William Hogarth’s 1754 election paintings are being turned into an animated, annotated online resource for secondary school pupils. The project builds on earlier research into how ordinary people—including women, children, and the poor—participated in elections before 1832, even though few could vote. That history is largely invisible in school curricula, and the paintings themselves are locked in a London museum where they cannot be reinterpreted on site. The problem is twofold: a gap in how we teach the messy, carnivalesque origins of British democracy, and a practical barrier to accessing the primary source material. If successful, the project will produce a free, AI-driven digital tool that lets Key Stage 3 pupils “read” Hogarth’s images—spotting bribery, voter manipulation, and the many forms of political engagement beyond the ballot box. The resource is designed to be embedded directly into the national curriculum for history and citizenship. It also demonstrates how generative AI can make fragile museum collections accessible to hard-to-reach audiences, especially young people outside London, without requiring physical access to the originals.
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The 2020-23 AHRC-funded 'Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture' project (ECPPEC) investigated the ways in which people participated in parliamentary elections before the 1832 Reform Act. Few could vote, but many were nevertheless engaged in elections and electioneering, including women as well as men, children as well as adults, poor and rich, franchised and unenfranchised. ECPPEC investigated the many modes of participation, including print and song, ceremonies and violence, dress and decoration. The most famous representations of pre-modern elections at their most corrupt and carnivalesque are the four paintings that comprise William Hogarth's 'Humours of an Election' series (1754-55). For this Follow-On for Impact project, we propose to use Hogarth's images to engage new audiences with pre-modern elections, and as a basis for opening up discussion about the status of democracy in our own society. The election paintings are full of detail, feature appealing characters and tell a compelling story: as Charles Lamb noted 'Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read'. They thus lend themselves to annotation, which can bring out the contexts and complexities of elections two hundred years ago; and they are well suited to narrativization and animation, which can engage audiences unused to looking at, still less 'reading', eighteenth-century paintings. The aim of this project then is to present Hogarth's paintings digitally, as a free online resource, with comprehensive annotation that explains and contextualises each image, linking back to the underlying ECPPEC research, and second, to use innovative generative AI tools to bring Hogarth's paintings to life. The objective is to provide unprecedentedly appealing ways for students and other non-specialists to engage with pre-modern electoral history, and more specifically, to build a highly charismatic resource for teaching history and citizenship to Key Stage 3 pupils. The development of democracy in Britain, expansion of the franchise, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens are all required elements of the KS3 National Curriculum in History and Citizenship. These can all be taught through the Hogarth images, as can the issues that he was himself concerned to highlight: political corruption, manipulation of voters, dishonest campaigning, and how elections are comprised of many more forms of participation that just the act of voting. The beneficiaries of the project will be these resource end-users, but also the Sir John Soane Museum in central London, where the pictures are displayed, as an Act of Parliament requires, exactly as they were when the museum opened in 1837. Access to the pictures is constrained, and in-situ interpretation impossible. The project has been designed, therefore, significantly to expand accessibility, both in the sense of allowing more people to engage with the paintings in informed ways, and by reaching different kinds of users. The Soane has struggled to engage diverse audiences, especially outside London, and especially young people. This project will demonstrate how cutting-edge but increasingly available digital technology, including generative AI, can be used to engage hard-to-reach audiences, be successfully embedded in school curricula, and use historical collections to raise pressing contemporary issues.
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