Hogarth's Literary Relationships was first published in 1948. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Hogarth's narrative drawings—A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Marriage a la Mode — have long been the delight of devotees of the eighteenth century. Although the relationship between Hogarth and the writers of the period has not passed unnoticed, it has never been analyzed in detail before.
In this engaging book Mr. Moore points out specific instances of the "manifest obligations" owed by Fielding and Smollett (and several minor contemporary novelists and dramatists) to Hogarth. He amply proves his two theses: that Hogarth was a fountain of literary inspiration and that appreciation of the artist as a satirist is essential to an understanding of eighteenth-century literature.
From the beginning of his career Hogarth was constantly imitated and plagiarized, and the illustrations in this volume include some of the more famous plagiaries. Hogarth's own work is too little known to present generation—no complete collection has been available for some hundred years — and the drawings reproduced in this book add greatly to its value.