The Legacy of William Hogarth, 1786–1866

William Hogarth was born on 25 March 1786 of a small landowning family in Dodding Green, near Kendal, in Westmorland. He and his older brother Robert were among the earliest students, in 1796, to enter the new northern seminary of Crook Hall, established in 1794 on its removal from Douai in northern France, in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. He and his contemporaries such as George Brown, the first Bishop of Liverpool, felt themselves to be foundationers, the very inaugurators of the next stage of the tradition. The Ushaw discipline was a strong one: rising at six, meditation in chapel until 7am, then Mass to 7.30, then study until breakfast at a quarter to nine, school from 9.30, dinner at 1.00, study at 3.00, prayer at 7.00 till supper, second prayers at 9.15, and then bed. There were two play days a week. The simple austerity of this life, pursued over thirteen impressionable years from the age of ten, left its mark. On the other hand, Hogarth or his fellow future bishop George Brown recorded his enormous educational debt to his brilliant young preceptor, the historian John Lingard: ‘I learned more in one month’, the writer recalled, ‘than I had done in six, under my former pedagogue; and I also remember that, while he [Lingard] was listening to me translating Latin into English, he was turning over the leaves of a large folio, and making notes for his history, and yet nothing escaped him of what I was reading.’