 Four years after he completed industry and the idleness, Hogarth came out with yet another pictorial series, this one shorter and darker than any he'd made before. The Four Stages of Cruelty tells the story of a poor orphan named Tom Nero, whose character is as black as his name. Over the course of the series four plates, we watch as Tom proceeds, from torturing a dog, to beating his horse, to murdering his mistress, all of which is rewarded in the final scene with a fittingly cruel end. In the last lecture we saw how industry and idleness marked a shift in Hogarth's artistic practice, away from the sophistication and complexity of a harlot's and rake's progress toward a simpler and sterner form and tone. With the stages of cruelty, Hogarth extended this shift even further. Nero's story is told in a mere four plates in a deliberately stripped-down visual style, and he is by far the lowest of the artist's many fictional anti-heroes in both moral and social terms. Yet paradoxically it was the stages of cruelty that Hogarth would later cite as one of the works, if not the work, that he was proudest to have made. Writing a decade or so after the series publication, he remarked that if cruelty has been prevented by these four prints, I had rather be maker of them than of the cartoons. By the cartoons, Hogarth meant the seven full-scale designs for tapestries, depicting scenes from the lives of the apostles made by Raphael for the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. In Hogarth's time, these paintings which hung at Hampton Court were the most celebrated and revered works of art in all of Britain. Hogarth's comment was no doubt designed to provoke. How could a series of prints plainly etched by a contemporary British artist and showing the darkest side of human nature, possibly rival, let alone exceed, a group of biblical subjects painted by a Renaissance master? But his claim had a serious aspect to it too. For a modern commercial society like Britain's, Hogarth seems to be saying, great paintings to be hung in grand churches were no longer really what was needed, nor for that matter were they what people wanted. Instead, this was to be found in modern commercial works like Hogarth's own modern moral progressives. And in particular, in a work like the one we'll be examining here, which takes square aim at the scourge of human cruelty through images designed at once to instruct, deter, and delight. My name is Meredith Gamer, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the fourth in a series of six films devoted to William Hogarth, produced as part of the Paul Mellon Center's 2021 Public Lecture Series program. All have been made in collaboration with the filmmaker John Law. In this film, I'll be focusing on the stages of cruelty, a series of four prints that Hogarth designed, engraved and published in the winter of 1751. Let's start by taking a closer look at the prints themselves, which, as we've come to expect with Hogarth's moral subjects, are packed full of narrative and incident. The series opens with a scene at childhood mayhem. On a clean, swept London street, a swarm of young boys are busy tormenting animals in a variety of impressively creative and fiendishly nasty ways. At right, too blind a bird with a fire hot needle. Another ties a bone to a hungry dog's tail. Several more are about to start a game of throwing a cox. And still more grin and holler as two cats, which they've strung up by their tails, frantically hiss and claw at one another. Meanwhile, toward the center of the scene, something even more horrible is happening. A young boy, dressed in rags, his face in shadow, is shoving an arrow down the backside of a large dog. The animal howls in pain as another boy, with tears in his eyes, desperately tries to intervene. With one hand he sees his hold of the boy's wrist. With the other he offers him food, a small round tart, as an enticement to stop. This is how Hogarth introduces us to Tom Nero, whose fortunes he traces over the next three prints. That Tom's life is already destined to end badly is predicted by yet another little boy, who has just drawn a stick figure picture of a man hanging from a gallows, and beneath it, Tom's name, on a balustrade wall. By the second stage of cruelty, Tom has grown up to become a hackney coachman, whose job it was, much like taxi cab drivers today, to ferry Londoners through the city. An older reflection of his younger self, he is abusing his aged and starving horse, which is broken down under the weight of four penny-pinching barristers, who have piled in together in order to save on their fare. Once again, Tom's act of cruelty is not an isolated event. At right, a drover is bludgeoning a straggling lamb, which has collapsed in exhaustion on the way to market. Nearby, a dozing drayman has unwittingly allowed his cart to trample a child. And in the distance, a man goads an overladen donkey with a pitchfork, while others chase a baited bull through the streets. In the next plate, cruelty and perfection, we move from the city to the suburbs. In a quiet churchyard cemetery late at night, Tom has been discovered by a party of hue and cry at the scene of a savage crime. Before him lies the dead body of his