DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

The Four Times of Day, Copper Engravings from paintings by Hogarth. The paintings were completed in 1736 and engraved in 1738.

 

Morning

  It is morning in London and the snow has formed icicles on the roofs of the buildings. At left, people are listening to the pitch of a snake-oil salesman, Dr. Rock (Burke and Caldwell n. 177) who promises to cure their ailments. Some are selling vegetables. Others are warming themselves by the fire, or caught in lascivious embraces. In the background at right, a row breaks out in The King’s Coffee House, and a wig goes flying into the street. Covent Garden is a district in the west end of London, in which Tom King’s coffee house was located The coffee house had a reputation as a meeting place for prostitutes and their customers (Pelzer and Pelzer). The central figure of this engraving is the spinster (Burke and Caldwell n. 177) who is walking to church, a servant boy carrying her prayer book. She seems unmoved by the riot around her, except for a slight gesture with her fan, suggesting her prim disgust with the scene before her. The riot and debauchery is confined to the right side of the print: public intoxication, adultery, and violence. The sense of movement created by the central figure’s pilgrimage suggests that the posh woman has walked unconcerned, past the scenes of poverty and sickness on the left side of the page and is, while disapproving of it, more focused on the sinful activities towards which she is walking. According to historian Ian Gordon, The Four Times of Day is an homage to classical gods and goddesses. In morning,  “Aurora, goddess of dawn, is ironically transformed into the severe prude who disapprovingly strides across Covent Garden on her way to church” (Gordon).

 Noon

 

Noon illustrates the scene of a busy London neighborhood, Camden, as a church congregation is being let out. The focus of the print is mainly on the congregation of wealthy aristocrats. Their status is evidenced by their clothing: both the adults and the children are wearing very elaborate pieces by comparison to the people who live and work around the church. The church is which is St. Giles in the Fields, also known as the poet’s church. As a contrast, Hogarth shows the life of the working class people behind them, who are dressed more or less in rags. The street is split between the church building, where the upper-class people stand, and the inn? Where the working-class people congregate. This divide emulates the great divide in wealth and lifestyle between the two groups. Around the inn, several images of decapitation—the headless maid on far signboard and the disembodied head on the near signboard—suggest that the commoners have been fundamentally cut off from means to improve their positions, including, it would seem, the church. A man and woman argue over the food that falls from the window of the inn as a poor girl eats scraps from the street, dropped by the delivery boy, who cries at left. These images add a level of irony to the only visible inscription, “good eating.” As in “Morning,” the prostitute at left symbolizes the immorality that poverty leads to, and its discord with the standards and lifestyles of the London elite.

 

Evening

 

 

 This scene takes place in a garden and contains many suggestions of a suburban wholesomeness. A cow is being milked in the background. In the foreground, there is a pregnant woman holding a fan, and beside her is her husband, is holding a girl child, who appears to be their daughter. The woman holds a fan up, between her face and that of her husband. The image on the fan is that of Venus and Adonis; this image and the horns of the cow, which appear from the top of the man’s head, suggest adultery. He has been cuckolded and she is bearing another man’s child. Following at left are two older children, the girl chiding the boy as he cries. Their actions mirror those of their parents, as it seems as if the wife is in charge and the husband is submissive. In the background at left, a woman walks towards Sadlers Wells, a theatre that satirist Ned Ward described as frequented by “butchers and bailiffs, and such sort of fellows, mixed with a vermin train’d up for the gallows” (Rogers). It seems as though the family at the center of the print have just left this theatre and are heading towards the New River (Ireland). At right, the window of the inn reveals two people smoking pipes. The print satirizes the summer holiday of urban people who come to the country to escape the heat of the city, but bring its vice and immorality along with them.

 

Night

 

 

 There are several focal points of the fourth and final plate. The print depicts the living conditions, such as the carelessly thrown out human waste from above a window into the street (upper left), and a poor family sleeping in a crevice of a barber shop (lower left). The first image depicts the unsanitary conditions of the street, and the second conveys the extent to which the poor were forced to live among them. Light is used to great effect in this print to show the divide in living conditions: the poor have to huddle around the bonfire or the dim candles for warmth, while the working class men, like the barber and barkeeper, have candles for occupation, and the rich have lanterns for a leisurely walk. Lights in the background of the print suggest a bright and inviting home, warmed by a fire, the smoke from which streams out into the night sky in the center of the print.

