The majority of the details about Hogarth and Richardson’s arrangement for illustrating the second edition of Pamela have not survived. From the contents of Aaron Hill’s letter to Samuel Richardson, it is known that preliminary arrangements were made for Hogarth to illustrate a frontispiece for the second edition of Pamela. Hill writes that, ‘the designs you have taken for frontispieces seem to have been very judiciously chosen; upon pre-supposition that Mr. Hogarth is able (and if any-body is, it is he) to teach pictures to speak and think.’
However, when the second edition of Pamela was published on 14th February 1741, the novel lacked a frontispiece and illustrations.
In the introduction to the second and third editions of Pamela (14 February and 12 March 1741), Richardson added a brief explanation for the lack of illustrations to these revised volumes. He stated that there had not been enough time for the illustrator to complete the entire project, and that the few images were unsatisfactory. As there was no other known illustrator hired by Richardson, these remarks most likely refer to Hogarth:
One was actually finished for that purpose; put there not being time for the other,
from the Demand for the new impression; and the Engraving Part of which was done
(tho’ no Expense was spared) having fallen very short of the Spirit of the Passages
they were intended to represent, the Proprietors were advised to lay them aside.
Richardson justifies the exclusion of images, suggesting that it might be impossible adequately to illustrate the eponymous heroine, for every image would fall short of her perfection, elegance, and amiability.
Was Richardson referring to Hogarth’s work when he claimed the image had not met the ‘spirit of the passage’? Hogarth was well-respected by Richardson,at first making this criticism unlikely, but Hogarth was the only potential illustrator mentioned in Hill and Richardson’s exchange of letters on the subject. The engraver and prolific journalist of the art world, George Vertue (1684-1756), does not mention the project or any scandalous fallout. From the fragments of the sparse correspondence between Hill and Richardson during the first months of 1741, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor posit that Richardson and Hogarth’s collaboration had failed and that Richardson was displeased with the products of his second ‘designer’.This seems entirely plausible, however, it implies that Hogarth was rejected and then replaced. The correspondence between Hill and Richardson does not provide any information about the fate of Hogarth’s proposed designs, or the attempts by the second ‘designer’, although we do learn that Richardson selected ‘Pamela sorting our her new bundles of clothing’ as the final frontispiece in lieu of the originally planned ‘contemplated suicide’ scene at the pond. Researchers have been left to wonder why Hogarth’s drawings did not make it to publication and to lament that none of the proposed frontispieces or illustrations from 1741 survive. The accepted conclusion is that Hogarth’s and other designers’ visions of Pamela were incongruous with Richardson’s image of the heroine. After all, idealism and perfection were not strong points in Hogarth’s repertoire.
The artistic incompatibility has been suggested by Alan McKillop, who claimed Hogarth’s artistic reputation as a satirist did not correspond with Richardson’s inclination to have Pamela depicted as the epitome of perfection. In fact, Hogarth later satirized one of Gravelot’s illustrations for Pamela, in which Pamela reaches out to embrace baby Billy (figure 1). Hogarth plays with this format in the last scene of Marriage-a-la-mode, and in this image, the baby reaches with outstretched arms for his dead mother, whose has taken poison upon learning of her lover’s death (figure 2). The unforgiving honesty of Hogarth’s draughtsmanship also supports this theory, and Ronald Paulson further explains this defining characteristic: ‘If Hogarth paints a wooden leg, it must look exactly and only like a firm piece of timber.’ As we have seen, Hogarth was skilled in conversation pieces, narratives series, and caricatures and it is entirely possible that he chose to take a satirical, moralizing approach to illustrating Pamela in the manner of Harlot’s Progress. Perhaps he shared Fielding’s disdain for the novel’s artificiality? If this is so, the trademark verisimilitude of Hogarth’s satirical sketches might have revealed tensions and incongruities in Pamela’s character, for if Hogarth drew a servant girl, it would look exactly and only like a servant girl, no matter how high her later status. This detail is important because the scenes that Richardson wanted illustrated -Pamela showing her bundles and Pamela contemplating suicide - capture Pamela at moral low-points, (just as the final scene of Marriage a-la-mode depicts the countess her lowest), making the heroine particularly vulnerable. Hogarth’s satirical reading of the situation would have illustrated an anti Pamelist reading of the novel, because this group of readers found the heroine’s perfection cloying, Richardson’s moralizing condescending, and Pamela’s social climbing and pretenses to virtue distasteful. To anti Pamelists, Pamela was a burlesque disguised as a moral, didactic novel. Charles Povey, author of the critique of Pamela, The Virgin in Eden, summarizes the anti Pamelist disdain for the novel’s artificiality, providing another interpretation of the burlesque: ‘Good God! What can youths and virgins learn from Pamela’s Letters, more than lessons to tempt their Chastity, those Epistles are only scenes of Immodesty, painted in Images of Virtue, Disguises in Masquerade’.
