I’m delighted that my pamphlet, an heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s prints, is published today by Culture Matters. It comes with a wonderful introduction by Fran Lock, and cover art by the Guardian’s Martin Rowson.

You can purchase a copy for £7.50 (plus £1.50 P&P, UK) at

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/praynard/9 , or Worldwide https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/praynard/12

From Fran Lock’s introduction

Peter Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) of A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733) run the same gamut of moral and social concerns but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout. Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy.

The Heir

A rich Father dies, so a son’s life as heir begins.
Vanity’s the sling which Tom will throw family
chains from: his Father, a staid suit of a man
battened down by the clamp of God’s utility

mother weeping, wife with child warming inside her.
He will leave enough to oil their grief, but says there
is no need to pray. With old money, time does shun
less miserly ways ending troughs of emotion

such wealth held: when men lay idle no-one need read
King James’ bible. New clothes fit both size and stead
with enough silver to sail a ship. London ho!
with its trade winds blown by slave labour. God well knows

the streets men of off-note graze on. All benighted
in the Capital’s treasures of sin but not be sinned

“What Hogarth etched and engraved, Raynard successfully recreates in verse.
The comparisons of life in Britain today are there to be made.” (Owen Gallagher)

“The tone Raynard manages to hit with his quite ravishing language and the use of the 3^rd
person voice as witness carries you along like you’re on some kind of walking tour of the
grubby streets of the human mind/body leaving you eager to turn the next page, the next corner, to see what has next befallen Moll or Rake.” (Martin Hayes)