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CHAPTER 1
I WAS BORN beside a printer's owned by a certain Mr Downinge of Bartholomew Close, East Spitalfields. As I was born, the stink of ink filled my nostrils. The clank of prints as they were made assailed my ears the very instant I barged my way out of my mother.
My fate was sealed, then, even as the midwife grasped me by the ankle with a cry of 'Gotcha! You slippery boy!' I was born to make images, prints and paintings. William Hogarth, Serjeant Painter at the court of George II, phizmonger to the high and mighty. At your service, out I came.
I was born, then, but I was not yet finished, not yet complete. What my father called 'The Finger of God' had not yet been laid upon my head. That happened some seven years later.
It was November. I am sure of that because my two sisters were born in that month: Anne was born on the same day of the month as me, and then came Mary. So our rooms were November-dark by the time of our meal at three o'clock.
Two bars at the window made the sign of the cross over us Hogarths as we ate. That cross of bars was the first image I trained my memory to keep. It was soon to form the backdrop to my father's prison cell. Many years later I even placed it in a gleam of light on a globe of the world in my portrait of my friend Thomas Coram: the portrait that was to be my masterpiece.
After gnawing my shank of Essex mutton clear of meat, placing the bone carefully on the trencher, I took my leave: 'Excuse me, pater. Thank you for the meal, mama.' And away I sped.
Bartholomew Close is the shape of a bulging bib on a baby, with narrow alleys north and south for drawstrings. I ran out of the Close through a paved alley to the south, my little shoes slapping on the loose cobbles of Duck Lane. Even as I turned from there into the first waving curve of Little Britain, past the first dingy clutch of printers and bookshops, the smog was descending, swirling under the eaves which leaned towards each other above me, nearly touching overhead. The air smelled acrid with burning coal.
I was heading for St Botolph Churchyard, to play tip-cat with my friends over the remains of my grandfather – my mother's father, John Gibbons. As I ran, a wind blew up. At first I took no notice. Wind and rain were nothing new that year; we had experienced little else for nearly two weeks.
But the wind grew fiercer, now thick with black dust. It carried the lowing and bleating of the Smithfield Market cattle and sheep. I imagined them protesting as the soot flecks hit them, black on white and black on brown.
I feared for my calamanco shirt, so skilfully stitched by mama from a piece of her oldest nightgown. My second shirt was still drying. I would be confined to our rooms if anything happened to this one. Mama was slow to anger, but when it came it was terrible. It was she, and never father, who slapped my sisters and me when there was cause.
I placed my arm across my chest as I ran to ward off the dust; not a sensible act, really, because the wind was coming from behind me. The gale, for a gale it now was, was growing fiercer.
Little Britain is a wide street with two bold curves in an S-shape. I was walking along the second of the curves, opposite one of the fine houses which mixed in with more humble homes and shops.
The raging wind was frightening me. As I hesitated, a roaring gust lifted me half off my feet, then tumbled me along at a forward-leaning trot. I saved myself from falling only by clutching at the grand railings of the house I was passing. Surely my friends would never keep to our planned meeting at St Botolph through this?
I turned to face the storm. Cruel little pricks of stone scattered into my face, making me cry aloud. Suddenly my face was wet, then my hair, then my chest, my poor shirt soaked tight to me; within seconds my breeches drenched through to my drawers. I threw myself forwards, battling the gale; our room, shortly before so gladly abandoned, was now a vividly pictured sanctuary.
I saw the crowd in Little Britain not, as I would normally have done, as subjects of great fascination, but as buffers against the wind and rain, which may with luck save me. Now all those in the crowd were moving fast with jerking limbs for fear of being lifted and tossed through the air.
There was a woman, a hawker of apples I believe, just about to abandon her produce as wind and rain whipped her mantua around her, showing her comely, firm curves. Her eyes widened at me, for a second seeking help, then, as she registered my tender years, unmistakeably offering help herself, with a waving arm which was itself lifted by the wind.
It was a gesture of goodness I have never forgotten, and far from being the last I have received from women. But she was facing me and in a blinking she was driven past at a run. I heard her scream, but I have no idea where she finished when the wind and rain had had its way with her.
Varlets were running in the street, grasping at anything, including each other, which might slow their hurtling along. Many were screaming and shouting, a cacophony of terror.
'It is the end of the world,' bellowed one fellow known to me by sight, a baker.
'God's wrath! God's wrath is come upon us,' moaned another, a chimneysweep, his black clothes stained with blood down one sleeve.
An old fellow lay himself down, clutching at the cobbles with his hands, to let the storm pass over him. Others made their way backwards or sideways like crabs, the better to progress.
'We have sinned! We have sinned!'
London is Sodom under good Queen Anne; overweening, overmighty, bloated with riches. We have forgotten God and this is His retribution. It was borne on the wind, lashed into us all by the rain.
