Abstract
Scholars of art history, literary criticism and animal studies have paid considerable attention of late to how visual representations of animals have frequently and sometimes to great effect been deployed in the imagination of national identity. Though the broad backcloth of this chapter is woven from the engagement of these several disciplines with such images, its concern is limited to those that couple nationalism with carnivorism. This couplet has not yet been explored in sufficient detail or depth. The chapter’s particular focus and its sole instantiation of this couplet is how the irascible English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) deployed images of animals’ edible flesh—of ‘beef’, especially—in order to nourish a nascent national identity in eighteenth-century Britain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The self-signed ‘Brito-phil’ of British art, Hogarth declared himself the great champion of aesthetic nationalism . In a widely circulated letter he attacked ‘[p]icture-Jobbers from abroad who continually import ship-loads of Dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental … and fix on us poor Englishmen the character of universal dupes’ (1737: 385).
- 2.
Anon., The Craftsman, June 1738.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
There are other pets who entered Hogarth’s life and for whom he obviously felt great personal affection. In Jane Hogarth (c.1740), for example, he portrayed his wife with a lamb on her lap—a masculinist, if sweet, declaration that she was his pet lamb and in need of his protection and care. See also Hogarth’s Mr. Wood’s Dog Vulcan (c.1735).
- 6.
Below ‘they Just Defence’ the writing on the scroll is indecipherable. The visible eight lines are usually identified as from a portion of Elizabeth I’s Tilbury address, though Elizabeth Einberg (2016: 246) supports the view that it is a ‘close adaptation’ of Addison’s tragedy Cato, 1713, Act III. However, we may never know its precise provenance, in part because there are at least three extant versions of Elizabeth’s speech.
- 7.
For example, aboard the sixty-gun HMS Nottingham in the patriotic Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin (1745), painted not long after Graham had captured several French privateers, Trump can be seen intruding on the space of the captain’s pet dog.
- 8.
For more on the cultivation of peculiarly English bulldogs see Rogers (2003: 123–45) and Paulson (1979: Chap. 5; and 2018, forthcoming). Paulson (2018, forthcoming) is of the strong view that Hogarth deliberately chose ‘attack dogs’ as his canine companions, and that his dogs in his 1747 Self-Portrait and The Bruiser (1763) are bulldogs:
Hogarth’s dog in the painting [the Self Portrait] … was not a pug … but a pit bull, or what then would have been called an English bulldog or early type of bull terrier. In retrospect, would Hogarth have associated himself with a lapdog? His own face in the self-portrait shows a prominent scar on his forehead, suggesting his affinity with attack dogs . (Paulson 2018: 25)
- 9.
For example, see the dogs depicted in Hogarth’s South Sea Scheme (1721), Sancho Panzo’s Feast (c.1725–34), Gin Lane (1751) and Columbus Breaking the Egg (1752). In The Lady’s Death (1745), a skeletal dog frantically snatches a decapitated pigs’s head adorning a festive dinner table (and see Chap. 1, p. 2).
- 10.
On the visual context of Hogarth’s execution images see Carrabine (2011).
- 11.
Hogarth was also the social reformer whose outraged depiction of throwing at cocks in The First Stage of Cruelty (1751) is, in all likelihood, an allegory of his enmity to France . On this opinion see also Ireland (1793, 2: 55). This self-same Hogarth also gave voice to the French aristocrat who reacted to his viewing of the horrors of his Cockpit (1759) with an outraged ‘Sauvage! Sauvage! Sauvage!’
- 12.
Anon. (1851: 21–22).
- 13.
- 14.
The Tatler, 29 April 1710. See also the comments by the puritan William Vaughan (1630: 3), for example, that beef made the English courageous and undaunted in the face of danger.
- 15.
In times of war and blockade, the eighteenth-century British navy’s demand for salted beef was insatiable. See also Ritvo, who argues that when Britain was vulnerable to blockade, ‘meat was a particularly valuable commodity in international competition, because the ability of especially urban industrial workers to buy it was an index of British commercial prowess, and because, according to popular belief, it was the consumption of red meat that distinguished brave and brawny soldiers from puny, sniveling Frenchmen’ (1987: 47).
- 16.
Uglow (1997: 274).
