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Summary
Summary
He was London's artist par excellence, and his work supplies the most enduring vision of the eighteenth century's ebullience, enjoyments, and social iniquities. From a childhood spent in a debtor's prison to his death in the arms of his wife, I, Hogarth follows the artist's life as he makes a name for himself and as he fights for artists with his Copyright Act. Through Hogarth's lifelong marriage to Jane Thornhill, his inability to have children, his time as one of England's best portrait painters, his old age and unfortunate dip into politics, and his untimely death, I, Hogarth is the remarkable story told through the artist's eyes. Michael Dean blends Hogarth's life and work into a rich and satisfying narrative, recommended for fans of Hilary Mantel and Peter Ackroyd.
Author Notes
Michael Dean studied history at Oxford and holds a masters in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of multiple books, including a novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
William Hogarth, famous for inventing a "moral" storytelling series of paintings and engravings he called Progresses (including the Rake's Progress and the Harlot's Progress), turns out to have had a progress of his own-from poor child to society artist, from engraver's apprentice to painter and lobbyist for copyright law, from frequenter of whorehouses to happily married man and back again, from ignored to lauded to mocked-that would require a Hogarth to depict. Lacking such an artist, we have Michael Dean's biographical novel, which draws on Hogarth's own writing and a range of other sources. That may make the novel sound boring, but it's not, largely because Hogarth-a likable self-promoter and self-described "pug" of a man-makes for highly diverting company. It helps that he knew everyone and went everywhere, and that Dean is good at showing his foibles and his artistic process. Hogarth's eye for human frailty and nose for news, coupled with his way with line, made him the perfect artist for the first half of the 18th century-a time when high and low mingled at the theater, the debtor's prison, and the brothel. If the BBC hasn't already optioned this, it should get a move on: Hogarth's life, as Dean portrays it, is an educational but sexily pleasurable costume drama waiting to happen. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Dean (Thorn, 2011) imagines the life, spirit and art of the English artist William Hogarth. Born in 1697 to a nave and inept Latin scholar and an intemperate, dissatisfied mother, Hogarth was apprenticed to an engraver, only to maneuver his way into tutelage from and assistantship to the court painter Sir James Thornhill. Hogarth's family fractures when father Richard lands in debtors' prison. Mother and children are assisted by Anthony da Costa, a Portuguese-Jewish moneylender. In da Costa's mansion, Hogarth glimpses Kate, a strumpet, the vision unleashing the artist's lifelong appreciation for fleshly sensuality, the dark side of which becomes the incurable "French pox." Apprenticing as an engraver, Hogarth frequents Lovejoy's bagnio, there meeting John Rakesby, later revealed to be John Thornhill, son of Sir James, a prominent artist. Dean's narrative of young Hogarth winnowing his way into Sir James' household shines with authenticity, right down to Hogarth's seduction of young Jane Thornhill. Dean's deciphering of Hogarth's art is as superb as his rendering of the streets of ribald and indecorous London, packed with drunks and thieves, privileged and poor. Dean offers the stories behind Hogarth's seminal works--the South Seas Scheme, A Harlot's Progress--and discusses Hogarth's lobbying for the Engraver's Copyright Act and support of Capt. Thomas Coram's quest for a foundling hospital. The fictional autobiographical narrative of the robust and complicated, sensual and sensitive Hogarth intrigues, but what gives the book its resonance is Dean's learned exploration of the depth and breadth--the sight, sound and stink--of Georgian London. A brilliant exercise in imagination and storytelling.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Dean, a linguist by training, has the renowned, eighteenth-century British painter, engraver, and illustrator William Hogarth tell his own life story in a work of vivid and ribald first-person historical fiction. His father is an unworldly writer of abstruse texts who lands in debtor's prison. His long-suffering yet entrepreneurial mother saves her family with the help of a moneylender. Hogarth Billy to his friends escapes the shocking confines of poverty through the arts, first as an apprentice engraver, then as a painter. We follow him from success to success, but he cannot forsake the pleasures of the flesh, and they exact their revenge on his health and his marriage. Or so Hogarth reports, offering unvarnished opinions of his enemies and fulsome praise for the pale, ample flesh of the harlots he can't quit. Not lust but pride cuts our smallish, increasingly pudgy man down to size. The period details are unobtrusive; the language is direct; the story, told in vignettes, is surely meant to evoke Hogarth's crowded prints. Not only devotees of historical fiction will enjoy Dean's Hogarth.