Mining England’s Dark Heart: From Knopfler to Hogarth
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Of course, the separation between A and B isn’t that clean – nothing is in Knopfler’s Newcastle. Twentieth century Newcastle and nineteenth century Newcastle are tangled, maybe even knotted. The dead man in the Jaguar is found by a collier cycling home “from his nightshift underground,” and he travels home past “the churchyard packed / with mining dead.” Mining isn’t over.
To some extent, Knopfler documents history, chronicling acknowledged details of Sibbet’s death, but as a songwriter, he also shapes how we think about that history. He (understandably) exploits opportunities for creativity, as when he describes the snow on top of the Jaguar as a “shroud,” which recalls a burial sheet. In the seventeenth century, members of the English Parliament passed the Burying in Woollen Acts, which required the dead – except plague victims and the destitute – to be buried in shrouds made of pure English wool. The acts were meant to increase demand for English wool and support the English economy. Sibbet, of course, wasn’t infected with the bubonic or septicemic plague, but surely he suffered from a social plague. He was morally destitute, in a manner of speaking. Nevertheless, what covers the car in Knopfler’s song isn’t just snow but “a shroud of snow.” Is this a gesture of sympathy, or just an evocative touch? Even if it’s a sympathetic gesture, what is clear in the song is that the new version of Britain – a mid-to-late twentieth century Newcastle plagued by violence and corruption – arose from and is built on top of an older version vexed by other varieties of exploitation and depravity. In 1967, coal is still mined, but there’s more to exploit than coal, and the seams that blow up or crack are more than geological.
William Hogarth’s The Cockpit, 1759, courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Hogarth’s England
In fact, there was always more to exploit in England. Those seams that blew up and cracked – the seams that Knopfler sings about – were sewn into England long before 1867. William Hogarth illustrated those seams in the eighteenth century in works such as The First Stage of Cruelty and The Cockpit. Derek Jarrett, in England in the Age of Hogarth, discusses these prints, writing, “At the very core of the English idea of pleasure lay a fight to the death combined with the chance to gamble.” Hogarth, Jarrett writes, “put the emphasis not so much on the violence as upon the gambling.” He condemned gambling, and condemned the folly and degradation associated with it.
Sibbet’s murder is the foundation or at least the inspiration for Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home, a 1970 novel famously adapted by Mike Hodges into Get Carter, the classic gangster film starring Michael Caine. After the film was released, the novel was renamed and rereleased with the movie’s title. In his introduction to a 2014 U.S. edition of the book, Hodges also mentions Hogarth, comparing the English underworld of the 1960s to the depravities of eighteenth century England that Hogarth exposed in his art. Hodges spent a compulsory two years in the Royal Navy. During his service he went ashore, visiting places he said were worthy of Hogarth’s most desperate works. He found a Britain that was corrupt, bleak, and nasty. “From now on I would be no stranger to the sleazy milieu Ted’s novel occupied,” he wrote.
Grime, brutality, and pornography define the film, to be sure. Quentin Tarantino called it his all-time favorite British film. To the extent the film tries to recall or evoke another world, it doesn’t look far. The movie opens with Jack Carter (Caine) on the train, reading Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. It’s an effective scene, but it doesn’t promise much of anything hopeful, and Jack Carter is no Philip Marlowe. Marlowe may explore the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, but he is a more conventional protagonist, which is to say he’s a generally nicer guy. There are moments of humor in the film, but even the humor underscores something fundamentally mean, as when Jack famously describes an old rival’s eyes as “piss holes in the snow.”
Early reviewers found the film repulsive. Felix Barker of the Evening News called it “a revolting, bestial, horribly violent piece of cinema.” Viewers confronted a bleak Newcastle – a bleak England. “I had never witnessed misery like this in my own country,” Caine said after shooting the film. “It was like Charles Dickens meets Emily Brontë, written by Edgar Wallace.” Hodges said, “Once I’d decided to tell the truth, I had to do it with the same ruthlessness as a surgeon opening up a cancer patient.”