Digging in Orkney

The producers of Time Team have released a 75-minute video covering the excavations at Orkney's Ness of Brodgar, which were conducted over a twenty-year period ending in summer 2024. Rather than the typical Time Team episode, in which a team of archaeologists swoop in and excavate a site in real time over a limited period, this is more of a straight documentary, and a very good one at that. The only recognizable Time Team regulars here are Tony Robinson, who contributes some voice-over, and the geophysicist John Gater, who has longstanding connections to the site. The other archaeologists seen on camera, including the site's director, Nick Card, are veterans of the dig at the Ness.

Orkney prehistory is fascinating. The Ness complex, dating to roughly 3000BC, is one of the most important Neolithic sites in Britain. Despite Orkney's isolation, it was no cultural backwater. In addition to the Ness, the islands are home to important stone circles, the chambered tomb at Maes Howe, and the settlement of Skara Brae. Whoever the ancient Orcadians were, they had sufficient time and energy to devote to craftsmanship and public architecture; the impressive fine stonework at the Ness is featured in the documentary.

When the excavation concluded, the site was reinterred to protect it, but during the final stages of that work a geophysical survey revealed an intriguing circular feature outside the limits of the original excavation, and the investigation of that feature (rumored to be a large Neolithic hearth) will be the subject of a future Time Team episode. The analysis and publication of the finds at the Ness is expected to go on for many years.

In Memoriam

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, murdered by the federal government of the United States in Biddeford, Maine on July 13, 2026.

More information:

The Guardian
Associated Press

The Missing Phoenix

As soon as I finished my last post I hauled down my copy of V. S. Pritchett's massive Collected Essays to see what if anything Pritchett had to say about Jonathan Wild. I soon discovered that not only had he anticipated (and amplified) much of my argument but that he had even used essentially the same title: "An Anatomy of Greatness." Since his piece was included in a collection published in 1942, the parallels he found between Fielding's criminal "Great Man" and modern political sociopaths focused on a different generation, but the underlying idea was the same.

There's no shame in ceding priority to Sir Victor, but the end of his essay held a surprise.

Mrs Heartfree's sea adventures, in which there is hardly a moment between Holland and Africa in which she is not on the point of losing her honour, are not so much padding but give a touch of spirit to her shopkeeping virtues and also serve the purpose of satirizing the literature of travel. It is hard on Mrs Heartfree; perhaps Fielding was insensitive.

All well and good, until Pritchett goes on:

Without that insensitivity we should have missed the adventure with the monster who was 'as large as Windsor Castle'; an episode which reminds us that the spirit of the nine o'clock news was already born in the 1700s:

I take it to be the strangest Instance of that Intrepidity, so justly remarked in our Seamen, which can be found on Record. In a Wood then, one of our Mucketeers [sic] coming up to the Beast, as he lay on the Ground and with his Mouth wide open, marched directly down his Throat.

He had gone down to shoot the Monster in the heart. And we should have missed another entrancing sight. Mrs Heartfree perceived a fire in the desert and thought at first she was approaching human habitation.

... but on nearer Approach, we perceived a very Beautiful Bird just expiring in the flames. This was none other than the celebrated Phoenix.

The sailors threw it back into the Fire so that it 'might follow its own Method of propagating its Species'.

My reaction to this was bafflement. Had I read Jonathan Wild so carelessly that I had breezed past a Monster and a Phoenix? Was V. S. Pritchett even reading the same book? As it turns out, he wasn't, exactly. The earliest version of Jonathan Wild was in a 1743 collection entitled Miscellanies. According to Fielding scholar Peter Jan de Voogd, the colorful chapter that described the Monster and the Phoenix was included in that edition, but Fielding apparently later decided it was too farfetched and left it out of a 1754 reprint. My Hamish Hamilton edition from 1947 followed the later version; Pritchett read the original text.

Anatomy of "Greatness"*

Henry Fielding's novel Jonathan Wild bears the full title The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. It may at first seem puzzling that Fielding uses the word "Great" to refer to his antihero, who is a pickpocket, gangster, and all-around scoundrel, but lest anyone miss the point he includes the word GREAT or GREATNESS (in all caps) in at least sixteen chapter titles: "An adventure where Wild, in the division of the booty, exhibits an astonishing instance of GREATNESS" and "Wild proceeds in the highest consummation of GREATNESS" (the latter is where he is hanged), and so on. Fielding's narrator makes it clear that Wild's "greatness" consists largely of limitless ambition and a total absence of scruples, and he contrasts it pointedly with "goodness," which Wild lacks utterly. The two qualties are, in fact, held to be incompatible. Wild's foil is the honest merchant Heartfree. Duped and swindled by Wild, Heartfree almost ends up on the scaffold, and the narrator makes it clear that he is utterly without "greatness." He refuses when given the opportunity to escape, because doing so might require the death of one or more of his guards. To Wild, this is nothing but contemptible weakness.

