ABSTRACT
There is a narrative dimension to the very arrangement of William Hogarth's scenes. By inviting the viewer's eye to wander, say, from left to right, the painter endows the scene with a temporal quality, thus trying to compensate for the limits of the visual – by nature atemporal. Hogarth enjoys a secure position in the histories of the early English novel, though, curiously enough, there is no mention of his contribution in Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. Recently, Steven Moore has gone so far as to actually include his progresses in the history of the novel, labelling them "graphic novels" and arguing for their mediation in the transition from the amatory fiction of the 1720s to the realist fiction of the 1740s. A classically educated writer, Henry Fielding practised diverse literary forms of prose and verse and manifested an understanding of the visual arts as an inherently related field of cultural activity.
