SOURCE: Momberger, Philip. “Cinematic Techniques in William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress.” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (fall 1999): 49-65.

In the following essay, Momberger suggests that Hogarth's engravings anticipate the narrative devices associated with cinema.

Recent and illuminating analyses of William Hogarth's serial engravings—A Harlot's Progress (1732), A Rake's Progress (1735), Marriage à la Mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747)—have explored his brilliant synthesizing of traditional pictorial forms with elements drawn from the popular arts of his eighteenth century London milieu, among them theater, pantomime, ballad opera, sensational journalism and erotica, book illustration, pictorial and verse satire, the traditional emblem book, and the newly emergent novel. Other commentaries have noted his anticipatings of such later forms as the comic strip, the comic book, and the political cartoon.¹ As yet unremarked, but at least as striking, are the uncanny presagings of cinematic device and structure that Hogarth devised in 1731-1732 for the...