I, Hogarth: A Novel
Dean, a linguist by training, has the renowned, eighteenth-century British painter, engraver, and illustrator William Hogarth tell his own life story in a work of vivid and ribald first-person historical fiction. His father is an unworldly writer of abstruse texts who lands in debtor’s prison. His long-suffering yet entrepreneurial mother saves her family with the help of a moneylender. Hogarth—Billy to his friends—escapes the shocking confines of poverty through the arts, first as an apprentice engraver, then as a painter. We follow him from success to success, but he cannot forsake the pleasures of the flesh, and they exact their revenge on his health and his marriage. Or so Hogarth reports, offering unvarnished opinions of his enemies and fulsome praise for the pale, ample flesh of the harlots he can’t quit. Not lust but pride cuts our smallish, increasingly pudgy man down to size. The period details are unobtrusive; the language is direct; the story, told in vignettes, is surely meant to evoke Hogarth’s crowded prints. Not only devotees of historical fiction will enjoy Dean’s Hogarth. --Michael Autrey