In this reaction, Povey is essentially categorizing Pamela as a masquerade and as a burlesque. The term ‘burlesque’ was a contentious term in eighteenth-century literary discourse; Richardson’s rival, Fielding, meditated on the differences between the burlesque and the comic in his preface to Joseph Andrews, a direct response to Pamela. Fielding concluded that the burlesque was an ‘exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural, and where our Delight, if we examine it, arises from the surprising Absurdity, as in appropriating the Manners of the highest to the lowest’. While it would be hyperbolical for modern readers to call Pamela’s gentrification ‘monstrous’ and ‘unnatural’, the narrative’s insistence that ‘ladyhood’ is a concept divorced from birth, class, and fashionability
would have struck some contemporary readers as improbable, fictitious, and even humorous. Fielding considered Pamela a burlesque, and he retaliated with his moral comedy Joseph Andrews to usurp and destabilize Pamela. Furthermore, the word masquerade was associated with prostitution, and Hogarth made this link himself in the second plate for Harlot’s Progress - he places a mask on a small side table in Moll’s bedroom. The elements of the burlesque and masquerade that could be gleaned from Pamela may have been revealed by Hogarth’s all too honest graver. There was too much slippage, and Pamela might have been conflated with The Harlot’s Progress.
The subject matter selected for the frontispiece, Pamela Contemplating Suicide, would also have proved challenging for Richardson and Hogarth. Within a year of two of Hogarth’s incomplete Pamela project, the artist was addressing the theme of suicide in the sixth plate of Marriage-a-la-mode, which, as we have seen, was also a direct response to a Gravelot illustration for Pamela. Hogarth’s disturbing image of the self-poisoned lady’s last breaths suggest that he would have been brutally honest in portraying Pamela’s distress while contemplating suicide. Pamela’s face might have been as pale and contorted as the dying lady’s, and this would not have been in keeping with Richardson’s loft intentions. As Richardson makes very clear in the narrative of Pamela, he wanted readers to imagine the heroine as a modern day Lucretia. Pamela presents this idea to the reader in her refusal of Mr B.: “‘May I,” said I, “Lucretia like, justify myself by my death, if I am used barbarously?”’ Richardson most likely conceived of an illustration for Pamela that resembled a history painting, not a probing commentary on contemporary society - perhaps he was thinking of Rembrandt’s majestically ethereal and haunted Lucretia, 1666 (figure 3). Although Hogarth executed several large-scale history paintings, many of which he painted for the Foundling Hospital,
this genre was not his forte. The switch from Pamela Contemplating Suicide to Pamela sorting our her new bundles implies that Richardson thought a gentler image of his heroine would be realized in a conversation piece format, and may also indicate an effort to guide Hogarth away from the satirical. Hill’s vote of confidence for the artist - ‘Mr. Hogarth is able’ - leads us to infer that Hogarth was not out of his depth.
But a survey of Hogarth’s work that addresses material wealth from around this period indicates that it was likely Hogarth would have taken a sharp, satirical line with the fetishism of wealth implied by Pamela’s adoration of her bundles. In the construction of this scene, Hogarth could have drawn a strong parallel between the heroine and Tom Rakewell, of the Rake’s Progress, 1734 (figure
4). In the second scene of Hogarth’s series, he captures the rake indulging in the splendors of luxury and fine clothing, along with his upper-class friends. Hogarth shrewdly satirizes the material trappings of the audience and their self-indulgent, unsupportable ways.
This ability to satirize the behaviour and opulence of the ton was a defining characteristic of Hogarth’s work; a Miss Edwardes paid Hogarth to mock the fashions of 1741 and the result was Taste in High Life.
We have found parallels in Hogarth’s modern moral series that give some indication of what Hogarth’s Pamela would have looked like if he worked within his strongest genre, but there is also evidence of the artist exploring themes from the novel in a less politically invigorated type of narrative painting - the Happy Marriage (figures 5 and 6). In an interesting twist, there are a few surviving oil sketches and engravings after a lost series of paintings by Hogarth that may be a direct, non-satirical response to Pamela. Paulson argues that Hogarth’s Happy Marriage was a visual retort to the success of Highmore’s Adventures of Pamela, and Bindman supports this theory.
There are two surviving scenes, The Staymaker and The Country Dance, which seem to warmly embrace the simplicity of a bucolic marriage. In The Staymaker the wife of the squire is devotedly attended to by her servants and she is surrounded by plump, playful children. The Country Dance depicts the whole panorama of society all spinning and whirling. As Bindman observes, there is no drama, no climax, and no ironic twist. Hogarth was not satisfied with the series and it was never completed. I would like to carry Paulson’s argument that these images were a response to Highmore’s Pamela one step further and suggest that if Hogarth’s original illustrations were not satirical, then they would have resembled The Happy Marriage. If this was indeed the case, then Hogarth’s illustrations would have fallen into the disappointingly bland and cautious category of his earlier Don Quixote illustrations, further confirming that the artist’s talents were best reserved for original narratives.
Richardson would have been well-aware of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress before he even approached the artist and Warren Mild raises an intriguing point - perhaps Hogarth was simply too busy to complete the project within the limits of Richardson’s schedule.
The commission for the Pamela illustrations came only a few years after the release of Hogarth’s immensely popular The Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s Progress, and also around the same time he was producing poignant images of London street life, such as The Shrimp Girl (1740-45) and The Enraged Musician (1741). During this period Hogarth was unable to make his own copperplates because of the high demand for his work, and in the case of Marriage-a-la-Mode, he outsourced the job to France.The failure of Richardson and Hogarth’s collaboration may ultimately have been a case of poor timing. But whether the artistic jilt was caused by incompatible artistic temperaments or bad timing, the collapse of Hogarth’s commission and the absence of any illustration in the second and third editions of Pamela opened up the novel to many possible visual representations - from Gravelot and Hayman’s rococo confections, to Highmore’s honest heroine, to Carwitham’s country girl and Mercier’s sly seductress, whom we met in the introduction. Richardson believed he needed a visual narrative with an optimistic, un-Hogarthian conclusion - a Pamela’s Progress.
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