William Hogarth's morality series ‘Industry and Idleness’ (1747; plate 6) depicts a scene at an urban wedding and is entitled ‘The industrious ‘prentice out of his time and married to his master's daughter’. At the centre, a band of musicians is playing drums, bass and rough instruments outside the house. On the right-hand side, the apprentice (‘Goodchild’) is leaning out of the window and offering one of the musicians a coin, while a servant at the doorstep is dispensing food from a plate onto the apron of a woman who is kneeling before him. On the left-hand side, amidst the crowd of musicians, a crippled beggar is handing out a broadside ballad (‘A new song’). Behind the musicians there are images of street houses and the monument that commemorates the Great Fire of London.

Hogarth's engraving aptly invokes some of the themes and preoccupations of this study. It teems with the kind of gestures of giving that are unlikely to surface in written records – the apprentice who offers a coin, the servant handing out food at the door and the beggar who presents a song. These gestures of offering and largesse also involve an exchange: the apprentice is rewarding the drummers for their merrymaking, while his own new status as the head of a household is affirmed by the charitable act. The beggar does not simply stretch out an empty palm but rather offers a song in anticipation of alms in return.