SOURCE: Kunzle, David. “William Hogarth: The Ravaged Child in the Corrupt City.” In Changing Images of the Family, edited by Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff, pp. 99-140. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Kunzle discusses Hogarth's sympathetic representation of children who were, in his view, neglected by their parents as well as by society as a whole.

The rich iconography of the child and family in Western painting since the Renaissance remains a great source of untapped information for the social historian. Philippe Ariès has looked at many pictures and considered them within broad lines of development, but specialized studies which take into account the problems peculiar to the study of imagery, as opposed to other sources of documentation, are generally lacking. The iconography of any given period and place may both confirm and seem to contradict conclusions drawn on the basis of...