All of this is, of course, highly ironic, and Wild, though based on a notorious criminal whose doings also inspired Defoe and John Gay, is generally considered to be a stand-in for Robert Walpole, the long-serving poltical leader who is counted as Britain's first prime minister. Whether Fielding's satirical depiction of Walpole's character is fair is questionable, but Walpole was at the time widely regarded, or mocked, as "a Great Man" and was not particularly known for possessing scruples. Today, when our public sociopaths openly pride themselves on their lack of concern for those whom they destroy, the figure of Wild seems at least as relevant as it was in the eighteenth century.

There are traces in the novel of a different kind of narrative: the nautical picaresque of Defoe and Smollett. In one puzzling chapter, Fielding sends Wild off to the Americas for a period of seven or eight years. What happens there isn't described, and when Wild returns it's as if he's just gone to the corner for a quart of milk. A more fully developed episode involves Heartfree's virtuous wife. Spirited abroad by Wild under false pretenses, she escapes rape at his hands, but her supposed rescuer, a French sea captain, proves only to be the next in a chain of attempted seducers. She survives a shipwreck on the coast of Africa and is saved from the advances of another rake by a kindly, half-naked hermit who then, naturally, throws himself at her feet. Eventually she makes it safely home.

* Update: After posting this I discovered that V. S. Pritchett has anticipated my title. More on that next time.

The Bruiser (Hogarth)

William Hogarth's satirical engravings often commented on social issues like gin drinking, popular credulity, and misguided marriages, but he tended to avoid involving himself in factional political disputes. The oddly adorable image above, which depicts the poet and former curate Charles Churchill, is the outgrowth of a rare exception. In 1762, Hogarth issued an allegorical street scene entitled The Times, Plate 1, in which the central figure was a firefighter (taken to be the Tory statesman John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute) who was struggling to extinguish the fires of the Seven Years War while being harrassed by members of a war party including, among others, figures presumed to represent the radical parliamentarian John Wilkes and Churchill, his close ally. Both of the latter were acquaintances of Hogarth's and had formerly been on good terms with him. When Wilkes blasted the artist in the pages of his periodical The North Briton, Hogarth produced a vicious caricature of him as a sinister, smirking rabble-rouser with a suggestion of devil's horns. (Hogarth, who had strong ideas about the use of the word "caricature," may have regarded it as more of a study of character.)

Hogarth was eventually to tire of the squabble and lose his enthusiasm for the faction surrounding the Earl of Bute, but the damage was done. Churchill penned a damning poetic Epistle to William Hogarth that publicly assaulted both his character and his career as an artist. Though he was fair-minded enough to admit the merits of Hogarth's earlier engravings ("HOGARTH unrivall'd stands, and shall engage / Unrivall'd praise to the most distant age") he characterized the man as "weak and vain" and as a has-been.

Hogarth's response to Churchill's dressing-down was ingenious but not without a touch of the bizarre. Rather than go to the trouble of engraving an image of Churchill comparable to the one he had made of Wilkes, he took out an old plate that he had used years earlier to create a self-portrait (below).

Hogarth then effaced his own likeness, mocked Churchill as a drunken bear with tattered clerical vestments, and added a copy of the Epistle, onto which the pug (a breed Hogarth favored) is now, in a characteristic Hogarthian touch, issuing a stream of urine. In later states of the plate (as shown at top) he replaced the palette with a miniature scene including Churchill as a dancing bear and Wilkes as a monkey.

In the words of Hogarth biographer Jenny Uglow,

It was an extraodinary act, to replace his own face with that of the man who had tried to destroy him, especially when he produced such a strong, powerful, almost attractive image. To some it might seem less of a revenge than an unconscious surrender: a suicide, even. In the midst of his anger, Churchill saw this. 'I take it for granted You have seen Hogarth's print — was ever anything so contemptible,' he wrote to Wilkes, '—I think he is fairly Felo de se.'

Nevertheless, the portrayal of Churchill as The Bruiser was popular and the engraving sold well. Time was running out, however; Hogarth died on October 26, 1764. The much younger and alcoholic Churchill, in exile in France, died just nine days later.

Jenny Uglow's Hogarth: A Life and a World admirably combines art history with a good overview of the social and political background of the very lively environment in which the artist worked. For larger illustrations (always a plus, in an artist who excelled at detail) a volume like Dover's Engravings by Hogarth is indispensable.