Raw, roast or half-baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate
| Author | Piers Beirne |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618787174 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
787174TCR0010.1177/1362480618787174Theoretical CriminologyBeirne
research-article2018
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(3) 426 –444
Raw, roast or half-baked?
© The Author(s) 2018
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Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618787174
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Piers Beirne
University of Southern Maine, USA
Abstract
Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid
considerable attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman
animals has often and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of
national identity. It is from the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad
backcloth of this article is woven. Its focus is the neglected coupling of patriotism
and carnism, instantiated here by its deployment in William Hogarth’s painting
Calais Gate (1749). A pro-animal reading is offered of the English artist’s exhortation
that it is in the nature of ‘true-born Britons’ to consume a daily dish of roast
beef served with lashings of francophobia and anti-popery. The article suggests
that alert contemporary viewers of Calais Gate would nevertheless have noticed
that Hogarth’s painterly triumphalism ironically rekindles the repressed memory of
English military defeat and territorial loss. Because the political and religious borders
between England and France were so easily defaced and refaced, the accompanying
air of uncertainty over national identity would also have infiltrated the perceived
authenticity of English roast beef. The article draws on animal rights theory, on
nonspeciesist green criminology and on green visual criminology in order to oppose
the historical dominance of human interests over those of other animal species in
discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.
Keywords
Calais Gate (Or, O the Roast Beef of Old England), francophobia, Hogarth, nationalism,
patriotism–carnism couplet, popery
Corresponding author:
Piers Beirne, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth St, Portland, ME 04104, USA.
Email: Beirne@maine.edu
Beirne
427
Introduction
Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid consider-
able attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman animals (henceforth,
‘animals’) has frequently and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of
national identity (Baker, 2001: ch. 2; Chez, 2016; Cozzi, 2013; Franklin, 2014). It is from
the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad backcloth of this article is woven.
Its particular focus is the neglected visual coupling in mid-18th-century Britain of patri-
otism and ‘carnism'; that is, a cluster of speciesist and typically masculinist ideologies
that encourages humankind to consume the flesh and by-products of other animal species
(Gålmark, 2008; Joy, 2001).1 In the continuing project of opposing the historical domi-
nance of human interests in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm, the article draws on
animal rights theory (Adams, 2015; Benton, 2007; Regan, 2004), on nonspeciesist green
criminology (Beirne, 2009, 2014, 2018; Sollund, 2014; White, 2017) and on green-vis-
ual criminology (Beirne and Janssen, 2014; Brisman and South, 2013).
It must be said that at the beginning of the 18th century ‘Britain’ (read ‘England’)was
a legal and ideological fiction which had been cobbled together, often with great physical
and cultural violence, by the rise of parliamentary sovereignty and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, by the defeat of Irish Catholicism, by the Acts of Union (1706–
1707) uniting the kingdoms of Scotland and England and by the Hanoverian accession of
1714. Enter carnism. Important cultural messages about a people are indeed conveyed
not only by which particular edibles they regularly consume or are encouraged to con-
sume (beef, for example, if they eat the flesh of animals such as cows, bulls and oxen)
but also by how their foods are prepared (e.g. roast beef) and by and for whom they are
reared and slaughtered (e.g. English roast beef). Though its heroic virtues had been fleet-
ingly touted c.1600 in Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act 3, Scene 7), not until the early 18th
century was the consumption of roast beef popularized as an item in an imagined identity
of Englishness. Some of the details of this pairing of patriotism and carnism were spelled
out, for example, in Daniel Defoe’s (1701/1705: 14, emphases in original) The True Born
Englishman (‘Fierce as the Briton…[a]nd English Beef their Courage does uphold’) and
in Joseph Addison’s (1709) Tatler, exhorting English soldiers to eat ‘English roast beef
thrice daily—[t]his excellent food’.
