Hogarth’s Engravings

BOSWELL ON DISPLAY 203 history, and to biography and bibliography. In short, everything Boswell touched is to be fully explored even when the relevance of this information to him is slight. The editor rightly does not make high claims for the intrinsic interest of the correspondence with Johnston. Boswell remarked to his friend on one occasion, HI must not rob my Journal to tell you what I have seen." And this statement explains why the letters are often barren of interest. Occasionally , they are spontaneous revelations of Boswell's feelings and thoughts, but never in this correspondence does he present any part of himself not delineated with more engaging detail in his journal. As one would expect from this Yale project, Professor Walker's editing is of the highest quality. Nothing is too trivial to elicit the fullest resources of the editor's knowledge and energy. Here is a God's plenty of facts ranging from the appearance of Boswell's hair ("very thick and heavy") to an account of a Scottish banking house in Montpellier, where Boswell passed a day in 1765. The work that has gone into this volume is so imposing that even Boswell, who said of himself that he was Hone of the most engaging Men that ever lived," might smile in wonder as well as complacency at seeing the Herculean labour that he has inspired. (JOHN CARROLL) HOGARTH'S ENGRAVINGS' Hogarth must be one of the greatest story-tellers of the age which saw the birth of the novel. His determined claims for the moral and aesthetic dignity of his new art, his extraordinary success in moulding an audience for such works, the delight with which he inserted, and his readers recognized, the persons of his contemporaries in his prints, the mordancy and topicality of his satire, all make Hogarth as important as he is difficult to understand for those who would pretend to some acquaintance with England in the eighteenth century. Hogarth's engravings are a part of the fabric of his times, and to know him is to know his age. These factors make any catalogue and explication of his engraved works a formidable undertaking. A substantial beginning was made shortly after Hogarth's time: John Trusler, the Irelands, John Nichols, and George Steevens preserved, often in surprising detail, the kind of ephemeral information , such as the supposed identities of people in his prints, which is likely to be lost to future generations, and at the end of the nineteenth century Austin Dobson and F. G. Stephens ( the latter in the British Museum Catalogue of ...Satires) approached Hogarth somewhat more dispassionately ""Hogarth's Graphic Works. Volume 1: Introduction and Catalogue. Vohune 11: The Engravings. First Complete Edition compiled and with a commentary by Ronald Paulson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1965. $40.00. 204 G. E. BENTLEY, JR. and methodically. Since then, there have been isolated studies of such problems as Hogarth's literary relationships and his place in European art, but no one had the extraordinary temerity to attack the enormous bulk of Hogarth's engraved work as a whole, to record, systematize, analyze, and reproduce copies of every print he is known to have made. The size of Mr Paulson's undertaking is tremendous, and it appears to me that in all matters pertaining directly to Hogarth his achievement is entirely admirable. Hogarth and students of eighteenth-century English art and society are fortunate to have had a man of the patient scholarship and determined energy of Mr Paulson working for their profit. Mr Paulson's book is divided into three parts: "Introduction" (I, 1-88), dealing with Hogarth as "Artist and Merchant," as ItComic History Painter," and as "Engraver"; "Catalogue and Commentary" (I, 89-319), concerned with the 216 plates plausibly attributed to Hogarth's graver, plus almost another hundred engraved by others after Hogarth's designs or questionably attributed to him; and 346 reproductions ( all the matter of volume II) of all the plates engraved by Hogarth, including the most important variant states, plus many of the plates engraved after Hogarth or once thought to be his. The first of these parts, dealing largely with biographical matter...