William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress

Ian Gordon (Anglia Ruskin University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1732

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Comedy
Satire

Resources

A Harlot's Progress is a seminal work in Hogarth's development. It marks his engagement in a new genre, narrative comic history-painting, or “modern moral subjects”, as he describes them in his Autobiographical Notes, through which he established comedy and satire in art as respectable categories worthy of serious attention. It was in 1730 when, according to the eighteenth-century diarist of artists' lives, George Vertue, Hogarth stumbled, almost by accident, on this genre. He had been painting a whore and her servant in her garret in Drury Lane, when he hit upon the idea of tracing her previous and subsequent histories. The six paintings of A Harlot's Progress, including likenesses of well-known contemporary p…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2565 words

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "A Harlot's Progress". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7146, accessed 20 May 2024.]

Save this article