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Letter
‘Shakespeare, who had the deepest penetration
into nature, has summed up all the charms of beauty
in two words: “infinite variety”.’
This, from William Hogarth’s 1753 Analysis
of Beauty (and from which Alan Hollinghurst
coined the title of his Booker Prize winning novel
The Line of Beauty), captures the essence
of Hogarth’s work, now in a special exhibition
at Tate
Britain. On seeing this excellent show last
week, the similarities to Persephone Books’
ethos and Hogarth’s vision particularly
struck me.
Called in turns the gentleman artist, art theorist,
celebrated satirist, the Comic History Painter
and Serjeant Painter to the King, Hogarth celebrated
life in all its guises. He demonstrates this diversity
in his paintings; thematically divided into rooms
entitled ‘Street Life’, ‘Pictures
of Urbanity’, ‘Patriotism, Portraiture,
and Politics’ and ‘The Harlot and
the Rake’ to name a few. Hogarth painted
scenes from brothels, to gaming houses, to the
interior of the Guildhall, to prisons, to portraits
of dozens of luminaries of the time, including
Captain Thomas Coram, with whom he and George
Frideric Handel founded The
Foundling Hospital, now a museum just up the
road from Lamb’s Conduit Street next to
Coram’s
Fields (cf: 30th
January 2007 Fortnightly Letter).
The variety of subjects and scenes Hogarth painted
demonstrate his ‘personal crusade to establish
modern urban life, including low life, as an appropriate
subject for high art.’ Indeed, this is,
in one sense, what we do at Persephone Books –
rediscovering and bringing back into print those
books that have been neglected (often because
they are not deemed of ‘classic’ literature
quality). Our books, furthermore, promote ordinary
people’s lives during a specific time period
– just as Hogarth’s paintings do.
Nicola wrote in last week’s Fortnightly
Letter about Katherine Sturtevant’s
book on feminist walking tours in London. It is
particularly germane to Bloomsbury, with its many
literary/peripatetic links, including of course
Virginia
Woolf (read her brilliant essay ‘Street-Haunting’
upon which I commented in the 30th
June 2006 Fortnightly Letter). ‘If she
got stuck, as she frequently did with her novels,’
Jean Moorcroft Wilson noted in her book on Woolf,
‘she would turn to London, “seeing
life, as I walk about the streets, an immense
opaque block of material to be conveyed by me
into its equivalent of language”’.
In ‘Pictures of Urbanity’, Hogarth
focuses on the interior, looking at domestic life.
Just as in so many Persephone Books – A
House in the Country, The
Priory, Julian
Grenfell, Alas,
Poor Lady, and House-Bound
to list a few – Hogarth’s settings
range from ‘grandly appointed ballrooms
to fictionalised country estates, men, women and
children act and interact according to the fashionable
contemporary ideal of politeness; a term associated
with the virtues of a restrained, polished and
tolerant sociability.’ The era depicted
in so many Persephone Books, either during or
between the two World Wars, is often characterised
by the strictures and rules of this ‘polite
society’. In The
Wise Virgins, for instance, Leonard
Woolf brilliantly parodies the strictly observed
rules of social etiquette found in the smart set
of Hampstead and Putney at the turn of the 20th
century. Inherent in both The
Wise Virgins and in Hogarth’s paintings
is a profoundly satiric take on the society they
depict; Julia Strachey’s witty novella Cheerful
Weather for the Wedding is another obvious
parody on the polished, ordered classes of English
society.
Otherwise, Nicola just returned from a whirlwind
week in New York where, on Saturday she entertained
sixty American Persephone readers at a Tea. She
is happy to be back in sunny London, however,
as the weather in New York was bitterly cold and
snowy. This week our spring books – House-Bound
and The
Shuttle – are launched; the Persephone
Biannually starts going out today and our
loyal and efficient envelope-stuffers come on
Wednesday to send it out to our foreign readers.
Spring has truly arrived now that we can leave
both the front and back door of the office open.
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© William Hogarth's
Marriage A-la Mode 2: The Tete a Tete
1745
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Emily Hill
15 April 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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