Mr Hogarth’s Morning
I used to think a lot about William Hogarth. The eighteenth-century artist was fundamental to my PhD research, as the only artist to produce an image of someone solving the longitude problem; but also someone whose wider life and work was deeply tied into the stories that revolved around longitude more broadly. That’s the thing about Hogarth, his work is so dense with meaning that it pulls in myriad parts of eighteenth century life.
I don’t think about Hogarth (or the eighteenth century) as much these days though, so I was excited to receive a novel from a friend: Mr Hogarth’s Morning by Thom Braun. I also don’t read as much fiction as I used to, so this was a perfect instigator.
The novel is, at heart, a thriller. Beware a few spoilers below, as I do recommend reading! It broadly follows the story of a fictional rival artist, Jonathan Smallow, who is plotting to kill Hogarth. But Smallow is in many ways one of the weaker and least interesting characters in the narrative. Rather, the novel’s strength is the same as Hogarth’s own. It weaves together a cast of around 10 major characters to paint a picture of the rich riot of life that existed in eighteenth-century Covent Garden (London, England).
I use the phrase ‘paint a picture’ advisedly, as the story revolves around one that Hogarth is painting, and the woman who is its central character. Morning was the first of four works from Hogarth’s (real) Four Times of the Day series from 1736, that comments on London society and its foibles through focusing on four different locales at four points in the day. ‘Morning’ is set in Covent Garden piazza, where an elderly spinster picks her way to church, looking aside at the drunken and licentious behaviour openly taking place around her. Her glance is both critical and curious, highlighting the Janus-faced approach that society took to the seedier parts of London life.
Again like Hogarth himself, the novel (and painting) mix real and imagined characters. Tom King’s infamous coffee house and drinking den features in both, as do Hogarth’s wife Jane, fellow artists Francis Hayman and Samuel Scott, and ‘quack’ doctor Richard Rock. The architecture of Covent Garden is almost a character in its own right, and vividly shapes the narrative.
Other fictional characters capture the breadth of life that co-existed around the piazza, and the different balance of power and precariousness that sat behind each life: from the impecunious nobleman, to the local boy pressed by the navy. I particularly liked the sense of the growing artworld that Braun evokes, from jobbing and immigrant painters, to bustling print shops, with the network of materials, tools and odd job men that sat behind it. Prudence Hyssop, the character who Braun has Hogarth choose as the central female figure in Morning, in one scene beautifully describes the way in which Hogarth’s own works evolved from painting to print.
As a thriller, the novel puts you the reader in a position of power. You follow the story partly with Smallow, knowing his plans and (some of) their outcomes before the other characters. This puts you in prime position to enjoy the twists and turns of the story as it rollicks through eighteenth-century life. It’s a representation of which Hogarth himself would have been proud.