- 17.
For more discussion of the Diana and Actaeon myth see Chap. 3 above (at pp. 51–52).
- 18.
Rogers (2003: 94).
- 19.
Rogers (2003: 94).
- 20.
A report has it that Hogarth and Thornhill had joined the Society because they were ‘stimulated by their love of the painter’s art, and the equally potent charm of conviviality’ ( Timbs 1872: 113).
- 21.
The following poem—recited at one of the Society’s weekly meetings—shows how thoroughly committed was its pained author to the ideology and practice of beef consumption (quoted in Timbs 1872: 109):Verse
Verse ON AN OX Most noble creature of the horned race, Who labours at the plough to earn thy grass, And yielding to the yoke, shows man the way To bear his servile chains, and to obey More haughty tyrants, who usurp the sway, Thy sturdy sinews till the farmer’s grounds, To thee the grazier owes his hoarded pounds: ’Tis by thy labour, we abound in malt, Whose powerful juice the meaner slaves exalt; And when grown fat, and fit to be devour’d, The pole-ax frees thee from the teasing goard: Thus cruel man, to recompense thy pains, First works thee hard, and then beats out thy brains.
- 22.
Arnold (1871: 4, 9–10). Alongside mention of the Society of Scare-Crows and Skeletons, the Confederacy of the Kings, the Kit-Kat Club (reputedly named for mutton pies after Christopher Cat) and the Club of Fat-Men, the first reference to a ‘Beef-Steak Club’ was likely made in The Spectator (1710–11, March, no. 9), though this also suggests that it had been founded in Queen Anne’s time. On the Beefsteak Society see also Timbs (1872: 105–35).
- 23.
Nevertheless, a good hint of the frolicks at SSBS dinners is contained in an anecdote about Hogarth and some of his rambunctious friends. In mid-1746 Hogarth, John Hoadly and David Garrick staged an irreverent play. This amateurish afternoon’s carnivorous caper was a bawdy parody of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In it Hogarth acted as Caesar’s ghost Grilliardo—the Devil’s Cook—and Garrick played Cassiarse. When Grilliardo, the butcher/cook, enters the scene, Brutarse (Hoadly) asks him ‘Zounds, who are you?’ To this Grillardo (Hogarth) replies:Verse
Verse I am Old Nick’s Cook – & hither am I come To slice some Steaks from off thy Brawny Bum, Make Sausage of thy guts, & Candles of thy Fat, And cut thy Cock off, to regale his Cat.
(Cited in Paulson [1979: 259], who suggests ‘given what we know of Hogarth’s piety, the casting was appropriate’.) - 24.
Arnold (1871: 13).
- 25.
Porter (1993: 59).
- 26.
Fielding introduces ‘The King’s Old Courtier’ with an animated conversation between Lady Apshinken (i.e. Queen Caroline) and Susan (the Queen’s cook), in the course of which the latter laments ( Fielding 1731: 54; see further, Train 1845: 108–09):
So, as the smell of the old English sentimentality used to invite people in, that of the present is to keep them away … Would I had lived in those days! I wish I had been born a cook in an age when there was some business for one, before we had learnt this French politeness and been taught to dress our meat by nations that have no meat to dress.
- 27.
- 28.
For a reading of Calais Gate see Beirne (2018, forthcoming).
- 29.
For example, see and hear the awful cacophonies in Hogarth’s Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington (1726), The Enraged Musician (1741)—in which a songbird mouths ‘Vivat Rex’—Southwark Fair (1731), The Idle ’Prentice Executed at Tyburn (1747) and March to Finchley (1750). On the importance of music to Hogarth and on the precise depiction of old instruments and music scores in his art, see Simon (2007: 243–56).
- 30.
Although Transubstantiation Satirized is marked ‘Hogarth pinxit’ (i.e. painted by Hogarth), Elizabeth Einberg (2016: 133) comments that it might have been executed by Richard Livesay after Hogarth. But the British Museum (Image AN548331001) has a printed engraving of Hogarth’s Enthusiasm Delineated (c.1760) with marginal notations by the artist himself, including a rough sketch of some of the key elements in Transubstantiation Satirized.
- 31.
- 32.
