SOURCE: Macey, Samuel L. “Hogarth and the Iconography of Time.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 5, edited by Ronald C. Rosbottom, pp. 41-53. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

In the following essay, Macey discusses Hogarth's representation of time and timekeeping devices in his graphic art.

If, in Maynard Mack's terms, we think of the City in contradistinction to the Garden, then Hogarth is clearly the artist of the City. As one might expect, both the denotation and the connotation in Hogarth's work reflect the radical changes taking place in London life. The most influential technological change was probably the achievement of mechanical timekeeping sufficiently accurate for the needs of modern urban man. Related to this were the batch production and division of labour methods then being introduced into the manufacture of clocks and watches. Some of the key dates are the use of the pendulum in clocks from...