Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN: 0 571169961 (hardback). Price: £25

William Godwin, an all-round man of letters in the best tradition, has been underrated as a biographer. His Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) no longer needs championing, of course, but his Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) does. It stands behind a rich tradition. Introducing what he claimed as 'a work of a new species', Godwin therein stated his belief that: Read 'artist' for 'poet' and 'Hogarth' for 'Chaucer' and this eloquently serves as a description of Jenny Uglow's Hogarth: A Life and a World , a vivid and enthralling biography in the Godwinian line. A metaphor Godwin used to describe the structure of his Life can, with particular appropriateness, be adapted to describe this one: 'The person of [Hogarth] may ... be considered as the central figure in a miscellaneous painting, giving unity and individual application to the otherwise disjointed particulars with which the canvas is diversified.' Spot on. While surprisingly little is known directly about Hogarth - Uglow mentions the 'few personal documents: a couple of letters, a sheaf of rough notes' (p. xvi) - the public nature of his art makes the Godwinian method essential. There is little, perhaps nothing, in Hogarth: A Life and a World that is strictly speaking new , but Uglow has integrated what was already known about Hogarth into a vibrant portrait of the age in which he lived, well aware that this is the way to know him better. The whole is considerably enriched by her suggestive and insightful descriptions of his engravings and paintings - art 'appreciation' rather than 'criticism' for the most part, but none the less valuable for that. The book is illustrated, but not as generously as it might have been, and the quality of the reproductions is sometimes distinctly mediocre. Given the scope of the study, and the fact that it aims at a broad public, more illustrations of art works by Hogarth's contemporaries would have been desirable. Probably the book suffers in these respects from a desire to keep it affordable: it is certainly very good value as bulky hardbacks go. Uglow has drawn on impressively wide reading in and about the eighteenth century, packing her book with quotations, which serve as the fruits in this rich cake. Her own writing is beautiful - a nicely varied prose that one will always return to with pleasure. At times, though, one does feel that the study could have been tighter - this is a long book - and more thoughtful. To take one example: in discussing the familiar painting/print 'The Gate of Calais, or O the Roast Beef of Old England' (1749; often referred to simply as 'The Roast Beef of Old England' but called by Uglow 'The Gate of Calais'), she quotes a contemporary comment by George Vertue (an acquaintance of Hogarth's and engraver to the Society of Antiquaries) to the effect that the print's subtitle - i.e. 'O the Roast Beef of Old England' - was 'a prodigious Blunder ... for he [Hogarth] has represented a Man carrying a peice of (Raw beef) instead of Roasted'. She gives this simply with an aside on Vertue's 'grumpiness' (p. 466), in this odd critical silence following Ronald Paulson, whose standard biography of Hogarth is, quite properly, one of her principal sources. In fact Robert Etheridge Moore pointed out as long ago as 1948 that 'O the Roast Beef of Old England' was a quotation from, and allusion to, a song originally written by Henry Fielding (and later expanded by the actor and singer/song-writer Richard Leveridge), and, frustratingly, Uglow knows this. In a lively discussion of the Beefsteak …