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We see a ghost: Hogarth's satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1998 by Bernd Krysmanski
22. See Paulson, 1989, no. 106 [107]; Dennis Todd, "Three Characters in Hogarth's Cunicularii - and Some Implications," Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (1982-83): 26-46; Fiona Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 28-51. For the background, see also S. A. Seligman, "Mary Toft - the Rabbit Breeder," Medical History 5 (1961): 349-60; and Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), the first half of which extensively deals with the case of Mary Toft.
23. See Wolfgang Kelsch, "William Hogarth: Freimaurer in Portrats und Kupferstichen," Quatuor Coronati Jahrbuch 25 (1988): 43; Ronald Paulson, "Putting Out the Fire in Her Imperial Majesty's Apartment: Opposition Politics, Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics," English Literary History 63 (1996): 93.
24. For full accounts of the story, see Oliver Goldsmith, The Mystery Revealed, Containing a Series of Transactions and Authentic Testimonials, Respecting the Supposed Cock Lane Ghost (London: W. Bristow and C. Ethrington, 1762), repr. in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 4, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 419-41; Douglas Grant, The Cock Lane Ghost (London: Macmillan, 1965); Emma Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 1.
25. Joseph Glanvil, Saducismus Triumphatus; or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (London: J. Collins and S. Lownds, 1681), repr. in Collected Works of Joseph Glanvil, vol. 9 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978), 89-117.
26. Ibid., 108-9.
27. John Wesley's ancestors spelled their name Westley. His most important sermons are reprinted in Edward H. Sugden, ed., Wesley's Standard Sermons, 2 vols. (London: Epworth Press, 1921).
28. See W.E.H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 92 n. 1. On Wesley's belief in ghosts, see also Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Sloughton, 1870-71), 22-24. In his Journal (May 25, 1768), Wesley wrote, "The English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it. . . . They well know. . . that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible"; quoted in Lecky, vol. 3, 91-92.
29. Daniel Defoe, Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 132-41.
30. See John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth (London: J. Nichols, 1782), 51; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. 2, High Art and Low, 1732-1750 (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 258-59.
31. Joseph Addison, quoted in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 186.
32. The story again was first published in Glanvil's Saducismus Triumphatus as "Relation XI," another fact that has escaped Hogarth scholars' attention so far. See Glanvil (as in n. 25), 225-27. The spelling "Villers" seems to have been current at that time. See the writing on Peter Lely's portrait of the second duke of Buckingham, reproduced in William Gaunt, Court Painting in England from Tudor to Victorian Times (London: Constable, 1980), 153.
