Guardian cartoonist Ben Jennings and I stand forlornly before Sir John Soane’s Museum in London as we are told that is it closed. We had planned to see William Hogarth’s tragicomic painting cycle A Rake’s Progress, the model for Jennings’ Snowflake’s Progress – his personal picaresque survey of broken Britain.
Like a couple of ne’er-do-well Georgian fops, we have mucked up – until another journalist generously phones the director, Will Gompertz, who comes down to size us up. The former BBC arts supremo apparently thinks what the hell and gives us a VIP tour of Soane’s atmospheric house.
Later Jennings explains how his character Snowflake differs from Hogarth’s antihero. “Unlike Tom Rakewell, who inherits a fortune and squanders it, Snowflake inherits the chaos and precariousness of the last 14 years. He’s thwarted, not by his own greed, but by the times we’re living through.”
Jennings was 19 when David Cameron formed his first government, in coalition with the Lib Dems, in 2010. “That was also the year I got my first cartoon published in the Guardian – it had a showcase for young cartoonists that summer.”
So Jennings is cartooning about his generation. “Obviously Snowflake’s the term used by the rightwing media to describe the millennials they deride so much, implying that their inability to get on in life is all down to them eating avocados in their safe spaces, rather than the unreliable housing market, the gig economy and austerity. This generation has been caricatured as a woke folk villain.”
Snowflake weaves his way through eight scenes of recognisable if surreally exaggerated British 21st-century life, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes less prominent: “It’s almost like Where’s Wally wandering through Broken Britain.”
The last 14 years of Tory rule certainly look wretched in his pictures, drawn in grainy black and white. Snowflake rides a delivery bike through driving rain, gets kettled in a demo, fights in pub toilets on a Friday night and escapes to the beach, only to find it overflowing with sewage.
Hogarth’s scabrous modern scenes, created almost 300 years ago, have irresistibly inspired remakes. David Hockney’s Rake’s Progress prints, ironically depicting his discovery of the US gay scene, have a happy ending: this was the 60s after all. Grayson Perry draws on Hogarth in his tapestry series The Vanity of Small Differences to mock 21st-century pretensions.
Jennings tells me part of the appeal of doing Snowflake’s Progress was to stand back from the frenetic pace of news deadlines to spend time on his images. He worked on the details for weeks instead of hours. Yet cartooning is work he plainly adores. As a teenager he was inspired by Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman and The Simpsons. “Cartoons stand in their own world,” he says. “A little bit art, a little bit journalism, a little bit comedy.”
Gompertz shows us some salient details of Hogarth’s paintings. After inheriting his family estate, Tom employs tutors to help him make it big in London: the music teacher is a portrait of Handel. Such airs and graces give way to debauchery as the Rake cavorts with pox-infected sex workers in a Covent Garden brothel. Gompertz enthusiastically points to a fight that is breaking out between two of the women.
It all leads to Bethlehem hospital, where the Rake slumps nearly naked, wigless, in hopeless despair, his reason destroyed by the thrills and spills of early capitalist London. But this is where Jennings breaks with other homages to Hogarth: Snowflake’s Progress starts as well as ends in a kind of Bedlam. It doesn’t show a gradual decline but a Britain that’s already ruined.
It is about inheritance, says Jennings – from the cash that Hogarth’s Rake wastes to the ruined country and world in which the Snowflake generation must make their way. Hogarth, a moralist, shows step by step how a young person can go wrong. Snowflake, however, does not start out with plenty. He has no agency, nor the luxury of responsibility. The only “choice” is to slog on through endless grime.
“It’s interesting, that word ‘Hogarthian’, isn’t it?” says Jennings. “That view of London that he captured, with all the grimness. That’s what my view of Britain tends to be: the muck and the grit, just things being a bit shit. Scaffolding. Chipboard. Aesthetically, that’s what I’m interested in.”
Snowflake’s Progress was conceived for an election year, though Jennings couldn’t have foreseen his exhibition would open immediately after the vote. It stands as a visceral portrait of the furious misery that has just swept Conservatism away. Jennings has captured the national mood. His vantage point is on the left, but the grimy desperation of a country drowning in effluent, booze, bad coffee, bad sex, would probably be recognised by Reform voters too.
At the Soane Museum we also look at Hogarth’s satire on corrupt 18th-century politics, The Humours of an Election. The candidates are a Whig versus a Tory. It’s an indication of how long the Tory party has existed, having started as an aristocratic faction, long before reinventing itself. Jennings doesn’t bother to portray its frequently changing faces over the last (final?) 14 years. He just captures the psychology of the ruled, in a rain of piss. Is Conservatism now a political corpse? If so, Jennings has drawn what he calls “a postmortem”.
• Snowflake’s Progress is at Coningsby Gallery, London, until 20 July. Buy a print from the series, signed by Ben Jennings, here