pregnant mistress, the servant Anne Gill, a stream of blood flowing from her brutally gashed neck. As the note by Anne's feet explains, Tom seduced her into helping him burgle her mistress's grand home, which rises up in the distance. The fruits of Anne's theft, a candlestick, kettle and serving dish, lie in a bundle at her side, along with her initial trunk. Meanwhile, a cache of pistols and stolen watches pours forth from Tom's fine coat pockets, which indicates that he's been making a living as a highwayman, robbing travelers on the dark roads in and around London. In the final plate, the reward of cruelty, Tom's crimes are punished and the prophecy of the first print fulfilled. He's been hanged at Tibern like Tom Idle before him. The gallows' rope still tied around his neck, he's now being subjected to the further and even more shameful punishment of being anatomized by a group of London surgeons. The presiding lecturer jabs a pointer at Tom's severed chest while one of his dissectors rummages around inside, emptying his organs into a wooden bucket below. Another of Tom's assailants gouges out his eye while a third prepares to slice into his ankle. A steaming cauldron filled with bones simmers away nearby and in a bit of poetic justice, a mangy dog makes a welcome feast of Tom's discarded heart. As even this relatively brief introduction to the prints will have made clear, the stages of cruelty is a work filled with violence, violence enacted by humans against animals and by humans against one another. All in all, it is Hogarth's most searing pictorial series. Modern viewers often find the prints difficult to look at and as we will see, there's good reason to believe that many 18th century viewers found them so as well. Why make such a set of images? What spurred Hogarth to these subjects and how might he have intended or expected them to work on their viewers? A first set of answers is suggested by the way Hogarth produced and marketed the stages of cruelty, the publication of which he announced at the same time as the publication of another set of prints, Beer Street and Gin Lane. The joint advertisement for all six prints, which began to appear in London newspapers in February 1751, not only included all the usual information about price and place of purchase, but also this note. As the subjects of these prints are calculated to reform some reigning vices peculiar to the lower class of people in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the author, meaning Hogarth, has published them in the cheapest manner possible. And these new prints were indeed cheap, at least by Hogarth's standards. As with industry and idleness, Hogarth developed the compositions first as drawings rather than paintings, and he engraved them in a similarly bold, blunt style, which allowed him in turn to sell them at a mere shilling per print. In addition, he also took the further and for him highly unusual step of offering the prints for sale individually rather than as sets alone. As a result, prospective buyers were free to purchase as many or as few of the six as they wanted or could afford. For more affluent customers, the curious Hogarth called them, he produced a smaller number of impressions on better paper, which he sold for a shilling and six pence. This strategy, which he'd also employed in the case of industry and idleness, makes clear that Hogarth expected the prints to appeal to viewers from a variety of classes. But his chief intended audience, as he says, seems to have been what he calls the lower class of people, which in 18th century Britain meant the vast majority of the population, really everyone except the landed aristocracy and urban professional classes. Indeed, it's for this reason that Hogarth appears to have experimented, at least initially, with publishing the stages of cruelty, not as engravings at all, but rather as woodcuts, a medium that was heavily associated in this period with all sorts of popular printed materials, like ballads, broadsides and chapbooks, precisely because it was so inexpensive to produce. Two remarkable large-scale woodcuts survive from this effort, both of them carved by the printmaker John Bell after Hogarth's designs for the last two plates in the series. In the end, for reasons that remain unclear, Hogarth abandoned the project and engraved the designs himself. But the fact that he seems to have conceived of the stages of cruelty, originally as woodcuts, is telling. According to his biographer John Ireland, his reason for doing so had everything to do with matters of cost. Hogarth's aim, Ireland says, was to make the prints price low enough for the poor man's purse. At the same time, Bell's vivid black and white images, with their deeply cut contours and strong linear design, aligned this pictorial series, more so than any other before it, with the popular visual culture of Hogarth's day. So what were the reigning vices that Hogarth's six prints were calculated to reform? The artist doesn't state these explicitly, but they're clear enough from the subjects he depicts. Beer Street and Gin Lane contrast a scene of jolly commerce and industry with one of starvation, poverty, and decrepitude. Here the target is the spirit Gin, a Dutch import that became enormously popular in the years following the accession of King William III. Cheap and potent, Gin was especially popular among the London poor. Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, went the common phrase. And by the 1730s and 1740s, it was increasingly seen by members of polite society as a root cause of all the nation's ills, a source of depravity, debauchery, sickness, and death. The neglect of children is a recurrent theme in Gin Lane. A shriveled youngster gnaws on a bone, a mother feeds her infant Gin instead of nursing it with milk. And at the very center of the print, another mother, her shirt wide open and legs covered with sores, allows her baby to tumble out of her arms as she reaches in a state of total stupefaction for another pinch of snuff. The young Tom Nero who Garth invites us to understand is a product of this blighted scene. Not only do his tattered and torn clothes recall those worn by the figures in Gin Lane, but the badge he wears with the initials SG identifies him as an orphaned ward of the parish of St. Giles, the notorious slum where Gin Lane is set. If Beers Street and Gin Lane took aim at the purported vice of excessive drunkenness among London's poor, proposing locally brewed British ale as a happy solution, the stages of cruelty turned its attention to what was widely perceived to be a closely related problem. In the winter of 1748, London newspapers began to report on a sudden rise in crime, particularly violent crime in the capital and its immediate surrounds. Never were so many, so bold and such various kinds of robberies as this winter, wrote Gertrude Savile in her diary in December of 1750. In the winter of 1748, London newspapers began to report on a sudden rise in crime in the capital and its immediate surrounds. Gertrude Savile wrote Gertrude Savile's diary in December of 1750. Indeed she continued to observe they increase every year. Historians now commonly attribute this mid-century crime wave to the end of the War of Austrian Succession, which returned thousands of unemployed and war-battered soldiers and sailors to the British mainland and above all to London. However, at the time observers including Hogarth's friend, the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding quickly linked this development instead and once again to the city's poor. It is within this context that we can better begin to understand both the story and the form of Hogarth's stages of cruelty. Like industry and idleness, the series makes ample use of text to help viewers decipher the scenes at hand. Six lines of rhyming verse accompany each print, telling us not only what is going on, but also how we should respond. In the first stage of cruelty, for example, the verses describe the exchange between Tom and the sensitive boy who begs him to stop, then sternly instruct us to learn from this fair example you whom savage sports delight, how cruelty disgusts the view while pity charms the sight. Other elements guide our interpretation, too. In each plate, Hogarth includes a single figure who serves as a positive foil to the wicked Nero, a bit like the contrast he sets up between good child and idol, only with the lines here even more sharply drawn. In plate one, he's the kind boy. In plate two, the man who is taking down Tom's vehicle number in order to report him to the authorities. In three, he's the man who holds out a lantern to illuminate Anne's body while shielding his face in horror. And in four, he's the man who points up at one of the skeletons that hang in niches on the wall, ominous portents of what Tom himself will soon become. Indeed, his pointing hand in this plate is one of many, nearly a dozen in all, that shepherd our gaze through the four prints, making sure that we see what we're supposed to see, that we don't miss a thing. And finally, again, much as we saw in industry and idleness, Hogarth relies on a variety of visual repetitions and puns in order to drive home certain key lessons that the stages seeks explicitly to convey. Look, for instance, at how the arrow that Nero wheels in plate one morphs into his whip handle in plate two, before changing once more into the lecturer's pointer in four. Or at the way Tom's bloodstained dagger reappears, poised at the ready as the chief surgeon's knife. Or still again at the way the softly curving bodies of Tom's animal victims mirror one another and even more conspicuously the way Anne's supine corpse so closely prefigures Tom's in the last print in the series. By these means, Hogarth suggests at a purely formal level how one stage of Tom's cruelty leads inexorably to the next and must inevitably be repaid in kind. This very twist in the stage's narrative, the fact that Nero's cruelty is met with cruelty points to something important. While it's true that the language of Hogarth's advertisement suggests that he considered cruelty a vice particular to the poor, the prints themselves paint a different picture. In these images, it's not just little boys and common laborers who bring about or benefit from the suffering of others, but lawyers, doctors and surgeons too. Men who owing both to their class and profession ought to know and be better. In plate two, as we've