Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"A Harlot's Progress, Plate 3
William Hogarth, English, 1697-1764
Engraving
Gift of Prof. William A. McGill, 2001.10.03.03
“Discarded by the merchant and her marketability reduced by disease, Moll is forced to live in a slum in Drury Lane and serve the population at large, even sexual deviants. Her principal lover is now a highwayman, James Dalton; his wig box rests on top of her crudely arranged canopy. In this breakfast scene, which exactly parallels the previous one, Moll rises at 11:45 A.M. to take her morning tea. Dressed a little less flamboyantly and looking considerably less vivacious, she dangles a watch taken from the previous night's customer.
An ugly but practiced woman whose nose has been eaten away by disease has replaced her naïve servants. The bunter seems intended to serve as an example of the fate of those superannuated harlots who survive the mortal effects of syphilis. Moll's bed, only partially visible in a discreet corner of her former apartment, now fills the room. The delicate silver teapot is replaced by a tin pot and the elegant table by a heavy, functional piece on which lie butter wrapped in a pastoral letter (Pastoral Letter to) and some eating utensils. her crude vanity holds a jar of professional make-up, a broken piece of mirror, a gin bottle, a fine-comb, a chipped punchbowl, a broken stem glass and a liquor measure. A letter addressed To Md. Hackabout lies in the vanity drawer. Beneath the table are ale measures and tobacco pipes. The exotic monkey is replaced by a household cat that postures suggestively to indicate the girl's occupation. The large, expensively framed pictures of the previous apartment are here reduced to four small works. Above her chair (which holds her work coat, a candle and a dish—used as a chamber pot) is a medallion of some saint. Above that hangs portraits of Moll's idols, the roguish highwayman Mac(k)heath from Gay's Beggar's Opera and Dr Sacheveral S.T.P. (sanctae theologiae professor), a controversial divine of the period. Placed purposefully on top of these two portraits are a jar and two vials of ""cures"" for venereal disease.
Above the room's broken windows hangs a cheap print portraying an angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac; it seems to warn of the girl's impending and uninterceded fate at the hands of the law. Over Moll's bed hangs a witch's hat and a bundle of birch rods, suggesting that her condition requires her to engage in flagellation and black magic. A wig hangs on the drape behind her bed. Through her apartment door come an arresting magistrate and his constables to apprehend Moll for prostitution. The leading figure, who fondles his mustache effetely, has been identified as Sir John Gonson, a type of the perennial harlot-prosecutors whose righteousness is only equaled by their compulsiveness.”
From Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth
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