ABSTRACT
The eleventh plate of Hogarth’s series, ‘Industry and Idleness’, depicts the hanging of Tom Idle. A vast crowd is arranged in the shape of a bowl: on one side scores of figures are perched in galleries erected for hanging, and on the other are soldiers on horseback, their lances held high. As ecclesiastical livings went in eighteenth-century London, that of the Ordinary of Newgate, while not especially lucrative, nevertheless possessed opportunities beyond its salary and usual gifts, and for that reason there were usually two or three contestants for the vacant office. In the eighteenth century three rituals guided the passage out of this world of the condemned malefactor: first, the judge’s sentence of death; second, the condemned sermon; and third, the hanging itself. The hanging from ‘posts and beams’, the ‘pointing and whispering’ and the ‘rattling of money’ suggests that the condemned may have played to a different audience from that which the Ordinary wished to set for them.
