The Distrest Poet

In the London of the 1730s a new kind of writer had appeared, the literary hack who ground out verse for the booksellers with no wealthy patron behind him. The street where many of them lodged, Grub Street, became shorthand for the whole hungry trade, and Hogarth put one of them in this attic. The poet sits by the window worrying at a poem whose title, just legible, is Upon Riches, while everything around him says the opposite. A milkmaid stands in the doorway demanding an overdue bill, the dog is making off with the last scrap of meat, the baby is crying, and the poet's wife mends the only breeches he owns. On the back wall Hogarth pinned a small print of Alexander Pope, the successful poet this one will never be.