William Hogarth, Tailpiece, or The Bathos

Ian Gordon (Anglia Ruskin University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Domains

Political Science

Dates

First circulation or publication 1764

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Comedy
Non-fictional prose
Satire

Resources

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Tailpiece, or The Bathos

, published on 17 April 1764, six months before his death on 26 October, was Hogarth's last print and self-proclaimed finale. In an advertisement in the

St James's Chronicle

for 14 April 1764 he announced: “it may serve as a tailpiece to all the author's engraved works when bound up together.” It is a bleak, pessimistic

memento mori

for the artistic, political and cultural worlds, as Hogarth found them in mid eighteenth-century England, comparable in tone and urgency to Pope's apocalyptic ending to

The Dunciad

, Book IV, published twenty years earlier in 1743 (see separate entry). Like Pope, Hogarth had come to feel, at this late stage in his life, that Chaos's “dread empire” had been restored and that “Universal Darkness” would soon bury all.

The full

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1187 words

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "Tailpiece, or The Bathos". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 December 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1747, accessed 24 November 2024.]