Trusler (1833: 114; similarly, see Nichols 1781: 111; and Bindman 1997: 23, 45). Robin Simon has commented that ‘Hogarth is one of the few artists of whatever kind who have formed the imaginative consciousness of a nation. Indeed, he shares that distinction only with Shakespeare and Dickens. Together, they remain the three British artists who have made a comparable impact world wide’ (2007: 275).
- 33.
See Chap. 2 above (pp. 20, 39n10) for discussion of the legislative banning of slaughterhouses from cities and their relocation to invisibilized sites in rural areas.
Bibliography
Anon. (1851). A Frenchman’s Visit to England. London: W.N. Wright.
Arnold, Walter. (1871). The Life and Death of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. London: Bradbury, Evans, & Co.
Beirne, Piers. (2018, forthcoming). ‘Raw, Roast or Half-Baked? Hogarth’s Beef in Calais Gate.’
Bindman, David. (1997). Hogarth and His Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Carrabine, Eamonn. (2011). ‘The Iconography of Punishment: Execution Prints and the Death Penalty,’ Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 50(5): 452–64.
Curling, Henry. (1851). A Lashing for the Lashers: Being an Exposition of the Cruelties Practised Upon the Cab and Omnibus Horses of London. London: W.N. Wright.
Einberg, Elizabeth. (2016). William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Fielding, H. (c.1731). (1968). ‘The King’s Old Courtier.’ In: Edgar V. Roberts (ed.), Fielding, The Grub-Street Opera. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 54.
Forrest, Theodosius. (c.1752). (1781). ‘The Roast Beef of Old England. A Cantata,’ The Vocal Magazine, or, Compleat British Songster, 1: 6.
Hogarth. (1737). ‘Weekly essay, from Britophil,’ The London Magazine, July: 385–86.
Ireland, John. (1791). Hogarth Illustrated. London: J. & J. Boydell.
Ireland, John. (1793). Hogarth Illustrated. 2 vols. London: J. and J. Boydell.
Ireland, Samuel. (1794). Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth. 2 vols. London: R. Faulder and J. Egerton.
MacInnes, Ian. (2003). ‘Mastiffs and Spaniels: Gender and Nation in the English Dog,’ Textual Practice, 17(1): 21–40.
Nichols, John. (1781). (1833). Anecdotes of William Hogarth Written by Himself. London: J.B. Nichols and Son.
Paulson, Ronald. (1971). Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Paulson, Ronald. (1979). Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Paulson, Ronald. (2018, forthcoming). ‘Hogarth’s Ghost, His Pug, and the Pit Bull: A Memoir.’ In: Bernd W. Krysmanski (ed.), 250 Years On: New Light on William Hogarth. Krysman Press.
Porter, Roy. (1993). ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’ In: John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 58–81.
Rice, Paul F. (2013). ‘Eighteenth-Century British Patriotic and Political Cantatas.’ In: Sharing the Voices: The Phenomenon of Singing. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 185–94.
Ritvo, Harriet. (1987). The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Roberts, Edgar V. (1964). ‘Henry Fielding and Richard Leveridge: Authorship of the “Roast Beef of Old England”,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 27(2): 175–81.
Rogers, Ben. (2003). Beef and Liberty. London: Chatto & Windus.
Simon, Robin. (2007). Hogarth, France & British Art: The Rise of the Arts in 18th-Century Britain. Cornwall: Hogarth Arts and TJ International.
Thomas, Keith. (1983). Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. New York: Oxford University Press.
Timbs, John. (1872). Clubs and Club Life in London. With anecdotes of Its Famous Coffee Houses, Hostelries, and Taverns, from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Time. London: John Camden Hotten.
Train, Joseph. (1845). Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man. 2 vols. London: Simpkin, Marshall.
Trusler, John. (1833). The Works of William Hogarth; In a Series of Engravings with Descriptions, and a Comment on their Moral Tendency. London: Jones.
Uglow, Jenny. (1997). Hogarth: A Life and a World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Vaughan, William. (1630). The Newlanders Cure. London: N[icholas] O[kes].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beirne, P. (2018). Hogarth’s Patriotic Animals: Bulldogs, Beef, Britannia!. In: Murdering Animals. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57468-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57468-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57467-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57468-8
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)