William Hogarth produced Four Times of the Day in 1736, a series of scenes depicting London at morning, noon, evening and night. The works satirised urban life across class, gender and neighbourhood. Hogarth treated the modern city as a sequence of comic moral narratives.

Hogarth's visual storytelling parallels the satirical poetry and prose of eighteenth-century London. His attention to ordinary streets, crowds and signs helps readers understand the urban world that shaped poets such as Gay, Swift and later Blake.