a la Mode, particularly to the popular drama of the time. The eighth is conoerned with the extensive and ironio use of analogies. The ninth chapter is concerned with the subject of structure, including the delineation of the rBle of the projected speotator as defined by the work which contains him. The tenth is about theme and includes the use made of the traditional elements and 'humours'. It is concluded that Marriage a la Mode is a tragi-comic and melodramatic work, and that Hogarth in what are here termed periphrastic sequences came close to making images behave like words without their becoming dependent on any verbal form. His achievement lay in the ability intelligently to organize diversity into a unified structure, similar to that of situation comedy. 105, 000 words Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) CONTENTS Preface i Introduction: the Essential Form of Hogarth's Narrative- Art 1 PART ONE I. The Marriage Contract 20 II. Shortly After the Marriage 60 III. The Visit to the Quack Doctor 85 IV. The Countess's Morning Lev~e 104 V. The Killing of the Earl 126 VI. The Suicide of the Countess 144 PART TWO VII. The Literary Allusions 169 VIII. Analogical Relationships in Marriage a" la Mode 189 IX. Some Structural Considerations 201 x. Some Thematic Considerations 221 Conclusion to the Thesis 235 Bibliography 253 ILLUSTRATIONS There are three types of illustration: (i) those numbered and listed below; they are usually referred to in the text (ii) a number of illustrations, cuttings from the prints, which are neither numbered nor referred to in the text; they are identified as !!!! standing (iii) the prints bound into Volume II, The SUpplement. as a series. The reader is invited to pullout the sequence and to have it in front of him in its entirety as he reads the thesis. I am grateful to the Director of the National Gallery for per- mission to reproduce the paintings and for access to the Hogarth dossier. The various photographs are taken mainly from the dossier. Illustration Gulielmus Hogarth (1740) frontispiece 1. Albrecht Durer (11) Frontispiece to !he Origins ~ (1489) opposite page 6 2. The Temptation Scene from the Caedmonian Genesis 6 3. Characters and Caricaturas, the Subscription Ticket to Marriage ~ la Mode (1743) 9 4. The Marriage Contract I (painting) 20 5. Le Brun's 'Passion' Pure Love 34 6. Le Brun's 'Passion' Fright 44 7. The Marriage Contract (drawing) 50 8. Shortly After the Marriage II (painting) 60 9. Shortly After the Marriage (drawing) 64 10. The Tune Book (detail) 64 11. The Battle of the Pictures (1744/5) 80 12. The Visit to the Quack Doctor (drawing) 85 13. The Visit to the Quack Doctor III (painting) 87 14. The Countess's Morning Levee IV 104 15. The Countess's Morning Levee (drawing) 105 16. The Lovers and the Toilette: the Heraldic Associations 108 (continued) Illustration 11. The Dutch Screen (detail) opposite page 109 18. Lot and His Daughters engraved by Lud. du Guernier after Caravaggio 120 19. The Killing of the Earl V (painting) 126 20. Le Brun's 'Passion' Bodily Pain 121 21. The Killing of the Earl (drawing) 129 22. The Suicide of the Countess.VI (painting) 144 23. The Suicide of the Countess (drawing) 153 24. The Patches of River Damp on the Ceiling (detail) 156 25. Silvertongue's Dying Speech (detail) 151 26. The Notes of Invitation (detail) 169 i PREFACE The original intention behind the thesis was to prepare a survey of Hogarth's narrative art as an enlargement on an MA thesis about! 1" Rake's Progress (1735)•. It was discovered, however, that a critical study of Marriage ~ la Mode (17421-1745), one of Hogarth's most impor- tant 'series' (his preferred term), had"not been made. The general survey was, postponed, therefore, for the sake of a detailed study of Marriage a la Mode. This series is appropriate to study for a number of reasons: first, it is one of Hogarth's most sustained and difficult works. Eric Newton made the point that the 'plot' of the first picture alone 2 'permeates every corner of the canvas'. His claim provides a starting point for an examination of the whole series in order to discover how coherent it is. Secondly, a development is apparent in Hogarth's choice of subjects from a concern with a country seamstress who becomes a harlot, through a merchant's son who is a rake, to the children of an earl and an alderman in Marriage ~ la Mode. The next series, Industry and Idleness (1747) represents a return to a humbler social class in its study of the careers of apprentices. Thirdly, Marriage ~ la Mode is a special case from the point of view of structure. The progresses are "histories", fictional bio- graphies, whereas Marriage a la Mode is constructed on a concept, that of marriage, to which the recurrent figures are made subordinate. (The Four Times of the Day (1738) is not taken into account because its principle of unification is one of duration and there are no recurrent figures.) Fourthly, Marriage a la Mode was composed during a period when the eighteenth-century novel was emerging. It is an overstatement to claim that Hogarth was the father of the English novel, but his influence on 3 , Fielding in the 1740s was considerable. Marriage a la Mode is worth studying in a thesis submitted to an English department for this reason, especially as Hogarth makes reference to Joseph Andrews in his subscrip- tion ticket (Introduction 4, page 10). Fifthly,"Ronald Paulson has examined A Harlot's Progress (1732) in his biography, Hogarth, His Life. Art, and Times.4 The MA thesis was an attempt to explore the next series. Paulson and Sean Shesgreen have considered Industry and Idleness in some detail in Emblem and Expres- ii ~ and Eighteenth-Century Studies respectively. Separate studies of Hogarth's quartets and pendant pairs remain to be made. The narrowness of scope is recognized, but the study of a single work of six pictures has its precedents: Mary F.S. Hervey published a Ph. D. thesis solely on the subject of Holbein's Ambassadors and Hildegard Omberg has concentrated on Hogarth's portrait of Captain Coram.5 An a,ttempt is made in the Introduction to compensate both for the narrowness and the postponement of the critical survey by consid- ering Marriage ~ la Mode in relation to the wider context of Hogarth's narrative art and to the theory of the narrative strip worked out in the twentieth-century. At first sight, this thesis is no more than a repetition of the approach to A Rake's Progress undertaken for the MA. It is thought there is an advance however: the question was asked whether a Hogarth- ian series did have an essentially narrative form and, if it did, whether an appropriate critical language could be found in which to discuss it. Marriage ~ la Mode has been approached on the assumptions that Hogarth's narratives are autonomous and that the appropriate critical language exists. The first six chapters consist Qf an analysis of each picture of a.rc:. 4~~ the series and the last four~with more general features. They represent in part a continuing attempt to study Hogarth's narrative art through Marriage a la Mode.