"The drama of real life. Charles Lamb and ‘tragic’ Hogarth"

Apart from a brief mention in one of his most famous Elia essays, ‘The Praise of Chimney- Sweepers’ (1823), and some scattered references in his letters, Lamb devoted just one single article to Hogarth. This was ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, first published in Leigh Hunt’s The Reflector as early as 1811. Yet, the pronouncement he made there soon came to represent a milestone in Hogarthian criticism – a sort of turning point marking the beginning of a new appreciation of the eighteenth-century artist during the Romantic period. The essay shows that, besides bestowing new dignity upon Hogarth’s work, Lamb’s study is fundamental in the development of the Romantic essayist’s own reflection on literature. From the very beginning, Lamb shifted attention from mere pictorial skill – the privileged target of Hogarth’s academic detractors – to the subjects of his paintings, their emotional appeal, and the moral lessons they convey. As a consequence, he emphatically rejected the widely accepted idea of Hogarth as a ‘mere comic painter’, and compared him to such illustrious predecessors as Juvenal and Shakespeare and, in narrative achievement, to contemporaries like Fielding and Smollett. In this way, the continuous parallel between paintings and literature ended up shedding light on the latter’s content, form and function, delineating a ‘poetics of the familiar’ which Lamb saw skilfully exemplified in Hogarth’s works and which he himself would thoroughly develop in his later essayistic production, in particular in his Essays of Elia. Thus Hogarth provided Lamb with an aesthetic model that suited his own idea of art and literature. He helped establish the familiar essay as a viable genre in a period, the Romantic Age, that was otherwise dominated by poetry.