For years I have immersed myself in the incredible detail of Hogarth's art and the influences at work on him. It is thus educationally refreshing to discover how others view his influence on later artists and authors. The essays here also encouraged me to return to Hogarth and look at him in a new light. The collection consists of twenty-eight essays on Hogarth's so-called “afterlives,” in two volumes, the slenderness of which disguises over 600 pages of formidable text by a distinguished team of contributors. The first volume is concerned with the visual aspects of Hogarth's enduring influence. The second is concerned with the ways in which his images and thoughts have been transmuted into verbal forms.The elegantly designed covers include clever illustrations by Pietro Spica (both 2020) that set the tone of the whole collection. For book 1, Spica's cover is a variation of Hogarth's Scholars at a Lecture (1736), which implies that the collection is written by academics for academics. For book 2, the cover is based on Hogarth's Characters and Caricaturas (1743), chosen to reveal his—and his followers’—fascination with the variety of all humanity.The collection has the usual academic apparatus: each essay is prefaced with an abstract. Footnotes abound and there is a hefty list of works cited, thirty-seven pages long, an invaluable gathering together of the scholarly literature on Hogarth. There are extensive notes on each contributor, with a majority of them from Italian universities. Hogarth had a major influence on philosophy, drama, television, and video, on different forms of literature, ekphrastic poetry, graphic novels, film studies, and art, especially forms of graphic satire. There is also an emphasis on the geographic spread of his influence, signposted in the subtitle, stretching over much of the European continent, including the British Isles. The range is extended in one essay as far as Russia, and to South Africa in another, wherein Hogarth's series on the evils of capitalism, Industry and Idleness, was an important source of inspiration.The collection is prefaced by a fervent defense of Hogarth's achievement and a celebration of his complexity by Frederic Ogee, the doyen of Hogarth studies in Europe. The editors chose contributors whose specialist fields are from later times. They have a working, rather than specialized, knowledge of Hogarth, so the strategy has some risk, but infelicities are more than compensated for by the fresh perspectives they have to offer. Thus, the collection is academic in the best sense of the concept, well-researched, authoritative, thankfully free of jargon, and it keeps postcolonial angst in proportion. Perhaps the abstracts are unnecessary, since Caroline Patey describes the contents of the essays in her introduction, and there are “Notes on Contributors,” too. The space saved by eliminating the abstracts could have been used to enlarge the index to include subjects as well as names, and it would have been helpful to track how extensive was the influence of, say, The Analysis of Beauty or a particular set of pictures like Marriage A-la-Mode.One weakness of an academic approach is that it tends to overlook or underplay ephemera, although I acknowledge the inclusion of the fascinating account of molly-houses in eighteenth-century London, and of the television spin-offs. Hogarth's pictures also inspired the design of ceramics, silverware, fashion accessories, furniture, drolls, and farces—the collection does mention punch bowls and snuffboxes. However, the editors might have considered Frederick Pilon's farce, The Humours of an Election, published in 1788, which includes a Bribewell Lane [sic] and a Guzzledown Street, references to Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress and his Election series, respectively. A farce attributed to one of Hogarth's earliest commentators, the much-overlooked John Trusler, acknowledges a conscious debt to Hogarth on the title-page: “The representation of Particular Scenes is submitted to Mr Hogarth's excellent Prints of the Election.” Mention should be made of George Bickham Jr.’s rather horrid The Rake's Rendezvous (short title, 1735), with its echoes of the tavern scene from A Rake's Progress. More directly, Hogarth's series inspired other sets of pictures: John Collet's Modern Love (engraved 1782) is a take on Marriage A-la-Mode; John Hamilton Mortimer did The Progress of Virtue (1755); James Northcote composed a female version of Industry and Idleness in ten pictures, called Diligence and Dissipation (1796), and so on.Gillray's debt to Hogarth is well described, but there is no mention of Cruikshank's series The Bottle (1847), a spin-off from A Rake's Progress, which caused a sensation at the time not just in temperance circles. It was followed up by an even more sanctimonious sequel, The Drunkard's Children; both are indebted to Hogarth.Much of the above depends on the definition of an afterlife; does there have to be a significant time interval between Hogarth's original work and the afterlife in question? How long ought it to be, if at all? Should it concentrate on “high culture” at the expense of “low”? Hogarth's pictures spawned ekphrastic compositions almost immediately after they were published. The account of his Peregrination (1732) was transmuted into Hudibrastic verse as a thank-you for the receipt of a complimentary copy. Does that represent an afterlife? Richard Savage, a favorite of Dr. Johnson's, wrote a Progress of a Divine as early as 1735. Was this not an immediate response to Hogarth's earlier series? Savage attacked similar targets—the bishop of London and corruption among the clergy. And what about the piracies, those