Faith, gin and charity

For a truly unvarnished view of early 18th-century England – its hypocrisies, vices and vast inequalities – look no further than the graphic satires of William Hogarth: from the temptation, decline and fall of a wealthy merchant’s son in A Rake’s Progress (1735), through to the human degradation of Gin Lane (1751).

Hogarth is famed as a contrarian and iconoclast – traits (you might think) that would naturally put him at odds with organised religion. Certainly his attitude to the Church of England was ambivalent – a relationship summed up by the occasion when he is said to have urinated in a church porch. Yet, when it comes to Hogarth and religion, all is not what it seems.

Hogarth was born in 1697 in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield, a short