A Harlots Progress

A Harlot’s Progress reinvents William Hogarth’s famous print of 1732, which tells the story of a prostitute, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate, and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. David Dabydeen’s novel endows Hogarth’s characters with alternative lives, redeeming them from their clichéd status as predators or victims. The protagonist—in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London’s oldest black inhabitant—tells his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. But instead of embarking upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery, he spins a tale of myths, half–truths, and fantasies: recreating Africa and 18th–century London in startlingly poetic ways.