Peter Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) of A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733) runs the same gamut of moral and social concerns but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout. Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy. Do we pity Tom Rakewell, now become a Tom O’ Bedlam, repenting in a madhouse? Do we pity Moll, beating rope in Bridewell Prison? Or dead in ‘the cold dark ground where a pauper’s/ place may be found’? What seems telling is that Moll is bereft of even sincere mourners, punished, as Raynard writes for ‘a simple dream to simply exist’ with only her madam upset by her passing.

Alongside Hogarth’s original engravings, Raynard’s pamphlet cover features Martin Rowson’s satirical grotesques after Hogarth’s Gin Alley, which signal the cyclical and enduring nature of negligence and exploitation, connecting the fates of the indigent poor in 1751 with those of the destitute in austerity Britain of the early 21^st Century. While the scenery changes, gussied up and glossed by the ongoing march of gentrification, the squalor, suffering, and their illusory avenues of escape remain horribly constant.

“What Hogarth etched and engraved, Raynard successfully recreates in verse. The comparisons of life in Britain today are there to be made.” - Owen Gallagher

The tone Raynard manages to hit with his quite ravishing language and the use of the 3rd person voice as witness carries you along like you’re on some kind of walking tour of the grubby streets of the human mind/body, leaving you eager to turn the next page, the next corner, to see what has next befallen Moll or Rake.” - Martin Hayes

The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, by Peter Raynard, ISBN 978-1-912710-77-5 is available as a hard copy to buy here (£7.50 plus £2.50 p&p), or as a downloadable e-publication below, with donations here please.