Fran Lock introduces The Harlot & The Rake by Peter Raynard, a new pamphlet from Culture Matters which is free to download below, with donation if possible. The front and back cover images are by Martin Rowson
William Hogarth (1697–1764) was an English painter, printmaker, and social satirist, best known for his series of ‘modern moral subjects’, most notably A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733). These works are characterised by their combination of dark, caustic humour, graphic and openly sexual images, and a stern moralistic tone. A Harlot’s Progress is a series of six paintings unfolding the fate of a young woman from the country, arriving in London for the first time, and being lured into a life of prostitution. A Rake’s Progress is a series of eight paintings telling the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who follows a path of dissipation, lechery, and self-destruction after inheriting—and in short order squandering—his father’s fortune.
Hogarth spent much of his childhood in a debtors’ prison, an experience that left him with an awareness of poverty, and a greater degree of sympathy towards the poor than many of his contemporaries. It also left him profoundly mistrustful of the wealthy, and with an abiding concern with what he saw as the slow deterioration of British morals. Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after Hogarth runs the same gamut of moral and social concerns, but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout.
The collection opens with ‘The Heir’ in which the newly monied Rake is already scheming his idle and
profligate future at the expense of his female dependents:
mother weeping, wife with child warming inside her.
He will leave enough to oil their grief, but says there
is no need to pray.
The poem’s speaker has an omniscient satirical eye, relating events in the third person, and in the present active tense. This imparts to the poem a quality of penetrating and impartial witness and combined with the metrical strictures of the sonnet form, it produces a distinct poetic voice, at once watching events unfold in real-time and at a disinterested distance of centuries. Raynard’s speaker owes something to the excoriating wit of Pope as well as to his own startlingly apt turn of phrase. Who else would signal the hollow and airless propriety of 18th Century patriarchy with the lines:
his Father, a staid suit of a man
battened down by the clamp of God’s utility
What impresses about this poem, I think, is the way in which Raynard extends Hogarth’s original commentary of moral decline and hypocrisy by weaving the turpitude of the individual with that of the state and its most venerated institutions. While Tom betrays his family, his religion, and the presumed probity of his class by setting out to waste his fortune, this same fortune is built —on a national scale—upon the betrayal of humanity, a betrayal that same church passively sanctions:
with enough silver to sail a ship. London ho!
with its trade winds blown by slave labour. God well knows.
The next sonnet in the crown is after The Harlot’s Progress, and Raynard alternates between Rake and Harlot throughout the sequence. By choosing to write a crown of sonnets, a form in which each of the fifteen sonnets is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line, and where the first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, Raynard skilfully entangles the stories of the exploited woman and the rich and feckless wastrel. This is something he signals explicitly in the text with the description of the pimp as ‘the Rake’s shadow’, and a theme he returns to with mounting conviction and intensity throughout the collection.
By following the Rake’s abandonment of his female family with ‘Moll Hackabout arrives at the Bell Inn, Cheapside’ Raynard offers a sad and suggestive commentary on the futures of women thus abandoned. Moll’s choices upon arrival in London are limited and stark: she could support herself as ‘seamstress’ with ‘pins & needles’, likely performing what was called ‘slop work’ (the sewing of rough, ready-made clothes) for starvation wages, or she could allow herself to be sold to the highest bidder. Thomas Hood’s campaigning poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’ written over a century later offers an insight into the life of a seamstress in London, and demonstrates how slow society was to grapple with the plight of destitute women and girls:
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang ‘The Song of the Shirt!’
The poor in London were compelled to use what physical capital they had in order to exist, trapped in bodies worn out by hard use. Poor bodies break down, class was—and is—a form of built-in obsolescence; for women this is also reproductive and sexual. As their trade takes its toll on their physical frames, they are forced to offer themselves for evermore abject forms of labour: what the prostituted woman does in order to survive is that which kills her. A bitter irony lost on neither Hogarth nor Raynard.
It is the sequence’s clear-sighted and empathetic treatment of Moll that is its most compelling feature. Raynard turns his gift for the acutely coruscating lyric riff upon Tom Rakewell and those who encourage him, as in these lines from ‘The Rake at the Levee’:
we’ll show him many ways
a man can spend riches, gambling drinking fucking
pox-ridden bitches. Behind them are the pictures:
‘Judgement of Paris’, driven by the mad rutting
of hormonal lust, limp biscuit men gather round
with all the pox from pleasure, tasty teeth turn foul.
or as in the grotesque carnival described in ‘The Orgy’, where wealth and degeneracy are linked together through the metaphor of the orgasm:
Pockets bulge with stress
burst open a scene of cocks with no crow.
Moll’s portrayal meanwhile is always underscored by a deep understanding of her status as a uniquely exploited worker, as painfully enmeshed in the logics of a rapacious emergent capitalism as millworkers or match girls. Moll’s life is inescapably tied to the whims of men, who emerge in the sequence as an oppressor class who profit from, punish and discard her for her ‘shame’ at will.
I found ‘From Kept Woman to Sex Worker’ particularly poignant, as the criminalisation of prostituted women, and the comparative leniency towards both pimps and johns is still a dangerous reality today. Moll’s ‘rise a balloon men / will pop’, the piece ends with her being dragged away, and it almost feels as if a snatch her own voice infiltrates the poem under the pressure of the moment:
Judge Gonson bursts in, three bailiffs
in tow, spots the witches hat and stick, tie for Moll
to go. Told she’s nothing but a common law stiff
of a whore. Which of these puritans are pure of whiff?
These forever-men still command immoral strays
as chattel catching wealth snatchers take Moll away.
Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy. Do we pity Tom Rakewell, now become a Tom O’ Bedlam, repenting in a madhouse? Do we pity Moll, beating rope in Bridewell Prison? Or dead in ‘the cold dark ground where a pauper’s/ place may be found’? What seems telling is that Moll is bereft of even sincere mourners, punished, as Raynard writes for ‘a simple dream to simply exist’ with only her madam upset by her passing. Tom Rakewell meanwhile is attended in his extremity by his much-abused wife, ‘Sarah, who somehow stays’. Are we left with a feeling of unfairness that Moll’s only solace is death; that she is shunned and neglected even as she leaves life? Or perhaps we feel that although not equally responsible for their fates, both the Harlot and the Rake have been cruelly duped by the malignant machinery of Capital, equally seduced and destroyed by money?
“What Hogarth etched and engraved, Raynard successfully recreates in verse. The comparisons of life in Britain today are there to be made.” (Owen Gallagher)
The tone Raynard manages to hit with his quite ravishing language and the use of the 3rd person voice as witness carries you along like you’re on some kind of walking tour of the grubby streets of the human mind/body, leaving you eager to turn the next page, the next corner, to see what has next befallen Moll or Rake.” (Martin Hayes)
The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, by Peter Raynard, ISBN 978-1-912710-77-5 is available as a hard copy to buy (£7.50 plus £2.50 p&p), please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Or you can download it as an e-publication below, please make a donation here.
