Four Stages of Cruelty - Cruelty in Perfection, third of series of engravings
Date: 1751
By the time of the third plate, Tom Nero has progressed from the mistreatment of animals to theft and murder. Having encouraged his pregnant lover, Ann Gill, to rob and leave her mistress, he murders the girl when she meets him. The murder is shown to be particularly brutal: her neck, wrist, and index finger are almost severed. Her trinket box and the goods she had stolen lie on the ground beside her, and the index finger of her partially severed hand points to the words "God's Revenge against Murder" written on a book that, along with the Book of Common Prayer, has fallen from the box. A woman searching Nero's pockets uncovers pistols, a number of pocket watches—evidence of his having turned to highway robbery (as Tom Idle did in Industry and Idleness), and a letter from Ann Gill which reads:
Dear Tommy
My mistress has been the best of women to me, and my conscience flies in my face as often as I think of wronging her; yet I am resolved to venture body and soul to do as you would have me, so do not fail to meet me as you said you would, for I will bring along with me all the things I can lay my hands on. So no more at present; but I remain yours till death.
Ann Gill.
The spelling is perfect and while this is perhaps unrealistic, Hogarth deliberately avoids any chance of the scene becoming comical. A discarded envelope is addressed "To Thos Nero at Pinne...". Ronald Paulson sees a parallel between the lamb beaten to death in the Second Stage and the defenceless girl murdered here. Below the print, the text claims that Nero, if not repentant, is at least stunned by his actions:
To lawless Love when once
betray'd.
Soon Crime to Crime
succeeds:
At length beguil'd to Theft, the
Maid
By her Beguiler bleeds.
Yet learn, seducing Man! nor
Night,
With all its sable Cloud,
can screen the guilty Deed from
sight;
Foul Murder cries aloud.
The gaping Wounds and
bloodstain'd steel,
Now shock his trembling Soul:
But Oh! what Pangs his Breast must
feel,
When Death his Knell shall toll.
Various features in the print are meant to intensify the feelings of dread: the murder takes place in a graveyard, said to be St Pancras but suggested by John Ireland to resemble Marylebone; an owl and a bat fly around the scene; the moon shines down on the crime; the clock strikes one for the end of the witching hour. The composition of the image may allude to Anthony van Dyck's The Arrest of Christ. A lone Good Samaritan appears again: among the snarling faces of Tom's accusers, a single face looks to the heavens in pity.
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