Our new series for 2015! Daily Constitutional editor Adam takes us on a Cartoon & Comic Book Tour of London – 20 stops on a metropolis-wide search for all things illustrated.
He'll be taking in everything from Gillray and Hogarth, to Scooby Doo and on to Deadpool and beyond! In addition he'll guide you to the best in London comic book stores as well as galleries that showcase the best in the cartoonist's art.
Panel 1/20. Hogarth, St George's & Gin Lane
William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) was the pioneer of Western sequential art.
Which, to my ear, is a fancy pants way of
saying he invented the cartoon strip as we know it.
The great man is currently the subject of
an acclaimed exhibition at The Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street – which
is just a marker pen's throw away from the first location in our Cartoon & Comic Book Tour of London.
St George's Church, Bloomsbury was designed
by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Here it is today…
And here it is in Hogarth's 1751 piece Gin Lane…
In a modern cartoon, if the opening panel features, say, The Shard, then we are immediately "in the picture". We know
exactly where the action is taking place without a word of dialogue.
The setting of Hogarth's Gin Lane, thanks
to the presence of Hawksmoor's church, would have been instantly recognisable to
the Londoner of 1751. We are in the parish of St Giles where gin was cheap and
life was cheaper. Where prostitution was rife. Where the 18th century equivalent of The Daily Constitutional
could be bought down Monmouth Street in the shape of a broadside.
The positioning of the church is key not
only in locating the scene, but in the moral of the story. It is somehow
remote, suggesting that God is very far away from the scene that unfolds before
us. God is an absentee slum landlord here and evil has moved in. Evil in liquid
form.
The positioning of the church is used a
second time to ram the message home – no one ever said that Hogarth was subtle.
Look at the three globes of the pawn shop sign on the left (where the working man is selling the tools of his trade to buy
booze). The globes hang directly above the church spire forming an inverted
cross. Money is worshipped here. Money buys gin. Who needs to slave a lifetime for salvation with
oblivion just a penny away?
The inverted cross is also an emblem of St
Peter – do we find Hogarth's legendary, 'ow you say, British Bulldog Spirit
present here? Is he asking us to behold the Irish Catholic immigrant – a predominant
demographic in the 18th & 19th Century rookery of St Giles – in a less than
flattering light?
With our modern eye we might even read the
inversion of the cross as further evidence of the presence of evil.
The religious imagery continues in the
figure sitting on the steps centre stage – the syphilitic madonna allowing her
child to fall to certain death, all for a pinch of snuff.
How would the marketeers of "Midtown" polish this one up for the estate agent's window?
St Giles is the patron saint of lepers and outcasts and finds himself in the right place at the right time here. Hogarth, however, is not here to watch over the fallen sinners. Instead his vicious pen lays bare the suffering on his doorstep. It is not the artist's function to provide solutions. That is the job of the politician. And later in our series we'll look at 18th century caricaturist Gillray and his vivid satire of our elected representatives attempts at governance.
See Bloomsbury on the British Museum and Literary Bloomsbury walks.
How would the marketeers of "Midtown" polish this one up for the estate agent's window?
St Giles is the patron saint of lepers and outcasts and finds himself in the right place at the right time here. Hogarth, however, is not here to watch over the fallen sinners. Instead his vicious pen lays bare the suffering on his doorstep. It is not the artist's function to provide solutions. That is the job of the politician. And later in our series we'll look at 18th century caricaturist Gillray and his vivid satire of our elected representatives attempts at governance.
See Bloomsbury on the British Museum and Literary Bloomsbury walks.










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