A conversation through essays: modeling and mapping the Hogarth Essays (1924–28)

This article investigates the Hogarth Essays (1923–26; 1926–28), analyzing them as a networked, years-long and polyvocal conversation about Bloomsbury aesthetics and politics. The Hogarth Essays was arguably the most successful of the Hogarth Press’s eponymous series of pamphlet-length publications. Individual essays have been the subject of much critical attention, some to a greater extent than others. However, there is little critical work to date that investigates the essays as a whole. This essay proposes to model various approaches to the Hogarth Essays that emphasize their networked and interrelated natures. The first set is book-historical: using resources from MAPP, from the University of Reading’s Archive of British Publishers, and from the personal writings of Hogarth Essays authors, I trace the ways in which the Hogarth Essays and their authors use the pamphlets to conduct conversations about aesthetics. The second set of approaches is analytical. I use topic modeling approaches to read across the pamphlets, creating data maps that visualize each pamphlet’s relationship with the others. This approach enables me not only to trace relations across the corpus as a whole but to identify and map more implicit sites of mirroring, echoing and repetition across the Essays. I end this article by arguing that a combination of analytical and book-historical methodologies can provide a framework for further large-scale investigations of small press culture.