Half a tree blew past me, lifted in the air by the wind so it seemed to run like a man. The lowing of cattle from the market grew louder, as if they, too, were trumpeting the end of the world. The street was becoming slippery with mud.
As I battled my way back into the curve of Little Britain and had the straight in sight, I gave a growl of triumph through clenched teeth, pushing into the wind with my left shoulder as prow, right hand on my privy parts, thanking the Lord for my small stature and chunky physique.
My bleary gaze perceived a sedan chair just going over, tilting Milord onto the muddy street way, Mechlin-laced cuffs and all, with his periwig in the grub with the piss and the dead dogs, while the no-doubt thankful chairmen, front and back, dropped the gilded poles and legged it as best they could into the storm.
Some sheep running loose overtook me.
To the right, I saw a dead cow belly-up outside a chandler's shop, which had its iron bar up across its front. The poor beast may well have met its end before these gusts from hell blew up, for all I knew, but I had no recollection of it from the walk the other way.
Lamps from the grander houses were crashing to the ground, so a novel hazard was broken glass, piling up with the tile shards and rubbish from the roofs of houses. Some tiles stuck upright in the mud like miniature gravestones.
The crowd around me appealed for mercy with their eyes, as far as they could open them. Some opened their mouths, but we were mute to each other in the howl of the wind. Still, I knew, as they knew, that it was the crowd which was saving its constituent members, by breaking the gale.
I had battled my way back to Duck Lane. I let loose a growl of triumph. Here, there was a glut of small businesses from pawnbrokers to barbers to printers and back again, with their street signs swinging wildly, bashing into each other and one and then another coming smashing down into the narrow street.
Between here and the warren of foetid alleys, the dingy courts and the lanes too narrow for two men to walk abreast which surrounded Bartholomew Close were some of the oldest streets in London: Cloth Fair, Barley Mow Passage, Rising Sun Court, Half Moon Court, Kinghorn Street.
Scorched but spared by the Great Fire, the whole stinking lot had also been preserved from Sir Christopher Wren, who had a grand design to rebuild them but had not been permitted to for lack of public money. The wind and rain, however, seemed bent on offering the good architect a second chance, as the old wood and wattle of these decaying buildings shook like the teeth in a nodding dowager.
I heard the crack first, just as Bartholomew Passage – the alley that led into Bartholomew Close – assumed an impossible angle, a thing of wild diagonals and steep bending rhomboids. Then it grew dark above me as a clockmaker's came down on me, sign first then the establishment itself. There was a sharp pain in the front of my head. I was aware of sticky blood in my nose. I felt hard cobbles against my back and the stench of freshly churned mud in my nostrils, and then nothing.
Nothing, that is, until strong hands reached under my armpits some time later. Hands that I knew even then, semi-conscious and seven years old, represented my salvation and my destiny. They were the hands of our neighbour John Dalton. And John Dalton was a painter.
My destiny was lifting my mud-bespattered, bloodied body out of the gutter.
CHAPTER 2
I DO NOT KNOW for how long I was unconscious, nor when John Dalton finally got me home. It was like death, as I have always imagined it. It gave me an awareness of the finality of things unusual, I believe, in one so young. It made me tenacious in my haste to accomplish whatever task I set myself, all too aware, even then, of fighting against time.
I awoke to a state of groaning half-being in my own bed, dressed in a nightgown, ragingly thirsty, with the devil's own pain in my head and a smile on my face.
'Hello, little man! I thought we'd lost you!'
My smile widened. This hurt me quite a lot, but I had no control over it. I smiled whenever my father spoke, or even as he cleared his throat in languid preparation to speak, as he tended to do. I smiled at the sight of him, at the thought of him. I believe my smile would even come at the smell of him, or at the trace of any evidence of him, like the touch of one of the books he wrote.
A diffident, though lengthy, clearing of the throat, accompanied no doubt by a stroking of the paternal chin. I can't be sure of that; I had my eyes shut.
'Um ... Little man? Can you ... er ... hear me?'
I tried to stop smiling, as it hurt so much, but the effort of stopping smiling amused me and made me smile more.
'Hello, pater,' I said. 'Yes, I can hear you. I am sorry I have worried you and mama.'
Speaking drove agonising pains through my head, so I stopped, noticing as I did so that my forehead was covered by a linen cloth soaked in water of cloves. The bed was pitching and yawing as if I were at sea. I drifted into a half-sleep, aware that the storm was still raging outside, wind lashing rain against our poor tiny window. It was to rage all night.
'Aeris impulsum,' pater was saying, to the room in general. 'That's what Aristotle called the wind.'
'Never mind Aristotle,' snapped mama. 'Tear me some fresh strips of cloth. And tear them straight, for heaven's sake.'
I awoke next time to the sound of baby Anne bawling. Pater took her from her crib and rocked her in his arms, which soon soothed her. My bed was still afloat on its own wild sea. Little Mary held a bowl of scented water in which mama dabbed a cloth, then mopped my wounded brow. It hurt like the torments of hell and I shrieked at her to stop it.