cruel backhanded compliments? Do they not count as afterlives? They offer a glimpse of what certain contemporaries remembered about the contents of Hogarth's pictures after a sneaky glance at them.Perhaps some thought should be given to Paul Sandby and his hurtful parodies of Painter Pugg, suggesting that Hogarth was past it? Widow Hogarth's lodger, Richard Livesay, began a collection of sketches taken from Hogarth's pictures. His Surprised Woman from Hogarth's Morning (1788) is a visual restatement of Hogarth's “old maid” from The Four Times of the Day. Livesay's woman is a gentler creation. His work is part of what Edmond Malone entitled “Hogarthomania,” a disease that spread throughout Britain in the later eighteenth century and beyond; it has infected me, too. The mania went beyond Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens, who are discussed in the collection; it is a huge subject. The geographical spread throws up surprises. I would never have thought that Katherine Mansfield would have been inspired by Hogarth to write a short story entitled Marriage A-la-Mode (1921). Many readers may also be surprised by the influence of Hogarth in Russia through Pavel Fedotov and his followers. Probably for the wrong reason, I was amused by Shklovsky's transmogrification of Gin Lane into “Vodka Lane.” It perhaps should be noted that Marina Peltzer discussed this influence in her entry in the German exhibition catalog, Hogarth und die Nachwelt: von Lichtenberg bis Hrdlicka (1988). One of the most valuable functions of Enduring Presence is that it demonstrates how authors and artists under repressive regimes used Hogarth's ideas and images as vehicles for dissent.However, there are omissions. Hogarth was as steeped in the art of the Dutch Golden Age as he was in French and Italian art, but there is no mention of any influence that he might have had in return on the culture of the European Lowlands. I have no prior knowledge of any myself, but there should have been some consideration of this in the collection, even if only to conclude that there was none. Also, should there not have been more than passing thoughts on influences in the Iberian Peninsula? That Hogarth's prints were available to Goya and were an influence on his art has been explored in detail by Werner Busch in his Nachahmung als Burgerliches Kunstprinzip: Ikonographische Zitate bei Hogarth und in Seiner Nachfolge (1977).Would this not be an appropriate point to mention the late Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego, who was born in Lisbon? Her remarkable triptych (1999) is about a disastrous marriage, and her tableaux are based on those in Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode. This was the subject of Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd's unpublished PhD dissertation, “Hogarth's Progress: ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ in the Art of David Hockney, Lubaina Himid, and Paula Rego” (2011). Did Rego know of Hogarth's triptych on Christ Rising painted for a church in Bristol, I wonder? One essay is dedicated to Hogarth's influence as far away as protests against apartheid in South Africa. Michael Godby has compared Hogarth's longer series with three twentieth-century Johannesburg artists in his Hogarth in Johannesburg (1990: Hodgkins, Deborah Bell, and Kentbridge). Then, what about Hogarth's influence in the equally distant Americas? In the United States, his work was published frequently in the thirteen colonies and he is claimed by admirers today as one of their own, especially through postgraduate studies. Colleen Terry, for example, wrote her PhD thesis on Hogarth's “Presence” in print in British North America (2014). This academic activity was inspired by the pioneering work of Ronald Paulson, which is generously acknowledged in the collection.Do Americans count in “British and European Afterlives”? Henry James is included as the subject of one of the essays, but surely, he is an American. And doesn't Whistler count as American? Thomas Nast, the nineteenth-century German-born, American political cartoonist, was influenced by both Hogarth, as was the English John Tenniel, the illustrator of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland fantasies. Did George Grosz leave the influence of Hogarth behind altogether when he emigrated from Germany to the States? As for the glittering array of cartoonists and satirists who arose in the wake of the Depression—H. L. Menken, James Thurber, and Garry Trudeau, among them—there must be influences to be found in their work. Perhaps there is room for a third volume on “Afterlives from the New World,” which one of the editors, Cynthia Ellen Roman, has considered to an extent in her earlier collection, Hogarth's Legacy (2016).In reviewing a collection of essays by capable authors, I hesitate to pick and choose, so I would like to consider some themes that pervade a number of them without discriminating among individual contributors. Hogarth's polemic, The Analysis of Beauty, with its theory of the serpentine line of grace, is the subject of several essays and is referred to many times in passing.I am afraid that I have regarded the serpentine line with its dubious genealogy as the gimmick of an ingenious man. I thought that the body of The Analysis itself was little more than a catalog of advice to aspiring artists. But I stand corrected when shown how seriously David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, took Hogarth's thought, especially the difficult Enlightenment concept of fitness. Did Hume develop his thoughts on contrast from looking at the contrarieties at work in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness? Other