I, Hogarth: A Novel - Hardcover

Dean, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468303422 ISBN 13: 9781468303421

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2013

Synopsis

He was London's artist par excellence, and his work supplies the most enduring vision of the eighteenth century's ebullience, enjoyments, and social iniquities. From a childhood spent in a debtor's prison to his death in the arms of his wife, I, Hogarth follows the artist's life as he makes a name for himself and as he fights for artists with his Copyright Act. Through Hogarth's lifelong marriage to Jane Thornhill, his inability to have children, his time as one of England's best portrait painters, his old age and unfortunate dip into politics, and his untimely death, I, Hogarth is the remarkable story told through the artist's eyes. Michael Dean blends Hogarth's life and work into a rich and satisfying narrative, recommended for fans of Hilary Mantel and Peter Ackroyd.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Dean studied history at Oxford.  He has a masters in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and a translator's qualification, AIL, in German. . He is the author of five novels including The Enemy Within,  about the 1941 Amsterdam uprising against the Nazis,  The Crooked Cross, about German Expressionist art and the rise of the Nazis, and THORN,  which is about Spinoza and Rembrandt. .

Reviews

Dean, a linguist by training, has the renowned, eighteenth-century British painter, engraver, and illustrator William Hogarth tell his own life story in a work of vivid and ribald first-person historical fiction. His father is an unworldly writer of abstruse texts who lands in debtor’s prison. His long-suffering yet entrepreneurial mother saves her family with the help of a moneylender. Hogarth—Billy to his friends—escapes the shocking confines of poverty through the arts, first as an apprentice engraver, then as a painter. We follow him from success to success, but he cannot forsake the pleasures of the flesh, and they exact their revenge on his health and his marriage. Or so Hogarth reports, offering unvarnished opinions of his enemies and fulsome praise for the pale, ample flesh of the harlots he can’t quit. Not lust but pride cuts our smallish, increasingly pudgy man down to size. The period details are unobtrusive; the language is direct; the story, told in vignettes, is surely meant to evoke Hogarth’s crowded prints. Not only devotees of historical fiction will enjoy Dean’s Hogarth. --Michael Autrey

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1468303422
• ISBN 13: 9781468303421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272