ABSTRACT
The starting point for Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress is Hogarth’s pictorial story of an innocent Yorkshire country girl, Moll Hackabout, who travels to the city to earn a living but is ultimately destroyed by its commercialism. Dabydeen’s protagonist, whom he names Mungo, is the black slave-boy from Plate 2 of Hogarth’s satirical series thirty years after the prints first appeared. Mungo is now the oldest black resident of London, and he is in the process of telling his life story to a “Mr Pringle,” Secretary of the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery, in exchange for food, clothing and the occasional shilling. But Mungo refuses to give Pringle the “story” he wants to hear, which can in part be attributed to his acute awareness of how he has been represented visually by and for white British society. According to Mungo, Pringle “hungers for understanding as to the link between barracoon and brothel, rank nigger and perfumed pet. He seems to believe that one moment I was a dusty black child playing in a sand-dune, crinkle-mouthed from the sun, then many rivers later I found myself in an English boudoir, a feathered turban on my head, my skin polished as bright as my teeth, and I am rollicking and sipping at Moll’s lush bosom” (4).