contributors see sinuosity and the wanton chase as important elements in the elusive concept of beauty. One omission did surprise me: I found only one passing mention of the rococo in the collection. It is a relatively lightweight term, principally concerned with various forms of ornamentation, but it is relevant in that Hogarth was not struggling to characterize beauty in a vacuum. The rococo labels a shift in taste that occurred, from seeing beauty in symmetry, rigidity, and balance, to preferring asymmetry and curvaceousness. Contributors refer to Hogarth's term “wanton,” meaning erotic, to contrast with the ascetism, let us say, of classical and neoclassical architecture and decoration. A matter of taste, therefore, helps put the philosophy in an international perspective. In recognizing, today, the seriousness with which the serpentine line has been taken long after Hogarth published The Analysis in 1753, I stand corrected.Hogarth's reputation as a man has taken a hit in the later twentieth century as part of the fashion for denigrating figures from the past. Nick Dear's play, The Hogarth Plays (2018), characterizes him as a foul-mouthed serial womanizer. Elsewhere, he has been identified as a pedophile because of his close associations with children from the Foundling Hospital. He is supposed to have died as a result of sexually transmitted disease. If he were infected, as many people were at the time, he does not appear to have infected his wife. She lived healthily enough to the ripe old age of eighty. If he were such a womanizer, would she have remained so loyal to him in her widowhood, even though he was a pain in the backside to live with? A possibly apocryphal account suggests that she declared herself proud of his art. Of course, her income came from selling his prints, so, her admiration for her husband was an economic imperative, . . . nevertheless—see Cristina Martinez's entry on Jane Hogarth in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2020). It is also worth noting that the essay that carefully catalogs Hogarth's energetic philanthropy makes no mention of ulterior motives. It all makes for good theater, though.Hogarth was clearly in the thick of things. He knew how people behaved—from studying the saddest denizens of the underclasses, to members of the royal family, from a portrait of the archbishop of Canterbury, to the depraved “Saint Francis” of Medmenham Abbey. My current view is that he was less an active participant and more a chronic observer, not a voyeur in the antisocial and criminal sense of the word, but someone who was always watching others close-up in all kinds of situations. He was fascinated by, moved by, the act of recording the pain, suffering, follies, and appearances of others, and then organizing his observations into intricate pictorial studies of human relationships.David Dabydeen, the subject of one of the essays, thanks to his groundbreaking academic publications, his marvellously intricate fictions, and clever inversions, has shown how sensitive Hogarth was to the plight of black people: the musician in the conversation piece, Lord George Graham in his Cabin (1745), and the gentle black lover in Noon come to mind. Dabydeen has reminded us how the startled or amused responses of black servants act as yardsticks by means of which the excesses of privileged white people may be measured. Paradoxically, Hogarth himself was prepared to paint the children of slave-owners, one of whom was to receive nine slaves as part of her dowry, and he would dine and correspond with at least one of the capitalist barons of the West Indies who was close enough to him to call him “Billy.”My feeling is that, as a freethinker and a rational follower of Newton, Hogarth disapproved of oppression of all kinds, but his principal aim was to hold up a mirror—in his case, using the medium of shiny copper plates and inked paper—for the relatively privileged to see how they themselves were treating the underprivileged, which included black people. The identification of Hogarth as an observer of all that was before him may account for his paradoxical, sympathetic, but, in a way, neutral, attitude to black people and slavery; not primus inter pares, but unis e multis. Enduring Presence might have also considered the Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare (mentioned in Ogee's foreword). His Diary is a series of photo-tableaux, with the artist himself as the protagonist, closely based on A Rake's Progress. Or, it might have included something on Michael Dean's I, Hogarth, a Novel (2012), which recreates the artist's life in fictional form, both raucous and bawdy. He, too, imagines Hogarth to have been diseased. Should they not be considered alongside Alan Hollinghurst's coming-of-age novel, The Line of Beauty, which is described in the collection? Incidentally, I am not sure why he alluded to Hogarth's “line of beauty” in his title; there must have been ironic intent.The survey of Hogarth's influence on Germany is welcome and necessary. I appreciated the references to the polymath George Christoph Lichtenberg. His commentaries, published at the end of the century, capture the pathognomy of Hogarth's series so perfectly that they form a kind of afterlife in their own right. They have never been surpassed. Bertolt Brecht, the subject of one essay, mentioned Hogarth only once, referring to his pictures as “epic” in scale. In composing The Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Kurt Weill must, of course, have come across John Gay's ballad opera and somehow or other saw an engraving of Hogarth's A Scene from the Beggar's Opera (1731), perhaps the one by William Blake. Features of these