'William!' she cried angrily. 'I am trying to help you!'
Then she told me to say the Lord's Prayer. Thinking I was about to meet my maker, I burst into tears, which caused the wound on my forehead to bleed afresh.
'Shan't!' I shouted at mama, regardless of the pain it caused me.
'Stubborn boy!' she shouted back, angrily flapping the succouring cloth at me, splashing the baby with clove-water.
'Will I live?' I asked pater.
'Of course you will,' snapped mama, in reply.
'It is thought,' said pater, with his customary care, as if cherishing each word, 'that the cause of storms is the influence of the sun upon vaporous matter, which ...'
'Make fast the door downstairs, Richard. This storm may be a curse on Christian folk but it is a blessing to thieves.'
'... which being dilated are obliged to possess themselves of more space than ...'
I fear I fell asleep again at that point.
We continued in this manner until morning, none of the Hogarth family sleeping; the storm, if anything, increasing in its ferocity. I awoke, for the first of many times, from feeble sleep to hear pater's soft voice.
'I shall fetch him something soothing for that wound.'
'Richard! You know very well we do not have the money for an apothecary.'
'Mr Reynolds sells it.'
Mr Reynolds kept the toy shop, a magnificent emporium, an Aladdin's cave of wonders. Mama was still refusing her consent when pater, without another word, trod softly to the door and left the room. I smiled defiance at mama.
'Stubborn boy!'
Pater was gone for what seemed to me a long time, but mama was not concerned. When he finally returned, he had an earthenware pot in his hand.
'How is it, outside?' said mama.
'Great destruction, sad to say. Whole houses down, or sometimes just the tops. Many chimneys down. The streets calf-deep in debris.'
'Everywhere?'
'Strange to say, not. Some places on the lee side have escaped untouched.'
'And people abroad?' For the first time a flicker of fear crossed mama's flat face.
'A few. Only a few.'
She looked relieved. 'We are not the only ones left then.'
'No, no ...'
She nodded to herself. 'I feared we may be another Noah family. The only ones left on God's earth.'
Pater smiled. 'Or like Deucalion after Zeus's flood. No, no. All will be well, and all will be well. And every good thing will be well.'
'Oh, will it, now?'
Pater grimaced comically as he took the wax paper off the top of the small earthenware pot. I laughed and held his hand tight. The salve for my wound turned out to be a thick brown ointment which stank and put me in mind of animal dung.
Papa squeezed my hand, then gently said, 'I say, little chap, nothing wrong with your little grip is there? Tight as a vice. Odysseus clung to the ram's belly no tighter than you!'
'O Richard! For heaven's sake ...'
Mama tried to seize the pot of balm, but pater merely smiled, gently turned aside, slowly disengaged my grip and applied the balm himself, tenderly, with two fingers.
'I say, little chap, that's quite a groove you've got there. On your poor little forehead. A valley, a veritable chasm, indeed. William ... my little Bill, say you are all right because ... to be frank with you, little chap, I don't think I could bear it if ...'
My eyes filled with tears. 'I am well, pater, aside from pain in the head. I am myself, as ever was!'
'O Billy Boy, my little chap. Thank God ... Oh, thank God for it!'
Pater began to weep. Mama sent him from the room, on the excuse of coddling baby Anne. Even then, I do believe, as early as that, with caked blood still new on my groove, I began to wonder at the meaning of what papa called 'The Finger of God' laid on my forehead.
Did 'The Finger of God' make me special?
CHAPTER 3
IN THE EVENINGS, pater worked in our room at his hack jobs. One of these was correcting the Latin in books, before they were published.
'I am cleaning the Augean Stable of error, little chap!' he would cry to me, as his pen swooped on some error or infelicity in conjugation or declension.
I can recall the title of one of these books, it was Opera Posthuma. If you ever see this book, please remember that its immaculate Latin is entirely due to my pater, and to none other. And remember him please, remember him for it, for he was a good man and the purest soul I was ever to meet in my life.
Only late at night did my pater turn to his latest magnum opus as he always called it. This was sometimes a textbook for schools, sometimes a play. I would sneak from my bed while my little sisters slept, to watch him write.
With a half-smile of fulfilment playing round his face, the quill resting elegantly in a languid hand, he scratched his head under his wig, just behind the right ear, as he wrote: whether to ease the head lice or for greater inspiration I never knew. But I hear him to this day:
'This is the one that will make our fortune, little chap!'
Mama sometimes sat opposite him as he worked, mending and patching our clothes or doing the household accounts with a tally- stick. She flicked sly glances at him over her sewing, sometimes muttering to herself: 'Looking for gold in the mines of Peru.'
I never understood this expression, though I suspect that Peru is devoid of gold mines.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I, Hogarth"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Michael Dean.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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