Ritual Encounters: Punch Parties and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Consider the two eighteenth-century bowls illustrated in Plates 1–4 (overleaf). The exterior of the first, a blue and white tin-glazed earthenware bowl made by Lawrence Harrison in Liverpool in 1748, is hand-painted with a vigorous and conventional hunting scene. More hidden from view on the interior is the image within the circular frame, which depicts a group of men drinking while huddled tightly around a table.1 On the second, a creamware bowl from c.1760, the exterior features bold and brightly painted exotic birds; but, again, the contrasting image cradled in its interior depicts a similar crowded scene (in reverse) of men drinking, albeit with a different decorative edging and colour palette.2 Within both bowls, liquid would have given these groups a rocking motion that would nicely mimic but also exaggerate the impression of drunken unsteadiness portrayed in the image itself. This image, of course, is a copy of William Hogarth's A Midnight Modern Conversation (painting c.1732; print 1733), which lifts the curtain on men at a punch party in a coffee-house (see Plate 5). Scholars have seen the image not only as a witty parody of the conversation piece genre and as a self-conscious representation of the degeneration of more polite gatherings in some of Hogarth's other work, but also as a criticism of the event it portrays: nothing less than a ‘sordid binge’.3 Yet this copy of the image appears on the interior of precisely the object — the punch bowl — that is central to the occasion that Hogarth depicts. His apparent critique of a punch party was itself situated at such a gathering, in the form of the decoration on the punch bowl. We are faced with a kaleidoscopic visual and material culture in which images of gatherings not only represent such gatherings but are also actually held in participants’ hands.