When considering evidence of widespread crime and prostitution in the early eighteenth century, particularly in the worst affected areas of London, Fielding's exasperation is understandable. The below table from Randolph Trumbach's Sex and the Gender Revolution (1998) illustrates the scale of the situation in London's West End, 1720-29:
(Source: Greater London Records Office.)
Covent Garden, (the location of Hogarth's studio at the time of A Harlot's Progress), is shown to have held a total of 290 disorderly houses between these years; this is an overwhelming number, and heavily suggestive of crime and corruption. The system of policing in these areas was inadequate to control the problem, so the voluntary Societies for the Reformation of Manners formed in 1690 by middling-class men to police the areas which they felt had got out of control. A main objective of the Societies was to suppress 'bawdy houses', which they saw as a root cause of the city's vice as they housed all other forms of criminal.
Plate 3 of A Harlot's Progress depicts the climactic moment at which Moll is on the brink of arrest, signalling her imminent downfall. This could be argued as a recognition of the success of the Societies in their campaign of 1730 to suppress disorderly establishments; indeed, Rictor Norton (2011) argued that "Gonson's campaign was relatively successful in cleaning up the neighbourhood...and newspapers reported that several of the most notorious keepers of disorderly houses had packed up their belongings and fled secretly during the night." However, Hogarth's treatment and representations of Gonson and the series' heroine raises the question as to who he is asking the viewer to sympathise with; this could indicate a general opinion of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. To address this, we must first consider the didactic nature of Hogarth's work.
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