The most disgusting handkerchief in British art

Anyone can understand the general idea of Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-Mode. Rich commoner girl marries foppish heir to earldom thanks to the schemes of their respective fathers, and then ere long it all goes very seriously pear shaped and they are both dead before their time. It’s all covered in six brilliant scenes charting a story with enough details to qualify as a novel in pigment. The couple lead dissolute lives of sexual carelessness; he is killed in a duel and she commits suicide. Their morals and taste are equally appalling.

But the story is so much more complex than that, and the more you look at the six pictures the more you see in them. Even so, it really takes a guidebook such as this to get the full impact of the subtleties of the work. Who, without a bit of help, would spot the sly references in the pictures in the background, seen through a doorway into the next room? ‘Little is incidental in Hogarth, though much is ambiguous’, Judy Egerton reminds us.

It is hard to say which of the six interior scenes is fuller of hints and suggestions. The rooms very much reflect the lives of their inhabitants, whether it is the arriviste alderman, the dissolute young couple, or the dubious doctor. They range from the opulent scene of The Tête à Tête to the low-life Bagnio, which was a sort of semi-brothel. The series begins like a comedy about social climbing and pretension, but in no time it has descended into the real implications for a rather shallow young couple who are thrown together by grasping fathers. High society only seems to exacerbate their shallowness. The clue that this is more than a light-hearted chuckle at other people’s foibles is there from the start, with the black spot representing venereal disease visible on the neck of the groom-to-be. There is a dark side to these foolish people with money and position but no balancing taste or morality. Syphilis is either hinted at or obvious in every scene. It doesn’t cause the death of either of the principals, but it is part of the diseased nature of their society.

Once alerted to the presence of so many oblique references and clues, the reader begins to search for them, too. Why are there quite so many overturned chairs? How do we know that the coronet on the chandelier means the old earl is still alive; mightn’t it now be the property of his son?

 The interior scenes are as full of telling objects as anything by, say, the 17^th-century Dutch genre painter Jan Steen. Egerton goes over the contents of the rooms like a detective with a magnifying glass. Books lie open with revealing texts for the keen sighted; the positioning of violin cases, of all things, suggests sexual impropriety. She seems to be the first to discover the family connection between the older woman and the girl in The Inspection. She has also discovered some arcane medical details. For all this elucidation, there are still some intriguing mysteries. What is the music score in The Tête à Tête? Why are there two sarcophagi in the doctor’s room? (My own private theory is that they might be related to the medieval medical ingredient of ‘mummy’, which was made of ground-up – yes, you guessed it – although we are told that there is no medical significance to them.)

Hogarth’s satire is Swiftian in its lacerating portrayal of social decadence. Yet Hogarth is not saying, ‘Aren’t these people awful?’ so much as, ‘This is what goes on in high society nowadays’. The author catches his allusions with a good deal of wit of her own. So young Viscount Squanderfield ‘will succeed as the next Earl of Squander when his father dies; but that is the only thing he is ever likely to succeed in or at’. 

The book is a witty and perceptive explication of this famous set of 18^th-century pictures and is a perfect accompaniment to a closer look at the original paintings.  First published in 1997 to go with a Hogarth exhibition at the National Gallery, it now features a DVD narrative by Alan Bennett. The DVD follows the book very closely but adds a few details. The book tells us that the music lying on the overturned chair in Tête-à-Tête is playable, but with the DVD we actually hear it. It is still unidentified, but a pleasing little tune—perhaps a popular ditty of the time. What new comment might it make on the situation, if only we knew its name?

This guide through Hogarth’s view of aristocratic marriage is engagingly written and well illustrated. The doctor (or ‘quack’ in some versions) ‘polishes his spectacles on what must be the most disgusting handkerchief in the whole of British art’. Is it? Now there’s a subject for further research!

Book and DVD published by Yale,  2011. £14.99, 80 pp. 34 col./11 mono illus.  ISBN 978 1 85709 510 4