In 1130, at the age of thirty-three, William Hogarth began a series of six paintings called A Harlot's Progress. From humble beginnings as an engraver of silver plate, he was now well on his way to becoming one of the greatest and most popular figures of his age: a satirist with an unerring eye, an artist of flamboyant, overflowing imagination, and a painter of vibrant color and tenderness.

Jenny Uglow uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from, immersing us in eighteenth-century London and bringing to vibrant life the scenes that became the subjects of his prints and paintings: political follies like the South Sea Bubble, gatherings in bourgeois households and fashionable salons, lurid criminal acts and trials, and wretched institutions like Bedlam or debtors' prison.