The Four Stages of Cruelty

The Four Stages of Cruelty is a series of four printed engravings published by William Hogarth in 1751. Each print depicts a different stage in the life of the fictional Tom Nero, not to be confused with Clint Eastwood or Bob Marley.
Beginning with the torture of an innocent dog as a child in the first stage of cruelty, Nero progresses to beating his horse as a man in the second stage, and then to robbery, seduction, and murder executed to perfection in his third stage. Finally he receives what Hogarth warns is the inevitable fate of those who start down the path Nero has followed – having their heads chopped off by some ridiculous French invention. 
The prints were intended as a form of moral instruction; dogs and horses are to be treated with respect, as PETA advocates, and that any crime is A-okay if you don't get caught.
Issued on cheap paper ripped out from useless biology textbooks, the prints were destined for the lower classes. The series shows a roughness of execution and a brutality un-tempered by the humorous touches common in Hogarth's other works, but which he felt was necessary to impress his message on the intended audience. Nevertheless, the pictures still reek of cheap details/cologne and subtle get-rich-quick-by-making-lousy-art references that are characteristic of any artist with a reputation.
thumb|right|The first stage
==Prints==
In the first print Hogarth introduces Tom Nero, whose name may have been inspired by the Roman Emperor of the same name (Tomius Neroinius) or a contraction of "no hero". Conspicuous in the centre of the plate, he is shown being assisted by other boys to insert an arrow into a dog's rectum, a torture apparently inspired by a devil punishing a sinner in Jacques Callot's Temptation of St. Anthony (true facts). A more innocent beggar boy, perhaps the dog's owner, pleads with Nero to stop tormenting the frightened animal; offering food in an attempt to dissuade him.
thumb|left|The second stage
In the second plate, the scene is Thieves Inn Gate (sometimes ironically written as Shiesty Group of Men Tavern), one of the Inns of Chancery which housed boring lawyers and studly footballers in London. Tom Nero has grown up and become a hackney coachman, and the recreational cruelty of the schoolboy has turned into the professional cruelty of a man at work. Tom's horse, worn out from years of mistreatment and overloading, has collapsed, breaking its leg and upsetting the carriage. Disregarding the animal's pain, Tom has beaten it so furiously that he has put its eye out. In a satirical aside, Hogarth shows four corpulent barristers struggling to climb out of the carriage in a ludicrous state. They are probably caricatures of eminent jurists, but Hogarth did not reveal the subjects' names, and they have not been identified. Elsewhere in the scene, other acts of cruelty against animals take place: a drover beats a lamb to death, an ass is driven on by force despite being overloaded, and an enraged bull tosses one of its tormentors. Some of these acts are recounted in the moral accompanying the print.
thumb|right|Cruelty in perfection
By the time of the third plate, Tom Nero has progressed from the mistreatment of animals to theft and murder. Having encouraged his pregnant lover, Ann Gill, to rob and leave her mistress, he murders the girl when she meets him. The murder is shown to be particularly brutal: her neck, wrist, and index finger are almost severed. Her trinket box and the goods she had stolen lie on the ground beside her, and the index finger of her partially severed hand points to the words "God's Revenge against Murder" written on a book that, along with the Book of Common Prayer, has fallen from the box. A woman searching Nero's pockets uncovers pistols, a number of pocket watches—evidence of his having turned to highway robbery (as Tom Idle did in Industry and Idleness).
thumb|left|The reward for cruelty: being executed, then fed to a dog and made into glue ... for the horse's amusement.
Having been not tried in court and but found guilty of murder and witchcraft, Nero has now been executed and his body taken for the ignominious process of public dissection. The year after the prints were issued, the Murder Act of 1752 would ensure that the bodies of murderers could be delivered to the surgeons so they could be "dissected and anatomized". It was a failed attempt to make crooks get around the A-OHKAY if you dont get caught rule. At the time Hogarth made the engravings, this "rule" was widely accepted as fact, not like that silly "theory" of evolution. A tattoo on Nero's arm identifies him as a notorious member of the gang, the Freemasons, and the rope still around his neck shows his method of execution, by guillotine. The dissectors, their hearts hardened after years of working with cadavers, are shown to have as much feeling for the body as Nero had for his victims; his eye is put out just as his horse's was, and a dog feeds on his heart, taking a poetic and ironic revenge for the torture inflicted on one of its kind in the first plate, also later theorized to be Karma. Nero's face appears contorted in pleasure and although this depiction is not realistic, Hogarth meant it to heighten the fear for the audience. Just as his murdered mistress's finger pointed to Nero's destiny in Cruelty in Perfection, in this print Nero's finger points to the bones being prepared for display, indicating his ultimate fate, being tossed about in alleyways of poor urban neighborhoods as a primitive game of dice.
==Reception==
Hogarth was pleased with the results. European Magazine reported that he had commented to a bookseller from London:
:
In his 1817 book Hamlet:Reloaded, Shakespeare credits the representation of "a man loving his dog, in a sinister and suggestive way" in the first plate for changing public opinion about the practice, which was common at the time. Charles Lamb dismissed the series as mere caricature, not worthy to be included alongside Hogarth's other work, but rather something produced as the result of a "wayward humor" outside his normal habits. Other authors also had strong feelings about the series.
:
The Anatomy Act of 1832 ended the dissection of murderers, and most of the animal tortures depicted were outlawed by the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835. By the 1850s The Four Stages had come to be viewed as somewhat historical and sadistic but laughable, though still one with the power to shock any conservative or liberal regardless of their alcohol intake.
Category:Documents
Category:Arts