 

Interpretations:

 

Critic Amy Sande-Friedman infers that Hogarth’s “intent of these works was to portray humourous caricatures of contemporary figures. The images are rich in detail, providing a glimpse into the world of 1730s London [….] Hogarth pokes fun at the prurient, drunken, slothful, and greedy ways of his fellow Englishmen, providing a glimpse into his world in all of its delightful immorality.” According to Ian Gordon, “Each of the prints satirizes hypocrisy and affectation displayed in the face of the crowded poverty and teeming struggle of everyday, eighteenth-century, London life (Gordon).

 

John Ireland, a close friend of William Hogarth, and a renowned biographer in the 17th century, went through great lengths to discuss the four plates in his book, Hogarth’s Works: With Life and Anecdotal Descriptions of His Pictures. Ireland claims of Hogarth’s work, “Where his works have been misconceived, or misrepresented, I have attempted the true reading...In my essay at an illustration of the prints, with a description of what I conceive the coming and moral tendency of each, there is the best information I could procure”(Ireland 130).

Regarding the plate titled, “Morning,” Ireland adds a poem written by an author, named E., before his analysis. The poem reads:

 

Keen blows the blast, and eager is the air;
With flakes of feather'd snow the ground is spread;
To step, with mincing pace, to early prayer, 
Our clay-cold vestal leaves her downy bed.
And here the reeling sons of riot see, 
After a night of senseless revelry.
Poor, trembling, old, her suit the beggar plies; 
But frozen chastity the little boon denies.

 

Ireland describes the woman pictured in this painting to be Miss Bridget Alworthy, a character in Henry Fielding’s comic novel titled, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). The book was known to be a critique of class friction and a satire of social institutions. Ireland states that this woman, Miss Bridget Alworthy, is on her way to attend a morning prayer service with a foot-boy beside her to carry her prayer-book. She is made to symbolize the winter season, and called “chaste as the isicle/That’s curdled by the frost from purest snow/And hangs on Dian’s temple” by the poet, titled, E (Ireland 132). Miss Bridget Alworthy is described as critical of the women embracing the “drunken beaux” that are pictured in front of Tom King’s Coffee-house. The woman pictured with the basket on her arm is thought to be an “orange girl,” or a girl that enjoys the attention shown to her by her lover. The old woman sitting on a basket and the girl beside her that is warming her hands over the fire contrast the lovers pictured behind them. The supposed “virgin” and “pure” Miss Bridget Alworthy, is more focused on the lovers than the suffers begging for money and warmth. Behind the lovers, Tom King’s coffee-house is pictured. Behind the woman, a fight is occurring and people are setting up for their work day at the same time. A woman holding a basket on her head is selling fruit, while beside her “the immediate descendant of Paracelsus, Doctor Rock, is expatiating on the never-failing virtues of his wonder-working medicines (Ireland 133). Miss Bridget Alworthy is also pictured as an aristocrat through her dress and is apathetic towards freezing page boy carrying her prayer book and the beggars, and this is ironic since she is on her way to church.

 

This piece mocks the façade of the aristocratic women and their stereotypical conventions of purity and modesty in the 16th century. It shows that dress and countenance cannot compensate for personality and character. In order to understand this piece, daily life in Covent Garden piazza during the eighteenth century must be taken into account. Also, the habits and social conventions of aristocratic women must also be understood. Women were raised to be housewives, dame, modest, and pious. In this piece, Hogarth shows the true nature of humanity and the burdens of societal pressure on women. The woman going to church is focused more on the couples displaying public affection, than on the scenery around her. This is ironic considering that she is on her way to church. John Ireland suggests that we should also know literature (i.e. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling), but that is based wholly on interpretation.

John Ireland also provides a critique of the third plate in Hogarth’s collection, “The Four Times of Day,” which coincides with the interpretations that our class group had during the archival project. Ireland adds another poem by E., which he further interprets in his analysis:

 

One sultry Sunday, when no cooling breeze 
Was borne on zephyr's wing, to fan the trees;
One sultry Sunday, when the torrid ray 
O'er nature beam'd intolerable day; 
When raging Sirius warn'd us not to roam, 
And Galen's sons prescrib'd cool draughts at home; 
One sultry Sunday, near those fields of fame 
Where weavers dwell, and Spital is their name, 
A sober wight, of reputation high 
For tints that emulate the Tyrian dye, 
Wishing to take his afternoon's repose, 
In easy chair had just began to doze, 
When, in a voice that sleep's soft slumbers broke, 
His oily helpmate thus her wishes spoke: 
"Why, spouse, for shame! my stars, what's this about? 
You's ever sleeping; come, we'll all go out;
At that there garden, pr'ythee, do not stare! 
We'll take a mouthful of the country air; 
In the yew bower an hour or two we'll kill; 
There you may smoke, and drink what punch you will. 
Sophy and Billy each shall walk with me, 
And you must carry little Emily.
Veny is sick, and pants, and loathes her food; 
The grass will do the pretty creature good. 
Hot rolls are ready as the clock strikes five— 
And now 'tis after four, as I'm alive!" 
The mandate issued, see the tour begun, 
And all the flock set out for Islington. 
Now the broad sun, refulgent lamp of day, 
To rest with Thetis, slopes his western way; 
O'er every tree embrowning dust is spread, 
And tipt with gold is Hampstead's lofty head. 
The passive husband, in his nature mild, 
To wife consigns his hat, and takes the child; 
But she a day like this hath never felt, 
"Oh! that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."
Such monstrous heat! dear me! she never knew. 
Adown her innocent and beauteous face, 
The big, round, pearly drops each other chase; 
Thence trickling to those hills, erst white as snow, 
That now like Ætna's mighty mountains glow, 
They hang like dewdrops on the full blown rose,
And to the ambient air their sweets disclose. 
Fever'd with pleasure, thus she drags along; 
Nor dares her antler'd husband say 'tis wrong. 
The blooming offspring of this blissful pair, 
In all their parents' attic pleasures share. 
Sophy the soft, the mother's earliest joy, 
Demands her froward brother's tinsell'd toy; 
But he, enrag'd, denies the glittering prize, 
And rends the air with loud and piteous cries. 
Thus far we see the party on their way— 
What dire disasters mark'd the close of day, 
'Twere tedious, tiresome, endless to obtrude;
Imagination must the scene conclude.

 

In this piece, the poet interprets the countenance of the “amiable pair” to be an image of “fatigue”. Unlike the copy we received in class, the original copy had the husband’s hands painted in blue “to shew that he was a dyer”. The woman’s face was originally in red, “to intimate her extreme heat” (142) The wife is described as having command, and her husband as “what his wife has made him,” as indicated by the cow’s horns, “which are so placed as to become his own” (143). The children are said to mimic the relationship between the husband and wife. The people in the alehouse beside the husband and wife are said to be relaxing and smoking. They are satirized by Ireland and his interpretation and Hogarth in his painting for spend leisure time in the country in the confines of a smokehouse—which was a common act in the city, and unusual in the country. The sign opposite of Sadler’s Wells is of Sir Hugh Middleton, who Ireland describes as a “great and public-spirited citizen” (144). He is said to have built the New River that the family is headed for in the painting. Ireland uses the poem by E. to mock the cuckolded husband and his demanding wife. Like the other plates, Hogarth mocks social conventions of the aristocracy.

 

 

Works Cited

Burke, Joseph and Colin Caldwell, eds. Hogarth: The Complete Engravings. New York: Abrams, 1988. Print.

 

Gordon, Ian. “The Four Times of Day and Strolling Actresses in a Barn.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 2003. Web. 22 July 2014.

 

Ireland, John. Hogarth Illustrated. 2 vols. London: Charles Dilly, 1793. Web. ECCO. 20 July 2014.

 

J. Pelzer and L. Pelzer. "Coffee Houses of Augustan London." History Today 32.10 (1982). 40–47. Web. 16 Aug. 2014.

 

Sande-Friedman, Amy. “The Four Times of the Day by William Hogarth.” The Common, 28 June 2013. Web. 17 July 2014.

 

Watson, Joseph. “William Hogarth.” The Aldine 7.8 (Aug 1874). Web. 7 Aug 2014.


 

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.