Witherbee (center, holding coat) and students, at the Otis House Museum on Beacon Hill. Photograph: Frank Curran

Most days, Amy Witherbee teaches her weekly afternoon English class standing in front of a movie screen lit with images of tawdry ladies in petticoats, horse-drawn carriages, and rakish men in white powdered wigs. Seductively titled “Rakes, Harlots, and Gin Alley: The Visual 18th Century,” Witherbee’s course explores the civilized veneer of British society and the seedy London underworld, looking at the tumultuous 1700s principally through the works of William Hogarth (1697–1764), the painter and engraver who satirized life in England’s grandiose mansions, middle-class homes, jails, brothels, and back alleys.

The idea for the course came to her about a year ago, says Witherbee, an energetic fourth-year Ph.D. student working in Irish, English, and Scottish literatures of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The 18th century, she says, is often approached as an age of prose, “but the fact is, it was an age of theater and visual images.” She wanted to design a course that intertwined the art of Hogarth and contemporaries such as Thomas Gainsborough with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, and articles from the Tattler and the Spectator. The class might include a field trip to the Otis House Museum, a restored grand home built in 1796 in Boston by Charles Bulfinch, architect to New England’s governing class. “I wanted to flip things,” Witherbee says. “I wanted to read the image to understand the literature, rather than the other way around.”

She presented the idea to the American Society for 18th-Century Studies and received one of the organization’s three annual $500 grants for innovative design, to develop the course further—a rare honor for a graduate student. This past Septem­ber, she taught the course for the first time, to a class of 16 BC juniors and seniors.

On a rainy Monday in October, the image on the film screen behind Witherbee was of a young prostitute in London—the first etching in a six-piece Hogarth series tracing the fallen woman’s path from upstanding young lady in a bonnet to syphilitic pauper in a casket. Witherbee had scrawled the title of the series, A Harlot’s Progress, in thin cursive on the blackboard, beside the screen; below it, in capital letters, she had written, “PROGRESS?” “Look at the details of the faces,” she said, the projected black-and-white Hogarth image rolling over her extended arm. “What can we learn from the harlot’s clothes, her expression, from the crowd gathered behind her?”

Around the U-shaped arrangement of tables in the darkened Gasson Hall classroom, students’ hands slowly rose. After the first two suggestions, answers came in rapid-fire succession: “She doesn’t want to join the profession,” said a young woman in a rain-soaked red fleece; “she had other options—look at her fine gown,” said another; “no one else around her in the picture seems to care,” said a young man in Boston College sweats; “they’re all turning away as if this happens all the time.”

Later, Witherbee said that Hogarth’s prints addressed developing stresses on the lineaments of society—race, class, marriage, morality—and that their satire speaks to attitudes of the time. “This is what makes the 18th century so fascinating; we see the unfamiliar become familiar to us with the rise of concepts like capitalism and two-party political systems,” she said. “In Hogarth’s prints we see many of the same social issues we face today.”

Often, Witherbee runs the class as a puzzle game, asking students to decode the prints, using the props in the pictures to investigate the society that produced them. “Where is religion here?” she asks. “What is a monkey doing in print Number 2?”

Witherbee’s open-topic homework assignments let students set a course of study. They were asked to write three one-page papers responding to any historical question that arose in class—“how is race addressed in the texts?” or “what does the pottery in the engraving say about the social strata depicted?”—as well as two longer papers on topics of their choice.

After a class discussion about Hogarth’s 1749 print Self-Portrait with Pug, Clara de Soto ’07, an English major, chose to write her first paper about dogs in 18th-century portraiture. Her final paper, on the cat organ—an 18th-century musical instrument (so-called) designed to inflict pain in varying degrees on harnessed kittens to elicit their howls—arose from a passing mention in one of Witherbee’s lectures.

Like most of his classmates, Kyle Trainor ’09, an English and film studies major, was new to Hogarth’s work. He had studied 18th-century literature, but Witherbee’s Hogarthian lens, he says, “allows you inside instead of just giving you a glimpse. I always thought of that era as stuffy and straitlaced. It turns out that most of the time it was anything but.”

For Trainor, that point was driven home the day Witherbee asked the class to stage a scene from Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, in a classroom recast as the 18th-century Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London. As a backdrop, Witherbee projected onto the film screen an engraved print of the theater’s interior, and each member of the class was given a slip of paper with an assigned role either as an actor or audience member. The two students who played actors stood in the middle of the room, trying to yell their lines over the insults of hecklers, recalls Trainor. One student was assigned the role of vendor and instructed to sell oranges during the play. Another, a commoner, was told to throw orange peels at the performers.

“Professor Witherbee created an environment that you would have experienced if you were there at that time,” says Trainor, who played a lord in the audience. “I’ve read books about the 18th century, but it took a class like this one for me to see what I was looking at.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg