The same moral was even more directly pointed in Hogarth’s graphic tale of
the contrasting fates of two apprentices in Industry and Idleness( 1747 ). This was a set
of twelve prints, deliberately engraved in a style that kept the price down, so
that—at twelve shillings for the set—masters would be able to afford to hang the
sequence around their workshops for the instruction of their apprentices. Some
scholars have found irony and coded messages, or at least ambiguity, in Hogarth’s
depiction of the story of the industrious apprentice, Francis Goodchild, who rises
to become lord mayor of London, and of his fellow apprentice, Jack Idle, who
wastes his time, gambles, profanes the sabbath, consorts with prostitutes, and,
having taken to the highway, ends up on the gallows.^180 But to those for whom the
series was intended—by Hogarth’s own account, employers and their appren-
tices^181 —it was surely a straightforward story of the consequences of an idle and
immoral life, a warning of the fate that awaited those who failed to inure them-
selves to industry and who indulged their passions and selfish interests. It may
have been fanciful to believe that every apprentice had an opportunity to become
lord mayor by working hard and obeying his master. But Jack Idle’s story was too
common, too endlessly repeated in Ordinary’s Accountsand in the ‘last dying
speeches’ of men executed at Tyburn, to be principally intended as anything
other than what it seemed to be on the surface—a warning to apprentices that
laziness, vice, and a taste for pleasure would bring them to a disastrous end.^182
This had also been the message that Samuel Richardson had put succinctly
in the conduct book he addressed to apprentices in the previous decade, follow-
ing in the long tradition of such literature. In explaining why any deviation from
modest and upright conduct could lead the unwary youth into bad company
and so inexorably down the slippery slope to crime and the gallows, he reminded
his readers of the lessons to be drawn from the printed reports of trials at the Old
Bailey and the biographies of those who were executed at Tyburn. There is, he
asserted, ‘but a Cobweb Partition that divides profane Speech from wicked
Actions’. And he went on:
One would not indeed expect that Persons who could allow themselves in the vile Prac-
tice of Swearing and talking profanely, should be deterr’d from other Vices: Drinking is
generally the next, and is almost a necessary Consequence of the low abandon’d Com-
pany such a one chuses to keep. And to a Habit of Drinking, every other Ill succeeds; for
what Guard has the Drunkard while in his Cups? Let the Sessions-Paperand the Dying-
Speechesof unhappy Criminals tell the rest: Let them inform the inconsiderate Youth, by
the Confessions of the dying Malefactors, how naturally, as it were Step by Step, Swear-
ing, Cursing, Profaneness, Drunkenness, Whoredom, Theft, Robbery, Murder, and the
Gallows, succeed one another!^18362 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^180) Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991 – 3 ), ii. 289 – 322 ; Ian A. Bell, Literature and
Crime in Augustan England( 1991 ), 28 – 46.
(^181) Paulson, Hogarth, ii. 290.
(^182) For that view of Industry and Idleness, see Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World( 1997 ), 438 – 52.
(^183) [Samuel Richardson,] The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum: or, Young Man’s Pocket-Companion( 1734 ), 32 – 3.
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