seen, Tom's carriage has broken down as a direct result of the miserliness of the lawyers he was transporting, even though their fine wigs and corpulent frames clearly suggest that they could have afforded to pay more for their ride. Nor do they seem especially concerned about or even alert to the trouble they've caused. More damning by far is Hogarth's treatment of the men in plate four. The circular room, royal coat of arms and emblem on the lecturer's chair, which shows a hand testing a pulse, make combined reference to London's two main medical societies, the Royal College of Physicians and the Company of Surgeons. Public dissections did in fact take place at each of these institutions several times a year on the corpses of executed criminals. And in some cases, their skeletons were preserved and hung up for public viewing, much as we see the two pictured here. Such events and objects were meant to be instructional to help the college and company's members gain a deeper understanding of the human body, which it was their job to treat, heal and cure. But that hardly seems to be what's happening here. The fellows in black caps and mortarboards appear variously disgusted by or indifferent to the sight of Tom's mangled corpse. One has his nose stuck in a book, two others natter away. Behind them a group of physicians ignore the proceedings altogether. Some hold forth while others doze, chat or look out the window. And then there's the way the dissection itself is unfolding with no apparent rhyme or reason. With their rolled up sleeves, sinewy arms and meaty hands, Tom's surgeons seem more like senseless butchers than enlightened men of science. Meanwhile, the lecturer who directs their activity looks on with imperious detachment, his brow raised and mouth set in a barely perceptible smirk. Of course there is a difference between murdering a young woman and opening a dead body between sadism and apathy. But we must remember that in 18th century Britain, criminal dissection was widely held in horror by rich and poor alike, both because of religious beliefs and practices surrounding the proper treatment and burial of the body after death, and because tales abounded of hanging victims reviving on the dissection table or being dissected half alive, as Tom's grimacing expression suggests might even be the case here. Indeed, public fear of dissection was such that in March 1752, just a little over a year after the stages of cruelty was published, Parliament added it to the sentence of death for murder in the hopes that it would deter where mere hanging apparently could not. The barbarism of Tom's dissectors was not lost on the stage's original viewers, just as it's hard for us to miss it today. For Horace Walpole, one of Hogarth's earliest and shrewdest critics, the brilliance of the whole series turned on this final, unexpected irony. How delicate and superior, too, is Hogarth's satire, Walpole remarked. When he intimates in this print how the legal habit of viewing shocking scenes pardons the human mind and renders it unfeeling. In moral terms, it would appear that Tom's callous punishers are little better and perhaps a good deal worse than Tom himself. In praising Hogarth's stages of cruelty, however, Walpole also calls attention to a problem the series raises. For if, as was commonly believed, viewing shocking scenes could harden the human mind and render it unfeeling, then shouldn't we also expect this to be the effect or at least a risk of viewing Hogarth's prints? In fact, later commentators would dismiss the stages of cruelty on these very grounds, and the question seems to have troubled Hogarth, too, who acknowledged that the prints were painful to look at and yet insisted that they had to be so in order to fulfill their main purpose, which was not to generate cruelty, but rather to stem it. Paradoxically, one way the prints do this is through the pleasure they generate, the formal pleasures of inky black lines against a pure white ground. Of deftly executed crosshatching that through subtle variations in density and direction can suggest here a hat, there a coat, a stockinged calf or buckled shoe. Of undulating ripples and waves like those we see in the folds of a sleeve, the loops of a bow, or the coils of a rope that lead the eye as Hogarth himself would famously say on a wanton kind of chase. And the pleasure, too, of looking at things that we think on some level we should not, of looking at things that fascinate even though, or indeed because, they repel. Things like the grotesque features of the surgeons in plate four with their protruding noses, sunken cheeks and weak chins, or like Tom's own sunken body with its ruptured chest, leathery skin and insides tumbling out. The pleasures of such looking, and no doubt also the pleasure that we must imagine Hogarth took in making these pictures, is I think what many viewers in the artist's time and since have found so disquieting about his stages of cruelty. But this is also what makes them so interesting. Can one diminish cruelty by depicting it? Perhaps. Or perhaps depicting and decrying the everyday cruelties that he encountered in the modernizing, urbanizing London he lived in, was Hogarth's way of living with them as well.