Beggar's Opera pictures make them forerunners of the Verfremdungseffekt.The striking thing about Hogarth's painting is that it depicts all the activity in the theater that occurs around a given moment in the performance and not just the performance alone. Hogarth's other theatrical pieces, his Falstaff Examining his Recruits and even Garrick as Richard III, do not include the audience (the latter, the subject of an essay in the collection). Members of the audience are present onstage in the scene from The Beggar's Opera alongside the actors, in full view; they compete with them for the viewer's attention. Knowledgeable contemporaries would have delighted in the scandalous relationship between the actress playing Polly, Lavinia Fenton, and her lover, the Duke of Bolton, also onstage. Huge proscenium statues of satyrs dominate the background, one of which discreetly points at the lover in the audience. Such distraction would have created even more distance between contemporary viewers and the actual performance. Of course, the presence of privileged members of an audience sitting on the stage was not new, reaching back to Tudor times at least, but Hogarth's other theatrical pieces, like his Falstaff Examining his Recruits and even Garrick as Richard III, do not include the audience (the latter, the subject of an essay in the collection).Brecht-inspired theatrical performances in modern times are characterized by banners or electronic messages flashing across the upper reaches of the stage. One of Hogarth's banners above the prison scene in his picture informs a viewer, through a commonplace Latin tag, that art is like life (“veluti speculum” = “as in a mirror”); the viewer is invited, commanded even, to read and think about what he sees rather than be absorbed in the performance. There are three men in the background of Hogarth's picture; it has been suggested that they are stagehands or performers waiting their turn. One reads a libretto or a promptbook. Backstage activity is there for a viewer to see and be reminded of the supposedly hidden mechanics of a play.Another “Brechtian” picture is Hogarth's theatrical conversation, the Conduitt Family-piece (1732–35, engraved by Robert Dodd, 1792). It has children instead of adults as actors. The audience is partly onstage and partly not; some cheer the children on, some ignore them. A shortsighted prompter is in full view. The heavy scenery fits awkwardly into an elegant salon. By a trick of the perspective, a distracting proscenium statue seems to have been dumped into the middle of the action. Did Brecht get a glimpse of these pictures in some form, and did they help him formulate his theatrical practice?The discussion of molly-houses and the discreet presence of homosexuality in Hogarth's art prompted me to recall the homosexual innuendos not only in The Beggar's Opera picture, where a member of the audience holds the tip of his cane close to his lips. Elsewhere, a chairman's backside is turned suggestively toward the Rake as he quits his chair in the arrest scene, A Rake's Progress, Plate IV. In the fourth picture of Marriage-A-la-Mode, a picture of the eagle menacing the genitals of Ganymede is directly above the beaky-nosed flautist (the latter, according to Bernd Krysmanski, a likeness of the homosexual King of Prussia, Frederick the Great). Taste in High Life is a mischievous exemplification and forerunner of camp aesthetics in the excesses of the overdressed couple to the right. Incidentally, this picture includes Hogarth's most condescending treatment of a black boy: a sharp-faced women chucks him under the chin as he squirms.If a reader wants to get a sense of the influence of Hogarth on the European stage, this collection supplies it. Its reach is impressive. I am not experienced enough to do more than admire it and poke minor holes in it here and there. The use of specialists from beyond the circle of Hogarth scholars, albeit looking like the work of a coterie of scholars, was worth it, and their perspectives, as outsiders, but experts in their own realms, gives the collection its authority. Perhaps the collection understates or fails to refer to all Hogarth's other careers—as book illustrator, and painter of family groups, single and double portraits, and devotional pictures. What was their influence on the art of Europe and the British Isles?I conclude by considering what the collection is and what it is for. It is part of the renewed love affair with all things Georgian that endures today. It is a descriptive and analytical record, in essay form, of the influences of one particular artist on his successors, Europe wide, and potentially worldwide, a huge subject. Hogarth has been identified as having a formidable intellect: the later artists, authors, and producers discussed in this collection, and the quality of the essayists who are tracing his afterlives, pay tribute to his intelligence. The collection is a consultative document for scholars, composed by scholars, as Spica's cover design also implies. It is invaluable for those investigating influences on their chosen specialties, and for those followers of Hogarth who seek a retrospective on his work, although the collection may be too daunting for the general public of art-lovers. It needs to be expanded, perhaps to a third volume, and periodically updated, as any kind of encyclopedia should be. It needs to be consulted alongside Cynthia Roman's earlier collection; the two complement each other.In more particular terms, the afterlives in both collections demonstrate that attempts to portray Hogarth as a Europhobe, other than on the surface, or as a nativist, are wrong. He was, and is, a progenitor of global dimensions.