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The Harlot's Progress. Channel 4. Shown 2.11.2006

The Harlot's Progress. Channel 4. Shown 2.11.2006
Interesting to see the eighteenth century recreated on TV, in all its squalor and poverty, disease and premature death, whilst reading Frances Burney.

Toby Jones plays William Hogarth in Channel 4’s televised presentation of an episode in the artist’s life. His portrayal of the man is deeply sensitive and understated, as he moves amongst the depravity and vice of London, conveying more than an honourable man, something deeper and more affecting than conscience and morals. Hogarth meets a newly arrived, and lovely, 16 year old girl from York and becomes fascinated by her, from her initial freshness and ambition, to her haughty pride and grandiose aspirations, throughout her descent into abuse, filthy whoredom, imprisonment and repeated rape, to her eventual death, pox-ridden and disfigured. Jones’s tenderness brings me to tears when her baby dies, simply by his look of accepting comprehension. He tells her the baby is sleeping, and smiles on her, in silent comfort and reassurance. The sense of peace, born of the inevitability of the infant’s death and her own, is moving without a trace of sentimentality or judgement. There is an air of suspension, a pause, for the deaths to occur, a relief in that brief moment from the chaos of survival.

Hogarth’s well-known set of prints of the The Harlot’s Progress chart the demise of a prostitute to her corruption and destruction. Sophie Thompson plays Hogarth’s wife giving a fine performance of faith, love, and tragic disappointment, she is sweetly stoic and warmly humane. The televised production has magistrates and clergymen commenting on his prints and paintings being an accurate demonstration of The Fall, and of the rightness of showing how the corrupted are punished. Jones’s face, whilst not seeming to move a muscle, effortlessly shows the viewer with merely a movement of his eyes that the harlot’s guilt is not his target. Research would discover if, at the time of their reception, it was clear at whom he aimed his criticism through his work, and it is easier for us, at this remove, to understand that a young girl is the prey, not the lure, of the powerful. Jones’ portrayal is of a man who sought to protect rather than to expose, and one of touching vulnerability at the same time as worldly wisdom. It is finely done.

Zoë Tapper plays the harlot, an unenviable part, as she must travel from young beauty to ravaged, diseased corpse, enduring along the way the use of her body as a piece of meat into which various shudderingly repellent men shove themselves. Her body is possessed, beaten, infected, and ultimately ruined. She travels from freshness to decay, her proud, and dignified, optimism becoming gin-dependent madness in prison, and eventual defeat. Directed by Justin Hardy, the drama of her life is neither melodramatic or pitiful. It merely is. To achieve the effect of ‘a tale simply told’ is not simple, and the powerful effect of Hardy’s understated directing quietly impressive.

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