In what follows I instantiate the neglected couplet of patriotism and carnism as it was
deployed by the English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) in his painting Calais Gate
(Or, O the Roast Beef of Old England) (1749). To this end I offer a microhistory of
Hogarth’s exhortation in Calais Gate that it is in the nature of every ‘true-born Briton’ to
consume a daily dish of English roast beef served with generous lashings of francopho-
bia and anti-popery.
Caution! Seeing through real animals
In order to approach the animal edibles represented in Hogarth’s Calais Gate one must
first see through the lifeblood and bones of real animals. Hogarth’s bonding agents: the
bones and skins of horses and rabbits and eggshells from ducks and chickens. His paints:
these are mixed with animals’ fat and their ground and charred bones. His paintbrushes:
428
Theoretical Criminology 22(3)
hair from the bodies, nostrils and ears of horses, oxen, pigs and squirrels. Hogarth’s
attire: in his self-portrait in Calais Gate his leather tricorn hat is made from the skin of
cattle; his periwig is crafted from the hair of horses or goats; although they are hidden
from view, his feet and ankles are likely encased in buckled half-boots or buskins made
from the skin of pigs and cattle. (This list of Hogarth’s art supplies does not include such
extras as the animal edibles that might have sustained him while he sketched and painted.)
Calais Gate (Or, O the Roast Beef of Old England)
The first time any one goes from hence to france by way of Calais he Cannot Avoid being
struck with the Extreem different face things appear with at so little a distance as from Dover a
farcical pomp of war, parade of riligion and Bustle with little with very little bussiness in short
poverty slavery and Insolence (with an affectation of politeness) give you even here the first
specimen of the whole country nor are the figure less opposite to those of dover than the two
shores. fish wemen have faces of [word illegible] leather and soldiers raged and lean.
Hogarth (1753/1955: 227–228)
Setting the scene(s)
In the late summer of 1748 William Hogarth travelled from London to Paris, via Dover
and Calais, across the body of water known by the English as the (English) Channel and
by the French as La Manche.2 As Morieux (2015: 150–151) indicates, such differences
in naming are captured nicely in the titles of the legal texts on which the respective judi-
cial and political authorities tended to rely: the English on Selden’s Mer Clausum, for
example, and the French on Grotius’s Mare Liberum. Almost needless to say, it was in
much more than their respective nomenclatures of this 22 mile/35.4 kilometre strait that
England and France differed. They also clashed in their concepts of ownership and con-
trol of the water that each of their lands bordered (‘territorial limits’)—differences which
had serious reverberations for the instigation and settlement of conflicts over navigation
and safe passage, fishing rights, piracy, smuggling, espionage and so on.
During his visit to Paris, Hogarth—who in some quarters there was recognized as a
creative English artist with a flair for comic history painting—was boorishly dismissive
of French customs.3 For whatever reason he decided to cut short his stay in France, once
again finding himself in the port town of Calais, seeking a packet boat back to England.
But bad weather intervened. Awaiting a favourable wind for his delayed return passage,
Hogarth decided to bide his time by sketching in the vicinity of the old seaport fortifica-
tions. It was a poor decision.
It is hard to know how much trust should be placed in the particulars of any of the
several contemporary reports of Hogarth’s brief sojourn in Calais. Piling one embellish-
ment upon another, they vary considerably in their respective accounts of exactly what
Hogarth did in Calais and what the French authorities there did to him and to his com-
panion, Francis Hayman, the accomplished English artist and fellow member of London’s
eccentric Sublime Society of Beefsteaks. But from the published reports it can reasonably
Beirne
429
be surmised that, while awaiting his return passage to England, Hogarth sketched the
Gate, the drawbridge and perhaps also some of the other English-built fortifications in
medieval Calais (Hogarth, 1753/1955: 228–229; Ireland, 1798, 3: 349–350; Nichols,
1781/1833: 31–32; Walpole, 1748/1885: 123).4 On his drawing of the Gate in situ
Hogarth (1753/1955: 228) himself later reflected, in his own peculiar way:
As I was santering about and obseving them & the gate which it seem was build by the English
when the place was in our possession there is a fair appearance still of the arms of England upon
it as I conceild...
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