SOURCE: Lowe, N. F. “The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth's Graphic Art.” In The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Linda E. Merians, pp. 168-82. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

In the following essay, Lowe explains Hogarth's many allusions to venereal disease as symbols for immorality and corruption at the highest levels of British society.

The paintings and engravings that William Hogarth called his “modern moral subjects” were not intended to be pictorial sermons preaching simple messages about right and wrong. Ronald Paulson has argued convincingly that Hogarth's intention was to illustrate a conventional moral theme, beneath which he would then hide a deeper, more subversive reading. In this reading certain themes usually emerge, such as “the forces of society and fashion … against the natural impulses of the individual,” a struggle in which Hogarth usually took the side of the natural.¹ For...