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BORN in 1697, William Hogarth was one of the most influential and fascinating British artists of the 18th century. A painter and satirist, he was known for depicting, as he himself puts it in Michael Dean's new historical novel, "modern moral subjects." "I, Hogarth" follows the artist's life from his impoverished childhood to the fame and fortune of his adult years. Brought up in Spitalfields, an area of East London that was home to a market and a labyrinth of narrow, stinking alleyways, Hogarth knew the underbelly of the metropolis from an early age. His father, Richard, was an unsuccessful scholar who spent his life trying - and failing - to sell the books he had written. Eventually, he landed the family in a debtor's prison. His son took refuge in drawing and, haunted by his father's downfall, was determined not to emulate him. Through a string of chance encounters, as well as great tenacity and sheer artistic talent, Hogarth slowly worked his way up in the social hierarchy. Introduced to Sir James Thornhill, court painter to King George I, he not only entered into the higher echelons of London's patronage system but also found a wife, Thornhill's daughter, Jane. Although Hogarth began his artistic career as an engraver, he hated the repetitive work - and the fact that one wrong line could ruin an entire plate. "When I drew," Dean's fictional Hogarth explains, "I wanted to catch the passing moment, quick, quick, quick, not scratch away laboriously like a whore with the clap, easing her itch." Hogarth's art was inspired by the world around him, by the excesses and fashions of London life. Many of his paintings tell a story in a series of images: so-called "sequential art," almost like the scenes of a play. The first and most famous of these was "A Harlot's Progress," in which six paintings portray the journey of a fictional country girl, Moll Hackabout, from her arrival in London to her experiences as a rich man's mistress to her time as a prostitute to her death from venereal disease. The series made Hogarth famous. The voice in which Dean's Hogarth tells his own story is rich and persuasive, seemingly authentic. Gritty, bawdy and funny, his narrative is like stepping into a Hogarth painting. The artist struts through the London streets buoyed by success and vanity - or we see him with his breeches pulled down, ready to sample the pleasures of prostitutes. ("I wanted her for the night; no hoisted-skirts bunter up against the wall for me.") He's arrogant and excitable. Sketching a scene while attending a play, he stands up to see more and responds sharply to complaints: "Oh shut up. . . . I am William Hogarth, the artist. And I shall stand, if I so please." HERE is a man who is flamboyant and impatient, a man capable of brusquely seducing his sisters' shop assistant in the storeroom but also compassionate enough to serve as a govof the Foundling Hospital in London, several of whose orphans he fostered. He relies on his wife's artistic advice but enher by contracting syphilis when he cheats on her. He's an artist satirizing the moral decline of modern society who, nonetheless, has no difficulty dropping any critical references to the prime minister, Robert Walpole, after receiving a commission from him. "You have to be practical, you see?" As Hogarth moves through London, the city, its streets, theaters, taverns and people come alive. The crowds in a theater create a fetid smell "like a dead dog rotting in the Devil's privy," while a "leather-faced" flower seller offers more fragrant wares in Covent Garden. Hogarth takes us along on a choppy boat ride on the Thames, then shows us the cobbled lanes of East London and the mansions of dukes. And he introduces us to contemporaries like Lavinia Fenton, whom Hogarth met as a young girl when her mother tried to sell the child's virginity to his father. Years later, Lavinia became a famous actress and married the Duke of Bolton. Another friend, Thomas Coram, a philanthropic-minded sea captain who helped establish the Foundling Hospital, took Hogarth into the slums where babies died outside the run-down gin palaces frequented by sailors and whores. Dean weaves Hogarth's opinions on art into the narrative, as well as an account of his fight for the rights of artists, which resulted in the Engravers' Copyright Act passed by Parliament in 1735. Dean has come up with a clever device to convey these more serious aspects of Hogarth's career. Set in taverns, where the artist persuades his friends to support his petition to protect engravers, or in drawing rooms, where he explains his art to Jane during their courtship, Hogarth's arguments are presented without didacticism, without dry theorizing. Dean's prose feels true to the 18th century without being irritatingly "historical." A maid is described as having fine features that would have been even finer "had they been allowed to sharpen on a duchess," while the crowd at the opening night of John Gay's "Beggar's Opera" is "heaving like a bishop's belly." Dean paints with words as Hogarth did with his brush. Born in East London in 1697, Hogarth knew the underbelly of the metropolis from an early age. Andrea Wulf's latest book is "Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens."
Library Journal Review
The title captures the classic grandiosity of the life lived by the painter and engraver whose name has become synonymous with an era. William Hogarth narrates the story of his rise from poverty in London to Sarjeant Painter to the King in language that evokes his most famous images. Along the way, the artist wins-and almost loses-the love of the gentle but keenly intelligent Jane Thornhill, the daughter of one of his artist heroes. Crammed with lovingly described sights that intoxicate the imagination, Hogarth's London emerges as the great romance of his life. While the artist's fall from public favor ultimately kills him, Jane's love mollifies the sting of cruel disapprobation. VERDICT The skill with historical subjects Dean demonstrated in his first novel, Thorn, in which he imagines a friendship between Spinoza and Rembrandt, is just as dazzling in this novel. Hogarth's voice brings 18th-century London vividly to life, especially with his earthy metaphors. Readers who keep a reference of Hogarth's works at hand will delight in Dean's attention to detail.-John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.